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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-si

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.
swatcoder 3y ago
> It explicitly doesn’t mean I disagree. That's simply incorrect. And besides, even if garage and dorm room projects sometime do start by illicit means, I don't really think it's responsible to encourage anyone to normaliE that and think it's grossly irresponsible to use that idea to excuse well-connected multi-million dollar organizations who can't hide behind ignorance and should be held to the highest standards lest the playing field for everyone else is ruined.
- benreesman 3y ago
  I’ve acknowledged to a sibling that I rushed that comment out and it requires kind of a tortured argument to justify it as written. The part I got right is about preventing comments citing germane information from getting karma bombed. You’re correct that I botched the landing on that one. On your substantial point about garage bands needing to sometimes move fast with limited legal infrastructure but arbitrarily resourced actors being held to a higher standard we’re in violent agreement. The strongest argument (and it’s not one I’d like to have to defend) for law-breaking tech corporations netting out useful is probably Uber? The situation pre-Uber was a capture cartel nightmare where basic transportation was a non-starter in certain situations/municipalities. The (admittedly weak) case that they should still be involved in some, “civil disobedience”, is that the medallion people seem to have decided they’re just never going to give up. If anyone has a “less bad” example of a big powerful company serving the public good I’d be keen to be reminded of it, but this “fair use for me, copyright for thee” seems to go hand-in-glove with stuff that belongs in both civil and criminal court.
NhanH 3y ago
> 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. Unfortunately, this is your personal interpretation of the downvote buttons. I agree with your interpretation, in fact, but it is not the norm. And confidently telling people to "get lost" while being misguided is very much not appreciated here. Here is some comment from the horse's mouth more than a decade ago on this very same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
- benreesman 3y ago
  Pardon my sloppy phrasing, I was rushing this out with my thumb because the GP was going grey fast. I meant that in the “karma bombing” sense as far as “explicitly” goes. And I should be more clear in both this subthread (as well as one other comment) that the guidelines I’m referring to aren’t the succinct ones on the literal guidelines page, but rather the evolved apparent consensus under “the @dang administration”. This is a pretty natural and healthy seeming extrapolation of the idea that rigor should go up as contentiousness goes up, something I personally fail in too often even these days, but will always apologize for failing in. Threads about OpenAI have set a new record for karma bombing proportional to front-page exposure, blowing away classics like crypto and social media and patent law, I’ve got at least one or two tuples of adjacent comments where the high-quality one got bombed and was on a #1 submission and the far worse form of the argument got too many upvotes on a less-engaged submission. I’ll decline (for now at least) to speculate on the mechanism/explanation around this (apparent) trend, but it’s inching into “concerning”.

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.

swatcoder 3y ago

> It explicitly doesn’t mean I disagree. That's simply incorrect. And besides, even if garage and dorm room projects sometime do start by illicit means, I don't really think it's responsible to encourage anyone to normaliE that and think it's grossly irresponsible to use that idea to excuse well-connected multi-million dollar organizations who can't hide behind ignorance and should be held to the highest standards lest the playing field for everyone else is ruined.

benreesman 3y ago
I’ve acknowledged to a sibling that I rushed that comment out and it requires kind of a tortured argument to justify it as written. The part I got right is about preventing comments citing germane information from getting karma bombed. You’re correct that I botched the landing on that one. On your substantial point about garage bands needing to sometimes move fast with limited legal infrastructure but arbitrarily resourced actors being held to a higher standard we’re in violent agreement. The strongest argument (and it’s not one I’d like to have to defend) for law-breaking tech corporations netting out useful is probably Uber? The situation pre-Uber was a capture cartel nightmare where basic transportation was a non-starter in certain situations/municipalities. The (admittedly weak) case that they should still be involved in some, “civil disobedience”, is that the medallion people seem to have decided they’re just never going to give up. If anyone has a “less bad” example of a big powerful company serving the public good I’d be keen to be reminded of it, but this “fair use for me, copyright for thee” seems to go hand-in-glove with stuff that belongs in both civil and criminal court.

NhanH 3y ago

> 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. Unfortunately, this is your personal interpretation of the downvote buttons. I agree with your interpretation, in fact, but it is not the norm. And confidently telling people to "get lost" while being misguided is very much not appreciated here. Here is some comment from the horse's mouth more than a decade ago on this very same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

benreesman 3y ago
Pardon my sloppy phrasing, I was rushing this out with my thumb because the GP was going grey fast. I meant that in the “karma bombing” sense as far as “explicitly” goes. And I should be more clear in both this subthread (as well as one other comment) that the guidelines I’m referring to aren’t the succinct ones on the literal guidelines page, but rather the evolved apparent consensus under “the @dang administration”. This is a pretty natural and healthy seeming extrapolation of the idea that rigor should go up as contentiousness goes up, something I personally fail in too often even these days, but will always apologize for failing in. Threads about OpenAI have set a new record for karma bombing proportional to front-page exposure, blowing away classics like crypto and social media and patent law, I’ve got at least one or two tuples of adjacent comments where the high-quality one got bombed and was on a #1 submission and the far worse form of the argument got too many upvotes on a less-engaged submission. I’ll decline (for now at least) to speculate on the mechanism/explanation around this (apparent) trend, but it’s inching into “concerning”.