13 ms·
Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?
- Art9681 3y agoThe most powerful force in the world is when a big group of humans unite behind a story, fictional or otherwise, and march forth under a common banner. The question is which group of humans will win this one. My vote is for the ones arguing correctly that knowledge in all of its forms routes around censorship with or without our approval, for better or worse. There was never a lock. We just pretend like there is.
- fredolivier0 3y agosurprise surprise
- pvaldes 3y agoFor context, I.P. here = Intelectual Property and not Internet Protocol address. You can save a click today.
- midasuni 3y agoIs the answer “yes” or “no”? I suspect the actual answer is “those with wealth will continue to amass it and those without will struggle more”
- amelius 3y agoTraditionally, rich people paid poor artists to obtain new artworks. In the future, they just click a button.
- tenebrisalietum 3y agoThis is actually not necessarily only a rich thing. There are numerous artists that will accept commissions and create something for you, unique to you, and it's not thousands of dollars. But your statement brings up (or at least makes me think of) what I think is an interesting point: there's the notion of mass media, which started when broadcasting became a thing. Play 1 recording via a method where potentially millions can hear or see it. It was after the development of broadcast technology that copyright maximalism took hold. IMHO the current IP regime is for that purpose, and cracks are showing in it because media is becoming more fragmented and more personalized. Would mass media ever become a thing of the past?
- johnnyanmac 3y agoCool, sounds like the 20X0's version of "we'll just outsource the engineers". Of course, they have relatively little to lose and can just reverse course in a few years, likely undercutting the market despite talent being more efficient and self sufficient and able to generate more funds for the company (if I take the charitable end road for this AI stuff). I guess history really does rhyme.
- marcosdumay 3y agoThe article is quite long, but it seems to agree with your suspicions. Personally, I don't think this is sustainable. Once you make the injustice obvious, people will give-up on following the rule.
- shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y agoA: No [1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
- amelius 3y agoI'm writing an article titled "Is Betteridge's law true?"
- waihtis 3y agothe actual answer is "those who apply themselves will be fine and those who spend all their days wallowing in marxist fantasies will stay poor (both spiritually and monetarily)"
- 8jef 3y agoI have not read the article, just responding to title: Hell yeah! I do wish I.P. dead. Or at least, I wish for a much shorter protection period, and for original authors / artists only. For all the wrong reasons, but primarily, because nothing's sacred. Amen.
- ImPleadThe5th 3y agoDo intellectuals / creatives not deserve the fruits of their own labor? I get corporate IP is used for a lot of bad. But intellectuals and artists create a lot of value for society in ways that are very hard to monitize as a individual. If we completely kill IP what becomes of our authors, philopshipers, historians, artists etc.? They are already having it hard as it is with existing ip protections vs. big tech, big pharma, big record labels, etc.
- teddyh 3y agoIt’s not that cut-and-dry: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_copyright> <http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...>
- 8jef 3y agoYes, you are right. But. People do abuse the protections, which are too lengthy, makes possible to sell rights, etc. In the end, corporations (ab)uses (buy and sell rights) protections for amassing fortunes much bigger than the original creator ever got. That's not right, not fair, at all. System's broken, need fix, throw it all out and build something new, centered around creators. Give back to creators only, for less time.
- ImPleadThe5th 3y agoI can get behind that for sure. I just don't like the blanket "get rid of IP" especially when we are talking about AI companies which already well surpased the legal and ethical limits of it.
- ska 3y agoBetteridge's law of headlines?
- CrzyLngPwd 3y agoNo!
- thot_experiment 3y agoNo subscription and archive.is is broken on 1.1 but it seems like the conversation is finally moving in a good direction. I'm very very tentatively hopeful that we might see some reduction of IP rights in my lifetime. It's going to be a long hard fight but maybe, just maybe we will see people wake the fuck up and realize how important the building up the fucking commons is to the progress of all humanity.
- __loam 3y agoIt's rich to see people talk about the commons like AI models aren't a massive tragedy of the commons.
- AnarchismIsCool 3y agoCan you expand on that?
- __loam 3y agoThese models will discourage creative work. They exist at the expense of the people who made them possible.
- KoolKat23 3y agoI assume you're referring to copyright. It could be argued copyright is a tragedy of the commons, the individual benefits at the expense of everyone else. Obviously it is intended that the wider impact of incentivising innovation will be beneficial to everyone, but that is not a sure thing, it is a compromise, a balancing act and that applies to AI too. The Luddites did lose their jobs after all.
- __loam 3y agoListening to people bash the luddites without understanding the actual history of the luddites is getting exhausting.
- gustavus 3y agoIntellectual property isn't.
- chefandy 3y agoThe problem is that our society has no other viable widespread mechanism to support the many millions of people who do intellectual work, and lots of intellectual work is really important for our society-- far more important than would make sense to relegate to hobbyists and volunteers. And this is coming from someone who's contributed well over 10k coding hours to FOSS software.
- teddyh 3y ago> The problem is that our society has no other viable widespread mechanism to support Except, of course, UBI.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoWe don't have that. Maybe we should, but we don't.
- chefandy 3y agoYep. Order of operations matters. This isn’t a theoretical “future problem” for a lot of people.
- falcolas 3y agoYup. It accounts for some 41% of the US' GDP, and a minimum of 47 million jobs. It's also growing at a fairly fast rate. That's too much money for anybody in charge to let die. They're much more likely to nuke AI.
- chefandy 3y ago> minimum of 47 million jobs What would you propose the US workforce did with some 47 million knowledge workers with suddenly useless skills if you removed the only widespread economic mechanism our society has to support them?
- dventimi 3y agohttps://archive.ph/2024.01.16-221827/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/22/who-owns-this-sentence-a-history-of-copyrights-and-wrongs-david-bellos-alexandre-montagu-book-review https://archive.ph/2024.01.16-221827/https://www.newyorker.c...
- pessimizer 3y agoI think so. Not just because of copyrights as the article covers, because the people who want to abuse copyright for A.I. and the people who own copyrights are basically the same people. They will simply cross-license and lock normal people out of using the products of A.I. by wielding that licensing against individuals. The real reason is that anybody can do A.I. and it can't be very patent-encumbered, being a number of abstract mathematical techniques. If it becomes an absurdly productive technology, you won't easily be able to keep people from using it in private. Maybe the real Butlerian Jihad will be the government Office of A.I. Copyright Royalties sending agents and their silicon-sniffing dogs to kick in people's doors following rumors of Aggravated Infringement. Maybe it will be what finally gets general purpose computers banned?
- deadbabe 3y agoIn a world where general purpose computers are banned, would there be some kind of underground speakeasy type computer labs?
- jerf 3y agoNo, it will result in a strengthening. It raises the value of things previous unprotectable, and thus will raise the incentive to get them protected. The Wild West of the AI world today will rapidly get captured because by the time you've amassed the resources to put up a credible AI, you're already a fairly large corporation. The scale of time necessary to get new protections passed is roughly comparable to the scale of time it will take for these companies to become owned one way or another by existing interests. The good news is that this probably still won't much affect your personal projects or anything. Anything you can already self-host and do today isn't going anywhere and you've probably got at least another two or three generations in this fast-moving space before the law clamps down. It is likely that many of the referenced AI aspects will be essentially "solved" before then, such as voice cloning. They aren't going to go after every last little AI user for every last thing because that's squeezing blood from a stone and not cost-effective. But don't plan on building a multi-million-subscriber YouTube channel out of it. And if you are interested in the freedom to do things the copyright owners don't want you to do, be sure to self-host and archive as much as possible. The ability to do this on platforms others host is going to disappear rapidly, if it isn't already.
- AnarchismIsCool 3y agoThis is a really interesting take, but I don't completely buy it. Traditionally technologies like these become more accessible with time. Take the youtube example, this is actually a really good counterpoint as if you can create videos with an AI you created, nobody has any way of figuring out that you trained it on so-and-so's IP. It's completely black box which is the direction things are probably going to go IMO. On the other hand, this is problematic because it'll slow down the development of the self-hostable models outside of the community moving to a darkweb like model where they stay beyond the reach of the legal system.
- jerf 3y agoOne of the big factors is whether or not AI can stay in the hands of the public or if it recedes into levels of hardware that only companies can own. If the latter, then the control will win. Keeping AI performance workable on personal-level hardware is going to be a big deal. Open source work on keeping performance at that level may be long-term more important that this or that feature. Watch out for calls for AI ethics to turn into calls for controls on hardware capable of running AI. I'm half surprised we aren't already hearing calls for that. I wouldn't be surprised to see it by the end of the year, though my expectation would be at least next year if not the one after. The real goal behind hardware control will be this sort of thing (though copyright control may actually be a secondary concern versus just keeping the really good tools out of the hands of the plebs), not AI ethics. (The elites know AI ethics limitations have no meanings as they have no intention of limiting themselves.)
- ricardo81 3y agoIt's been dead a while because of big tech. YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter - they have no way of effectively managing IP and so you basically see people's stolen content and they monetise it, so <shrug> TBF Napster and torrents are another and earlier angle. Purely IMO, big tech normalised the taking of other people's content, and it's getting to the point where content creators (as in, ones that are capable of producing unique content, not wealthy YouTubers per se) have simply had enough. The idea of authorities and primary sources is rapidly diminished with the hodge podge we have to navigate through in information discovery.
- ronsor 3y ago> big tech normalised the taking of other people's content This was normalized by large media companies long before big tech.
- ricardo81 3y agoDo you have examples? Obviously it's hard to compare scales though.
- TuringNYC 3y agoAny case where a small player cannot effectively defend patents they hold, but at any time, can be sued for infringement and cannot effectively defend themselves either.
- jachee 3y agoRecord labels spring immediately to mind.
- ricardo81 3y ago@TuringNYC and @jachee What had sprung to mind for me was the wholesale rip off of European IP by the US in its commercial development in the 19th century and China now with the US. I guess what I'm thinking of is at the individual level, no one cares much for re-appropriating someone elses work. It has been normalised.
- adventured 3y agoIt inherently has to damage our present conception of IP, unless we plan to cripple the AI revolution in the crib. If you have smart robots in the home, much less AGI, what's the plan on restricting them? Sorry robot, you may only learn this limited set of skills, you're not allowed to create, because you've seen too much and might be too good at learning and producing. They'll be incredibly metered if they're not allowed to learn and produce at a high capability. And if we're talking about AGI, you can never realistically reach it if you put it in the straightjacket required to protect IP as things are today. Sorry all-knowing AGI god, you may not make images that look too much like XYZ. In fact, you're not allowed to even see any of it because of your capabilities. In fact, Disney has decided through the copyright act of 2042 that you're not even allowed access to the Internet (or magazines, or radio, or music, or TV). It can't be AGI if it can't create. Forget about trained on ('just do not train it on material with copyright'), it'll self-train, and then what? Well then you can't even let it self-train, ie no AGI is possible. It's going to be either or. Either the IP laws get changed, or you get no AGI. The only thing possible would be extremely boxed off, narrow, high capability AI.
- jprete 3y agoWhy do you think AGI is desirable?
- foobiekr 3y agoHumans are too stupid to collectively govern themselves. Just look at the US election cycle that is starting. There is a genuine messianistic cult at work.
- tatrajim 3y agoAll hail the wisdom of the cold circuits. We hear and obey.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoIsn't this the premise of like, half of all cyberpunk works?
- somewhereoutth 3y agoDepending on the outcome of the NYT case, I.P. may in fact be the death of (profitable) AI. One problem with AI (vs e.g. Google search) is that there is no mechanism for attribution. So it is impossible for rights holders to understand whether their works are being monetised (unlike, say, Spotify). Should NYT win, then either AI services will have to pay into a (very large) common pot for rights holders, which likely will make AI uneconomic (even if it does turn out to have some business benefit), or (paid) AI services will simply be banned.
- TuringNYC 3y ago>> One problem with AI (vs e.g. Google search) is that there is no mechanism for attribution. Sorry if this is a silly question, but is that really the case? Can we not train an LLM on successively larger training sets, each will uniquely ID's model and associated better performance?
- djohnston 3y agoThere’s no way AI services are going anywhere. If the US kneecaps itself for parasitic rent seekers then China will win and benefit from the productivity these tools produce.
- gumballindie 3y agoSo the proposal of sociopathic thieves is that we turn into china and steal people’s property? What an odd take.
- djohnston 3y agoIt’s a hard world and we need to play to win.
- gumballindie 3y agoYeah by stealing things from our own people? Thats a dumb way to win.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoI can only hope. In the mean time, we have and even worse situation: "AI" models like LLMs are effectively allowed to launder IP. As long as companies like OpenAI are allowed to be ignorant of copyright, they get to monopolize that ignorance. The result is that the rest of us are in an even worse position, because we have to respect DMCA, but can't benefit from it by monopolizing our own IP.
- ricardo81 3y ago100%, sleight of hand plea of ignorance. Take xx billion pages of unique human content, do something, pretend that there's no monetary value to that content and monetise it. Farcical.
- mlsu 3y agoCopyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Subverting copyright law is not like subverting the laws of physics. What happens when you subvert copyright law is some guys with guns, in either an overt way or a subtle one, force a trade of your imaginary resource (copyright) for the real resource (money), through licensing or fines. Debate about what AI means for copyright is really a debate about what we choose to do, what we choose to allow. It's a debate about whether the guys with guns will stop the development of AI, or how much. It's a bit of clever misdirection to declare the output of AI's "copyrightable" or "not copyrightable." Copyrightable is made up! It's fiction! It is whatever we want it to be!
- maester-of-bots 3y agoNever knew HN catered to sovereign citizens. Yikes.
- tilwidnk 3y ago> Copyright is not a real thing. It's a fiction. Now, I don't have a college degree, but with my 60+ years life experience I can say, yes, copyright is a real thing, it protects people who create, from assholes and AI.
- jncfhnb 3y agoIt doesn’t though
- wahnfrieden 3y agoIt's not real beyond what the parent post described, which is an expectation that the state will use guns and cages in reaction to certain behaviors
- mewpmewp2 3y agoBut they won't if it's going to threaten their military capability vs other actors like China, Russia or otherwise.
- gumballindie 3y ago
- cratermoon 3y agoNo, but media companies like Disney, Warner Bros, and Paramount might find it a useful lever to squeeze independent creators even further than they already are.
- Jun8 3y agoHere’s a story from my days at Motorola Labs around 2009 that you might find relevant: we were looking at ways for streaming content to homes (Moto owned a set-top box business at that time) and there were big debates about the future of streaming. The position that prevailed was that consumers would not be able to stream content to their heart’s content en masse because content providers would never let it. I distinctly remember a presentation poster that said you couldn’t stream because it’s against the law, hence use our solution, etc. Moral of the story for me is that if there’s adequate money to be made laws, protocols, etc. can totally be changed.
- artninja1988 3y ago> Bellos, a comparative-literature professor at Princeton, and Montagu, an intellectual-property lawyer, find this kind of rent-seeking objectionable. They complain that corporate copyright owners “strut the world stage as the new barons of the twenty-first century,” and they call copyright “the biggest money machine the world has seen.” They point out that, at a time when corporate ownership of copyrights has boomed, the income of authors, apart from a few superstars, has been falling. They think that I.P. law is not a set of rules protecting individual rights so much as a regulatory instrument for business. Couldn't agree more
- noitpmeder 3y agoRemove copywriter protections and small time authors have the potential to earn EVEN LESS. Why write books or any creative text based content when the second it's available it will be hoovered into the next AI training cycle and can be reproduced in part or in whole by users who almost definitely do not know who you are in the first place.
- artninja1988 3y agoIs that even the case? Who would read a small time writers fiction book through chatgpt? Most of the use cases I've seen for chatgpt, e.g. Translation, conversation, brainstorming, reformulation, summarization are wholly different from the dataset of books. I would say that the art generators have a stronger claim of competing with their work than llms
- noitpmeder 3y agoOpenAI/other is earning money (by selling subscriptions, ...) with a product that has been trained on and utilizes the protected work to produce their results. Personally I think the only way forward is for these AI companies to curate their dataset to only material that is legal for use. E.g. only GitHub repos with licenses stating such. Just because there is not a license doesn't mean it's free to hoover.
- 3y ago
- mcguire 3y agoIt's amazing how fast the "I want to get paid for my work" attitude disappears when discussing someone else getting paid for their work.
- huytersd 3y agoWell it’s kind of silly to say an AI is replicating my style when your style is “I only use purple and yellow and thick black outlines in my work”.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kylehotchkiss 3y agoI used the new Instagram "AI" yesterday to "Add a famous duck and his famous mouse friend" to my image which gave me a perfect Donald Duck in the background (I guess it forgot the famous mouse). Surely lawyers just need to work on the replication prompts to demonstrate the model was trained from a copyrighted image and replicates it so accurately to make their case?
- ur-whale 3y ago> Is A.I. The Death of I.P.? One can only hope.
- silveira 3y agoI find it revealing that some decades ago when teenagers were copying mp3s in their rooms for their own enjoyment it was piracy, crime, reprehensible, police, prisons, etc. When corporations are doing mass copyright infringement, we are talking about death of IP or changing the copyright laws to accommodate them.
- reb 3y agoThis is the right take — whatever your position on the future of this technology or its costs and benefits for humanity, the hypocrisy mentioned here shouldn't go unacknowledged.
- mwhitfield 3y agoIt's only "hypocrisy" if it's the same people saying it. The media zeitgeist is not a person.
- nsagent 3y agoMicrosoft has a very long history of fighting piracy and they are one of OpenAI's main funders. It's definitely hypocrisy. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: "Piracy reduction can be a source of Windows revenue growth." [1] Current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: "Well, we’ve always had freemium. Sometimes our freemium was called piracy." [2] [1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/only-consumers-pressure-can-curb-microsofts-obsession-with-anti-piracy-technology/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/only-consumers-pressure-can-cu... [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/20/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcript-microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-sits-down-with-cnbcs-jon-fortt.html https://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/20/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcri...
- Intralexical 3y agoIdk man; I think our values and the enforcement of those values should have some moral self-consistency to them on a cultural level too.
- mwhitfield 3y ago
- ricardo81 3y agoPerhaps another angle is that the incoming and young workforce find it extremely convenient to take everyone else's work and make it their own. It is nature after all, to spend the least amount of energy to attain a goal. It would be convenient to accept it as par for the course. The problem seems to be is that copyright laws are basically ignored nowadays.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rikroots 3y agoIf anyone wants to train their AI thing on my poetic output ... they're more than welcome to![1] I've been working for decades to get people's eyeballs bleeding from reading (too much of) my poetry; the thought that someone would even want to train a machine to churn out eyeball-bleeding poetry influenced by my work - it makes me happy! [1] - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/blog/copyrights https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/blog/copyrights (sarcasm only half-intended)