5 ms·

Your issue is with capitalism apparently. Like it or not, creators rely on copyright to make a living and have an incentive to create more, and quality, art.

AbrahamParangi 3y ago
My issue is not with capitalism but with assuming the present rules of asset ownership are optimal! If we could make housing free - conjure it out of thin air - it would be really bad for landlords. They rely on that income to make a living! We should still obviously do it. More of a thing that people want is usually good.
- Nevermark 3y ago
  What exactly would we want to incentivize landlords for if land was free? ??? They are not creating anything unique or otherwise. It’s not remotely comparable.
- yffi_bit 3y ago
  Conjuring things out of thin air also tends to have side-effects, and it's better not to stop at the first-order effect of an action before going ahead and "just doing it". Concretely with content generation: if the disregard for copyright leads to a world where people no longer make the effort to produce and think about new things, the only things that you will consume will be produced by AI. Reminds me of The Matrix :-)
  - AbrahamParangi 3y ago
    Conjuring things out of thin air does not have side effects because it is not possible. The whole point of the phrase was to describe a hypothetical situation with no side effects to avoid sideways arguments about "but actually here's some bad things that would happen if you did that unrelated to the central argument".
    - yffi_bit 3y ago
      I actually agree completely with that; my initial reply doesn't quite put the focus where it needs to be. So let me try again: in my view, you shouldn't think of policies or laws impacting real people by ever placing yourself outside of the reality in an ideal case, because the hard bit is not conjuring ideals but finding a way of making them happen. It's always a lot messier where the rubber meets the road. People have already died and suffered because ideals (specifically around asset ownership) that weren't quite thought through, but caught on. Take communism as an example. Part of my point is that such "implementation details" are not as unrelated to the central argument as they seem. This is very different from the software world where it might be ok to assume that in 2 years we'll have the computations be 10x as fast and work out a solution backwards from there.
deeviant 3y ago
Copyright protects the work, not the thoughtspace. Unless the LLM recreates their work in a form similar enough to be legally defined as the copyrighted material, there is no copyright issue, period. Starting a legal precedent that copyrights spreads like fungus and encompasses any thought related to the copyrighted work seems like a horrible idea, one that can only lead to a dystopian future.
- rendall 3y ago
  > Copyright protects the work, not the thoughtspace. I think that is a good argument, but conflates is and ought, and I have two counters: copyright owners can dictate how their work is used (with some exceptions), and if that use hurts the copyright owner, the owner should have the right to forbid it. the intent of copyright is to reward and encourage creators and creativity. If a script kiddie can just train a model and duplicate the hard-won aesthetic work of Molly Crabapple or Ralph Steadman or anyone at all, and either dilute the value of it or actually profit from it, what is the incentive for creators to create new work at all?
  - clucas 3y ago
    > copyright owners can dictate how their work is used (with some exceptions), and if that use hurts the copyright owner, the owner should have the right to forbid it. Consider a poet who publishes poetry in some unique meter, or has some other unique stylistic structure for which they are well known... should they be allowed to sell copies of their poems that can be used for reading only, but prevents usage of those stylistic devices by other authors? I'm going to assume that we agree the answer is "no, the author should not be able to prevent those uses" at least for human consumers of their works. This is how art has always developed... even though that use "hurts the copyright owner" by diluting the market for works with that style, the owner does NOT have the right to forbid it. Now, let's say that same poet drew a lot of inspiration from a bunch of out-of-copyright poets. Let's also say that I train an AI model on the poet's inspirations, but NOT on the poet's work directly. Then I ask the AI to write a poem in the style of the poet's inspirations, and to include the unique stylistic device for which that poet is famous. In your world, is this OK?

AbrahamParangi 3y ago

My issue is not with capitalism but with assuming the present rules of asset ownership are optimal! If we could make housing free - conjure it out of thin air - it would be really bad for landlords. They rely on that income to make a living! We should still obviously do it. More of a thing that people want is usually good.

Nevermark 3y ago
What exactly would we want to incentivize landlords for if land was free? ??? They are not creating anything unique or otherwise. It’s not remotely comparable.
yffi_bit 3y ago
Conjuring things out of thin air also tends to have side-effects, and it's better not to stop at the first-order effect of an action before going ahead and "just doing it". Concretely with content generation: if the disregard for copyright leads to a world where people no longer make the effort to produce and think about new things, the only things that you will consume will be produced by AI. Reminds me of The Matrix :-)
- AbrahamParangi 3y ago
  Conjuring things out of thin air does not have side effects because it is not possible. The whole point of the phrase was to describe a hypothetical situation with no side effects to avoid sideways arguments about "but actually here's some bad things that would happen if you did that unrelated to the central argument".
  - yffi_bit 3y ago
    I actually agree completely with that; my initial reply doesn't quite put the focus where it needs to be. So let me try again: in my view, you shouldn't think of policies or laws impacting real people by ever placing yourself outside of the reality in an ideal case, because the hard bit is not conjuring ideals but finding a way of making them happen. It's always a lot messier where the rubber meets the road. People have already died and suffered because ideals (specifically around asset ownership) that weren't quite thought through, but caught on. Take communism as an example. Part of my point is that such "implementation details" are not as unrelated to the central argument as they seem. This is very different from the software world where it might be ok to assume that in 2 years we'll have the computations be 10x as fast and work out a solution backwards from there.

deeviant 3y ago

Copyright protects the work, not the thoughtspace. Unless the LLM recreates their work in a form similar enough to be legally defined as the copyrighted material, there is no copyright issue, period. Starting a legal precedent that copyrights spreads like fungus and encompasses any thought related to the copyrighted work seems like a horrible idea, one that can only lead to a dystopian future.

rendall 3y ago
> Copyright protects the work, not the thoughtspace. I think that is a good argument, but conflates is and ought, and I have two counters: copyright owners can dictate how their work is used (with some exceptions), and if that use hurts the copyright owner, the owner should have the right to forbid it. the intent of copyright is to reward and encourage creators and creativity. If a script kiddie can just train a model and duplicate the hard-won aesthetic work of Molly Crabapple or Ralph Steadman or anyone at all, and either dilute the value of it or actually profit from it, what is the incentive for creators to create new work at all?
- clucas 3y ago
  > copyright owners can dictate how their work is used (with some exceptions), and if that use hurts the copyright owner, the owner should have the right to forbid it. Consider a poet who publishes poetry in some unique meter, or has some other unique stylistic structure for which they are well known... should they be allowed to sell copies of their poems that can be used for reading only, but prevents usage of those stylistic devices by other authors? I'm going to assume that we agree the answer is "no, the author should not be able to prevent those uses" at least for human consumers of their works. This is how art has always developed... even though that use "hurts the copyright owner" by diluting the market for works with that style, the owner does NOT have the right to forbid it. Now, let's say that same poet drew a lot of inspiration from a bunch of out-of-copyright poets. Let's also say that I train an AI model on the poet's inspirations, but NOT on the poet's work directly. Then I ask the AI to write a poem in the style of the poet's inspirations, and to include the unique stylistic device for which that poet is famous. In your world, is this OK?