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No 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 tha

No 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 ago
It's rich to see people talk about the commons like AI models aren't a massive tragedy of the commons.
- AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
  Can you expand on that?
  - __loam 3y ago
    These models will discourage creative work. They exist at the expense of the people who made them possible.
- KoolKat23 3y ago
  I 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 ago
    Listening to people bash the luddites without understanding the actual history of the luddites is getting exhausting.
    - KoolKat23 3y ago
      I think you should read my comment again.
- thot_experiment 3y ago
  Please explain to me how baking all the art into a big tensor and then giving it away to everyone for free to run on any half decent GPU from the past 10 years is somehow anti-commons. Rent-seeking by controlling AI models is anti-commons, the models themselves are not, neither is training them. Don't delude yourself into thinking that Miyazaki didn't study Moebius didn't study Mucha. Even if you got your way and all training on copyrighted material was stopped today and all existing models were deleted it would only be a matter of time before we could synthesize arbitrary styles (at least as well as we can today) by identifying and controlling the correct axes in tensor space using a model purely informed by public domain data. Your art is mostly not yours, your art is mostly an amalgamation of other people's art which itself is also the same, all the way down. You are a sprinkling of flavor on top. Your art is stolen styles, techniques and vibes mashed together. And here you are, trapped arguing about where we draw the line on what's okay. 75 years? now 95? Look at what you're saying! Introspect and realize that your understanding of the context is defined by Disney and Bono wanting to collect rent on ideas. You're just focused on getting your crumbs of the pie in a game that's rigged to centralize power and keep it centralized.
  - splitstud 3y ago
    [dead]
  - mplewis 3y ago
    We all know that an artist studying the masters to make something original isn't the same as an autocomplete API picking the color of the next pixel. Come on, man.
    - visarga 3y ago
      > studying the masters to make something original original or "original"? maybe AI companies need to hire people to make "original" content for AI.
    - thot_experiment 3y ago
      Whether or not those things are equivalent isn't relevant to any part of my point.
- Dracophoenix 3y ago
  The tragedy of the commons relates to deletable resources, such as grass feed for livestock. How's that relevant to ML models that create content/resources about as fast as most can think? What's being depleted?
  - __loam 3y ago
    Qualifying this statement by saying this is something I've thought about and this is my own bullshit theory. There's a limited amount of "attention" on the internet that's available in online art spaces. I theorize that artists need to maintain a public portfolio to find work, either creative work for advertising or entertainment companies or commissions or patreon subscription. You need to be out there for people to hire you if you want to make a living doing art. AI art is disruptive and harmful to that ecosystem in a few ways. It competes with artists not only for dollars and jobs for commercial art (ie ad agency work), but more fundamentally it competes with artists for attention on the internet, which at a macro scale makes it so there's less money in the system for real artists to practice and master their skills. It's also not necessarily that the AI art is better, it's just good enough to pollute the signal to noise ratio. And as you said, it's fast. That can quickly overwhelm sites like DeviantArt or Art Station, which moves those communities and resources away from their original purpose. Additionally, AI art models need data from the commons to function. I'm skeptical that synthetic data is good enough to use for improving these models, so theoretically, one of the main ways to improve these models is getting more and better data from humans. If the economy of these models is structured in a way that discourages artists from posting their work publicly, or working at all, then the pace of improvement decreases. I think a lot of artists are pretty pissed off that their work is being used to produce commercial software that creates substitutes for their work without their permission or knowledge. So that's what I mean by the tragedy of the commons. The online art ecosystem is more fragile than many people think it is and ai companies are over exploiting it. The content remains but the thing you're actually trying to sample, human knowledge and skill, withers on the vine.
foobiekr 3y ago
Let's see how software people feel when it becomes routine to AI wash projects to de-license them.
- thot_experiment 3y ago
  That's bad, but the problem there isn't the AI.
- vdaea 3y ago
  As a software person that feels great.
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    I for one am looking forward to LLM-based super-decompilers that can recognize assembly patterns and understand what the high level intent was. Suddenly there would be a wealth of effectively open-source code (with the hope that it wouldn't change much about SaSS-ifying things since that's mostly already done where the market will bear it).
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Software people here, we dont want ai people to steal our open source code, hide it behind closed models, and sell it without attribution or other terms respected. Many in the software world are in awe how much theft ai people do.
  - visarga 3y ago
    Open generative models are to open source what open source is to closed source - an even deeper level of openness, customisability and accessibility. Like open source they empower their users, are private and easy to adapt. Most of the time you just need to prompt, other times you apply a fine-tuning tool, which is also open source. I really don't understand open source people combating generative AI. I've never seen this ethos since the javascript framework wars. Take a look at llama.cpp, ollama and vllm repos and their friends. They got such a sustained rate of development and participation.
robertlagrant 3y ago
Is that from the perspective of a reader of novels or a writer of novels? Readers love free stuff.
- thot_experiment 3y ago
  When it costs zero to produce a copy of a novel is the moral choice to create artificial scarcity to preserve it's value in our current system of value assignment, or is the moral choice to fight to change and improve the system to more align with the reality that novels exist in a post-scarcity world? Do we really want to deny people something that costs nothing in order to preserve the status quo? Perhaps it's the system of value assignment that's broken.
  - harimau777 3y ago
    Novels don't exist in a post scarcity world because their writers still need money to live. I'm not necessarily opposed to moving to a post scarcity model without IP, but we need to actually be post scarcity first.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Does that mean novel writing would only be for those who are already independently wealthy? How would that actually work?
    - thot_experiment 3y ago
      I'm not claiming to have worked out how to make this all function. I'm just pointing out that the cost of duplicating a novel approaches zero and the assumption that the way we're assigning value is the only one that works leads to a world where we must deny people things they could have in order to preserve their value. This does not seem morally correct to me. I do not need to have a solution in order to identify a problem. Perhaps we could make strides toward a future where you don't need to be independently wealthy to write a novel by having some sort of a UBI scheme.

__loam 3y ago

It's rich to see people talk about the commons like AI models aren't a massive tragedy of the commons.

AnarchismIsCool 3y ago
Can you expand on that?
- __loam 3y ago
  These models will discourage creative work. They exist at the expense of the people who made them possible.
KoolKat23 3y ago
I 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 ago
  Listening to people bash the luddites without understanding the actual history of the luddites is getting exhausting.
  - KoolKat23 3y ago
    I think you should read my comment again.
thot_experiment 3y ago
Please explain to me how baking all the art into a big tensor and then giving it away to everyone for free to run on any half decent GPU from the past 10 years is somehow anti-commons. Rent-seeking by controlling AI models is anti-commons, the models themselves are not, neither is training them. Don't delude yourself into thinking that Miyazaki didn't study Moebius didn't study Mucha. Even if you got your way and all training on copyrighted material was stopped today and all existing models were deleted it would only be a matter of time before we could synthesize arbitrary styles (at least as well as we can today) by identifying and controlling the correct axes in tensor space using a model purely informed by public domain data. Your art is mostly not yours, your art is mostly an amalgamation of other people's art which itself is also the same, all the way down. You are a sprinkling of flavor on top. Your art is stolen styles, techniques and vibes mashed together. And here you are, trapped arguing about where we draw the line on what's okay. 75 years? now 95? Look at what you're saying! Introspect and realize that your understanding of the context is defined by Disney and Bono wanting to collect rent on ideas. You're just focused on getting your crumbs of the pie in a game that's rigged to centralize power and keep it centralized.
- splitstud 3y ago
  [dead]
- mplewis 3y ago
  We all know that an artist studying the masters to make something original isn't the same as an autocomplete API picking the color of the next pixel. Come on, man.
  - visarga 3y ago
    > studying the masters to make something original original or "original"? maybe AI companies need to hire people to make "original" content for AI.
  - thot_experiment 3y ago
    Whether or not those things are equivalent isn't relevant to any part of my point.
Dracophoenix 3y ago
The tragedy of the commons relates to deletable resources, such as grass feed for livestock. How's that relevant to ML models that create content/resources about as fast as most can think? What's being depleted?
- __loam 3y ago
  Qualifying this statement by saying this is something I've thought about and this is my own bullshit theory. There's a limited amount of "attention" on the internet that's available in online art spaces. I theorize that artists need to maintain a public portfolio to find work, either creative work for advertising or entertainment companies or commissions or patreon subscription. You need to be out there for people to hire you if you want to make a living doing art. AI art is disruptive and harmful to that ecosystem in a few ways. It competes with artists not only for dollars and jobs for commercial art (ie ad agency work), but more fundamentally it competes with artists for attention on the internet, which at a macro scale makes it so there's less money in the system for real artists to practice and master their skills. It's also not necessarily that the AI art is better, it's just good enough to pollute the signal to noise ratio. And as you said, it's fast. That can quickly overwhelm sites like DeviantArt or Art Station, which moves those communities and resources away from their original purpose. Additionally, AI art models need data from the commons to function. I'm skeptical that synthetic data is good enough to use for improving these models, so theoretically, one of the main ways to improve these models is getting more and better data from humans. If the economy of these models is structured in a way that discourages artists from posting their work publicly, or working at all, then the pace of improvement decreases. I think a lot of artists are pretty pissed off that their work is being used to produce commercial software that creates substitutes for their work without their permission or knowledge. So that's what I mean by the tragedy of the commons. The online art ecosystem is more fragile than many people think it is and ai companies are over exploiting it. The content remains but the thing you're actually trying to sample, human knowledge and skill, withers on the vine.

foobiekr 3y ago

Let's see how software people feel when it becomes routine to AI wash projects to de-license them.

thot_experiment 3y ago
That's bad, but the problem there isn't the AI.
vdaea 3y ago
As a software person that feels great.
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  I for one am looking forward to LLM-based super-decompilers that can recognize assembly patterns and understand what the high level intent was. Suddenly there would be a wealth of effectively open-source code (with the hope that it wouldn't change much about SaSS-ifying things since that's mostly already done where the market will bear it).
gumballindie 3y ago
Software people here, we dont want ai people to steal our open source code, hide it behind closed models, and sell it without attribution or other terms respected. Many in the software world are in awe how much theft ai people do.
- visarga 3y ago
  Open generative models are to open source what open source is to closed source - an even deeper level of openness, customisability and accessibility. Like open source they empower their users, are private and easy to adapt. Most of the time you just need to prompt, other times you apply a fine-tuning tool, which is also open source. I really don't understand open source people combating generative AI. I've never seen this ethos since the javascript framework wars. Take a look at llama.cpp, ollama and vllm repos and their friends. They got such a sustained rate of development and participation.

robertlagrant 3y ago

Is that from the perspective of a reader of novels or a writer of novels? Readers love free stuff.

thot_experiment 3y ago
When it costs zero to produce a copy of a novel is the moral choice to create artificial scarcity to preserve it's value in our current system of value assignment, or is the moral choice to fight to change and improve the system to more align with the reality that novels exist in a post-scarcity world? Do we really want to deny people something that costs nothing in order to preserve the status quo? Perhaps it's the system of value assignment that's broken.
- harimau777 3y ago
  Novels don't exist in a post scarcity world because their writers still need money to live. I'm not necessarily opposed to moving to a post scarcity model without IP, but we need to actually be post scarcity first.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Does that mean novel writing would only be for those who are already independently wealthy? How would that actually work?
  - thot_experiment 3y ago
    I'm not claiming to have worked out how to make this all function. I'm just pointing out that the cost of duplicating a novel approaches zero and the assumption that the way we're assigning value is the only one that works leads to a world where we must deny people things they could have in order to preserve their value. This does not seem morally correct to me. I do not need to have a solution in order to identify a problem. Perhaps we could make strides toward a future where you don't need to be independently wealthy to write a novel by having some sort of a UBI scheme.