5 ms·

We are approaching the "UBI or Guillotine" fork simply because rules and regulations work selectively. Just like with the "If we pay for copyright or business b

by mrtksn 2y ago

We are approaching the "UBI or Guillotine" fork simply because rules and regulations work selectively. Just like with the "If we pay for copyright or business becomes impossible" defense, this is yet another wast unfairness against those who had to transfer their resources to learn a skill. Awful lot of people had hard life or got into debt for things that big tech is immune from. Or maybe we will come into the conclusion that all this works only if there's no such thing as IP, reset the playing field for everyone and if anyone wants to make money will have to actually work for it every single time. IIRC that's what's happening in China and its how they surpassed US in innovation. Technically, that's a deregulation - just not the kind of deregulation the big tech is pushing for. Maybe the next time there's a graph showing how regulations made EU lag behind, add the graph of China too to spice things up. With so many technical people out of work and promises of make the employed ones obsolete too, it can be a good idea to let people build thing instead of unfairly concentrating even more power onto kleptocratic entities.

casey2 2y ago
How can you get the definition of fairness so backwards? Giant corporations provide literally everything you take for granted and they should be punished because you are envious? I don't get it. There is a reason everyone with over 130 IQ wants to work for them rather than starting their own companies.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  People who are smart typically have better things to do than talk about their IQs. Or sell ads, for that matter.
- Lucasoato 2y ago
  They shouldn’t be punished because people are envious, they should be punished because they’re not respecting other people's intellectual property without an agreement in place. We can’t protect IPs only when that benefits big corps. We should protect them always or accept that the world is better if we go in another direction, changing the rules for everybody.
  - visarga 2y ago
    Training on copyrighted data should be legally allowed - of course exact reproduction of protected content is a no-no - but learning is ok, as long as it is transformative. User prompts and responses are pushing the model outside its training distribution anyway - users add their own intent, making usage transformative - when LLMs synthesize from multiple sources, the result is transformative - if you try to protect expression it is meaningless now, but if you protect abstract ideas it kneecaps creativity - the problems of copyright started with the apparition of internet, not with AI - revenues from royalty are almost zero today, as each new content competes against an unbounded list of other works that have been accumulating for decades online - because royalties are shit, creatives now focus on ads, and this leads to enshittification, attention grabbing junk everywhere, attention is scarce content is post-scarcity - we actually like interactive participation more than passive consumption; we now edit Wikipedia, contribute to open source, have papers published for free on arXiv, use social networks where our comments are shared with the world, play games instead of reading books - it is another age, the interactive age - AI is actually more than an infringement tool, it is useful for many legit purposes - and AI is the worst possible infringement tool, it can hallucinate details, get thins wrong; By comparison copying is free and easy and precise to the letter So the idea that training is infringement is pretty abusive, it tries to make copyright be about abstractions which is wrong. We can't return to 1990s, so we have to live with its demise. It's been dying for 3 decades already.
    - xena 2y ago
      How do writers eat when the market value of their writing is zero?
      - visarga 2y ago
        It's been reduced to zero for 3 decades. When you publish your work, there are a million other works competing for attention. That is the real issue. When you search for an image, you get thousands of images instantly, faster than diffusion models. Content doesn't matter anymore, attention matters, curation matters too. Even if you forbid AI from training on copyrighted works, people are going to comment about them online, and the model will pick up the ideas. There is no way to protect ideas from spreading and reaching AIs.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bdndndndbve 2y ago
  How can you get the definition of fairness so backwards? The King provides literally everything you take for granted and he should be punished because you are envious? I don't get it. There's a reason why every vassal with a sizeable estate wants to be in the King's court rather than starting their own country.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> We are approaching the "UBI or Guillotine" fork Even in the 18th century, the French aristocracy mostly cruised through the Revolution from afar, surviving with fortunes largely intact to this day [1]. If the fork is UBI or guillotine, the selfish move by the private-jetting billionaire class—personally and financially more mobile and global than the French aristocracy ever was—is the latter. > if there's no such thing as IP, reset the playing field for everyone Your thesis is letting Altman, Zuckerberg and Musk have free rein would decrease inequality? > IIRC that's what's happening in China Not really [2]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37655777 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37655777 [2] https://www.chinaiplawupdate.com/2023/08/china-prosecutes-11675-people-for-ip-crimes-in-2023-h1/ https://www.chinaiplawupdate.com/2023/08/china-prosecutes-11...
- XorNot 2y ago
  The other way to look at it though is that revolution won't solve your problems, and Americans are far too confident that it will.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > other way to look at it though is that revolution won't solve your problems, and Americans are far too confident that it will Americans are largely not for a revolution because most of us aren’t idiots. There is idle chatter of a civil war, but that’s again (a) bluster (not that this can’t take on a life of its own) and (b) about consolidating control versus wholesale rebuilding the American class structure.
    - tyleo 2y ago
      FWIW there is a difference between revolution and civil war. I see a decent number of people advocate for the first but basically no one advocate for the second. In either case the numbers aren’t a majority.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
netfl0 2y ago
Ah yes, because the working class is primarily concerned with protecting their intellectual property…
- bdndndndbve 2y ago
  I think OP is coming from the "temporarily embarassed billionaire" perspective where if only we had a libertarian hellscape without pesky laws they would be a funeral baron who runs Bartertown.
- impomura 2y ago
  the working class is paywalled out of education because of IP laws that can seemingly be ignored by the AI companies
bdndndndbve 2y ago
The idea that abolishing IP protections and letting AI companies run rampant is an offramp for wealth inequality is such a wild take to me? Realistically billionaires are using racist and homophobic populism as a way to direct working class energy away from wealth inequality. Making people think "woke" is the reason why the earth is on fire and they can't have health insurance.
wesapien 2y ago
Isn't UBI just going to raise inflation? People who don't need it will claim it and use the existing tax loopholes. Tax laws will need to be rewritte.
- tharmas 2y ago
  Indeed it would as the landlords would just raise rents accordingly. We saw a bit of that with Covid cheques.
  - PaulRobinson 2y ago
    I think you'll find rising rents are more correlated with rising interest rates than Covid cheques, but given one of the key grievances perceived by UBI advocates is class inequality and lack of social mobility, if UBI became politically possible then so would rent controls and controls on prices of key essential commodities while waiting for it to "settle in".
    - tharmas 2y ago
      Good point about the interest rates. However, in the UK landlords adjusted their rents accordingly when the Govt introduced Housing Benefits (years before interest rates began to rise). A lot of govt MPs are landlords. I'm not against the idea of UBI, I just see the landlords eating it up like they do with peoples wages.
- webmaven 2y ago
  The "U" in UBI is for "Universal". There is no means-testing. Everyone gets it regardless of assets or income, which means there is no need to spend any effort on checking whether someone is "poor enough". Though the state would have to make sure the person receiving the benefit actually exists, is still alive, etc.
  - wesapien 2y ago
    I understand what UBI means but it's the effect is what I think people do not understand. Based on the Cantillon effect, UBI will just accelerate the separation between the rich and the poor.
Workaccount2 2y ago
The legal problem is in outputting IP, I still have yet to see a convincing argument that training on copyrighted data is a breach of IP laws. The trained models are trillionths the size of their training sets. There is no archive of copied data in them.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  Training on copyrighted works licensed for such use is inarguably conforming. Acquiring and using works without such license is just piracy. Whatever your stand on piracy is, most individuals and businesses are not free to incorporate it into their projects. Normal people have faced significant penalties for piracy, and concientious business operators avoid it. Sure would be disappointing to all those people if there were suddenly a ruling that said "well, but it's okay that these guys did it because they're filthy rich and went real hard with it"
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    Again, models are not archives of data. Llama 3.1 70B is around 45GB is size, despite being trained on likely hundreds of petabytes of data. And before you say it, they are not fancy compression algo's either, the loss is so high they would be useless.
    - dns_snek 2y ago
      What our society has to decide is whether these use cases are beneficial or detrimental to society at large, and adjust IP laws accordingly. Whether LLMs are archives of data, a compression method, or whatever else is just an unimportant technical implementation detail.
    - swatcoder 2y ago
      Was this replied to the wrong comment? I'm not sure what it has to do with what I wrote. But here's another way to think about what I'm saying, in case you missed it: Personally, I'd love to download a complete archive of JSTOR. I'd train myself, and maybe even I could even use it as input into some product I mean to launch soon. JSTOR doesn't offer a license for that, at least not to me, but I'm sure I can scrape their site or find an archive elsewhere and make it happen anyway. Do you think I should do that? What do you think might happen if I tried?
ColdTakes 2y ago
There isn't going to be a revolution. Americans are all talk no action.

by mrtksn 2y ago

casey2 2y ago

How can you get the definition of fairness so backwards? Giant corporations provide literally everything you take for granted and they should be punished because you are envious? I don't get it. There is a reason everyone with over 130 IQ wants to work for them rather than starting their own companies.

saagarjha 2y ago
People who are smart typically have better things to do than talk about their IQs. Or sell ads, for that matter.
Lucasoato 2y ago
They shouldn’t be punished because people are envious, they should be punished because they’re not respecting other people's intellectual property without an agreement in place. We can’t protect IPs only when that benefits big corps. We should protect them always or accept that the world is better if we go in another direction, changing the rules for everybody.
- visarga 2y ago
  Training on copyrighted data should be legally allowed - of course exact reproduction of protected content is a no-no - but learning is ok, as long as it is transformative. User prompts and responses are pushing the model outside its training distribution anyway - users add their own intent, making usage transformative - when LLMs synthesize from multiple sources, the result is transformative - if you try to protect expression it is meaningless now, but if you protect abstract ideas it kneecaps creativity - the problems of copyright started with the apparition of internet, not with AI - revenues from royalty are almost zero today, as each new content competes against an unbounded list of other works that have been accumulating for decades online - because royalties are shit, creatives now focus on ads, and this leads to enshittification, attention grabbing junk everywhere, attention is scarce content is post-scarcity - we actually like interactive participation more than passive consumption; we now edit Wikipedia, contribute to open source, have papers published for free on arXiv, use social networks where our comments are shared with the world, play games instead of reading books - it is another age, the interactive age - AI is actually more than an infringement tool, it is useful for many legit purposes - and AI is the worst possible infringement tool, it can hallucinate details, get thins wrong; By comparison copying is free and easy and precise to the letter So the idea that training is infringement is pretty abusive, it tries to make copyright be about abstractions which is wrong. We can't return to 1990s, so we have to live with its demise. It's been dying for 3 decades already.
  - xena 2y ago
    How do writers eat when the market value of their writing is zero?
    - visarga 2y ago
      It's been reduced to zero for 3 decades. When you publish your work, there are a million other works competing for attention. That is the real issue. When you search for an image, you get thousands of images instantly, faster than diffusion models. Content doesn't matter anymore, attention matters, curation matters too. Even if you forbid AI from training on copyrighted works, people are going to comment about them online, and the model will pick up the ideas. There is no way to protect ideas from spreading and reaching AIs.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bdndndndbve 2y ago
How can you get the definition of fairness so backwards? The King provides literally everything you take for granted and he should be punished because you are envious? I don't get it. There's a reason why every vassal with a sizeable estate wants to be in the King's court rather than starting their own country.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> We are approaching the "UBI or Guillotine" fork Even in the 18th century, the French aristocracy mostly cruised through the Revolution from afar, surviving with fortunes largely intact to this day [1]. If the fork is UBI or guillotine, the selfish move by the private-jetting billionaire class—personally and financially more mobile and global than the French aristocracy ever was—is the latter. > if there's no such thing as IP, reset the playing field for everyone Your thesis is letting Altman, Zuckerberg and Musk have free rein would decrease inequality? > IIRC that's what's happening in China Not really [2]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37655777 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37655777 [2] https://www.chinaiplawupdate.com/2023/08/china-prosecutes-11675-people-for-ip-crimes-in-2023-h1/ https://www.chinaiplawupdate.com/2023/08/china-prosecutes-11...

XorNot 2y ago
The other way to look at it though is that revolution won't solve your problems, and Americans are far too confident that it will.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > other way to look at it though is that revolution won't solve your problems, and Americans are far too confident that it will Americans are largely not for a revolution because most of us aren’t idiots. There is idle chatter of a civil war, but that’s again (a) bluster (not that this can’t take on a life of its own) and (b) about consolidating control versus wholesale rebuilding the American class structure.
  - tyleo 2y ago
    FWIW there is a difference between revolution and civil war. I see a decent number of people advocate for the first but basically no one advocate for the second. In either case the numbers aren’t a majority.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago

netfl0 2y ago

Ah yes, because the working class is primarily concerned with protecting their intellectual property…

bdndndndbve 2y ago
I think OP is coming from the "temporarily embarassed billionaire" perspective where if only we had a libertarian hellscape without pesky laws they would be a funeral baron who runs Bartertown.
impomura 2y ago
the working class is paywalled out of education because of IP laws that can seemingly be ignored by the AI companies

bdndndndbve 2y ago

The idea that abolishing IP protections and letting AI companies run rampant is an offramp for wealth inequality is such a wild take to me? Realistically billionaires are using racist and homophobic populism as a way to direct working class energy away from wealth inequality. Making people think "woke" is the reason why the earth is on fire and they can't have health insurance.

wesapien 2y ago

Isn't UBI just going to raise inflation? People who don't need it will claim it and use the existing tax loopholes. Tax laws will need to be rewritte.

tharmas 2y ago
Indeed it would as the landlords would just raise rents accordingly. We saw a bit of that with Covid cheques.
- PaulRobinson 2y ago
  I think you'll find rising rents are more correlated with rising interest rates than Covid cheques, but given one of the key grievances perceived by UBI advocates is class inequality and lack of social mobility, if UBI became politically possible then so would rent controls and controls on prices of key essential commodities while waiting for it to "settle in".
  - tharmas 2y ago
    Good point about the interest rates. However, in the UK landlords adjusted their rents accordingly when the Govt introduced Housing Benefits (years before interest rates began to rise). A lot of govt MPs are landlords. I'm not against the idea of UBI, I just see the landlords eating it up like they do with peoples wages.
webmaven 2y ago
The "U" in UBI is for "Universal". There is no means-testing. Everyone gets it regardless of assets or income, which means there is no need to spend any effort on checking whether someone is "poor enough". Though the state would have to make sure the person receiving the benefit actually exists, is still alive, etc.
- wesapien 2y ago
  I understand what UBI means but it's the effect is what I think people do not understand. Based on the Cantillon effect, UBI will just accelerate the separation between the rich and the poor.

Workaccount2 2y ago

The legal problem is in outputting IP, I still have yet to see a convincing argument that training on copyrighted data is a breach of IP laws. The trained models are trillionths the size of their training sets. There is no archive of copied data in them.

swatcoder 2y ago
Training on copyrighted works licensed for such use is inarguably conforming. Acquiring and using works without such license is just piracy. Whatever your stand on piracy is, most individuals and businesses are not free to incorporate it into their projects. Normal people have faced significant penalties for piracy, and concientious business operators avoid it. Sure would be disappointing to all those people if there were suddenly a ruling that said "well, but it's okay that these guys did it because they're filthy rich and went real hard with it"
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Again, models are not archives of data. Llama 3.1 70B is around 45GB is size, despite being trained on likely hundreds of petabytes of data. And before you say it, they are not fancy compression algo's either, the loss is so high they would be useless.
  - dns_snek 2y ago
    What our society has to decide is whether these use cases are beneficial or detrimental to society at large, and adjust IP laws accordingly. Whether LLMs are archives of data, a compression method, or whatever else is just an unimportant technical implementation detail.
  - swatcoder 2y ago
    Was this replied to the wrong comment? I'm not sure what it has to do with what I wrote. But here's another way to think about what I'm saying, in case you missed it: Personally, I'd love to download a complete archive of JSTOR. I'd train myself, and maybe even I could even use it as input into some product I mean to launch soon. JSTOR doesn't offer a license for that, at least not to me, but I'm sure I can scrape their site or find an archive elsewhere and make it happen anyway. Do you think I should do that? What do you think might happen if I tried?

ColdTakes 2y ago

There isn't going to be a revolution. Americans are all talk no action.