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I don’t think this is a great line of argument. It hinges on choice, which rapidly degrades into an argument about free will and the nature of whether anyone tr

I don’t think this is a great line of argument. It hinges on choice, which rapidly degrades into an argument about free will and the nature of whether anyone truly makes a choice or if our apparent “choices” are just a rationalization of deterministic response to external stimuli. I don’t think there’s a subjectively true answer to that question, so we just end up bickering over free will instead of AI. If you just want to declare humans to be special, I would just go straight to that. Humans are already legally special in all kinds of ways.

graypegg 3y ago
I think making humans legally special is a good argument though. The whole point of copyright, is to allow artists to be able to generate a little income with exclusive rights to the works they produce. It's not just there because it's some inherent property of artwork: us humans decided that courts should punish people that threaten the livelihood of artists (in a very narrow scope of ways) via the judicial system. Of course the "spirit" of the law is meaningless, but I at least don't think understanding copyright law as a purely legal tool, divorced from the human element, is participating in the same conversation artists are having. Should people that just make art, eat? Early human history the answer was no. Then we advanced to a point where people can specialize in skills, and art made life worth living, so the answer was yes. Now where are we?
- visarga 3y ago
  Now that generative AI is here, there will be artists who will try to differentiate themselves from AI, and artists that will embrace it to explore new possibilities. It's not a matter of protecting artists, but of choosing what artists to protect, the first or second group? Should we ban photography as well, how about synthesizers, should home owners band new construction in their neighborhood to protect their investments? In my opinion any attempt at restricting AI training is also restricting people who would use it to create new things. And it will backfire spectacularly, by scanning for derivative works in AI we automatically need to do the same for every work claimed to be created by a human, because we don't know who's using AI secretly. And it will create a chilling effect, incidental similarity would be too high a risk to take. Even old works will be revealed, their secret influences laid bare for everyone to see. Excessive scrutiny could deter artists from experimenting with new forms of expression, possibly leading to a homogenized art world where innovation is curtailed.
  - graypegg 3y ago
    I can get that. There's never a path forward that doesn't leave something on the table. I of course want artistic freedom + technology to advance alongside each other. But we're also talking about MAKING generative AI models. Not USING generative AI models. Making a model is so far outside of the scope of a single artist it's almost comical. We're talking about a task that, given no bounds, would include the subtask "ingest all human creative output". That's hard to do so therefore it's restricted to the realm of well funded companies. But even as well off and talented as these companies are, they did very little of the actual work. The total scale of effort that goes into these big lists of coefficients, is beyond human comprehension at this point. We've literally NEVER had to contend with tasks of this magnitude before. Many thousands of centuries of human life hours distilled. Copyright as it's legally inscribed precisely, is ill-prepared to achieve it's end goals in this situation. But considering: 1) that's kind of cool we can do this 2) it makes interesting things that could better people's lives 3) we still think that humans should be able to make art (ai or not) and not die of starvation ideally ... we need to figure out what to do. Maybe it's not copyright! That was created to solve a specific problem. Now we have new problems. I just think people latch too hard onto the legalese as if it's some magic property of the universe, and NOT a set of systems humans made, for very human goals. I don't want a system where we just say "well look at copyright, it says this is fine, so we will just use everything for free". It's missing the point. I agree with you that it's asking the hard question of "which artists do we protect". That, I'm not feeling like I have a good answer for right now. I definitely heavily lean towards the talented artists who've honed their craft. That's just more interesting. But I wish more people we're thinking about it, in those terms.
    - visarga 3y ago
      > We've literally NEVER had to contend with tasks of this magnitude before. Many thousands of centuries of human life hours distilled. And one poem or a page of text is but a drop in this ocean, an infinitesimal contribution. The model is much smaller than the training set. For example Stable Diffusion packs 5B images in 5GB, that's a compression factor of 100,000:1, about 1 byte per training image, not even a pixel. Taking so little from everyone, I am amazed how strong a reaction it creates. The final model doesn't steal almost anything, it doesn't rely on any training example too much, just a compressed abstraction of the training data. You have to overfit it and also prime it to make it regurgitate some training examples, and most attempts fail, resulting in novel outputs.

graypegg 3y ago

I think making humans legally special is a good argument though. The whole point of copyright, is to allow artists to be able to generate a little income with exclusive rights to the works they produce. It's not just there because it's some inherent property of artwork: us humans decided that courts should punish people that threaten the livelihood of artists (in a very narrow scope of ways) via the judicial system. Of course the "spirit" of the law is meaningless, but I at least don't think understanding copyright law as a purely legal tool, divorced from the human element, is participating in the same conversation artists are having. Should people that just make art, eat? Early human history the answer was no. Then we advanced to a point where people can specialize in skills, and art made life worth living, so the answer was yes. Now where are we?

visarga 3y ago
Now that generative AI is here, there will be artists who will try to differentiate themselves from AI, and artists that will embrace it to explore new possibilities. It's not a matter of protecting artists, but of choosing what artists to protect, the first or second group? Should we ban photography as well, how about synthesizers, should home owners band new construction in their neighborhood to protect their investments? In my opinion any attempt at restricting AI training is also restricting people who would use it to create new things. And it will backfire spectacularly, by scanning for derivative works in AI we automatically need to do the same for every work claimed to be created by a human, because we don't know who's using AI secretly. And it will create a chilling effect, incidental similarity would be too high a risk to take. Even old works will be revealed, their secret influences laid bare for everyone to see. Excessive scrutiny could deter artists from experimenting with new forms of expression, possibly leading to a homogenized art world where innovation is curtailed.
- graypegg 3y ago
  I can get that. There's never a path forward that doesn't leave something on the table. I of course want artistic freedom + technology to advance alongside each other. But we're also talking about MAKING generative AI models. Not USING generative AI models. Making a model is so far outside of the scope of a single artist it's almost comical. We're talking about a task that, given no bounds, would include the subtask "ingest all human creative output". That's hard to do so therefore it's restricted to the realm of well funded companies. But even as well off and talented as these companies are, they did very little of the actual work. The total scale of effort that goes into these big lists of coefficients, is beyond human comprehension at this point. We've literally NEVER had to contend with tasks of this magnitude before. Many thousands of centuries of human life hours distilled. Copyright as it's legally inscribed precisely, is ill-prepared to achieve it's end goals in this situation. But considering: 1) that's kind of cool we can do this 2) it makes interesting things that could better people's lives 3) we still think that humans should be able to make art (ai or not) and not die of starvation ideally ... we need to figure out what to do. Maybe it's not copyright! That was created to solve a specific problem. Now we have new problems. I just think people latch too hard onto the legalese as if it's some magic property of the universe, and NOT a set of systems humans made, for very human goals. I don't want a system where we just say "well look at copyright, it says this is fine, so we will just use everything for free". It's missing the point. I agree with you that it's asking the hard question of "which artists do we protect". That, I'm not feeling like I have a good answer for right now. I definitely heavily lean towards the talented artists who've honed their craft. That's just more interesting. But I wish more people we're thinking about it, in those terms.
  - visarga 3y ago
    > We've literally NEVER had to contend with tasks of this magnitude before. Many thousands of centuries of human life hours distilled. And one poem or a page of text is but a drop in this ocean, an infinitesimal contribution. The model is much smaller than the training set. For example Stable Diffusion packs 5B images in 5GB, that's a compression factor of 100,000:1, about 1 byte per training image, not even a pixel. Taking so little from everyone, I am amazed how strong a reaction it creates. The final model doesn't steal almost anything, it doesn't rely on any training example too much, just a compressed abstraction of the training data. You have to overfit it and also prime it to make it regurgitate some training examples, and most attempts fail, resulting in novel outputs.