5 ms·

The more we are getting ourselves all worked up about how dangerous AI is, the less we are thinking about the fact that LLMs are sucking up all the intellectual

by rhelz 3y ago

The more we are getting ourselves all worked up about how dangerous AI is, the less we are thinking about the fact that LLMs are sucking up all the intellectual property we created in the information age, and then selling it back to us. Astounding. IMHO the biggest achievement wasn't technical at all--it was how they were all able to do this gigantic end-run around copywrite, trademark, or patent protections. Essentially, there is no such thing as intellectual property anymore.

atleastoptimal 3y ago
AI training doesn't constitute copyright infringement. It's not the same thing. Could I host a Hollywood movie on my personal website? Could I take the text of "Harry Potter" and sell it as my own novel? If not, then intellectual property obviously still exists. Inaccurate hyperbole doesn't help your side. It just makes claims about AI training overstepping IP boundaries seem illegitimate.
- rhelz 3y ago
  > AI training doesn't constitute copyright infringement. It's not the same thing. Why not? E.g., chagGpt 3.5, if you ask what the first paragraph of "Moby Dick" is, it prints it out verbatim. How is that not reselling somebody else's IP? If you ask it to print out the entire book of "Green Eggs and Ham" it dutifully says it can't because of copywrite restrictions. HOWEVER, you can ask it to print out the nth page, and it will happily print it out, for all 1 <= n<= #pages in book. It snorked up Dr. Suisses IP, and is reselling it to us. > Could I take the text of "Harry Potter" and sell it as my own novel? Well, I asked chatGtp to print out the first paragraph of Harry Potter, and it did, but said that it might violate copywright.... LLMs are quite "self aware" (for want of a better word) that they have appropriated copywrited IP. It will still sell it back to us. LLMs are a compressed representation of the training set. So...in answer to your question, no, you cannot take the text of "Harry Potter" and sell it as your own content. But chatGtp sure can!!!!! > Inaccurate hyperbole doesn't help your side. sigh yes, its important not to overstate your case. Let me try again: Intellectual Property Laws are for plebs like us. OpenAI and its cohorts, however, have found a way to rip off, repackage, and resell any IP they want to. And all this fuss over how dangerous AI, and how it should be regulated, etc, is just a false flag to distract us from the real issues.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    ChatGPT can't sell it as its own content, ChatGPT has no brain, no thoughts and no agency. There are a few questions that matter here. * Is the literal act of copying data to the hard drives used in model training fair use? * Is the act of training using the data count as a performance of the work? (This one likely not because there's no human being performed to.) * Are the resultant model weights considered a derivative work of some or all copyrighted works in the training set? * Does a model reproducing some or all of a copyrighted work count as a performance? Does transmitting it as an API response? Does hosting it in the conversion history? * If the answer to the above is yes who has done copying? OpenAI or the user? What situations is it one, the other, or both? Nothing says you can't acquire data with reckless abandon, and use it to train your AI which would be fair use. I would love to see someone get sued for piracy and mount a defense that they were torrenting to gather data for AI training and see how it goes.
    - a_random_canuck 3y ago
      > ChatGPT can't sell it as its own content, ChatGPT has no brain, no thoughts and no agency. There are a few questions that matter here. ChatGPT is a machine built and operated by humans. If ChatGPT infringes copyright, then it is those humans who own and operate it who are infringing. The fact that they built a complex obfuscated system that stores many copyrighted works in a novel way (model weights) and reproduces them incompletely or unpredictably when asked, doesn’t change the fact that they have built a system whose purpose is to infringe copyright. It’s a little bit like saying I started the car running and let it drive off on its own accord in front of a huge crowd of people, I’m not responsible for the deaths because it was the car that ran them over and the car doesn’t have agency. The car wasn’t designed to kill and never intended to kill. But it’s still me who operates the car and should have foreseen the obvious consequences. I don’t buy into any of these arguments that just because ChatGPT is very complex or mysterious that somehow the humans who built or are running it aren’t responsible for its actions.
      - d1sxeyes 3y ago
        > It’s a little bit like saying I started the car running and let it drive off on its own accord in front of a huge crowd of people <snip> Interesting. Why do you feel as though this is the proper analogy, rather than being the car manufacturer who builds the car which could be used in this way? What about a car manufacturer who knowingly does not put in a widget to ensure the car is never allowed to exceed the speed limit? Or does not install a breathalyser which drivers need to blow into in order to start the car? It's also worth noting that simply reproducing copyrighted material is not necessarily an infringement of that copyright, and in most jurisdictions, it depends on the purpose the reproduction is intended to serve.
artninja1988 3y ago
>Essentially, there is no such thing as intellectual property anymore. If only
- rhelz 3y ago
  Imagine no possessions....its easy if you try....
Newlaptop 3y ago
I don't believe you're right, but that would be the greatest outcome imaginable to me. If AI means the freeing us all from living under the thumb of the current copyright cartel, I'd be dancing for joy. The tiny handful of powerful media conglomerates that sue 12 year olds for sharing a song, take down criticism by abusing automated DMCA systems for obvious fair use and use their monopolistic power to enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else in society should be dismantled. Of course, in practice, I'm sure the lobbyists from the major copyright profiteers are already working to make sure they get unjustly paid and fair use for regular citizens gets further eroded.
- barrysteve 3y ago
  No intellectual property protection means you destroy the next generation of scientists. It's dumbfounding to watch everyone equate piracy with hollywood movies, while the real innovators and scientists get thrown under the bus by theivery. It is order of magnitudes more difficult to spend 10years studying something when your work can be stolen and reproduced at any moment. The world is broken and ctrl c, ctrl v broke it. Don't expect einstein level scientists and their downstream products that started the computer revolution... you killed the protections needed for the people that made it, cause you wanted movies for free. It's insanity.
  - barfbagginus 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - rhelz 3y ago
      > Intellectual property has no reason to exist Intellectual property is a very weird construct. Imagine if we had Star Trek-style replicators, and in principle there was no scarcity of, say, diamond rings, but we passed a bunch of laws which forced you to pay $10,000 if you wanted a diamond ring. But we do have Star Trek-style replicators for information!! So why do we take something which has no intrinsic scarcity, and impose this whole edifice copywrite, patents, etc, to artificially create scarcity, and make it property? Because private property is how we keep score: you can get stuff you want if you make enough stuff that other people want. Market prices--how much you have to pay for stuff--is how we collectively decide what kinds of stuff other people want. We have no other way of 1) signaling what kinds of stuff we want produced, or 2) motivating people to produce the stuff that everybody else's actually wants. Or, at least, it's the best way we've found to predict and plan what to do, without wasting effort and resources on stuff nobody wants. We don't have to do it this way. Richard Stallman suggested a software tax: 2-3% of society are good programmers, so if we taxed society 2-3% of GDP, and distributed it to all good programmers, we could just let them work on whatever they wanted as long as they gave it away freely. It's a great idea really. At least we wouldn't have the best computer science minds furiously working on how to make us doom scroll. But it's fair to ask, who decides who is a "good programmer?" How do we decide the appropriate tax rate, to ensure we're getting enough software? If programmers can work on whatever they want, how can we ensure we get the software we want and need? How do we allocate the money? Do we just distribute it evenly? Or do programmers get more proportional to (insert bogus metric here)? We don't have any better way of answering those questions than by just creating a market for IP. And for a market to exist, there has to be scarcity. Treating information the same way you treat a plot of land or a case of beer seems really artificial, and it is absolutely artificial, but we don't know any better way to do it.
aitchnyu 3y ago
IIRC Youtube was not an authorized "seller" for music videos and movies and Google gave them cheap dark fibre which was no match for many ISPs who complained. Youtube won.
- rhelz 3y ago
  This is a very interesting observation....I never would have thought of the parallels between OpenAI and Youtube, during this startup/rapid growth phase. You are exactly right; YouTube also bent IP laws to the point of breaking while it was trying to grow fast enough to get a commanding market share. However, eventually, YouTube had to issue endless EULA-violations and copywrite takedowns...and the free ride was over. Maybe if YouTube had convinced everybody that its tech was an existential threat, governments would still be debating about what regulations should be enacted, instead of enforcing IP laws on YouTube.... Just underscores what a GENIUS move it was for OpenAI to hype-up the existential threat angle. It got everybody scared, and when you are scared, your reasoning is impaired, and you start making dumb decisions. Just brilliant...
visarga 3y ago
You mean learning from humans to help humans?
hoseja 3y ago
"intellectual property"
barfbagginus 3y ago
Intellectual property should not exist. All knowledge should be free if it is beneficial to the well-being of humanity. I believe that open source AIs will leak the knowledge from closed AIs, and provide democratized access to all human knowledge for any human who needs it for their well-being and survival. That is something that intellectual property cannot do because it is a mechanism for enforcing scarcity not universal survival and well-being. If intellectual property has the potential to threaten our survival, and I sincerely believe that it already is doing so, then we must dissolve every single piece of it, and make it a common good for all.

by rhelz 3y ago

atleastoptimal 3y ago

AI training doesn't constitute copyright infringement. It's not the same thing. Could I host a Hollywood movie on my personal website? Could I take the text of "Harry Potter" and sell it as my own novel? If not, then intellectual property obviously still exists. Inaccurate hyperbole doesn't help your side. It just makes claims about AI training overstepping IP boundaries seem illegitimate.

rhelz 3y ago
> AI training doesn't constitute copyright infringement. It's not the same thing. Why not? E.g., chagGpt 3.5, if you ask what the first paragraph of "Moby Dick" is, it prints it out verbatim. How is that not reselling somebody else's IP? If you ask it to print out the entire book of "Green Eggs and Ham" it dutifully says it can't because of copywrite restrictions. HOWEVER, you can ask it to print out the nth page, and it will happily print it out, for all 1 <= n<= #pages in book. It snorked up Dr. Suisses IP, and is reselling it to us. > Could I take the text of "Harry Potter" and sell it as my own novel? Well, I asked chatGtp to print out the first paragraph of Harry Potter, and it did, but said that it might violate copywright.... LLMs are quite "self aware" (for want of a better word) that they have appropriated copywrited IP. It will still sell it back to us. LLMs are a compressed representation of the training set. So...in answer to your question, no, you cannot take the text of "Harry Potter" and sell it as your own content. But chatGtp sure can!!!!! > Inaccurate hyperbole doesn't help your side. sigh yes, its important not to overstate your case. Let me try again: Intellectual Property Laws are for plebs like us. OpenAI and its cohorts, however, have found a way to rip off, repackage, and resell any IP they want to. And all this fuss over how dangerous AI, and how it should be regulated, etc, is just a false flag to distract us from the real issues.
- Spivak 3y ago
  ChatGPT can't sell it as its own content, ChatGPT has no brain, no thoughts and no agency. There are a few questions that matter here. * Is the literal act of copying data to the hard drives used in model training fair use? * Is the act of training using the data count as a performance of the work? (This one likely not because there's no human being performed to.) * Are the resultant model weights considered a derivative work of some or all copyrighted works in the training set? * Does a model reproducing some or all of a copyrighted work count as a performance? Does transmitting it as an API response? Does hosting it in the conversion history? * If the answer to the above is yes who has done copying? OpenAI or the user? What situations is it one, the other, or both? Nothing says you can't acquire data with reckless abandon, and use it to train your AI which would be fair use. I would love to see someone get sued for piracy and mount a defense that they were torrenting to gather data for AI training and see how it goes.
  - a_random_canuck 3y ago
    > ChatGPT can't sell it as its own content, ChatGPT has no brain, no thoughts and no agency. There are a few questions that matter here. ChatGPT is a machine built and operated by humans. If ChatGPT infringes copyright, then it is those humans who own and operate it who are infringing. The fact that they built a complex obfuscated system that stores many copyrighted works in a novel way (model weights) and reproduces them incompletely or unpredictably when asked, doesn’t change the fact that they have built a system whose purpose is to infringe copyright. It’s a little bit like saying I started the car running and let it drive off on its own accord in front of a huge crowd of people, I’m not responsible for the deaths because it was the car that ran them over and the car doesn’t have agency. The car wasn’t designed to kill and never intended to kill. But it’s still me who operates the car and should have foreseen the obvious consequences. I don’t buy into any of these arguments that just because ChatGPT is very complex or mysterious that somehow the humans who built or are running it aren’t responsible for its actions.
    - d1sxeyes 3y ago
      > It’s a little bit like saying I started the car running and let it drive off on its own accord in front of a huge crowd of people <snip> Interesting. Why do you feel as though this is the proper analogy, rather than being the car manufacturer who builds the car which could be used in this way? What about a car manufacturer who knowingly does not put in a widget to ensure the car is never allowed to exceed the speed limit? Or does not install a breathalyser which drivers need to blow into in order to start the car? It's also worth noting that simply reproducing copyrighted material is not necessarily an infringement of that copyright, and in most jurisdictions, it depends on the purpose the reproduction is intended to serve.

artninja1988 3y ago

>Essentially, there is no such thing as intellectual property anymore. If only

rhelz 3y ago
Imagine no possessions....its easy if you try....

Newlaptop 3y ago

I don't believe you're right, but that would be the greatest outcome imaginable to me. If AI means the freeing us all from living under the thumb of the current copyright cartel, I'd be dancing for joy. The tiny handful of powerful media conglomerates that sue 12 year olds for sharing a song, take down criticism by abusing automated DMCA systems for obvious fair use and use their monopolistic power to enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else in society should be dismantled. Of course, in practice, I'm sure the lobbyists from the major copyright profiteers are already working to make sure they get unjustly paid and fair use for regular citizens gets further eroded.

barrysteve 3y ago
No intellectual property protection means you destroy the next generation of scientists. It's dumbfounding to watch everyone equate piracy with hollywood movies, while the real innovators and scientists get thrown under the bus by theivery. It is order of magnitudes more difficult to spend 10years studying something when your work can be stolen and reproduced at any moment. The world is broken and ctrl c, ctrl v broke it. Don't expect einstein level scientists and their downstream products that started the computer revolution... you killed the protections needed for the people that made it, cause you wanted movies for free. It's insanity.
- barfbagginus 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - rhelz 3y ago
    > Intellectual property has no reason to exist Intellectual property is a very weird construct. Imagine if we had Star Trek-style replicators, and in principle there was no scarcity of, say, diamond rings, but we passed a bunch of laws which forced you to pay $10,000 if you wanted a diamond ring. But we do have Star Trek-style replicators for information!! So why do we take something which has no intrinsic scarcity, and impose this whole edifice copywrite, patents, etc, to artificially create scarcity, and make it property? Because private property is how we keep score: you can get stuff you want if you make enough stuff that other people want. Market prices--how much you have to pay for stuff--is how we collectively decide what kinds of stuff other people want. We have no other way of 1) signaling what kinds of stuff we want produced, or 2) motivating people to produce the stuff that everybody else's actually wants. Or, at least, it's the best way we've found to predict and plan what to do, without wasting effort and resources on stuff nobody wants. We don't have to do it this way. Richard Stallman suggested a software tax: 2-3% of society are good programmers, so if we taxed society 2-3% of GDP, and distributed it to all good programmers, we could just let them work on whatever they wanted as long as they gave it away freely. It's a great idea really. At least we wouldn't have the best computer science minds furiously working on how to make us doom scroll. But it's fair to ask, who decides who is a "good programmer?" How do we decide the appropriate tax rate, to ensure we're getting enough software? If programmers can work on whatever they want, how can we ensure we get the software we want and need? How do we allocate the money? Do we just distribute it evenly? Or do programmers get more proportional to (insert bogus metric here)? We don't have any better way of answering those questions than by just creating a market for IP. And for a market to exist, there has to be scarcity. Treating information the same way you treat a plot of land or a case of beer seems really artificial, and it is absolutely artificial, but we don't know any better way to do it.

aitchnyu 3y ago

IIRC Youtube was not an authorized "seller" for music videos and movies and Google gave them cheap dark fibre which was no match for many ISPs who complained. Youtube won.

rhelz 3y ago
This is a very interesting observation....I never would have thought of the parallels between OpenAI and Youtube, during this startup/rapid growth phase. You are exactly right; YouTube also bent IP laws to the point of breaking while it was trying to grow fast enough to get a commanding market share. However, eventually, YouTube had to issue endless EULA-violations and copywrite takedowns...and the free ride was over. Maybe if YouTube had convinced everybody that its tech was an existential threat, governments would still be debating about what regulations should be enacted, instead of enforcing IP laws on YouTube.... Just underscores what a GENIUS move it was for OpenAI to hype-up the existential threat angle. It got everybody scared, and when you are scared, your reasoning is impaired, and you start making dumb decisions. Just brilliant...

visarga 3y ago

You mean learning from humans to help humans?

hoseja 3y ago

"intellectual property"

barfbagginus 3y ago

Intellectual property should not exist. All knowledge should be free if it is beneficial to the well-being of humanity. I believe that open source AIs will leak the knowledge from closed AIs, and provide democratized access to all human knowledge for any human who needs it for their well-being and survival. That is something that intellectual property cannot do because it is a mechanism for enforcing scarcity not universal survival and well-being. If intellectual property has the potential to threaten our survival, and I sincerely believe that it already is doing so, then we must dissolve every single piece of it, and make it a common good for all.