4 ms·

Generative AI is not learning. Copyrights don’t depend on whether I choose to publish a particular work or not. Zuckerberg personally approved using pirated c

Generative AI is not learning. Copyrights don’t depend on whether I choose to publish a particular work or not. Zuckerberg personally approved using pirated content to train a model. Is that OK too?

wiseowise 2y ago
Yes.
Kiro 2y ago
Absolutely. Abolish all copyright. I can't believe hackers have lost their pirating roots and have become copyright zealots instead.
- xtracto 2y ago
  This!. Thing is you are preaching to the wrong choir, Hackernews roots were not about the "original" hacking, but more about Silicon Valley for profit entrepreneurs creating stuff for profit to heavy quotes "make the world a better place" and "democratization X". The real hackers were in usenet, /. and similar forums. Now, I'm too old and haven't found a good place. Information wants to be free, copyright is a last century millennium construct to earn money from invention. (Before copyright, people got paid by patrons to invent their stuff). Copyright should be left at the XX century door, and whoever wants to "monetize" their intellect should use methods for the XXI century.
  - angoragoats 2y ago
    At least in the United States, copyright has existed since the founding of the country, and the Constitution explicitly grants Congress the authority to regulate it. It’s not as recent as you make it out to be, and it’s not going away anytime soon. To the extent that there is a problem to be solved here, it must be solved within the context of copyright law.
- angoragoats 2y ago
  Just wanted to respond to this point as well, to say that while this is a logically consistent stance, painting all hackers as pirates is unfair. Even Aaron Swartz, the subject of this post, made a distinction (both in his writing/talks and his actions) between academic, scientific, and judicial articles, which he believed should be free for everyone, and other copyrighted content such as books and movies. He seemed to take a softer stance on the latter. I am not a copyright zealot by any means, but I’m trying to keep an open mind regarding the seemingly knee-jerk “abolish all copyright” takes from certain people in the AI sphere.
starfezzy 2y ago
IP is fake. What I mean is, all laws are fake, but while we have to follow some collective hallucination about magic words giving people authority—to keep society together—the specific delusion that we should enforce artificial scarcity by extending monopolies to patterns of information is uniquely silly.
worik 2y ago
> Generative AI is not learning. Walks like a duck and quacks like a duck; I think it's a duck
- angoragoats 2y ago
  No, it neither walks nor quacks like a duck. Once a model is trained, the weights are static unless you train it again. This is a huge practical difference between LLMs and humans. I need to give the LLM the context I want it to consider every single time I use it, because it doesn’t learn from past use at all, it just produces a plausible string of words based on its constant, unchanging set of weights.

wiseowise 2y ago

Yes.

Kiro 2y ago

Absolutely. Abolish all copyright. I can't believe hackers have lost their pirating roots and have become copyright zealots instead.

xtracto 2y ago
This!. Thing is you are preaching to the wrong choir, Hackernews roots were not about the "original" hacking, but more about Silicon Valley for profit entrepreneurs creating stuff for profit to heavy quotes "make the world a better place" and "democratization X". The real hackers were in usenet, /. and similar forums. Now, I'm too old and haven't found a good place. Information wants to be free, copyright is a last century millennium construct to earn money from invention. (Before copyright, people got paid by patrons to invent their stuff). Copyright should be left at the XX century door, and whoever wants to "monetize" their intellect should use methods for the XXI century.
- angoragoats 2y ago
  At least in the United States, copyright has existed since the founding of the country, and the Constitution explicitly grants Congress the authority to regulate it. It’s not as recent as you make it out to be, and it’s not going away anytime soon. To the extent that there is a problem to be solved here, it must be solved within the context of copyright law.
angoragoats 2y ago
Just wanted to respond to this point as well, to say that while this is a logically consistent stance, painting all hackers as pirates is unfair. Even Aaron Swartz, the subject of this post, made a distinction (both in his writing/talks and his actions) between academic, scientific, and judicial articles, which he believed should be free for everyone, and other copyrighted content such as books and movies. He seemed to take a softer stance on the latter. I am not a copyright zealot by any means, but I’m trying to keep an open mind regarding the seemingly knee-jerk “abolish all copyright” takes from certain people in the AI sphere.

starfezzy 2y ago

IP is fake. What I mean is, all laws are fake, but while we have to follow some collective hallucination about magic words giving people authority—to keep society together—the specific delusion that we should enforce artificial scarcity by extending monopolies to patterns of information is uniquely silly.

worik 2y ago

> Generative AI is not learning. Walks like a duck and quacks like a duck; I think it's a duck

angoragoats 2y ago
No, it neither walks nor quacks like a duck. Once a model is trained, the weights are static unless you train it again. This is a huge practical difference between LLMs and humans. I need to give the LLM the context I want it to consider every single time I use it, because it doesn’t learn from past use at all, it just produces a plausible string of words based on its constant, unchanging set of weights.