4 ms·

I don’t actually think this is complicated and reading a comment is not the same thing as scraping the internet and you obviously know that. A few factors that

by mdhb 2y ago

I don’t actually think this is complicated and reading a comment is not the same thing as scraping the internet and you obviously know that. A few factors that come to mind would be: - scale - informed consent which there was none in this case - how you are going to use that data. For example using everybody others work so the worlds richest company can make more money from it while giving back nothing in return is a bullshit move.

cwp 2y ago
Reading a comment is exactly the same thing as scraping the internet, you just stop sooner.
llamaimperative 2y ago
I think it's even simpler than that: incentives. The entire premise of copyright law (and all IP law) is to protect the incentive to create new stuff, which is often a very risky and highly time or capital intensive endeavor. So here's the question: Does a person reading a comment destroy the incentive for the author to post it? No. In fact, it is the only thing that produces the incentive for someone to post. People post here when they want that thing to be read by someone else. Does a model sucking up all the artistic output of the last 400 years and using that to produce an image generator model destroy the incentive of producing and sharing said artistic output? Yes. At least, that is the goal of such a model -- to become so good it is competitive with human artists. Of course you have plenty of people positioned benefit from this incentive-destruction claiming it does no such thing. I personally tend to put more credence in the words of people who have historically actually been incentivized by said incentives (i.e. artists) who generally seem to perceive this as destructive to their desire to create and share their work.
- bigyikes 2y ago
  Thanks, this is a helpful comment. It isn’t clear to me that these models destroy incentive to create. I mean, ChatGPT can generate comments in my style all day, and yet I’m still incentivized to comment. I fancy myself a photographer. I still want to take photos even if DALL-E 4 will generate better ones. What even is the point of creating art? I think there are two purposes: personal expression and enjoyment for others. People will continue to express themselves even if a bot can produce better art. And if a bot can produce enjoyment for others en masse, then that seems like a huge win for everybody.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Right, it doesn’t destroy the incentive to write comments. Also right, it won’t destroy the hobbyist’s interest in having a hobby. But IP law was never intended to protect hobbyist interest.
  - NBJack 2y ago
    It cheapens the incentive greatly. And you probably aren't selling your photos to make a living.
    - c1sc0 2y ago
      Selling art as a way of making a living actually is a pretty recent thing. Up until not too long ago patronage was pretty much the only way to survive for artists. Maybe we will go back to that model?
      - asadotzler 2y ago
        Artists have been selling art for as long as we've been selling anything. Sure, some successful artists, during a few periods in history, managed to secure patronage, but those have always been the minority. Most artists have sold or traded their wares directly and your attempts to derail this discussion with inaccurate histories is neither helpful nor appropriate.
  - cush 2y ago
    > I think there are two purposes: personal expression and enjoyment for others. This is exactly what non-artists assume artists do art for. The reality is that most professional visual artists work in publishing, marketing, entertainment and the like. It’s a regular job. The incentive is money. Similarly for theatre, music, video, dance, etc etc. Artists can’t feed their families off exposure and expressing themselves. Their work has value and taking that work to create free derivative works without compensating them is theft.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  > Does a model sucking up all the artistic output of the last 400 years and using that to produce an image generator model destroy the incentive of producing and sharing said artistic output? Copyright, at least in the US, cares about the effect of the use on the market for that specific work. It's individual ownership, not collective. And while model regurgitation happens, it's less common than you think. The real harm of AI to artists is market replacement. That is, with everyone using image generators to pop out images like candy, human artists don't have a market to sell into. This isn't even just a matter of "oh boo hoo I can't compete with Mr. Diffusion". Generative AI is very good at creating spam, which has turned every art market and social media platform into a bunch of warring spambots whose output is statistically indistinguishable from human. The problem is, no IP law in the world is going to recognize this as a problem, because IP is a fundamentally capitalist concept. Asserting that the market for new artistic works and notoriety for those works should be the collective property of artists and artists alone is not a workable legal proposal, even if it's a valid moral principle. And conversely the history of copyright has seen it be completely subverted to the point where it only serves the interests of the publishers in the middle, not the creators of the work in question. Hell, the publishers are licking their chops as to how many artists they can fire and replace with AI, as if all their whinging about Napster and KaZaA 24 years ago was just a puff piece.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    > Copyright, at least in the US, cares about the effect of the use on the market for that specific work. Not quite. The historical implementation of copyright has mostly protected individual pieces of work. Not only does IP law broadly protect much more than individual pieces of work, but the philosophical basis of IP law in general is to protect incentives. Now that the technological landscape has shifted, the case law will almost certainly shift as well because it’s clearly undesirable to live in a world where no one is willing to dedicate themselves to becoming an excellent artist/writer/musician/etc. IP law is a natural extension of property rights, which in turn is predicated on a utilitarian need to protect certain incentives.
bigyikes 2y ago
I personally disagree but you make fair points. Scale: Many companies (e.g. Google, Bing) have been scraping at scale for decades without issue. Why does scale become an issue when an LLM is thrown into the mix? Informed consent: I’m not sure I fully understand this point, but I’d say most people posting content on the public internet are generally aware that people and bots might view it. I guess you think it’s different when the data is used for an LLM? But why? Data usage: Same question as above. I just don’t see how ingestion into an LLM is fundamentally different than the existing scraping processes that the internet is built on.
- roywiggins 2y ago
  There's a big difference between scraping a website so you can direct curious people to it (Googlebot) and scraping a website so you can set up a new website that conveys the same information, but earns you money and doesn't even credit the sources used (which these LLM services often do). There is a whole genre of copyright infringement where someone will scrape a website and create a per-pixel copy of it but loaded up with ads, and blackhat SEOed to show up above the original website on searches. That's bad, and to the extent that LLMs are doing similar things, they are bad too. Imagine I scrape your elaborate GameFAQs walkthrough of A Link to the Past. I could 1) use what I learn to direct curious people to its URL, or 2) remove your name from it, cut it into pieces, and rehost the content on my own page, mashed up with other walkthroughs of the same game. Then I sell this service as a revolutionary breakthrough that will free people from relying on carefully poring through GameFAQs walkthroughs ever again. People will get mad about the second one, and to the extent what LLMs do is like that, will get mad at LLMs.
  - astrange 2y ago
    > There's a big difference between scraping a website so you can direct curious people to it (Googlebot) and scraping a website so you can set up a new website that conveys the same information, but earns you money and doesn't even credit the sources used (which these LLM services often do). "Crediting the sources used" is not really a principle in copyright law. (Funny enough, online fanartists seem determined to convince everyone it is as a way of shaming people into doing it.) Whether or not a use is transformative is protective though, and is what both of those cases rely on.

by mdhb 2y ago

cwp 2y ago

Reading a comment is exactly the same thing as scraping the internet, you just stop sooner.

llamaimperative 2y ago

I think it's even simpler than that: incentives. The entire premise of copyright law (and all IP law) is to protect the incentive to create new stuff, which is often a very risky and highly time or capital intensive endeavor. So here's the question: Does a person reading a comment destroy the incentive for the author to post it? No. In fact, it is the only thing that produces the incentive for someone to post. People post here when they want that thing to be read by someone else. Does a model sucking up all the artistic output of the last 400 years and using that to produce an image generator model destroy the incentive of producing and sharing said artistic output? Yes. At least, that is the goal of such a model -- to become so good it is competitive with human artists. Of course you have plenty of people positioned benefit from this incentive-destruction claiming it does no such thing. I personally tend to put more credence in the words of people who have historically actually been incentivized by said incentives (i.e. artists) who generally seem to perceive this as destructive to their desire to create and share their work.

bigyikes 2y ago
Thanks, this is a helpful comment. It isn’t clear to me that these models destroy incentive to create. I mean, ChatGPT can generate comments in my style all day, and yet I’m still incentivized to comment. I fancy myself a photographer. I still want to take photos even if DALL-E 4 will generate better ones. What even is the point of creating art? I think there are two purposes: personal expression and enjoyment for others. People will continue to express themselves even if a bot can produce better art. And if a bot can produce enjoyment for others en masse, then that seems like a huge win for everybody.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Right, it doesn’t destroy the incentive to write comments. Also right, it won’t destroy the hobbyist’s interest in having a hobby. But IP law was never intended to protect hobbyist interest.
- NBJack 2y ago
  It cheapens the incentive greatly. And you probably aren't selling your photos to make a living.
  - c1sc0 2y ago
    Selling art as a way of making a living actually is a pretty recent thing. Up until not too long ago patronage was pretty much the only way to survive for artists. Maybe we will go back to that model?
    - asadotzler 2y ago
      Artists have been selling art for as long as we've been selling anything. Sure, some successful artists, during a few periods in history, managed to secure patronage, but those have always been the minority. Most artists have sold or traded their wares directly and your attempts to derail this discussion with inaccurate histories is neither helpful nor appropriate.
- cush 2y ago
  > I think there are two purposes: personal expression and enjoyment for others. This is exactly what non-artists assume artists do art for. The reality is that most professional visual artists work in publishing, marketing, entertainment and the like. It’s a regular job. The incentive is money. Similarly for theatre, music, video, dance, etc etc. Artists can’t feed their families off exposure and expressing themselves. Their work has value and taking that work to create free derivative works without compensating them is theft.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
kmeisthax 2y ago
> Does a model sucking up all the artistic output of the last 400 years and using that to produce an image generator model destroy the incentive of producing and sharing said artistic output? Copyright, at least in the US, cares about the effect of the use on the market for that specific work. It's individual ownership, not collective. And while model regurgitation happens, it's less common than you think. The real harm of AI to artists is market replacement. That is, with everyone using image generators to pop out images like candy, human artists don't have a market to sell into. This isn't even just a matter of "oh boo hoo I can't compete with Mr. Diffusion". Generative AI is very good at creating spam, which has turned every art market and social media platform into a bunch of warring spambots whose output is statistically indistinguishable from human. The problem is, no IP law in the world is going to recognize this as a problem, because IP is a fundamentally capitalist concept. Asserting that the market for new artistic works and notoriety for those works should be the collective property of artists and artists alone is not a workable legal proposal, even if it's a valid moral principle. And conversely the history of copyright has seen it be completely subverted to the point where it only serves the interests of the publishers in the middle, not the creators of the work in question. Hell, the publishers are licking their chops as to how many artists they can fire and replace with AI, as if all their whinging about Napster and KaZaA 24 years ago was just a puff piece.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  > Copyright, at least in the US, cares about the effect of the use on the market for that specific work. Not quite. The historical implementation of copyright has mostly protected individual pieces of work. Not only does IP law broadly protect much more than individual pieces of work, but the philosophical basis of IP law in general is to protect incentives. Now that the technological landscape has shifted, the case law will almost certainly shift as well because it’s clearly undesirable to live in a world where no one is willing to dedicate themselves to becoming an excellent artist/writer/musician/etc. IP law is a natural extension of property rights, which in turn is predicated on a utilitarian need to protect certain incentives.

bigyikes 2y ago

I personally disagree but you make fair points. Scale: Many companies (e.g. Google, Bing) have been scraping at scale for decades without issue. Why does scale become an issue when an LLM is thrown into the mix? Informed consent: I’m not sure I fully understand this point, but I’d say most people posting content on the public internet are generally aware that people and bots might view it. I guess you think it’s different when the data is used for an LLM? But why? Data usage: Same question as above. I just don’t see how ingestion into an LLM is fundamentally different than the existing scraping processes that the internet is built on.

roywiggins 2y ago
There's a big difference between scraping a website so you can direct curious people to it (Googlebot) and scraping a website so you can set up a new website that conveys the same information, but earns you money and doesn't even credit the sources used (which these LLM services often do). There is a whole genre of copyright infringement where someone will scrape a website and create a per-pixel copy of it but loaded up with ads, and blackhat SEOed to show up above the original website on searches. That's bad, and to the extent that LLMs are doing similar things, they are bad too. Imagine I scrape your elaborate GameFAQs walkthrough of A Link to the Past. I could 1) use what I learn to direct curious people to its URL, or 2) remove your name from it, cut it into pieces, and rehost the content on my own page, mashed up with other walkthroughs of the same game. Then I sell this service as a revolutionary breakthrough that will free people from relying on carefully poring through GameFAQs walkthroughs ever again. People will get mad about the second one, and to the extent what LLMs do is like that, will get mad at LLMs.
- astrange 2y ago
  > There's a big difference between scraping a website so you can direct curious people to it (Googlebot) and scraping a website so you can set up a new website that conveys the same information, but earns you money and doesn't even credit the sources used (which these LLM services often do). "Crediting the sources used" is not really a principle in copyright law. (Funny enough, online fanartists seem determined to convince everyone it is as a way of shaming people into doing it.) Whether or not a use is transformative is protective though, and is what both of those cases rely on.