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It's sad seeing peers become luddites over AI. It's never been the right side of history to be on.

asylteltine 3y ago
It’s not a big ask to force so called “””ai””” companies to you know, pay for the use of content. If a human did what models are doing, it would be considered plagiarism at best. It’s not okay. They can pay a license if they want to profit off my content.
- tavavex 3y ago
  > If a human did what models are doing, it would be considered plagiarism at best. They wouldn't, and that's the issue. If I looked at a thousand drawings done in a certain, specific style and used my findings to make my own unique product in that same style, you'd be hard-pressed to find any reasonable people who'd accuse me of plagiarism. Not to mention that this flavor of "profiting" is something we've been seemingly fine with until specifically generative AI came about. Google profits off of your content directly by using their machine learning algorithms to scrape your website and use its contents in search results, next to their ads. It was found legal, so why should generative AI pay a fee?
  - chlorion 3y ago
    If people who reverse engineer things like Windows APIs can be sued simply because they have viewed leaked Windows source code and may implement something similar to it, on accident, I think "AI" should be held to the same standard. Clean room reverse engineering is a thing that exists exactly for this reason but it doesn't seem to apply to "AI". Also "AI" is not a human, and there is no proof that it "learns like humans". or that it should be even compared to humans in any way, so none of this matters anyways.
    - tavavex 3y ago
      > If people who reverse engineer things like Windows APIs can be sued simply because they have viewed leaked Windows source code and may implement something similar to it, on accident, I think "AI" should be held to the same standard. It already is. The Windows source code is proprietary data, having unauthorized access to it is already disallowed. You already can't legally use proprietary or pirated data in AI training for the same reasons why you can't use it anywhere else. But this conversation is about the use of publicly posted information that's already out on the internet. It's the equivalent of Microsoft openly publishing the MS-DOS source code and then suing people for viewing it and potentially getting ideas from it. > Also "AI" is not a human, and there is no proof that it "learns like humans". or that it should be even compared to humans in any way, so none of this matters anyways. It makes absolutely no sense that a ruling would apply to automation and not humans. If I can legally do a thing myself, can you come up with an argument why I can't build a machine that does that thing for me? The only exception that I can think of is cases where human health and safety is at stake, which is an edge case that doesn't apply to generating text or images.
      - chlorion 3y ago
        >But this conversation is about the use of publicly posted information that's already out on the internet. This is a common fallacy, that having access to the source gives you the legal right to do what you want with it, and that is not correct. The license must be followed regardless of whether it's accessible to the public. Having access to or viewing Windows source code and pirated content isn't disallowed. The thing that isn't allowed is copying it. That's what copyright laws are about. The same laws that make it illegal to copy Windows source code are exactly what the GPL are based on, copyright laws. So why do copyright laws only apply to one side here? I think there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about how copyright and software licenses work here. Windows is able to state that the Windows source code is proprietary because it is their IP, my software is also my IP, so my terms must also be followed in order to legally use my software. >can't legally use proprietary or pirated data in AI training for the same reasons why you can't use it anywhere else. This is the same reason why you can't use GPL code in proprietary projects! The mechanisms that allow something to be proprietary are the same mechanisms that the GPL are based on, this is why it's sometimes called "copyleft".
neffo 3y ago
Metaverse? Crypto?
- MeImCounting 3y ago
  Did anyone actually take those things seriously? Theres certainly a difference between those blatant and clear money grabs and the actual technological advances that the current AI craze represents, for instance years of serious academic research and real world capabilities. The whole anti-AI self-righteous craze will die down soon enough (as will the "feel the AGI" craze) and Transformer models will be just another tool in the toolbox
  - FridgeSeal 3y ago
    It’s easy to say they’re obviously silly now, and while a lot of us were saying they were silly before, there was a definite period where crypto/NFT/blockchain stuff was being taken reasonably seriously by commenters here and elsewhere.
    - MeImCounting 3y ago
      I wasnt really involved in tech circles when it was getting big around 2012 but by the time I was starting to get educated on such things it was pretty clear that any scheme like cryptocurrency which revolves around money and has no intrinsic value is pretty much guaranteed to be a scam. Again AI doesnt have any of these hallmarks
      - randomdata 3y ago
        Cryptocurrencies were of interest at one point because they showed promise for providing a way to transfer money electronically in a universal fashion. Eventually the limitations proved too great and interest waned. This AI wave of which we speak may be slightly different in that it has already proven to solve a certain class of problems, while I'm not sure cryptocurrencies ended up solving any problems in the end, but they both share a similar hallmark of people believing that early promise will lead to complete game changes in the coming years. That is quite ripe for scams to take hold. It would hardly be the first time where we saw some incremental progress in AI, only to see it stall out and interest wane, but with the grifters trying to latch onto the early hype, convincing others that they have something magical to offer.
haswell 3y ago
While I wouldn’t call myself a Luddite, I’ve definitely moved beyond the blind techno-optimism that I held in the 90s and early 2000s. But it’s not AI that’s making me shift my views. It’s the mess of unresolved problems brought about by the last major generation of tech that gives me pause. Tech that is causing real harms. We still haven’t figured out how to survive the algorithmic social media hellscape we created, and now we’re hurtling towards opening more boxes that would make Pandora proud. The recent AI explosion has crystallized this view, but did not cause it. My personal view is that tech is nearing some of the very dangerous end points that we’ve only been able to speculate about throughout most of human history. The atomic bomb completely changed warfare. There are developments past which all old mental models no longer apply. Reducing this to “sides” is a distraction. I still think technology is part of the solution to the world’s future problems, including the ones brought about by “AI”, but I think it’s foolish to downplay or oversimplify the concerns.
- MeImCounting 3y ago
  Genuinely curious what do you see as the dangers and concerns caused by social media/potential dangers and concerns caused by AI? Take the atomic bomb for example: it pretty much ended large scale industrial warfare on the level of the world wars. There are still wars but not ones in which entire continents are destroyed and entire generations across dozens of countries are lost. All things told the nuclear bomb saved the world a lot of suffering. For the most part I tend to think of social media such as facebook etc as something that will soon be used mostly by out touch old people and hobbyists participating in hobby groups. All things told social media has probably helped the world more than harmed despite enabling Google and others to get filthy rich off private data, in the long term I suspect it will be a flash in the pan caused by the newness of seemless online communication.
  - nmeagent 3y ago
    > There are still wars but not ones in which entire continents are destroyed and entire generations across dozens of countries are lost. Yet. Nuclear weapons are an existential threat and may yet destroy human civilization. We've come very close many times already to starting a nuclear war and we're all basically lucky to be alive. Pour one out for Stanislav Petrov and take a look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls
barbariangrunge 3y ago
You don't want competing nations or groups to be able to beat you up because you didn't act. But at the same time, these tools are being deployed against us, replacing us, being used to track and manipulate us. There's a difference between staying out from under boot and laissez-faire letting a new tech harm your people. The analogy that comes to mind is weapons research: if weapons were regularly tested on civilians to accelerate the R&D, and to enrich huge corporations, yeah, don't call us luddites for being unhappy about it
barbariangrunge 3y ago
Small ficiton publishers are being utterly swamped by ai generated submissions right now, getting thousands of submissions, depsite an (unenforceable) no-ai guideline. Will human stories even get read, or will the reviewers simply become exhausted before they get to them? Eventually, it's going to be the end of humans being able to work in the arts. That's horrific. The most valuable part of the arts isn't consumption, it's the joy of production, subsidized by sales and consumption--and that's going to be gone
chlorion 3y ago
All your peers want is for their software's licenses and other related things to be respected. Many people publish their software under the GPL because they want to enforce that their work remains open and free for everyone. ChatGPT slurping up the source and emitting something based on it, that is then used in a non-free project makes it impossible to guarantee that your work will remain free. I personally would be ok with my source code being trained on and used as long as the output from the AI is used within the rules of the license I choose. It would also be a little different if we could train our own "AI", or if ChatGPT and friends were trained on something like Windows source code and the rest of the non-free code on Github. At least then it would be easier to believe that it's actually ok to slurp up code without respecting the license. The GPL was designed specifically so that you could publish source code without the license being stripped from it by somebody else, that it will remain free no matter who or what uses it or derives from it. Giving the ability to strip the GPL from software as seen fit is something that should be scary and considered very deeply before thinking that it's ok.
arp242 3y ago
The factory owners were fighting the Luddites to keep child labour and poverty wages. It's pretty clear to me who was on the "right side of history" there. Luddites weren't fighting against technology as such, they were fighting against the negative effects it had: factory owners treating workers in ways that would net you many years in prison today. And it's the same with AI; people generally don't hate the concept as such, they oppose or are concerned with the effects it has or might have. You can disagree with that, that's fine and by all means let's have that discussion! But you can't just brush people aside as "Luddites", as if that's somehow an argument, because it's not.
sensanaty 3y ago
The only thing your peers want is for their labor to be respected by Trillion dollar mega-corporations like M$ that are pushing so that they may absorb anything and everything they can possible get their grubby hands on. Maybe if they trained OpenAI on Microsoft's internal code, or if """Open"""AI released their own source code for free, or anything of the sort maybe less people would be so skeptical, but to anyone without a vested interest in these AI tools it's obvious that they're playing the game of steal everyone else's data without their own data falling into everyone else's hands. After all, if they're so confident these models are safe and won't reproduce Your (the royal You) intellectual property verbatim, why aren't they feeding the Windows internal code to it? Why is it they want everyone else's data, when they have so much of their own?

It’s not a big ask to force so called “””ai””” companies to you know, pay for the use of content. If a human did what models are doing, it would be considered plagiarism at best. It’s not okay. They can pay a license if they want to profit off my content.

tavavex 3y ago
> If a human did what models are doing, it would be considered plagiarism at best. They wouldn't, and that's the issue. If I looked at a thousand drawings done in a certain, specific style and used my findings to make my own unique product in that same style, you'd be hard-pressed to find any reasonable people who'd accuse me of plagiarism. Not to mention that this flavor of "profiting" is something we've been seemingly fine with until specifically generative AI came about. Google profits off of your content directly by using their machine learning algorithms to scrape your website and use its contents in search results, next to their ads. It was found legal, so why should generative AI pay a fee?
- chlorion 3y ago
  If people who reverse engineer things like Windows APIs can be sued simply because they have viewed leaked Windows source code and may implement something similar to it, on accident, I think "AI" should be held to the same standard. Clean room reverse engineering is a thing that exists exactly for this reason but it doesn't seem to apply to "AI". Also "AI" is not a human, and there is no proof that it "learns like humans". or that it should be even compared to humans in any way, so none of this matters anyways.
  - tavavex 3y ago
    > If people who reverse engineer things like Windows APIs can be sued simply because they have viewed leaked Windows source code and may implement something similar to it, on accident, I think "AI" should be held to the same standard. It already is. The Windows source code is proprietary data, having unauthorized access to it is already disallowed. You already can't legally use proprietary or pirated data in AI training for the same reasons why you can't use it anywhere else. But this conversation is about the use of publicly posted information that's already out on the internet. It's the equivalent of Microsoft openly publishing the MS-DOS source code and then suing people for viewing it and potentially getting ideas from it. > Also "AI" is not a human, and there is no proof that it "learns like humans". or that it should be even compared to humans in any way, so none of this matters anyways. It makes absolutely no sense that a ruling would apply to automation and not humans. If I can legally do a thing myself, can you come up with an argument why I can't build a machine that does that thing for me? The only exception that I can think of is cases where human health and safety is at stake, which is an edge case that doesn't apply to generating text or images.
    - chlorion 3y ago
      >But this conversation is about the use of publicly posted information that's already out on the internet. This is a common fallacy, that having access to the source gives you the legal right to do what you want with it, and that is not correct. The license must be followed regardless of whether it's accessible to the public. Having access to or viewing Windows source code and pirated content isn't disallowed. The thing that isn't allowed is copying it. That's what copyright laws are about. The same laws that make it illegal to copy Windows source code are exactly what the GPL are based on, copyright laws. So why do copyright laws only apply to one side here? I think there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about how copyright and software licenses work here. Windows is able to state that the Windows source code is proprietary because it is their IP, my software is also my IP, so my terms must also be followed in order to legally use my software. >can't legally use proprietary or pirated data in AI training for the same reasons why you can't use it anywhere else. This is the same reason why you can't use GPL code in proprietary projects! The mechanisms that allow something to be proprietary are the same mechanisms that the GPL are based on, this is why it's sometimes called "copyleft".

neffo 3y ago

Metaverse? Crypto?

MeImCounting 3y ago
Did anyone actually take those things seriously? Theres certainly a difference between those blatant and clear money grabs and the actual technological advances that the current AI craze represents, for instance years of serious academic research and real world capabilities. The whole anti-AI self-righteous craze will die down soon enough (as will the "feel the AGI" craze) and Transformer models will be just another tool in the toolbox
- FridgeSeal 3y ago
  It’s easy to say they’re obviously silly now, and while a lot of us were saying they were silly before, there was a definite period where crypto/NFT/blockchain stuff was being taken reasonably seriously by commenters here and elsewhere.
  - MeImCounting 3y ago
    I wasnt really involved in tech circles when it was getting big around 2012 but by the time I was starting to get educated on such things it was pretty clear that any scheme like cryptocurrency which revolves around money and has no intrinsic value is pretty much guaranteed to be a scam. Again AI doesnt have any of these hallmarks
    - randomdata 3y ago
      Cryptocurrencies were of interest at one point because they showed promise for providing a way to transfer money electronically in a universal fashion. Eventually the limitations proved too great and interest waned. This AI wave of which we speak may be slightly different in that it has already proven to solve a certain class of problems, while I'm not sure cryptocurrencies ended up solving any problems in the end, but they both share a similar hallmark of people believing that early promise will lead to complete game changes in the coming years. That is quite ripe for scams to take hold. It would hardly be the first time where we saw some incremental progress in AI, only to see it stall out and interest wane, but with the grifters trying to latch onto the early hype, convincing others that they have something magical to offer.

haswell 3y ago

While I wouldn’t call myself a Luddite, I’ve definitely moved beyond the blind techno-optimism that I held in the 90s and early 2000s. But it’s not AI that’s making me shift my views. It’s the mess of unresolved problems brought about by the last major generation of tech that gives me pause. Tech that is causing real harms. We still haven’t figured out how to survive the algorithmic social media hellscape we created, and now we’re hurtling towards opening more boxes that would make Pandora proud. The recent AI explosion has crystallized this view, but did not cause it. My personal view is that tech is nearing some of the very dangerous end points that we’ve only been able to speculate about throughout most of human history. The atomic bomb completely changed warfare. There are developments past which all old mental models no longer apply. Reducing this to “sides” is a distraction. I still think technology is part of the solution to the world’s future problems, including the ones brought about by “AI”, but I think it’s foolish to downplay or oversimplify the concerns.

MeImCounting 3y ago
Genuinely curious what do you see as the dangers and concerns caused by social media/potential dangers and concerns caused by AI? Take the atomic bomb for example: it pretty much ended large scale industrial warfare on the level of the world wars. There are still wars but not ones in which entire continents are destroyed and entire generations across dozens of countries are lost. All things told the nuclear bomb saved the world a lot of suffering. For the most part I tend to think of social media such as facebook etc as something that will soon be used mostly by out touch old people and hobbyists participating in hobby groups. All things told social media has probably helped the world more than harmed despite enabling Google and others to get filthy rich off private data, in the long term I suspect it will be a flash in the pan caused by the newness of seemless online communication.
- nmeagent 3y ago
  > There are still wars but not ones in which entire continents are destroyed and entire generations across dozens of countries are lost. Yet. Nuclear weapons are an existential threat and may yet destroy human civilization. We've come very close many times already to starting a nuclear war and we're all basically lucky to be alive. Pour one out for Stanislav Petrov and take a look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls

barbariangrunge 3y ago

You don't want competing nations or groups to be able to beat you up because you didn't act. But at the same time, these tools are being deployed against us, replacing us, being used to track and manipulate us. There's a difference between staying out from under boot and laissez-faire letting a new tech harm your people. The analogy that comes to mind is weapons research: if weapons were regularly tested on civilians to accelerate the R&D, and to enrich huge corporations, yeah, don't call us luddites for being unhappy about it

barbariangrunge 3y ago

Small ficiton publishers are being utterly swamped by ai generated submissions right now, getting thousands of submissions, depsite an (unenforceable) no-ai guideline. Will human stories even get read, or will the reviewers simply become exhausted before they get to them? Eventually, it's going to be the end of humans being able to work in the arts. That's horrific. The most valuable part of the arts isn't consumption, it's the joy of production, subsidized by sales and consumption--and that's going to be gone

chlorion 3y ago

All your peers want is for their software's licenses and other related things to be respected. Many people publish their software under the GPL because they want to enforce that their work remains open and free for everyone. ChatGPT slurping up the source and emitting something based on it, that is then used in a non-free project makes it impossible to guarantee that your work will remain free. I personally would be ok with my source code being trained on and used as long as the output from the AI is used within the rules of the license I choose. It would also be a little different if we could train our own "AI", or if ChatGPT and friends were trained on something like Windows source code and the rest of the non-free code on Github. At least then it would be easier to believe that it's actually ok to slurp up code without respecting the license. The GPL was designed specifically so that you could publish source code without the license being stripped from it by somebody else, that it will remain free no matter who or what uses it or derives from it. Giving the ability to strip the GPL from software as seen fit is something that should be scary and considered very deeply before thinking that it's ok.

arp242 3y ago

The factory owners were fighting the Luddites to keep child labour and poverty wages. It's pretty clear to me who was on the "right side of history" there. Luddites weren't fighting against technology as such, they were fighting against the negative effects it had: factory owners treating workers in ways that would net you many years in prison today. And it's the same with AI; people generally don't hate the concept as such, they oppose or are concerned with the effects it has or might have. You can disagree with that, that's fine and by all means let's have that discussion! But you can't just brush people aside as "Luddites", as if that's somehow an argument, because it's not.

sensanaty 3y ago

The only thing your peers want is for their labor to be respected by Trillion dollar mega-corporations like M$ that are pushing so that they may absorb anything and everything they can possible get their grubby hands on. Maybe if they trained OpenAI on Microsoft's internal code, or if """Open"""AI released their own source code for free, or anything of the sort maybe less people would be so skeptical, but to anyone without a vested interest in these AI tools it's obvious that they're playing the game of steal everyone else's data without their own data falling into everyone else's hands. After all, if they're so confident these models are safe and won't reproduce Your (the royal You) intellectual property verbatim, why aren't they feeding the Windows internal code to it? Why is it they want everyone else's data, when they have so much of their own?