6 ms·

I 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, p

I 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 ago
This 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 ago
  It's only "hypocrisy" if it's the same people saying it. The media zeitgeist is not a person.
  - nsagent 3y ago
    Microsoft 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 ago
    Idk 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
      There are hundreds of millions or billions of us, though, depending on how broad a brush you use. Any given issue or value is going to have someone, in fact quite a lot of someones, on every conceivable side of it. Even if you limit your scope to the people who have a substantial voice in the culture.
      - Intralexical 3y ago
        Yeah, but it's not a good look when the influence-weighted average of all those people applies double standards for different groups in similar situations. I mean, even when you take just a single person, they're probably going to have a couple conflicting feelings towards any one topic. And yet, if the emergent result of that internal conflict doesn't produce some level of self-consistency in resulting opinions and actions, then something's not quite right. Like… the entire idea of words like "society", "culture", "zeitgeist", etc. is that they imply a greater level of organization, shared values and ability to act as though one autonomous entity or whatever, than if you merely took "hundreds of millions or billions of" people and dumped them all in one place. A society or zeitgeist can absolutely have 'hypocrisy'. If it can't, then it's not a culture, just a mass of hominids. Plus, though it's hard to track, there's probably some degree of hypocrisy aggregated from an individual level too, where people who took one side before are taking the other side now.
- mcmoor 3y ago
  I see the exact hypocrisy from the opposite side too. Praising pirating while treating AI as crime against humanity.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Depends on your lens. If you view it as "crime", sure. If you view it as "obtaining quality content", you can see why and where these users' priorities are. The web is already this riddled SEO optimized spam-Festa that makes it hard to find what you want or desire, now AI comes in and increases the spam tenfold. AI for those people just make their jobs of seeking what's worth pirating that much harder. Especially for those that can now fire half their staff and put most of that remaining money into said SEO optimization for their spam.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  In a vacuum this shouldn't be an issue at all. We make stuff, we honor and benefit the creators, we share as needed and progress humanity as a whole. So I can understand the more optimistic approaches to AI as a tech revolution. But in reality, everytime small entrepreneurs always thnk this will be the tech that let them usurp the big boys, and they end up selling out (not necessarily blaming them. I'd do it too). They have more resources, can scale up faster, produce more, and hire more people. It's a hopelessly risky gambit to think you can topple such advantage. And if you get an edge in, they just take it in for themselves and you're back at square one. But you may not even get that far. They try to make use of this new commons and the Big Boys will litigate the gates back closed for them specifically. They got their value, made the next iteration, and then decided not to give back to the commons (a tragedy, if you will). They may even seem benevolent at first, but time goes on, priorities or leaders change, and the focus on market capture eclipses any public goodwill. The same players as yester-decade are at the helm, so I don't know why anyone would want to trust them after giving decades of scrutiny as they gradually unmasked themselves. I don't necessarily fear the tech per se, I fear the same "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" playbook happening all over again, maybe in such a way to make the new gap insurmountable.
JumpCrisscross 3y 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 It's been over a decade since an individual was prosecuted for digital piracy [1]. Longer since anyone was threatened with jail time. When it was new, both individuals and companies were prosecuted. The tides shifted and law enforcement responded. This isn't a story of different standards, but one of evolving ones. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_v._Tenenbaum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_v._Tenenbaum
- ricardo81 3y ago
  I think the GP's point was it's different rules for big co vs individuals breaching the same idea.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > GP's point was it's different rules for big co vs individuals breaching the same idea My point is it isn't. Individual copyright infringement is virtually unenforced today. To the extent it was in the last decade, the penalty was a fine. Meanwhile, OpenAI is being sued by the New York Times [1] and various writers [2]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-times-open-ai-microsoft-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-t... [2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/more-writers-sue-openai-copyright-infringement-over-ai-training-2023-09-11/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/more-writers-sue-openai-c...
    - deleted 3y ago
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    - deleted 3y ago
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    - ricardo81 3y ago
      I don't think you have a point, the original poster was talking about individual indiscretions (20 years ago also) vs wholesale scraping of billions of people's copyrighted work for corporate gain, today. Some lawsuits don't change that fact.
dageshi 3y ago
We're not exactly tearing everything apart to combat piracy nowadays even though piracy still exists, so I'm not sure exactly what it reveals other than attitudes change?
pylua 3y ago
Are they training it on music from top artists or their lyrics? Maybe they haven’t poked the wrong bear yet.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  Did some limited testing(chatgpt 3.5). If you ask it to complete text and give it the first line, it will sometimes continue the lyrics. Seems to work best for particularly famous stretches of lyrics, like Lose Yourself by Eminem, Bohemian Rhapsody or Hurt. When I told it to complete the text "Obie Trice, real name no gimmicks", it said I'm sorry I can't reproduce the lyrics to Without Me by Eminem. And offered to tell me more about Obie Trice. When I just asked it to reproduce the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody, it once again refused and offered to analyse the lyrics. Seems like there's clearly song lyrics in the training data, and that they've at least made attempts to prevent it from regurgitating them.
  - jug 3y ago
    Holy crap, I managed it now in POE and ChatGPT 3.5. It halts output and can't continue even if requested as JSON for a project etc But look at this... https://poe.com/s/Y73se7ueRrQy9xHRPuoh https://poe.com/s/Y73se7ueRrQy9xHRPuoh I swear the chaps at OpenAI have it all as exact copies. Articles and whatnot. Why wouldn't they if they have the lyrics precisely cloned.
    - weebull 3y ago
      ASCAP Vs Open AI in 3...2...1...
rhystmills 3y ago
There are plenty of articles from major news orgs about we shouldn't accept LLMs infringing copyright. The New York Times are suing OpenAI.
- tanseydavid 3y ago
  >> There are plenty of articles from major news orgs Opinion articles.
supertofu 3y ago
Remember those very dramatic warnings before movie trailers equating piracy to real-world theft (You wouldn't steal a car; you wouldn't rob a bank; piracy is a crime...)? Seems laughable now.
happytiger 3y ago
Rules for thee and not for me? Perhaps V, perhaps. I want to gently reframe the debate, for while I agree with the hypocrisy it rather misses a very key point. Intellectual law, as bedrock principle, explicitly doesn’t recognize nonhuman creators. So at the heart of the issue isn’t changing copyright laws or the death of IP, but what to do with non-human creativity? This is an interesting issue now, but most of the debates and options being debated thus far won’t survive an AGI let alone a world full of advanced AGIs. But it’s a critical distinction between “so now it doesn’t matter when it was theft before,” and “what do we do with non-human intelligence when our entire system of creativity protection is build around humans and non-humans now exist?” It’s a paradigm shift that gets somewhat denied by the hypocrisy argument. Most people look at AI as “technology” we have developed, but if any science fiction writers are right it’s actually a bona fide digital intelligence that’s getting developed here — essentially the possible digital twin of human intelligence — and that’s a whole different set of considerations.
- nsagent 3y ago
  As an NLP researcher, I've come across no convincing research indicating LLMs are "the possible digital twin of human intelligence." Claims certainly get made, but they are subsequently shot down by future research. This has happened for discussions of emergence [1], reasoning [2], and other human attributes people have ascribed to LLMs. [1]: https://neurips.cc/virtual/2023/poster/72117 https://neurips.cc/virtual/2023/poster/72117 [2]: https://m-cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/276268-can-llms-really-reason-and-plan/fulltext https://m-cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/276268-can-llms-reall...
  - happytiger 3y ago
    I think you’re discussing the logical extension of our current AI efforts, and I’m discussing the fully realized science fiction reality that could take decades to perfect or that would be driven by breakthroughs beyond the forecast of existing systems. That’s the difference between seeing it as a technology vs a larger directional shift in human development. Put more directly we have been experiencing the age of miniaturization, and now we are entering the age of digital intelligences. Very often early technology looks toy-like and lacks substantive real world application (despite the hype). It’s only later that deliver substantive applications and real-world change. This generation of AI is following the Gartner hype cycle perfectly thus far: https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-artificial-intelligence-from-the-2023-gartner-hype-cycle https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-artificial... That said Gartner tends to be part of the hype cycle these days, but the pattern of new technology holds true. So in short I would expect anything like a digital twin to emerge from post trough applications not the current generation, and I don't mean to imply that the current technology will create such a system but just that science fiction and futurists generally forecast or even predict this technology will generate a digital twin (in the form of an AGI) from this civilization-level line of technology exploration. All that said, I don’t think many of us technologists were thinking we would be anywhere near this level of AI technology in 2018. In five or six years we have gone what people thought would take 10-20. So, as always, linear extension predictive and mental models of technology advancement once again fails to predict the true course of technology progress, which seems to be much more dynamic than people generally consider when talking about the future.
leotravis10 3y ago
This is the absolute correct take, especially with the uncertainty and legal actions (copyright infringment lawsuits) against AI right now.
ddingus 3y ago
Spot on. What happens when AI systems can work around IP? This gets done all the time now. It is going to be way cheaper.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
"The law today treats companies as "authors," and classifies things like the source code of software as "literary works," giving software a much longer period of protection than it would have if it were classified only as an invention and eligible for a patent (now good for twenty years, with some exceptions)." Microsoft has been arguably the largest beneficiary of software copyright. Gates argued for it in the early days of MicroSoft. Microsoft's anti-piracy campaigns are unparalleled. Anyone remember the "Business Software Alliance". Now the company wants to be the largest beneficiary of "AI".

reb 3y ago

This 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 ago
It's only "hypocrisy" if it's the same people saying it. The media zeitgeist is not a person.
- nsagent 3y ago
  Microsoft 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 ago
  Idk 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
    There are hundreds of millions or billions of us, though, depending on how broad a brush you use. Any given issue or value is going to have someone, in fact quite a lot of someones, on every conceivable side of it. Even if you limit your scope to the people who have a substantial voice in the culture.
    - Intralexical 3y ago
      Yeah, but it's not a good look when the influence-weighted average of all those people applies double standards for different groups in similar situations. I mean, even when you take just a single person, they're probably going to have a couple conflicting feelings towards any one topic. And yet, if the emergent result of that internal conflict doesn't produce some level of self-consistency in resulting opinions and actions, then something's not quite right. Like… the entire idea of words like "society", "culture", "zeitgeist", etc. is that they imply a greater level of organization, shared values and ability to act as though one autonomous entity or whatever, than if you merely took "hundreds of millions or billions of" people and dumped them all in one place. A society or zeitgeist can absolutely have 'hypocrisy'. If it can't, then it's not a culture, just a mass of hominids. Plus, though it's hard to track, there's probably some degree of hypocrisy aggregated from an individual level too, where people who took one side before are taking the other side now.
mcmoor 3y ago
I see the exact hypocrisy from the opposite side too. Praising pirating while treating AI as crime against humanity.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Depends on your lens. If you view it as "crime", sure. If you view it as "obtaining quality content", you can see why and where these users' priorities are. The web is already this riddled SEO optimized spam-Festa that makes it hard to find what you want or desire, now AI comes in and increases the spam tenfold. AI for those people just make their jobs of seeking what's worth pirating that much harder. Especially for those that can now fire half their staff and put most of that remaining money into said SEO optimization for their spam.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
In a vacuum this shouldn't be an issue at all. We make stuff, we honor and benefit the creators, we share as needed and progress humanity as a whole. So I can understand the more optimistic approaches to AI as a tech revolution. But in reality, everytime small entrepreneurs always thnk this will be the tech that let them usurp the big boys, and they end up selling out (not necessarily blaming them. I'd do it too). They have more resources, can scale up faster, produce more, and hire more people. It's a hopelessly risky gambit to think you can topple such advantage. And if you get an edge in, they just take it in for themselves and you're back at square one. But you may not even get that far. They try to make use of this new commons and the Big Boys will litigate the gates back closed for them specifically. They got their value, made the next iteration, and then decided not to give back to the commons (a tragedy, if you will). They may even seem benevolent at first, but time goes on, priorities or leaders change, and the focus on market capture eclipses any public goodwill. The same players as yester-decade are at the helm, so I don't know why anyone would want to trust them after giving decades of scrutiny as they gradually unmasked themselves. I don't necessarily fear the tech per se, I fear the same "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" playbook happening all over again, maybe in such a way to make the new gap insurmountable.

JumpCrisscross 3y 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 It's been over a decade since an individual was prosecuted for digital piracy [1]. Longer since anyone was threatened with jail time. When it was new, both individuals and companies were prosecuted. The tides shifted and law enforcement responded. This isn't a story of different standards, but one of evolving ones. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_v._Tenenbaum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_v._Tenenbaum

ricardo81 3y ago
I think the GP's point was it's different rules for big co vs individuals breaching the same idea.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > GP's point was it's different rules for big co vs individuals breaching the same idea My point is it isn't. Individual copyright infringement is virtually unenforced today. To the extent it was in the last decade, the penalty was a fine. Meanwhile, OpenAI is being sued by the New York Times [1] and various writers [2]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-times-open-ai-microsoft-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-t... [2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/more-writers-sue-openai-copyright-infringement-over-ai-training-2023-09-11/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/more-writers-sue-openai-c...
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - deleted 3y ago
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  - ricardo81 3y ago
    I don't think you have a point, the original poster was talking about individual indiscretions (20 years ago also) vs wholesale scraping of billions of people's copyrighted work for corporate gain, today. Some lawsuits don't change that fact.

dageshi 3y ago

We're not exactly tearing everything apart to combat piracy nowadays even though piracy still exists, so I'm not sure exactly what it reveals other than attitudes change?

pylua 3y ago

Are they training it on music from top artists or their lyrics? Maybe they haven’t poked the wrong bear yet.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
Did some limited testing(chatgpt 3.5). If you ask it to complete text and give it the first line, it will sometimes continue the lyrics. Seems to work best for particularly famous stretches of lyrics, like Lose Yourself by Eminem, Bohemian Rhapsody or Hurt. When I told it to complete the text "Obie Trice, real name no gimmicks", it said I'm sorry I can't reproduce the lyrics to Without Me by Eminem. And offered to tell me more about Obie Trice. When I just asked it to reproduce the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody, it once again refused and offered to analyse the lyrics. Seems like there's clearly song lyrics in the training data, and that they've at least made attempts to prevent it from regurgitating them.
- jug 3y ago
  Holy crap, I managed it now in POE and ChatGPT 3.5. It halts output and can't continue even if requested as JSON for a project etc But look at this... https://poe.com/s/Y73se7ueRrQy9xHRPuoh https://poe.com/s/Y73se7ueRrQy9xHRPuoh I swear the chaps at OpenAI have it all as exact copies. Articles and whatnot. Why wouldn't they if they have the lyrics precisely cloned.
  - weebull 3y ago
    ASCAP Vs Open AI in 3...2...1...

rhystmills 3y ago

There are plenty of articles from major news orgs about we shouldn't accept LLMs infringing copyright. The New York Times are suing OpenAI.

tanseydavid 3y ago
>> There are plenty of articles from major news orgs Opinion articles.

supertofu 3y ago

Remember those very dramatic warnings before movie trailers equating piracy to real-world theft (You wouldn't steal a car; you wouldn't rob a bank; piracy is a crime...)? Seems laughable now.

happytiger 3y ago

Rules for thee and not for me? Perhaps V, perhaps. I want to gently reframe the debate, for while I agree with the hypocrisy it rather misses a very key point. Intellectual law, as bedrock principle, explicitly doesn’t recognize nonhuman creators. So at the heart of the issue isn’t changing copyright laws or the death of IP, but what to do with non-human creativity? This is an interesting issue now, but most of the debates and options being debated thus far won’t survive an AGI let alone a world full of advanced AGIs. But it’s a critical distinction between “so now it doesn’t matter when it was theft before,” and “what do we do with non-human intelligence when our entire system of creativity protection is build around humans and non-humans now exist?” It’s a paradigm shift that gets somewhat denied by the hypocrisy argument. Most people look at AI as “technology” we have developed, but if any science fiction writers are right it’s actually a bona fide digital intelligence that’s getting developed here — essentially the possible digital twin of human intelligence — and that’s a whole different set of considerations.

nsagent 3y ago
As an NLP researcher, I've come across no convincing research indicating LLMs are "the possible digital twin of human intelligence." Claims certainly get made, but they are subsequently shot down by future research. This has happened for discussions of emergence [1], reasoning [2], and other human attributes people have ascribed to LLMs. [1]: https://neurips.cc/virtual/2023/poster/72117 https://neurips.cc/virtual/2023/poster/72117 [2]: https://m-cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/276268-can-llms-really-reason-and-plan/fulltext https://m-cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/276268-can-llms-reall...
- happytiger 3y ago
  I think you’re discussing the logical extension of our current AI efforts, and I’m discussing the fully realized science fiction reality that could take decades to perfect or that would be driven by breakthroughs beyond the forecast of existing systems. That’s the difference between seeing it as a technology vs a larger directional shift in human development. Put more directly we have been experiencing the age of miniaturization, and now we are entering the age of digital intelligences. Very often early technology looks toy-like and lacks substantive real world application (despite the hype). It’s only later that deliver substantive applications and real-world change. This generation of AI is following the Gartner hype cycle perfectly thus far: https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-artificial-intelligence-from-the-2023-gartner-hype-cycle https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-artificial... That said Gartner tends to be part of the hype cycle these days, but the pattern of new technology holds true. So in short I would expect anything like a digital twin to emerge from post trough applications not the current generation, and I don't mean to imply that the current technology will create such a system but just that science fiction and futurists generally forecast or even predict this technology will generate a digital twin (in the form of an AGI) from this civilization-level line of technology exploration. All that said, I don’t think many of us technologists were thinking we would be anywhere near this level of AI technology in 2018. In five or six years we have gone what people thought would take 10-20. So, as always, linear extension predictive and mental models of technology advancement once again fails to predict the true course of technology progress, which seems to be much more dynamic than people generally consider when talking about the future.

leotravis10 3y ago

This is the absolute correct take, especially with the uncertainty and legal actions (copyright infringment lawsuits) against AI right now.

ddingus 3y ago

Spot on. What happens when AI systems can work around IP? This gets done all the time now. It is going to be way cheaper.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

"The law today treats companies as "authors," and classifies things like the source code of software as "literary works," giving software a much longer period of protection than it would have if it were classified only as an invention and eligible for a patent (now good for twenty years, with some exceptions)." Microsoft has been arguably the largest beneficiary of software copyright. Gates argued for it in the early days of MicroSoft. Microsoft's anti-piracy campaigns are unparalleled. Anyone remember the "Business Software Alliance". Now the company wants to be the largest beneficiary of "AI".