4 ms·

I'm not sure the analogy really fits. As I see it, hypothetical farmers aren't an elite class that gets rich from copying and transforming the communications an

by bitzun 3y ago

I'm not sure the analogy really fits. As I see it, hypothetical farmers aren't an elite class that gets rich from copying and transforming the communications and creative output of billions(?) of unknowing people.

arduanika 3y ago
The Bolsheviks would beg to differ on whether the kulaks were an elite class. When LLMs reproduce someone else's work, it is theft and appropriation, and our tech culture is rationalizing it out of hatred of the laptop class -- the kulaks, in my analogy. These traditional media do have their faults, and it's fine to point those out. But reporting is work, consisting of more than just "copying and transforming", and stealing it is wrong. "[F]orcing" it into the public domain is no more a "best outcome" than forcing the farms to collectivize.
- flir 3y ago
  There's a trivial solution here. Stick all the NYT's still-in-copyright text in a big database. Every time the chatbot produces a paragraph, check it against the NYT-censor. If it's more than 70% similar to anything in the database (mythical 30% rule), have the chatbot rephrase it. Thus, the chatbot is no longer reproducing someone else's work. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that solution wouldn't be acceptable to the NYT, which is why I think they're trying for a land grab. They're trying to extend copyright beyond what was intended.
  - rickydroll 3y ago
    I would go one step further. retrain without any NYT data and any references to the NYT. As afar as any LLM user is concerned, NYT would not exist.
- bitzun 3y ago
  I understand what you're saying now, my comment was pretty flippant in retrospect. I didn't mean to devalue the NYT's work, my suggestion was hypothetically intended to liberate the free moat OpenAI got from the fruit's of NYT's labor. In retrospect it's obvious that putting GPT's model in the public domain is also putting NYT's work in the public domain, but that hadn't occurred to me. Thanks for the food for thought. Now I kind of like the idea of destroying the existing models if a royalty system can't be figured out, sort of a "reset" to force them to do it properly.

by bitzun 3y ago

arduanika 3y ago

The Bolsheviks would beg to differ on whether the kulaks were an elite class. When LLMs reproduce someone else's work, it is theft and appropriation, and our tech culture is rationalizing it out of hatred of the laptop class -- the kulaks, in my analogy. These traditional media do have their faults, and it's fine to point those out. But reporting is work, consisting of more than just "copying and transforming", and stealing it is wrong. "[F]orcing" it into the public domain is no more a "best outcome" than forcing the farms to collectivize.

flir 3y ago
There's a trivial solution here. Stick all the NYT's still-in-copyright text in a big database. Every time the chatbot produces a paragraph, check it against the NYT-censor. If it's more than 70% similar to anything in the database (mythical 30% rule), have the chatbot rephrase it. Thus, the chatbot is no longer reproducing someone else's work. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that solution wouldn't be acceptable to the NYT, which is why I think they're trying for a land grab. They're trying to extend copyright beyond what was intended.
- rickydroll 3y ago
  I would go one step further. retrain without any NYT data and any references to the NYT. As afar as any LLM user is concerned, NYT would not exist.
bitzun 3y ago
I understand what you're saying now, my comment was pretty flippant in retrospect. I didn't mean to devalue the NYT's work, my suggestion was hypothetically intended to liberate the free moat OpenAI got from the fruit's of NYT's labor. In retrospect it's obvious that putting GPT's model in the public domain is also putting NYT's work in the public domain, but that hadn't occurred to me. Thanks for the food for thought. Now I kind of like the idea of destroying the existing models if a royalty system can't be figured out, sort of a "reset" to force them to do it properly.