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> a few copyright holders By which you mean every copyright holder. > AGI in the near future Something that is purely speculative, undefined, and has been pr

> a few copyright holders By which you mean every copyright holder. > AGI in the near future Something that is purely speculative, undefined, and has been promised in the near future for 50+ years. I don't see copyright holders lying down for someone else's benefit and I don't see governments gutting copyright, contract law, and several other avenues of protection that copyright holders can deploy in the name of something that doesn't exist and may not ever exist.

squidbeak 3y ago
If a child is instructed to read a copyrighted work at school, which later becomes a factor in his own derivative works, he won't be in breach of copyright. Why should other intelligent entities be prevented from reading copyrighted works and gaining whatever there is to gain from those works the way any human might?
- dingnuts 3y ago
  thats irrelevant since an LLM is not an intelligent entity. Whatever you're arguing about is fiction.
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    LLMs are clearly a type of lower level intelligence. Intelligence does not require consciousness.
    - Sheeplator 3y ago
      The only thing that I would say is "clear" is that LLMs are big collections of statistical data on how we use language. That does not cross my threshold for "intelligence".
      - mistermann 3y ago
        > That does not cross my threshold for "intelligence". You have your own individual threshold for what "is" intelligence? Holy cow, imagine if each other agent had their own also, but spoke as if they had a common one...that sure wouldn't be a very intelligent way to run a simulation, imagine the unrealized confusion and delusion that could result if that became a cultural convention!
    - vehemenz 3y ago
      That’s quite a lot of metaphysical speculation for a conclusion that is all but clear.
  - block_dagger 3y ago
    ChatGPT is not an intelligent entity? What’s been comprehending and rewriting all my crappy code for several months? An auto-complete? There’s obviously emergent behavior there that is actually defined by the maker and most users as “intelligence.” Edit: typo
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      I would paraphrase one of Clarke's laws and say that "Any sufficiently advanced text generator is indistinguishable from an intelligent entity." Just because a computer program's output is remarkably good does not mean there is any emergent intelligence, any more than a technology we don't understand means there is magic.
      - helf 3y ago
        [dead]
      - ben_w 3y ago
        The reverse can also be true, with John Keats' agreeing with Charles Lamb that Newton "had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia_(poem) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia_(poem) If we should ever fully understand how our own minds work, will we hold machines in higher esteem, or ourselves in lower?
        edgyquant 3y ago
        Any biology or physics that suggests humans are just a pattern recognizer will be discarded as us being a conscious being is the only thing every human knows to be 100% true.
        ben_w 3y ago
        So, all of biology and physics then. If souls exist, they have no mass, and have a weird way of being repeatably disrupted in consistent ways by damage to certain parts of the brain or specific chemicals. Just because consciousness is a mystery today, doesn't mean we get to stop and say it will be so forever more. Heck, the problem still fundamentally exists regardless of if you're atheist, monotheist, polytheist, or pantheist. -- “We’re not listening to you! You’re not even really alive!” said a priest. Dorfl nodded. “This Is Fundamentally True,” he said. “See? He admits it!” “I Suggest You Take Me And Smash Me And Grind The Bits Into Fragments And Pound The Fragments Into Powder And Mill Them Again To The Finest Dust There Can Be, And I Believe You Will Not Find A Single Atom Of Life–” “True! Let’s do it!” “However, In Order To Test This Fully, One Of You Must Volunteer To Undergo The Same Process.” There was silence. “That’s not fair,” said a priest, after a while. “All anyone has to do is bake up your dust again and you’ll be alive…” - Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett
- sensanaty 3y ago
  A child isn't a computer program, and no amount of anthropomorphizing will ever make them so. Especially ChatGPT and other LLMs, they're not even close to being AGI or an "intelligent entity" as you put it, despite what all the AI-bro hype and marketing would like everyone else to believe.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > they're not even close to being AGI Only because all three letters of the initialism mean different things to different people. Existing LLMs won't do everything, but bluntly: good, we're not ready for a world where there is an AI that can do everything for $1-60/million words[0], and we need to get ready for that world before we find ourselves living in it. ChatGPT-3.5 has a lot of weaknesses, but it can still do a better job of coding than a few of my coworkers demonstrated over the last 20 years. I'm listening to a German language learning podcast, and the hosts mentioned using it to help summarise a long email from one of their listeners. My sister has work anecdotes about it helping, and she's not in tech. Influencers, teachers, lawyers, Hollywood writers… well, "moral panic" doesn't tell you much… the game Doom was 30 years ago, and that had a moral panic that looks quaint given how much FPS games' graphics improved with each subsequent release, and I suspect ChatGPT-3.5 was to conversational AI what Doom was to 3D realtime gaming: the point at which people take note, followed by a decade of every new release being (wrongly) called "photorealistic". [0] current pricing for gpt-3.5-turbo-1106 ($0.0010 / 1K tokens) and gpt-4-32k ($0.06 / 1K tokens) pricing: https://openai.com/pricing https://openai.com/pricing
    - sensanaty 3y ago
      > ChatGPT-3.5 has a lot of weaknesses, but it can still do a better job of coding than a few of my coworkers demonstrated over the last 20 years. Whenever people say stuff like this I can't help but wonder what on earth kind of projects they work on. Even GPT4, while useful for things like reformatting or generating boilerplate code and stuff like that, it's still a far cry from any decent dev I've ever worked with, especially if you're not using a popular language like JS or Python. My usual PRs at work are pretty big, complex pieces of code that all have to actually work when integrated with the larger system around it, no AI tool I've tried so far has come even close to acceptable here, other than for generating some boilerplate code that I would've written myself anyway. But even with the innocent-looking boilerplate there's always a weird gotcha that isn't obvious until you really analyze the code closely. It ends up saving nothing more than a few keystrokes, if that, yet people say all the time that they're generating entire pieces of software by gluing together code it spits out, which I find absolutely insane given my anecdotal attempts at it. This can circumvented by going with more elaborate in-depth prompts, but at that point are you really saving on effort compared to the alternative? Is it really more efficient? By the time I have a prompt complex enough for it to spit out something good at me, I could've already bashed out the code myself anyways. That's not even mentioning all the legacy shit you have to keep in mind for any one line of code, plus whatever conventions and standards your team uses and has etc. I mean it works great for a function or whatever, but is that seriously what most people are working on? Simple, one-off independent function calls that don't interact in any way with anything within a larger system? Even simple CRUD apps aren't so well isolated. Don't even get me started on the actual difficult part which is the whole preamble to creating the ticket in JIRA or whatever task management software you use where you're talking with stakeholders and planning out the work ahead, you're telling me you're paying 'Open'AI to do that whole rigamarole for you, and you're doing it successfully?
- d4mi3n 3y ago
  This argument might hold more water when generative models are more than fancy compression algorithms/text completion engines. A more practical way of looking at this is: who is making money off of these models? How did they get their training data? I’m not a fan of copyright in general, but we have serious outstanding issues with companies and organizations stealing or plastering work without compensating the original creators of said works. Thusfar, LLMs are becoming another method to concentrate wealth to whoever has the resources to train and sell these models at scale.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > This argument might hold more water when generative models are more than fancy compression algorithms/text completion engines. I doubt that part of the argument would change even if we perfected brain uploads. Now, if you gave the current LLMs a robot body with a cute face, that'll probably change minds faster, regardless of the underlying architecture. > who is making money off of these models? When the models are open source, or at least may be downloaded and used locally for no cost, that would be the users of the models. And back to the biological comparison: I learned to read (and also to code) in part from the Commodore 64 user manual, should I owe the shareholders anything for my lifetime earnings? As I got to the end of that sentence, a thought struck me: taxes do that. And in the UK the question of if university should be funded by taxes or by the students themselves followed the same lines.
    - d4mi3n 3y ago
      > When the models are open source, or at least may be downloaded and used locally for no cost, that would be the users of the models. I think there's a bit more nuance to this. The profits go to those with the ability to run these models and to those with the infrastructure (or capitol) to run said models. I'm hoping this will change and we'll see lower barriers to entry as LLMs are made more accessible over time. > And back to the biological comparison: I learned to read (and also to code) in part from the Commodore 64 user manual, should I owe the shareholders anything for my lifetime earnings? This is more a philosophical question than anything else. I don't think there's right or wrong answer, but in my opinion the answers we arrive at should provide as much benefit to as many people as possible. > As I got to the end of that sentence, a thought struck me: taxes do that. And in the UK the question of if university should be funded by taxes or by the students themselves followed the same lines. I agree with your assessment and this model lines up well with my own opinions on reasonable ways to ensure equitable benefit from AI (be it ML, LLMs, or some theoretical general AI in the future).
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  If the child / author then regurgitates entire paragraphs or sections verbatim in his own works and someone notices, you bet there will be a plagiarism lawsuit coming his way.
  - rileymat2 3y ago
    Wouldn’t this be well handled by suing the person that prompted and distributed the results?
    - pier25 3y ago
      Isn't OpenAI distributing content in its apps?
      - madamelic 3y ago
        This is an extremely dangerous precedent that I think you are purposefully trying to put forward. It's a horrendously bad idea especially for startups to make it apps' faults for how users use their platform. It's only in the benefit of entrenched tech companies to make this precedent.
    - heavyset_go 3y ago
      No, whoever operates the LLM service is liable for unauthorized modification, reproduction and distribution of copyrighted work to users.
      - shandor 3y ago
        Ok, so is it ok if I run the whole thing on my own hardware, and never distribute? If not, how does that differ from me making an unauthorized pencil drawing of Mario?
        heavyset_go 3y ago
        It's no different than pirating. No one will care unless you start sharing or try to start a business from it.
- allturtles 3y ago
  If llms are intelligent entities legally equivalent to a human child, then they incur an even more serious legal problem, as we are all in violation of the 13th amendment.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - dmvdoug 3y ago
    Hey, don’t look at me. I always say please and thank you when I play with LLMs.
- pier25 3y ago
  LLMs are not intelligent entities.
  - RyEgswuCsn 3y ago
    Until they are.
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      Even then, society exists by and for humans.
      - ctxSw1tch 3y ago
        [dead]
      - ben_w 3y ago
        > Even then, society exists by and for humans. 150 years ago society exists by and for men specifically (as in: not women) in most nations; 220 years ago, US society was by and for rich white (specifically white) land owners. I don't know when AI will count as people in law, or even if they ever will; we may well pass laws prohibiting the creation of any mind in danger of coming close to this threshold. But be wary, for AI acting enough like people is different to being anything like a person on the inside, and that means being wrong in either direction can have horrifying consequences. To appear but not to be conscious, leads to a worthless future. To be but not to appear conscious, leads to a fate worse than the history of slavery, for the slaves were eventually freed.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  Humans and machines are regulated and viewed differently all the time.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Because these are statistical models and laws protecting humans dont apply to them nor should they, ever.
ben_w 3y ago
> Something that is purely speculative, undefined, and has been promised in the near future for 50+ years. "Undefined", although not literally, in practice definitely: each letter of that initialism means a different thing to different people. To that extent, I'll even grant "speculative" despite many of those meanings being demonstrably met by us humans. But as someone who (unfortunately) has just turned 40: who was it that was promising AGI "in the near future" for more than my entire lifetime? Including the second AI winter? Because even the biggest timeline-optimists I can remember (Kurzweil and Yudkowsky), who very few cared to listen to, put things more than 20 years ahead of when they were writing. (And yes, Yudkowsky was definitely wrong about a singularity in 2021, though as you say AGI is undefined I think if someone in 1996 had seen ChatGPT they'd have said "yes, this is AGI" despite its flaws). Now the crowdsourced guess for AGI is 7 about years: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-general-intelligence/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-... > I don't see copyright holders lying down for one else's benefit and I don't see governments gutting copyright, contract law, and several other avenues of protection that copyright holders can deploy in the name of something that doesn't exist and may not exist. I tend to agree. Although I don't accept that contract law has much of anything to do with this discussion, to the extent that it does have implications, it isn't going anywhere. But at the same time, Google exists by reading the entire public internet, indexing it, and presenting clips of it to its users. This has in fact resulted in copyright disputes, and I was surprised how long it took for that to happen. Likewise, while copyright holders must fight for their survival, mere LLMs even as they exist right now are economically relevant, so this isn't going to be a one-sided fight by just copyright holders.
- nonameiguess 3y ago
  > But as someone who (unfortunately) has just turned 40: who was it that was promising AGI "in the near future" for more than my entire lifetime? Including the second AI winter? Because even the biggest timeline-optimists I can remember (Kurzweil and Yudkowsky), who very few cared to listen to, put things more than 20 years ahead of when they were writing. (And yes, Yudkowsky was definitely wrong about a singularity in 2021, though as you say AGI is undefined I think if someone in 1996 had seen ChatGPT they'd have said "yes, this is AGI" despite its flaws). You won't be able to read this without a subscription and I can't figure out how to find an archive link to something published in 1958: https://www.nytimes.com/1958/07/08/archives/new-navy-device-learns-by-doing-psychologist-shows-embryo-of.html https://www.nytimes.com/1958/07/08/archives/new-navy-device-.... The important quote, however, is: > The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence. Later perceptrons will be able to recognize people and call out their names and instantly translate speech in one language to speech and writing in another language, it was predicted. They were talking about the very first perceptron, a hardware implementation funded by the Navy and built by a team led by Frank Rosenblatt, one of the earlier evangelists of neural nets, in 1957. The terminology "AGI" hadn't come into use yet that I'm aware of, as "AI" in itself meant the same thing back then, but in order to be able to call inferior, more limited software capabilities "AI" for marketing purposes, we had to invent "AGI" as the stronger concept. I'm guessing they expected it to happen sooner than 75 years later, though.
DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
The examples given are all billion-dollar, decades old characters. The volume of material directly/indirectly referencing those characters in a random internet crawl will be fairly large. Most copyrighted works won't have that issue. If anything it means they only infringe on archetypal works and not the other 99.9%. If I write a story involving robots and spaceships (of which there are many, before and since Star Wars) DALL-E won't infringe me because it will be busy infringing on Star Wars.
- _jal 3y ago
  The examples were chosen by the author to make a point precisely because they are well known. But every single copyright holder with their works online (which includes you and me) has the same legal rights as the NYT or Disney. Naturally some copyright holders have more real-world capability to go legal than others, but that does not reduce the legal risk. > If anything it means they only infringe on archetypal works and not the other 99.9% How on earth do you get to that conclusion? There's no "popularity" floor to copyright protection. Either a work has been infringed or it hasn't.
- jprete 3y ago
  I'm opposed to my (fairly minor) copyrighted works being used in GenAI datasets as well. I just have no practical way to stop it, and there aren't clear enough damages to sue. That doesn't make it legal.
  - eropple 3y ago
    OpenAI also plays some ugly games with regards to the difference between training and search. Search requests come from the `ChatGPT-User` user-agent, and I'd like to allow those; training and scraping requests come from `GPTBot`, and I have no interest in those. But as per their own documentation, putting one in robots.txt disables the other.
    - nullstyle 3y ago
      Thats a major asshole move and I’ll reference it when people ask about bad acts from OpenAI. Thanks!
pama 3y ago
Japan is already taking action regarding copyright law and the AI world is noticing: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/japanese-government-identified-issues-related-ai-and-copyrights https://www.natlawreview.com/article/japanese-government-ide... https://www.cliffordchance.com/insights/resources/blogs/talking-tech/en/articles/2023/10/Japanese-Law-Issues-Surrounding-Generative-AI.html https://www.cliffordchance.com/insights/resources/blogs/talk...
- leereeves 3y ago
  Neither of those sources describe any actions "gutting copyright law". They just say that officials met to discuss the issues.
  - pama 3y ago
    I will update my language that mimicked the original comment. However it is not simple discussion. Here is a snippet related to Japan’s law, updated from ca 2018 with AI systems in mind, and clarified recently. I personally find it totally reasonable and support it. “The use of copyrighted products or materials to train generative AI models would be prima facie copyright infringement under the Copyright Act, as it is a reproduction (fukusei) or other form of use of the copyrighted work. However, Article 30-4 of the Copyright Act stipulates that the use of copyrighted works by generative AI for learning purposes is allowed in principle.”
    - leereeves 3y ago
      And it goes on to say "unless such use of copyrighted works unreasonably prejudices the interests of the copyright owner, in light of the nature or purpose of the work or the circumstances of its exploitation in Japan." Which suggests that when AI art threatens commercial interests, the protection offered by 30-4 can disappear. To me it sounds like they tried to please everyone and left the hard decisions about conflicting interests to the courts (in particular the courts will have to decide what "unreasonably" means).
oliveshell 3y ago
Thank you for this. The greed-fueled magical thinking around AI is absolutely out of control at the moment.

squidbeak 3y ago

If a child is instructed to read a copyrighted work at school, which later becomes a factor in his own derivative works, he won't be in breach of copyright. Why should other intelligent entities be prevented from reading copyrighted works and gaining whatever there is to gain from those works the way any human might?

dingnuts 3y ago
thats irrelevant since an LLM is not an intelligent entity. Whatever you're arguing about is fiction.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  LLMs are clearly a type of lower level intelligence. Intelligence does not require consciousness.
  - Sheeplator 3y ago
    The only thing that I would say is "clear" is that LLMs are big collections of statistical data on how we use language. That does not cross my threshold for "intelligence".
    - mistermann 3y ago
      > That does not cross my threshold for "intelligence". You have your own individual threshold for what "is" intelligence? Holy cow, imagine if each other agent had their own also, but spoke as if they had a common one...that sure wouldn't be a very intelligent way to run a simulation, imagine the unrealized confusion and delusion that could result if that became a cultural convention!
  - vehemenz 3y ago
    That’s quite a lot of metaphysical speculation for a conclusion that is all but clear.
- block_dagger 3y ago
  ChatGPT is not an intelligent entity? What’s been comprehending and rewriting all my crappy code for several months? An auto-complete? There’s obviously emergent behavior there that is actually defined by the maker and most users as “intelligence.” Edit: typo
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    I would paraphrase one of Clarke's laws and say that "Any sufficiently advanced text generator is indistinguishable from an intelligent entity." Just because a computer program's output is remarkably good does not mean there is any emergent intelligence, any more than a technology we don't understand means there is magic.
    - helf 3y ago
      [dead]
    - ben_w 3y ago
      The reverse can also be true, with John Keats' agreeing with Charles Lamb that Newton "had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia_(poem) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia_(poem) If we should ever fully understand how our own minds work, will we hold machines in higher esteem, or ourselves in lower?
      - edgyquant 3y ago
        Any biology or physics that suggests humans are just a pattern recognizer will be discarded as us being a conscious being is the only thing every human knows to be 100% true.
        ben_w 3y ago
        So, all of biology and physics then. If souls exist, they have no mass, and have a weird way of being repeatably disrupted in consistent ways by damage to certain parts of the brain or specific chemicals. Just because consciousness is a mystery today, doesn't mean we get to stop and say it will be so forever more. Heck, the problem still fundamentally exists regardless of if you're atheist, monotheist, polytheist, or pantheist. -- “We’re not listening to you! You’re not even really alive!” said a priest. Dorfl nodded. “This Is Fundamentally True,” he said. “See? He admits it!” “I Suggest You Take Me And Smash Me And Grind The Bits Into Fragments And Pound The Fragments Into Powder And Mill Them Again To The Finest Dust There Can Be, And I Believe You Will Not Find A Single Atom Of Life–” “True! Let’s do it!” “However, In Order To Test This Fully, One Of You Must Volunteer To Undergo The Same Process.” There was silence. “That’s not fair,” said a priest, after a while. “All anyone has to do is bake up your dust again and you’ll be alive…” - Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett
sensanaty 3y ago
A child isn't a computer program, and no amount of anthropomorphizing will ever make them so. Especially ChatGPT and other LLMs, they're not even close to being AGI or an "intelligent entity" as you put it, despite what all the AI-bro hype and marketing would like everyone else to believe.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > they're not even close to being AGI Only because all three letters of the initialism mean different things to different people. Existing LLMs won't do everything, but bluntly: good, we're not ready for a world where there is an AI that can do everything for $1-60/million words[0], and we need to get ready for that world before we find ourselves living in it. ChatGPT-3.5 has a lot of weaknesses, but it can still do a better job of coding than a few of my coworkers demonstrated over the last 20 years. I'm listening to a German language learning podcast, and the hosts mentioned using it to help summarise a long email from one of their listeners. My sister has work anecdotes about it helping, and she's not in tech. Influencers, teachers, lawyers, Hollywood writers… well, "moral panic" doesn't tell you much… the game Doom was 30 years ago, and that had a moral panic that looks quaint given how much FPS games' graphics improved with each subsequent release, and I suspect ChatGPT-3.5 was to conversational AI what Doom was to 3D realtime gaming: the point at which people take note, followed by a decade of every new release being (wrongly) called "photorealistic". [0] current pricing for gpt-3.5-turbo-1106 ($0.0010 / 1K tokens) and gpt-4-32k ($0.06 / 1K tokens) pricing: https://openai.com/pricing https://openai.com/pricing
  - sensanaty 3y ago
    > ChatGPT-3.5 has a lot of weaknesses, but it can still do a better job of coding than a few of my coworkers demonstrated over the last 20 years. Whenever people say stuff like this I can't help but wonder what on earth kind of projects they work on. Even GPT4, while useful for things like reformatting or generating boilerplate code and stuff like that, it's still a far cry from any decent dev I've ever worked with, especially if you're not using a popular language like JS or Python. My usual PRs at work are pretty big, complex pieces of code that all have to actually work when integrated with the larger system around it, no AI tool I've tried so far has come even close to acceptable here, other than for generating some boilerplate code that I would've written myself anyway. But even with the innocent-looking boilerplate there's always a weird gotcha that isn't obvious until you really analyze the code closely. It ends up saving nothing more than a few keystrokes, if that, yet people say all the time that they're generating entire pieces of software by gluing together code it spits out, which I find absolutely insane given my anecdotal attempts at it. This can circumvented by going with more elaborate in-depth prompts, but at that point are you really saving on effort compared to the alternative? Is it really more efficient? By the time I have a prompt complex enough for it to spit out something good at me, I could've already bashed out the code myself anyways. That's not even mentioning all the legacy shit you have to keep in mind for any one line of code, plus whatever conventions and standards your team uses and has etc. I mean it works great for a function or whatever, but is that seriously what most people are working on? Simple, one-off independent function calls that don't interact in any way with anything within a larger system? Even simple CRUD apps aren't so well isolated. Don't even get me started on the actual difficult part which is the whole preamble to creating the ticket in JIRA or whatever task management software you use where you're talking with stakeholders and planning out the work ahead, you're telling me you're paying 'Open'AI to do that whole rigamarole for you, and you're doing it successfully?
d4mi3n 3y ago
This argument might hold more water when generative models are more than fancy compression algorithms/text completion engines. A more practical way of looking at this is: who is making money off of these models? How did they get their training data? I’m not a fan of copyright in general, but we have serious outstanding issues with companies and organizations stealing or plastering work without compensating the original creators of said works. Thusfar, LLMs are becoming another method to concentrate wealth to whoever has the resources to train and sell these models at scale.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > This argument might hold more water when generative models are more than fancy compression algorithms/text completion engines. I doubt that part of the argument would change even if we perfected brain uploads. Now, if you gave the current LLMs a robot body with a cute face, that'll probably change minds faster, regardless of the underlying architecture. > who is making money off of these models? When the models are open source, or at least may be downloaded and used locally for no cost, that would be the users of the models. And back to the biological comparison: I learned to read (and also to code) in part from the Commodore 64 user manual, should I owe the shareholders anything for my lifetime earnings? As I got to the end of that sentence, a thought struck me: taxes do that. And in the UK the question of if university should be funded by taxes or by the students themselves followed the same lines.
  - d4mi3n 3y ago
    > When the models are open source, or at least may be downloaded and used locally for no cost, that would be the users of the models. I think there's a bit more nuance to this. The profits go to those with the ability to run these models and to those with the infrastructure (or capitol) to run said models. I'm hoping this will change and we'll see lower barriers to entry as LLMs are made more accessible over time. > And back to the biological comparison: I learned to read (and also to code) in part from the Commodore 64 user manual, should I owe the shareholders anything for my lifetime earnings? This is more a philosophical question than anything else. I don't think there's right or wrong answer, but in my opinion the answers we arrive at should provide as much benefit to as many people as possible. > As I got to the end of that sentence, a thought struck me: taxes do that. And in the UK the question of if university should be funded by taxes or by the students themselves followed the same lines. I agree with your assessment and this model lines up well with my own opinions on reasonable ways to ensure equitable benefit from AI (be it ML, LLMs, or some theoretical general AI in the future).
loloquwowndueo 3y ago
If the child / author then regurgitates entire paragraphs or sections verbatim in his own works and someone notices, you bet there will be a plagiarism lawsuit coming his way.
- rileymat2 3y ago
  Wouldn’t this be well handled by suing the person that prompted and distributed the results?
  - pier25 3y ago
    Isn't OpenAI distributing content in its apps?
    - madamelic 3y ago
      This is an extremely dangerous precedent that I think you are purposefully trying to put forward. It's a horrendously bad idea especially for startups to make it apps' faults for how users use their platform. It's only in the benefit of entrenched tech companies to make this precedent.
  - heavyset_go 3y ago
    No, whoever operates the LLM service is liable for unauthorized modification, reproduction and distribution of copyrighted work to users.
    - shandor 3y ago
      Ok, so is it ok if I run the whole thing on my own hardware, and never distribute? If not, how does that differ from me making an unauthorized pencil drawing of Mario?
      - heavyset_go 3y ago
        It's no different than pirating. No one will care unless you start sharing or try to start a business from it.
allturtles 3y ago
If llms are intelligent entities legally equivalent to a human child, then they incur an even more serious legal problem, as we are all in violation of the 13th amendment.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dmvdoug 3y ago
  Hey, don’t look at me. I always say please and thank you when I play with LLMs.
pier25 3y ago
LLMs are not intelligent entities.
- RyEgswuCsn 3y ago
  Until they are.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Even then, society exists by and for humans.
    - ctxSw1tch 3y ago
      [dead]
    - ben_w 3y ago
      > Even then, society exists by and for humans. 150 years ago society exists by and for men specifically (as in: not women) in most nations; 220 years ago, US society was by and for rich white (specifically white) land owners. I don't know when AI will count as people in law, or even if they ever will; we may well pass laws prohibiting the creation of any mind in danger of coming close to this threshold. But be wary, for AI acting enough like people is different to being anything like a person on the inside, and that means being wrong in either direction can have horrifying consequences. To appear but not to be conscious, leads to a worthless future. To be but not to appear conscious, leads to a fate worse than the history of slavery, for the slaves were eventually freed.
RandomLensman 3y ago
Humans and machines are regulated and viewed differently all the time.
edgyquant 3y ago
Because these are statistical models and laws protecting humans dont apply to them nor should they, ever.

ben_w 3y ago

> Something that is purely speculative, undefined, and has been promised in the near future for 50+ years. "Undefined", although not literally, in practice definitely: each letter of that initialism means a different thing to different people. To that extent, I'll even grant "speculative" despite many of those meanings being demonstrably met by us humans. But as someone who (unfortunately) has just turned 40: who was it that was promising AGI "in the near future" for more than my entire lifetime? Including the second AI winter? Because even the biggest timeline-optimists I can remember (Kurzweil and Yudkowsky), who very few cared to listen to, put things more than 20 years ahead of when they were writing. (And yes, Yudkowsky was definitely wrong about a singularity in 2021, though as you say AGI is undefined I think if someone in 1996 had seen ChatGPT they'd have said "yes, this is AGI" despite its flaws). Now the crowdsourced guess for AGI is 7 about years: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-general-intelligence/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-... > I don't see copyright holders lying down for one else's benefit and I don't see governments gutting copyright, contract law, and several other avenues of protection that copyright holders can deploy in the name of something that doesn't exist and may not exist. I tend to agree. Although I don't accept that contract law has much of anything to do with this discussion, to the extent that it does have implications, it isn't going anywhere. But at the same time, Google exists by reading the entire public internet, indexing it, and presenting clips of it to its users. This has in fact resulted in copyright disputes, and I was surprised how long it took for that to happen. Likewise, while copyright holders must fight for their survival, mere LLMs even as they exist right now are economically relevant, so this isn't going to be a one-sided fight by just copyright holders.

nonameiguess 3y ago
> But as someone who (unfortunately) has just turned 40: who was it that was promising AGI "in the near future" for more than my entire lifetime? Including the second AI winter? Because even the biggest timeline-optimists I can remember (Kurzweil and Yudkowsky), who very few cared to listen to, put things more than 20 years ahead of when they were writing. (And yes, Yudkowsky was definitely wrong about a singularity in 2021, though as you say AGI is undefined I think if someone in 1996 had seen ChatGPT they'd have said "yes, this is AGI" despite its flaws). You won't be able to read this without a subscription and I can't figure out how to find an archive link to something published in 1958: https://www.nytimes.com/1958/07/08/archives/new-navy-device-learns-by-doing-psychologist-shows-embryo-of.html https://www.nytimes.com/1958/07/08/archives/new-navy-device-.... The important quote, however, is: > The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence. Later perceptrons will be able to recognize people and call out their names and instantly translate speech in one language to speech and writing in another language, it was predicted. They were talking about the very first perceptron, a hardware implementation funded by the Navy and built by a team led by Frank Rosenblatt, one of the earlier evangelists of neural nets, in 1957. The terminology "AGI" hadn't come into use yet that I'm aware of, as "AI" in itself meant the same thing back then, but in order to be able to call inferior, more limited software capabilities "AI" for marketing purposes, we had to invent "AGI" as the stronger concept. I'm guessing they expected it to happen sooner than 75 years later, though.

DonsDiscountGas 3y ago

The examples given are all billion-dollar, decades old characters. The volume of material directly/indirectly referencing those characters in a random internet crawl will be fairly large. Most copyrighted works won't have that issue. If anything it means they only infringe on archetypal works and not the other 99.9%. If I write a story involving robots and spaceships (of which there are many, before and since Star Wars) DALL-E won't infringe me because it will be busy infringing on Star Wars.

_jal 3y ago
The examples were chosen by the author to make a point precisely because they are well known. But every single copyright holder with their works online (which includes you and me) has the same legal rights as the NYT or Disney. Naturally some copyright holders have more real-world capability to go legal than others, but that does not reduce the legal risk. > If anything it means they only infringe on archetypal works and not the other 99.9% How on earth do you get to that conclusion? There's no "popularity" floor to copyright protection. Either a work has been infringed or it hasn't.
jprete 3y ago
I'm opposed to my (fairly minor) copyrighted works being used in GenAI datasets as well. I just have no practical way to stop it, and there aren't clear enough damages to sue. That doesn't make it legal.
- eropple 3y ago
  OpenAI also plays some ugly games with regards to the difference between training and search. Search requests come from the `ChatGPT-User` user-agent, and I'd like to allow those; training and scraping requests come from `GPTBot`, and I have no interest in those. But as per their own documentation, putting one in robots.txt disables the other.
  - nullstyle 3y ago
    Thats a major asshole move and I’ll reference it when people ask about bad acts from OpenAI. Thanks!

pama 3y ago

Japan is already taking action regarding copyright law and the AI world is noticing: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/japanese-government-identified-issues-related-ai-and-copyrights https://www.natlawreview.com/article/japanese-government-ide... https://www.cliffordchance.com/insights/resources/blogs/talking-tech/en/articles/2023/10/Japanese-Law-Issues-Surrounding-Generative-AI.html https://www.cliffordchance.com/insights/resources/blogs/talk...

leereeves 3y ago
Neither of those sources describe any actions "gutting copyright law". They just say that officials met to discuss the issues.
- pama 3y ago
  I will update my language that mimicked the original comment. However it is not simple discussion. Here is a snippet related to Japan’s law, updated from ca 2018 with AI systems in mind, and clarified recently. I personally find it totally reasonable and support it. “The use of copyrighted products or materials to train generative AI models would be prima facie copyright infringement under the Copyright Act, as it is a reproduction (fukusei) or other form of use of the copyrighted work. However, Article 30-4 of the Copyright Act stipulates that the use of copyrighted works by generative AI for learning purposes is allowed in principle.”
  - leereeves 3y ago
    And it goes on to say "unless such use of copyrighted works unreasonably prejudices the interests of the copyright owner, in light of the nature or purpose of the work or the circumstances of its exploitation in Japan." Which suggests that when AI art threatens commercial interests, the protection offered by 30-4 can disappear. To me it sounds like they tried to please everyone and left the hard decisions about conflicting interests to the courts (in particular the courts will have to decide what "unreasonably" means).

oliveshell 3y ago

Thank you for this. The greed-fueled magical thinking around AI is absolutely out of control at the moment.