5 ms·

Even if they are small enough to be run be individuals, this still doesn't solve the issue of profiting from someone's work for free. Many of us publish our op

Even if they are small enough to be run be individuals, this still doesn't solve the issue of profiting from someone's work for free. Many of us publish our open source work under GPL or AGPL with the intention that you can profit from it but you have to give back what you built on it under the same license. LLMs allow anyone to launder copyleft code and profit without giving anything back. If people who downvote bothered to reply, they'd probably say that by being "absorbed" into LLM weights, the code served that purpose and is available for everyone to use. That forgets 2 critical points: - LLMs give no attribution. I deserve to be credited for my fractional contribution to the collective output of humanity. - LLMs are not intelligences, they don't suddenly make intellectual work redundant. Using them still requires work to integrate their output and therefore companies build (for-profit) products on top of my work without compensating me, without crediting me and without giving anyone the freedom to modify the code.

chromanoid 2y ago
I am not sure if profits are easy to gather if all professional users can rent hardware instead of renting the service. In the end the users would actually profit from the model, not the provider (who competes with other providers of the same open source model). And here I am not sure if we can see AI as some kind of cybernetic enhancement that allows to execute ideas on the shoulders of humanity instead of just a scammy way to resell already present content.
- martin-t 2y ago
  Exactly. It's impractical to distribute compensation (and credit) fairly so it's very easy for those who profit to say "we can't", their their hands up and keep profiting. Doesn't make it right. It's just the rich getting richer by taking from everyone so little that no individual bothers to fight back.
  - chromanoid 2y ago
    Why do you think the rich get richer when operating an AI is a price competition and training new models gives only a short competitive advantage? I would hope that for each individual there opens an ocean of opportunities that is sustained by all humans that came before and poured their bucket of knowledge into it.
    - martin-t 2y ago
      1) For starters, ML companies clearly go through enormous amounts of money, the rich people in control of them very obviously get compensated quite generously, if you're into euphemisms, which the people who built the "training data" (= their copyrighted works) get nothing. 2) It's not just ML companies but anyone using their products. A while ago everyone was upset that chatGPT regurgitated fast inverse square root from Quake's GPL code verbatim including a comment, clearly violating the license unless the program it generated it into was also under GPL. I am sure since then they've made sure the copyrighted material used as training data gets misex up a bit more thoroughly so it doesn't produce it in the output verbatim and is therefore harder to detect. So what if i spend a couple days writing an algorithm, give it a nice doc comment and tests, publish it under AGPL, it gets used as training data and a random programmer in a random company working on a random for-profit product runs into the same problem but instead of writing the algo himself, he asks a generative model and it produces my code just a little mixed up so it's not immediately recognizable but clearly based on my code? I deserve to be paid, that's what happens.
      - chromanoid 2y ago
        Algorithms should not be subject to copyright IMO. If you publish code, AFAIK under EU law only blatant copies are an infringement. In case of art, copyright is enforceable anyway, at least not in any different form than before AI. Yes, current AIs just remix their training data in a rather direct way. But in the end how different is that to how humans create? I would suggest we should embrace this new way of creating things while finding laws to empower all creators and not only those who were hired by deep pockets.
        2y ago
liamwire 2y ago
> LLMs give no attribution. I deserve to be credited for my fractional contribution to the collective output of humanity. I disagree, respectfully. You’re unable to accurately credit the myriad of people, sources, and works that’ve all educated and influenced you along the way. Suppose even if you could, you’d not be able to resolve their dependencies ad infinitum. Nor would it even make sense—arguably, as a species we’re defined by the compounding and shared nature of the knowledge we learn, implicitly and explicitly. Shoulders of giants, and all that. If your contributions were a significant portion of the entire training corpus, then perhaps we’d have a separate discussion to have, but there’s no single person for which you can reasonably argue that’s true. Maybe for authors of hyper-niche topics or cutting edge research?

chromanoid 2y ago

I am not sure if profits are easy to gather if all professional users can rent hardware instead of renting the service. In the end the users would actually profit from the model, not the provider (who competes with other providers of the same open source model). And here I am not sure if we can see AI as some kind of cybernetic enhancement that allows to execute ideas on the shoulders of humanity instead of just a scammy way to resell already present content.

martin-t 2y ago
Exactly. It's impractical to distribute compensation (and credit) fairly so it's very easy for those who profit to say "we can't", their their hands up and keep profiting. Doesn't make it right. It's just the rich getting richer by taking from everyone so little that no individual bothers to fight back.
- chromanoid 2y ago
  Why do you think the rich get richer when operating an AI is a price competition and training new models gives only a short competitive advantage? I would hope that for each individual there opens an ocean of opportunities that is sustained by all humans that came before and poured their bucket of knowledge into it.
  - martin-t 2y ago
    1) For starters, ML companies clearly go through enormous amounts of money, the rich people in control of them very obviously get compensated quite generously, if you're into euphemisms, which the people who built the "training data" (= their copyrighted works) get nothing. 2) It's not just ML companies but anyone using their products. A while ago everyone was upset that chatGPT regurgitated fast inverse square root from Quake's GPL code verbatim including a comment, clearly violating the license unless the program it generated it into was also under GPL. I am sure since then they've made sure the copyrighted material used as training data gets misex up a bit more thoroughly so it doesn't produce it in the output verbatim and is therefore harder to detect. So what if i spend a couple days writing an algorithm, give it a nice doc comment and tests, publish it under AGPL, it gets used as training data and a random programmer in a random company working on a random for-profit product runs into the same problem but instead of writing the algo himself, he asks a generative model and it produces my code just a little mixed up so it's not immediately recognizable but clearly based on my code? I deserve to be paid, that's what happens.
    - chromanoid 2y ago
      Algorithms should not be subject to copyright IMO. If you publish code, AFAIK under EU law only blatant copies are an infringement. In case of art, copyright is enforceable anyway, at least not in any different form than before AI. Yes, current AIs just remix their training data in a rather direct way. But in the end how different is that to how humans create? I would suggest we should embrace this new way of creating things while finding laws to empower all creators and not only those who were hired by deep pockets.
      - 2y ago

liamwire 2y ago

> LLMs give no attribution. I deserve to be credited for my fractional contribution to the collective output of humanity. I disagree, respectfully. You’re unable to accurately credit the myriad of people, sources, and works that’ve all educated and influenced you along the way. Suppose even if you could, you’d not be able to resolve their dependencies ad infinitum. Nor would it even make sense—arguably, as a species we’re defined by the compounding and shared nature of the knowledge we learn, implicitly and explicitly. Shoulders of giants, and all that. If your contributions were a significant portion of the entire training corpus, then perhaps we’d have a separate discussion to have, but there’s no single person for which you can reasonably argue that’s true. Maybe for authors of hyper-niche topics or cutting edge research?