4 ms·

I am an author. While 99% of "ordinary people" are not authors, 99% of authors are "ordinary people". Under your moral logic, everyone should just be free to p

I am an author. While 99% of "ordinary people" are not authors, 99% of authors are "ordinary people". Under your moral logic, everyone should just be free to pirate/steal any creative work, as why shouldn't the un-talented (or un-trained, or un-dedicated) have equal rights to the works. All this leads to a case where there is no longer an incentive to create and popularize creative work, and suddenly all that is available are AI rehashes of AI summaries. I, for one, don't look forward to such a marketplace of non-ideas.

thecrash 2y ago
> there is no longer an incentive to create and popularize creative work It's reasonable to be worried about this scenario. If there was no incentive to produce creative work, our society would be much worse. But the notion that there's only one way to prevent this scenario, and it requires a drastic expansion of the already sweeping "intellectual property" regime...well it just lacks creativity. It's not that we want to eliminate the incentive to be creative, it's that we believe there are better ways to prevent that scenario than to further entrench a broken system.
ycombinatrix 2y ago
I don't think I should be able to steal or pirate your work. I do think I should be allowed to read your book & do math with it.
- freejazz 2y ago
  >I do think I should be allowed to read your book & do math with it. This is such a painfully obtuse construction of what is occurring that it escapes any reasonable discussion.
  - ycombinatrix 2y ago
    Up to you. You can stop people from reading your book but you can't stop people from doing math.
    - freejazz 2y ago
      You are being obtuse, copying is "just math" and is already illegal. "Just math" is not a legal argument, this is childish.
meiraleal 2y ago
You give me your creative work for free. What I do with texts in my computer is my business, not yours. Don't like it? Stop publishing your creative work online. There is nothing being stolen.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  AI changes the rules here, because AI is able to automate extracting structure/meaning, and launder it of its origins. In classical copyright, fair use allows certain.. fair uses. Going beyond that is considered stealing. You can chop things up into small parts, and there are rules governing how you can put the pieces back together and claim them wholly or partly as your own work. LLMs behave more like a solvent. Everything goes in the pot, gets melted down, and by the time it's recast you can't say for sure where anything came from or who it once belonged to. Even if sometimes you might get a strong whiff.
  - freejazz 2y ago
    Not according to the NYTimes' attorneys.
- bumby 2y ago
  This is strange logic that ignores the idea of copyright. Just because I allow you to view my work for free does not mean I relinquish copyright protection. If I write a song that I perform for free, it doesn’t give you license to record and sell that song, for example.
  - meiraleal 2y ago
    > This is strange logic that ignores the idea of copyright What is strange in ignoring the idea of copyright? If you write a song and I can play it in my computer, I use it the way I want in my computer. If you don't want that, don't make your work public. Copyright is a men's creation, nobody is forced to respect it. The code I develop can be accessed for free in github and even in the browser "view source", I won't be fighting for other people to have the right to force others to pay for using their creation while they don't pay for mine and all other open source and open science creations.
visarga 2y ago
LLMs don't steal/pirate works, "copying" is the word you're looking for. So much faster, cheaper and precise to copy than to use LLMs. What LLMs do is to combine user information with patterns learned from data. Almost never a full work, they rarely generate more than 1000 words at once. Books are 100x larger
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  Actually, "launder" is the word I'd use for LLMs. Clean things up just enough that it's difficult to prove where their semantic content came from. How useful this is or isn't, and how much of a threat to rightful IP owners, depends very much on the type of IP.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - visarga 2y ago
    If "laundering" IP is made illegal, then we're all in for a huge surprise. Almost everything we say and do has been said and done before. And we're rarely the originators of our main ideas, we "launder" 99.99% of what we know, even subconsciously. Any one human could be suspected of secretly using AI today.
    - Earw0rm 2y ago
      Totally agree, the difference is speed and scale. Copyright laws didn't need to be invented until the printing press came along, because the act of copying was slow and difficult. Not a fan of the patent model for software, for example, but perhaps this is an argument for it. Or, we just get used to the fact that idea-reuse is cost-free, accept a couple of decades of uncomfortable economic dislocation, and get on with it.
- Kim_Bruning 2y ago
  I don't think "copying" applies to what an LLM does either!
- 2y ago

thecrash 2y ago

> there is no longer an incentive to create and popularize creative work It's reasonable to be worried about this scenario. If there was no incentive to produce creative work, our society would be much worse. But the notion that there's only one way to prevent this scenario, and it requires a drastic expansion of the already sweeping "intellectual property" regime...well it just lacks creativity. It's not that we want to eliminate the incentive to be creative, it's that we believe there are better ways to prevent that scenario than to further entrench a broken system.

ycombinatrix 2y ago

I don't think I should be able to steal or pirate your work. I do think I should be allowed to read your book & do math with it.

freejazz 2y ago
>I do think I should be allowed to read your book & do math with it. This is such a painfully obtuse construction of what is occurring that it escapes any reasonable discussion.
- ycombinatrix 2y ago
  Up to you. You can stop people from reading your book but you can't stop people from doing math.
  - freejazz 2y ago
    You are being obtuse, copying is "just math" and is already illegal. "Just math" is not a legal argument, this is childish.

meiraleal 2y ago

You give me your creative work for free. What I do with texts in my computer is my business, not yours. Don't like it? Stop publishing your creative work online. There is nothing being stolen.

Earw0rm 2y ago
AI changes the rules here, because AI is able to automate extracting structure/meaning, and launder it of its origins. In classical copyright, fair use allows certain.. fair uses. Going beyond that is considered stealing. You can chop things up into small parts, and there are rules governing how you can put the pieces back together and claim them wholly or partly as your own work. LLMs behave more like a solvent. Everything goes in the pot, gets melted down, and by the time it's recast you can't say for sure where anything came from or who it once belonged to. Even if sometimes you might get a strong whiff.
- freejazz 2y ago
  Not according to the NYTimes' attorneys.
bumby 2y ago
This is strange logic that ignores the idea of copyright. Just because I allow you to view my work for free does not mean I relinquish copyright protection. If I write a song that I perform for free, it doesn’t give you license to record and sell that song, for example.
- meiraleal 2y ago
  > This is strange logic that ignores the idea of copyright What is strange in ignoring the idea of copyright? If you write a song and I can play it in my computer, I use it the way I want in my computer. If you don't want that, don't make your work public. Copyright is a men's creation, nobody is forced to respect it. The code I develop can be accessed for free in github and even in the browser "view source", I won't be fighting for other people to have the right to force others to pay for using their creation while they don't pay for mine and all other open source and open science creations.

visarga 2y ago

LLMs don't steal/pirate works, "copying" is the word you're looking for. So much faster, cheaper and precise to copy than to use LLMs. What LLMs do is to combine user information with patterns learned from data. Almost never a full work, they rarely generate more than 1000 words at once. Books are 100x larger

Earw0rm 2y ago
Actually, "launder" is the word I'd use for LLMs. Clean things up just enough that it's difficult to prove where their semantic content came from. How useful this is or isn't, and how much of a threat to rightful IP owners, depends very much on the type of IP.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- visarga 2y ago
  If "laundering" IP is made illegal, then we're all in for a huge surprise. Almost everything we say and do has been said and done before. And we're rarely the originators of our main ideas, we "launder" 99.99% of what we know, even subconsciously. Any one human could be suspected of secretly using AI today.
  - Earw0rm 2y ago
    Totally agree, the difference is speed and scale. Copyright laws didn't need to be invented until the printing press came along, because the act of copying was slow and difficult. Not a fan of the patent model for software, for example, but perhaps this is an argument for it. Or, we just get used to the fact that idea-reuse is cost-free, accept a couple of decades of uncomfortable economic dislocation, and get on with it.
Kim_Bruning 2y ago
I don't think "copying" applies to what an LLM does either!
2y ago