4 ms·

Theft, or borrowing, to get started is a tried and true modern business model, isn't it? First you "borrow", then become quite useful, then everyone forgets abo

Theft, or borrowing, to get started is a tried and true modern business model, isn't it? First you "borrow", then become quite useful, then everyone forgets about the first bit. It appears to have made some people billionaires. Examples: Spotify was started by an employee uploading their MP3 collection. The FB scraped the Harvard student directory.

doctor_eval 3y ago
Not sure why you’re downvoted. Google certainly did this kind of thing. In the early days there was resistance to web crawling - it’s why robots.txt exists - but Google did it anyway. Then they scanned physical books. It was dubious at the time, and I don’t see how it’s different in intent - to monetise it - from what openAI is doing today.
- Minor49er 3y ago
  Google actually serves up copywritten work directly as part of their results, often to a degree that intercepts traffic that would have made it back to the original source. LLMs at least form a derivative based on a much wider variety of sources rather than just one. Yet nobody bats an eye at Google over this
  - supriyo-biswas 3y ago
    The portions of work used by Google (their regular search, and not SGE) are only small snippets and cannot be considered as substitutes for the original work, and Google adds value in the form of a search engine, where quoting some portion of the article is an essential functionality to prove the relevance of the search result. Further, this usage also benefits the author of the article in the form of website visits as the quoted text isn’t a substitute for the article, as mentioned above (and people disagreeing with this, such as news companies, often find out what happens when they lose search traffic due to link tax legislation.) On the other hand, AI models directly derive their value from the training data, and to a large extent, produces works that are a substitute for the original works.
- treflop 3y ago
  I think your recollection of history is completely off. By the time Google came on the scene, web crawling was well established. AltaVista and Lycos, among others, were already entrenched search engines. robots.txt was created by the guy that created the first search engine.
ZoomerCretin 3y ago
Is there any difference between a human watching 1000 videos on a topic and producing content based on that information, and a machine learning model? If it only creates original work, what does it matter?
- __loam 3y ago
  There's a pretty big difference but the aspirant neuroscientists and legal scholars on hackernews would have you believe it's the same thing.
- raincole 3y ago
  The difference is that one is a human and one is a machine. Just because they do something kinda similar it doesn't make them the same. Selling human organs will never be the same as selling beef liver, while the difference between a human's liver and a cow's is much smaller than the difference between your brain and a A100 tensor core.
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  Because humans are entitled to certain rights and privileges that computer systems are not, and coming up with systems that causes profits to be distributed within the top 1% while using the output of people without compensating them is inherently unfair.
  - visarga 3y ago
    When we use gen-AI, the provider makes a few cents, and users get to set the prompt and use the outputs. So benefits go to the prompter more than the provider. It's like buying pills - yes, the drug manufacturer makes a profit, but the patient might save her health - a much larger benefit. Gen-AI is an empowering technology for the masses and easy to run locally. And the providers are in a race to the bottom on pricing.
    - supriyo-biswas 3y ago
      People hate the pharma industry but at least some of them perform their own research, and thus are, at least from a moral standpoint, more entitled to make a profit than the genAI companies where the value primarily comes from the training data. (Whether they should be able to hike drug prices by 100% overnight or sell drugs with insane markups is a separate question.)
raincole 3y ago
Exactly. The only question left unanswered is how useful OpenAI will be. If it becomes as useful as Google (many claim they already did), then the reality (read: legislation) will bend for them.
supriyo-biswas 3y ago
This is getting downvoted, but if we broaden the “theft” bit to mean the use of any unpriced externality, this rings true. After all, while companies didn’t have to pay to pollute the environment, humanity has to eventually suffer; and in the same way the current crop of generative has people’s their work assimilated into models that results in profits for AI companies while the author of the content is denied their fraction of the economic value generated from this process, as well as any recognition and other second order effects they may have benefited from.
benreesman 3y ago
It’s against site guidelines to complain about being downvoted. So I’ll do it for you, because it’s squarely within site guidelines and norms to defend high-signal comments from getting gang-tackled. The parent is right, you all know it, and as pernicious and ugly as this side of our business has always been, the stakes are some huge discontinuous amount higher this time. So downvoters, remember what that button means: it means this is a low-signal or otherwise net-negative value comment on the thread. It explicitly doesn’t mean I disagree. There’s a disagree button, it’s labeled “reply”. Use it, or get lost.
- jdminhbg 3y ago
  Sorry, but GP is begging the question. Whether or not training AI on copyrighted material constitutes theft is not a settled question you can simply assume and move on from.
  - consumer451 3y ago
    This is indeed not a settled question, but my point is that the answer doesn't really matter, either way. This appears to be how the world works: focus on the product, don't get all caught up in "silly" legal technicalities, and this is how fortunes are made. Regarding the argument, I have seen both sides argued well. The best argument that I have seen for OpenAI being at fault is in cases where gen AI outputs exact copies of copyrighted work, be they visual or text. Dall-E and GPT both need to have serious guardrails added to prevent this, as is shown by the leaked system prompts. If you can jailbrean an LLM, it happily provides the user with exact copies of copyrighted work, in some cases.
  - benreesman 3y ago
    The legal semantics are probably on their way to the Supreme Court. The ethical debate had settled into a soft consensus that this sort of thing was icky at best on topics ranging from FB leveraging the Harvard facebooks to Uber ignoring medallion laws to Google scanning all those books to AMP cutting the publisher out of the loop to Amazon eating the OSHA fines rather than give the workers bathroom breaks to FB/Google paying the fines and laughing over EU regulations (which in fairness they seemed to have backed down on), to currently Apple trying to malicious compliance the DMA gatekeeper regulations. Some of this stuff has been litigated, some not, all of it is cringe-worthy, this is a new low. The parent cited germane examples from the list. That adds to the discussion. Folks are free to do the moderate effort thing and write a dissenting reply, they’re not supposed to do the lazy thing and grey out something they spinal-reflex don’t like. You took the time to write a reply, so even though I think you’re wrong, I applaud you taking the time to state a position.
ixaxaar 3y ago
Indeed this is the new formula for "disruptions". Another take: is real true value creation only possible outside of capitalism? Hence those communist pockets like academia and practices like treating everything as public property are allowed to exist, otherwise there would be no innovation etc just a bunch of companies suing each other?
esafak 3y ago
OpenAI is drowning in money. They don't need to steal squat; they need to start paying creators. Of the examples you gave Spotify is the most relevant, so let's talk about that. Spotify has not been good for musicians, unfortunately. Some say that musicians need to perform live, and Spotify gives them visibility. But the visual artists that OpenAI is disempowering don't even have the option of touring. Their only means of making money is being eviscerated.
- benreesman 3y ago
  All of digitized human thought is worth a hell of a lot more than OpenAI has. This is vacuously true in the sense that (so far) their primary declared financial backer is worth a financial accounting line item called “goodwill” less it’s IP in toto. It’s a slightly more interesting exercise to estimate the multiple on how much OpenAI can’t afford what they’re doing with any conceivable investor if they had to pay for the training data, but I’ll posit it can be demonstrated to the satisfaction of a reasonable person if not to a business-friendly court. I’ll bet the rent it can be demonstrated to a European court.
untangle 3y ago
And Paypal stretched banking laws. And Youtube was built on the back of countless music and TV videos under copyright. And Airbnb played/plays free & loose with hoteling laws. And Uber with taxi rules. The list is long, and the excesses are large. Move fast and break things. Become too big to fail. This is nothing new. It is core to technological advancement and capitalist enablement.
- benreesman 3y ago
  It’s not a long-standing pillar of either technological advancement or a robust return for investors. I’ll spare you the essay unless we really want to get into it, but a book I’d recommend to anyone (“The Idea Factory” about the Bell Era in general and the Labs in particular) is both a must-read for any technologist and utterly demolishes that trope into the bargain.

doctor_eval 3y ago

Not sure why you’re downvoted. Google certainly did this kind of thing. In the early days there was resistance to web crawling - it’s why robots.txt exists - but Google did it anyway. Then they scanned physical books. It was dubious at the time, and I don’t see how it’s different in intent - to monetise it - from what openAI is doing today.

Minor49er 3y ago
Google actually serves up copywritten work directly as part of their results, often to a degree that intercepts traffic that would have made it back to the original source. LLMs at least form a derivative based on a much wider variety of sources rather than just one. Yet nobody bats an eye at Google over this
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  The portions of work used by Google (their regular search, and not SGE) are only small snippets and cannot be considered as substitutes for the original work, and Google adds value in the form of a search engine, where quoting some portion of the article is an essential functionality to prove the relevance of the search result. Further, this usage also benefits the author of the article in the form of website visits as the quoted text isn’t a substitute for the article, as mentioned above (and people disagreeing with this, such as news companies, often find out what happens when they lose search traffic due to link tax legislation.) On the other hand, AI models directly derive their value from the training data, and to a large extent, produces works that are a substitute for the original works.
treflop 3y ago
I think your recollection of history is completely off. By the time Google came on the scene, web crawling was well established. AltaVista and Lycos, among others, were already entrenched search engines. robots.txt was created by the guy that created the first search engine.

ZoomerCretin 3y ago

Is there any difference between a human watching 1000 videos on a topic and producing content based on that information, and a machine learning model? If it only creates original work, what does it matter?

__loam 3y ago
There's a pretty big difference but the aspirant neuroscientists and legal scholars on hackernews would have you believe it's the same thing.
raincole 3y ago
The difference is that one is a human and one is a machine. Just because they do something kinda similar it doesn't make them the same. Selling human organs will never be the same as selling beef liver, while the difference between a human's liver and a cow's is much smaller than the difference between your brain and a A100 tensor core.
supriyo-biswas 3y ago
Because humans are entitled to certain rights and privileges that computer systems are not, and coming up with systems that causes profits to be distributed within the top 1% while using the output of people without compensating them is inherently unfair.
- visarga 3y ago
  When we use gen-AI, the provider makes a few cents, and users get to set the prompt and use the outputs. So benefits go to the prompter more than the provider. It's like buying pills - yes, the drug manufacturer makes a profit, but the patient might save her health - a much larger benefit. Gen-AI is an empowering technology for the masses and easy to run locally. And the providers are in a race to the bottom on pricing.
  - supriyo-biswas 3y ago
    People hate the pharma industry but at least some of them perform their own research, and thus are, at least from a moral standpoint, more entitled to make a profit than the genAI companies where the value primarily comes from the training data. (Whether they should be able to hike drug prices by 100% overnight or sell drugs with insane markups is a separate question.)

raincole 3y ago

Exactly. The only question left unanswered is how useful OpenAI will be. If it becomes as useful as Google (many claim they already did), then the reality (read: legislation) will bend for them.

supriyo-biswas 3y ago

This is getting downvoted, but if we broaden the “theft” bit to mean the use of any unpriced externality, this rings true. After all, while companies didn’t have to pay to pollute the environment, humanity has to eventually suffer; and in the same way the current crop of generative has people’s their work assimilated into models that results in profits for AI companies while the author of the content is denied their fraction of the economic value generated from this process, as well as any recognition and other second order effects they may have benefited from.

benreesman 3y ago

It’s against site guidelines to complain about being downvoted. So I’ll do it for you, because it’s squarely within site guidelines and norms to defend high-signal comments from getting gang-tackled. The parent is right, you all know it, and as pernicious and ugly as this side of our business has always been, the stakes are some huge discontinuous amount higher this time. So downvoters, remember what that button means: it means this is a low-signal or otherwise net-negative value comment on the thread. It explicitly doesn’t mean I disagree. There’s a disagree button, it’s labeled “reply”. Use it, or get lost.

jdminhbg 3y ago
Sorry, but GP is begging the question. Whether or not training AI on copyrighted material constitutes theft is not a settled question you can simply assume and move on from.
- consumer451 3y ago
  This is indeed not a settled question, but my point is that the answer doesn't really matter, either way. This appears to be how the world works: focus on the product, don't get all caught up in "silly" legal technicalities, and this is how fortunes are made. Regarding the argument, I have seen both sides argued well. The best argument that I have seen for OpenAI being at fault is in cases where gen AI outputs exact copies of copyrighted work, be they visual or text. Dall-E and GPT both need to have serious guardrails added to prevent this, as is shown by the leaked system prompts. If you can jailbrean an LLM, it happily provides the user with exact copies of copyrighted work, in some cases.
- benreesman 3y ago
  The legal semantics are probably on their way to the Supreme Court. The ethical debate had settled into a soft consensus that this sort of thing was icky at best on topics ranging from FB leveraging the Harvard facebooks to Uber ignoring medallion laws to Google scanning all those books to AMP cutting the publisher out of the loop to Amazon eating the OSHA fines rather than give the workers bathroom breaks to FB/Google paying the fines and laughing over EU regulations (which in fairness they seemed to have backed down on), to currently Apple trying to malicious compliance the DMA gatekeeper regulations. Some of this stuff has been litigated, some not, all of it is cringe-worthy, this is a new low. The parent cited germane examples from the list. That adds to the discussion. Folks are free to do the moderate effort thing and write a dissenting reply, they’re not supposed to do the lazy thing and grey out something they spinal-reflex don’t like. You took the time to write a reply, so even though I think you’re wrong, I applaud you taking the time to state a position.

ixaxaar 3y ago

Indeed this is the new formula for "disruptions". Another take: is real true value creation only possible outside of capitalism? Hence those communist pockets like academia and practices like treating everything as public property are allowed to exist, otherwise there would be no innovation etc just a bunch of companies suing each other?

esafak 3y ago

OpenAI is drowning in money. They don't need to steal squat; they need to start paying creators. Of the examples you gave Spotify is the most relevant, so let's talk about that. Spotify has not been good for musicians, unfortunately. Some say that musicians need to perform live, and Spotify gives them visibility. But the visual artists that OpenAI is disempowering don't even have the option of touring. Their only means of making money is being eviscerated.

benreesman 3y ago
All of digitized human thought is worth a hell of a lot more than OpenAI has. This is vacuously true in the sense that (so far) their primary declared financial backer is worth a financial accounting line item called “goodwill” less it’s IP in toto. It’s a slightly more interesting exercise to estimate the multiple on how much OpenAI can’t afford what they’re doing with any conceivable investor if they had to pay for the training data, but I’ll posit it can be demonstrated to the satisfaction of a reasonable person if not to a business-friendly court. I’ll bet the rent it can be demonstrated to a European court.

untangle 3y ago

And Paypal stretched banking laws. And Youtube was built on the back of countless music and TV videos under copyright. And Airbnb played/plays free & loose with hoteling laws. And Uber with taxi rules. The list is long, and the excesses are large. Move fast and break things. Become too big to fail. This is nothing new. It is core to technological advancement and capitalist enablement.

benreesman 3y ago
It’s not a long-standing pillar of either technological advancement or a robust return for investors. I’ll spare you the essay unless we really want to get into it, but a book I’d recommend to anyone (“The Idea Factory” about the Bell Era in general and the Labs in particular) is both a must-read for any technologist and utterly demolishes that trope into the bargain.