5 ms·

I cannot abide the argument that obviating work is a harm. That's luddism, which has proven every single time to be more harmful in the long term than embracing

by bloppe 3y ago

I cannot abide the argument that obviating work is a harm. That's luddism, which has proven every single time to be more harmful in the long term than embracing new technology, which may have harms but only in the short term. I also think you're overestimating the short term harms. I believe human writing will stay valuable, especially the premium creative variety. It's the un-creative, mechanical writing that's becoming somewhat obsolete.

Palmik 3y ago
I think we should not try to forcefully preserve jobs that are no longer needed, AND I think it could cause harm in the short term, and lead to further transfers of wealth.
- Avicebron 3y ago
  I'm curious as to your solution to providing comparable (better?) options for those people who have been displaced? Agreed this will cause further transfers of wealth, but with the caveat that this will probably be upwards (it always seems to be) and in denser concentrations leading to long term harm.
  - jazzyjackson 3y ago
    (not the parent poster): Treat data like oil, a public resource, and redistribute the profits to everyone equally. I don't love the idea of taxing profits and letting the government send checks out, so being creative, how about we force dilution of the stockholders of whoever wins the AI wars and make every citizen a beneficiary of dividends.
    - Avicebron 3y ago
      I see no problem with this as long as the dividends are equal to the potential of anyone displaced or otherwise having their marketshare impacted. EDIT: otherwise, if I lose a 120k+ (or whatever) job a year programming because one engineer and a cadre of llms is 'good enough' for management, and all I get is $15 a month for my portion of the collective dole, it's not really a solution.
jazzyjackson 3y ago
That's a fine ethical argument for progress, and copyright law is indeed about encouraging the arts and sciences alike, but OpenAI is trying to specifically make an argument about "Fair Use", which does consider whether the new work obviates the old one and prevents those original authors from being compensated since people will just buy the new one instead. What OpenAI is offering is a commercial product that obseletes an entire industry of creative output - why pay any author or songwriter a dime from here on out? Just pay 19.99/month to OpenAI. If that's progress in technology, great, but they're arguing that the training data and subsequent transformation is "fair use" - that the original authors get no say and no compensation. I'd be all for commercializing the collective works of humanity if we got to redistribute the profits to those producers who actually made the superintelligence possible (ie, everyone) but whats not cool is a single commercial entity taking the worlds' copyrighted work and turning a profit from it without a single dime in due compensation.
- bloppe 3y ago
  This notion that a "single commercial entity" stands to benefit is very wrong [1]. There will be fierce commercial competition, and many open-source non-commercial options, for everyone to benefit from this technology. I'm all for redistributing the gains from automation and economic concentration generally. I see the ideal future as one where so much of the economy is automated that everyone is free to spend their time as they choose, like doing creative or social work. But I don't mean for this to become an argument about UBI. I just don't see any difference between your arguments and the classic Luddite arguments, and nobody seriously thinks that was a good idea anymore. People can still make money weaving and knitting things by hand; it's non-commodified and therefore considered premium. I'll still write software even in a future where 90% of todays widget-churning jobs have been automated, it will just be more interesting. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322
ang_cire 3y ago
> I cannot abide the argument that obviating work is a harm. That's a misrepresentation of the argument. The actual argument is that taking someone's work sans-permission and building on it in order to obviate the original work is a harm, because you would not have been able to obviate their work without their work as a starting point. In other words, you didn't do most of the work, you just altered it, and then want to claim credit (and legal ownership) for it wholesale.
- bloppe 3y ago
  I'm not sure whether the courts will determine if this is fair use or not. It's a difficult concept to define rigorously. If it's found to be fair, I'm arguing that its effect on work cannot be considered harmful to society in the long term. "you didn't do most of the work, you just altered it, and then want to claim credit (and legal ownership) for it wholesale" is a good description of all scientific research that has ever occurred.
  - ang_cire 3y ago
    > "you didn't do most of the work, you just altered it, and then want to claim credit (and legal ownership) for it wholesale" is a good description of all scientific research that has ever occurred. And this is why we shouldn't allow copyrights or patents for broad concepts, only for specific methodologies/ implementations/ designs (patent) and exact works (copyright). But in this case they are not starting with a broad scientific principle like e=mc2, they are starting with an exact work/ book. Learning the concepts taught in a textbook and then making your own textbook fro the generally-derived knowledge is ok. Taking the textbook and creating a list of notes, and then making a textbook from those notes, is copyright infringement and plagiarism. ML models are not learning anything about the concepts behind the works they analyze. They are creating patterns of metadata about the content of the work itself, not the concepts therein, and creating an approximation of the content from those patterns in turn. This is directly akin to the metadata notes approach. A more direct analogy would be reverse-engineering of software. Legal RE is entirely possible, but requires a strict non-analysis of the software content itself, only the inputs and outputs can be analyzed. Never the software itself. If you examine the content of the software, even if you do not actually copy any code, you are (potentially) committing copyright infringement or even IP theft. All ML models do the latter; they look at the book/ song/ art content itself, and then attempt to produce something with similar effects. Is the case a sure win against OpenAI? Not at all; courts are notoriously non-technical, and prosecutors may also not have the technical knowledge to properly contextualize the actions of OpenAI in a way the judge(s) can understand. But do I think that based on all evidence it should be a sure loss for OpenAI? Absolutely.

by bloppe 3y ago

Palmik 3y ago

I think we should not try to forcefully preserve jobs that are no longer needed, AND I think it could cause harm in the short term, and lead to further transfers of wealth.

Avicebron 3y ago
I'm curious as to your solution to providing comparable (better?) options for those people who have been displaced? Agreed this will cause further transfers of wealth, but with the caveat that this will probably be upwards (it always seems to be) and in denser concentrations leading to long term harm.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  (not the parent poster): Treat data like oil, a public resource, and redistribute the profits to everyone equally. I don't love the idea of taxing profits and letting the government send checks out, so being creative, how about we force dilution of the stockholders of whoever wins the AI wars and make every citizen a beneficiary of dividends.
  - Avicebron 3y ago
    I see no problem with this as long as the dividends are equal to the potential of anyone displaced or otherwise having their marketshare impacted. EDIT: otherwise, if I lose a 120k+ (or whatever) job a year programming because one engineer and a cadre of llms is 'good enough' for management, and all I get is $15 a month for my portion of the collective dole, it's not really a solution.

jazzyjackson 3y ago

That's a fine ethical argument for progress, and copyright law is indeed about encouraging the arts and sciences alike, but OpenAI is trying to specifically make an argument about "Fair Use", which does consider whether the new work obviates the old one and prevents those original authors from being compensated since people will just buy the new one instead. What OpenAI is offering is a commercial product that obseletes an entire industry of creative output - why pay any author or songwriter a dime from here on out? Just pay 19.99/month to OpenAI. If that's progress in technology, great, but they're arguing that the training data and subsequent transformation is "fair use" - that the original authors get no say and no compensation. I'd be all for commercializing the collective works of humanity if we got to redistribute the profits to those producers who actually made the superintelligence possible (ie, everyone) but whats not cool is a single commercial entity taking the worlds' copyrighted work and turning a profit from it without a single dime in due compensation.

bloppe 3y ago
This notion that a "single commercial entity" stands to benefit is very wrong [1]. There will be fierce commercial competition, and many open-source non-commercial options, for everyone to benefit from this technology. I'm all for redistributing the gains from automation and economic concentration generally. I see the ideal future as one where so much of the economy is automated that everyone is free to spend their time as they choose, like doing creative or social work. But I don't mean for this to become an argument about UBI. I just don't see any difference between your arguments and the classic Luddite arguments, and nobody seriously thinks that was a good idea anymore. People can still make money weaving and knitting things by hand; it's non-commodified and therefore considered premium. I'll still write software even in a future where 90% of todays widget-churning jobs have been automated, it will just be more interesting. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322

ang_cire 3y ago

> I cannot abide the argument that obviating work is a harm. That's a misrepresentation of the argument. The actual argument is that taking someone's work sans-permission and building on it in order to obviate the original work is a harm, because you would not have been able to obviate their work without their work as a starting point. In other words, you didn't do most of the work, you just altered it, and then want to claim credit (and legal ownership) for it wholesale.

bloppe 3y ago
I'm not sure whether the courts will determine if this is fair use or not. It's a difficult concept to define rigorously. If it's found to be fair, I'm arguing that its effect on work cannot be considered harmful to society in the long term. "you didn't do most of the work, you just altered it, and then want to claim credit (and legal ownership) for it wholesale" is a good description of all scientific research that has ever occurred.
- ang_cire 3y ago
  > "you didn't do most of the work, you just altered it, and then want to claim credit (and legal ownership) for it wholesale" is a good description of all scientific research that has ever occurred. And this is why we shouldn't allow copyrights or patents for broad concepts, only for specific methodologies/ implementations/ designs (patent) and exact works (copyright). But in this case they are not starting with a broad scientific principle like e=mc2, they are starting with an exact work/ book. Learning the concepts taught in a textbook and then making your own textbook fro the generally-derived knowledge is ok. Taking the textbook and creating a list of notes, and then making a textbook from those notes, is copyright infringement and plagiarism. ML models are not learning anything about the concepts behind the works they analyze. They are creating patterns of metadata about the content of the work itself, not the concepts therein, and creating an approximation of the content from those patterns in turn. This is directly akin to the metadata notes approach. A more direct analogy would be reverse-engineering of software. Legal RE is entirely possible, but requires a strict non-analysis of the software content itself, only the inputs and outputs can be analyzed. Never the software itself. If you examine the content of the software, even if you do not actually copy any code, you are (potentially) committing copyright infringement or even IP theft. All ML models do the latter; they look at the book/ song/ art content itself, and then attempt to produce something with similar effects. Is the case a sure win against OpenAI? Not at all; courts are notoriously non-technical, and prosecutors may also not have the technical knowledge to properly contextualize the actions of OpenAI in a way the judge(s) can understand. But do I think that based on all evidence it should be a sure loss for OpenAI? Absolutely.