7 ms·

Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something. There are all kinds of things people and companies do which I dislike but for which there's no

by _bin_ 1y ago

Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something. There are all kinds of things people and companies do which I dislike but for which there's no just basis for regulating. If Adobe properly licenses all their training data artists don't have a right to say "well i think this is bad for creativity and puts my job at risk, ban it!!!" Or more precisely, they have a right to say that, but no moral justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it. I hate Adobe's subscription model as much as the next guy and that's a good reason to get annoyed at them. Adobe building AI features is not.

TeMPOraL 1y ago
> Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something. It isn't, but it doesn't stop people from trying and hoping for a miracle. That's pretty much all there is to the arguments of image models, as well as LLMs, being trained in violation of copyright - it's distaste and greed[0], with a slice of basic legalese on top to confuse people into believing the law says what it doesn't (at least yet) on top. > If Adobe properly licenses all their training data artists don't have a right to say "well i think this is bad for creativity and puts my job at risk, ban it!!!" Or more precisely, they have a right to say that, but no moral justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it. I'd say they have plenty of moral / ethical justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it, they just don't have much of a legal one at this point. But that's why they should be trying[1] - they have a legitimate argument that this is an unexpected, undeserved, unfair calamity for them, threatening to derail their lives, and lives of their dependents, across the entire sector - and therefore that laws should be changed to shield them, or compensate them for the loss. After all, that's what laws are for. (Let's not forget that the entire legal edifice around recognizing and protecting "intellectual property" is an entirely artificial construct that goes against the nature of information and knowledge, forcing information to behave like physical goods, so it's not unfair to the creators in an economy that's built around trading physical goods. IP laws were built on moral arguments, so it's only fair to change them on moral grounds too.) -- [0] - Greed is more visible in the LLM theatre of this conflict, because with textual content there's vastly more people who believe that they're entitled to compensation just because some comments they wrote on the Internet may have been part of the training dataset, and are appalled to see LLM providers get paid for the service while they are not. This Dog in the Manger mentality is distinct from that of people whose output was used in training a model that now directly competes with them for their job; the latter have legitimate ethical reasons to complain. [1] - Even though myself I am for treating training datasets to generative AI as exempt from copyright. I think it'll be better for society in general - but I recognize it's easy for me to say it, because I'm not the one being rugpulled out of a career path by GenAI, watching it going from 0 to being half of the way towards automating away visual arts, in just ~5 years.
- skissane 1y ago
  > they have a legitimate argument that this is an unexpected, undeserved, unfair calamity for them, threatening to derail their lives, and lives of their dependents, across the entire sector - and therefore that laws should be changed to shield them, or compensate them for the loss. After all, that's what laws are for. Lots of people have had their lives disrupted by technological and economic changes before - entire careers which existed a century ago are now gone. Given society provided little or no compensation for prior such cases of disruption, what’s the argument for doing differently here?
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    Moral growth and learning from history?
    - skissane 1y ago
      There’s a big risk that you end up creating a scheme to compensate for technological disruption in one industry and then fail to do so in another, based on the political clout / mindshare / media attention each has - and then there are many people in even worse personal situations (through no fault of their own) who would also miss out. Wouldn’t a better alternative be to work on improving social safety nets for everybody, as opposed to providing a bespoke one for a single industry?
      - TeMPOraL 1y ago
        > Wouldn’t a better alternative be to work on improving social safety nets for everybody, as opposed to providing a bespoke one for a single industry? Yes, but: 1) It's not really an exclusive choice; different people can pursue different angles, including all of them - one can both seek immediate support/compensation for the specific case they're the victim of and seek longer-term solution for everyone who'd face the same problem in the future. 2) A bespoke solution is much more likely to be achievable than a general one. 3) I don't believe it would be good for society for artists to succeed in curtailing generative AI! But, should they succeed, I imagine the consequences will encourage people to seek the more general solution that mitigates occupational damage of GenAI while preserving its availability, instead of having to deal with a series of bespoke stopgaps that also kills GenAI entirely. 4) Not that banning GenAI has any chance of succeeding - the most we'd get is it being unavailable in some countries, who'd then be at a disadvantage in competition with countries that embraced it. Again, I'm not in favor of banning GenAI - on the contrary, I'm in favor of giving a blanket exception from copyright laws for purposes of training generative models. However, I recognize the plight of artists and other people who are feeling the negative economic impact on their jobs right now (and hell, my own line of work - software development - is still one of the most at risk in the near to mid-term, too); I wish for a solution that will help them (and others about to be in this situation), but in the meantime, I don't begrudge them for trying to fight it - I think they have full right to. I only have problems with people who oppose AI because they feel that Big AI is depriving them of opportunity to seek rent from society for the value AI models are creating.
skywhopper 1y ago
In the context of encouraging art, it totally is! Copyright and patents are 100% artificial and invented legal concepts that are based solely on the distaste for others profiting off a creator’s ideas. The reason for them is to encourage creativity by allowing creators to profit off new ideas. So there’s no reason why “distaste” about AI abuse of human artists’ work shouldn’t be a valid reason to regulate or ban it. If society values the creation of new art and inventions, then it will create artificial barriers to encourage their creation.
- bmacho 1y ago
  Yup, banning AI for the sake of artist would be exactly the same as the current copyright laws. (Also they are attacking AI not purely for fear of their jobs, but bc it is illegal already.)
- _bin_ 1y ago
  Disagree. Authority is given Congress to establish an IP regime for the purpose of "promot[ing] the progress of science and useful arts". You would have to justify how banning gen AI is a. feasible at all, particularly with open-weight models; and b. how it "promotes the progress of useful arts." You would lose in court because it's very difficult to argue that keeping art as a skilled craftsman's trade is worse for its progress than lowering the barriers to individuals expressing what they see. I think bad AI makes bad output and so a few people are worried it will replace good human art with bad AI art. Realistically, the stuff it's replacing now is bad human art: stock photos and clipart stuff that weren't really creative expression to start with. As it improves, we'll be increasingly able to go do a targeted inpaint to create images that more closely match our creative vision. There's a path here that lowers the barriers for someone getting his ideas into a visual form and that's an unambiguous good, unless you're one of the "craftsmen" who invested time to learn the old way. It's almost exactly the same as AI development. As an experienced dev who knows the ins and outs really well I look at AI code and say, "wow, that's garbage." But people are using it to make unimportant webshit frontends, not do "serious work". Once it can do "serious work" that will decrease the number of jobs in the field but be good for software development as a whole.
cratermoon 1y ago
> Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something I disagree. There are many laws on the books codifying social distastes. They keep your local vice squad busy.
- _bin_ 1y ago
  I thought most people supported moving away from that and towards a more socially liberal model. If we're no longer doing that I have a whole stack of socially conservative policies I guess I'll go back to pushing. I don't think y'all really want to go down this road; it leads straight back to the nineties republicans holding senate hearings on what's acceptable content for a music album.
  - fc417fc802 1y ago
    Many laws come down to distaste at the root. There's usually an alternative angle about market efficiency or social stability or whatever if you want to frame it that way. The same applies in this case as well. For but a few examples consider laws regarding gambling, many aspects of zoning, or deceptive marketing. What's the purpose of the law if not providing stability? Why should social issues be exempted from that?
computerthings 1y ago
[dead]
weregiraffe 1y ago
>Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_obscenity_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_obscenity_law

by _bin_ 1y ago

TeMPOraL 1y ago

> Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something. It isn't, but it doesn't stop people from trying and hoping for a miracle. That's pretty much all there is to the arguments of image models, as well as LLMs, being trained in violation of copyright - it's distaste and greed[0], with a slice of basic legalese on top to confuse people into believing the law says what it doesn't (at least yet) on top. > If Adobe properly licenses all their training data artists don't have a right to say "well i think this is bad for creativity and puts my job at risk, ban it!!!" Or more precisely, they have a right to say that, but no moral justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it. I'd say they have plenty of moral / ethical justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it, they just don't have much of a legal one at this point. But that's why they should be trying[1] - they have a legitimate argument that this is an unexpected, undeserved, unfair calamity for them, threatening to derail their lives, and lives of their dependents, across the entire sector - and therefore that laws should be changed to shield them, or compensate them for the loss. After all, that's what laws are for. (Let's not forget that the entire legal edifice around recognizing and protecting "intellectual property" is an entirely artificial construct that goes against the nature of information and knowledge, forcing information to behave like physical goods, so it's not unfair to the creators in an economy that's built around trading physical goods. IP laws were built on moral arguments, so it's only fair to change them on moral grounds too.) -- [0] - Greed is more visible in the LLM theatre of this conflict, because with textual content there's vastly more people who believe that they're entitled to compensation just because some comments they wrote on the Internet may have been part of the training dataset, and are appalled to see LLM providers get paid for the service while they are not. This Dog in the Manger mentality is distinct from that of people whose output was used in training a model that now directly competes with them for their job; the latter have legitimate ethical reasons to complain. [1] - Even though myself I am for treating training datasets to generative AI as exempt from copyright. I think it'll be better for society in general - but I recognize it's easy for me to say it, because I'm not the one being rugpulled out of a career path by GenAI, watching it going from 0 to being half of the way towards automating away visual arts, in just ~5 years.

skissane 1y ago
> they have a legitimate argument that this is an unexpected, undeserved, unfair calamity for them, threatening to derail their lives, and lives of their dependents, across the entire sector - and therefore that laws should be changed to shield them, or compensate them for the loss. After all, that's what laws are for. Lots of people have had their lives disrupted by technological and economic changes before - entire careers which existed a century ago are now gone. Given society provided little or no compensation for prior such cases of disruption, what’s the argument for doing differently here?
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  Moral growth and learning from history?
  - skissane 1y ago
    There’s a big risk that you end up creating a scheme to compensate for technological disruption in one industry and then fail to do so in another, based on the political clout / mindshare / media attention each has - and then there are many people in even worse personal situations (through no fault of their own) who would also miss out. Wouldn’t a better alternative be to work on improving social safety nets for everybody, as opposed to providing a bespoke one for a single industry?
    - TeMPOraL 1y ago
      > Wouldn’t a better alternative be to work on improving social safety nets for everybody, as opposed to providing a bespoke one for a single industry? Yes, but: 1) It's not really an exclusive choice; different people can pursue different angles, including all of them - one can both seek immediate support/compensation for the specific case they're the victim of and seek longer-term solution for everyone who'd face the same problem in the future. 2) A bespoke solution is much more likely to be achievable than a general one. 3) I don't believe it would be good for society for artists to succeed in curtailing generative AI! But, should they succeed, I imagine the consequences will encourage people to seek the more general solution that mitigates occupational damage of GenAI while preserving its availability, instead of having to deal with a series of bespoke stopgaps that also kills GenAI entirely. 4) Not that banning GenAI has any chance of succeeding - the most we'd get is it being unavailable in some countries, who'd then be at a disadvantage in competition with countries that embraced it. Again, I'm not in favor of banning GenAI - on the contrary, I'm in favor of giving a blanket exception from copyright laws for purposes of training generative models. However, I recognize the plight of artists and other people who are feeling the negative economic impact on their jobs right now (and hell, my own line of work - software development - is still one of the most at risk in the near to mid-term, too); I wish for a solution that will help them (and others about to be in this situation), but in the meantime, I don't begrudge them for trying to fight it - I think they have full right to. I only have problems with people who oppose AI because they feel that Big AI is depriving them of opportunity to seek rent from society for the value AI models are creating.

skywhopper 1y ago

In the context of encouraging art, it totally is! Copyright and patents are 100% artificial and invented legal concepts that are based solely on the distaste for others profiting off a creator’s ideas. The reason for them is to encourage creativity by allowing creators to profit off new ideas. So there’s no reason why “distaste” about AI abuse of human artists’ work shouldn’t be a valid reason to regulate or ban it. If society values the creation of new art and inventions, then it will create artificial barriers to encourage their creation.

bmacho 1y ago
Yup, banning AI for the sake of artist would be exactly the same as the current copyright laws. (Also they are attacking AI not purely for fear of their jobs, but bc it is illegal already.)
_bin_ 1y ago
Disagree. Authority is given Congress to establish an IP regime for the purpose of "promot[ing] the progress of science and useful arts". You would have to justify how banning gen AI is a. feasible at all, particularly with open-weight models; and b. how it "promotes the progress of useful arts." You would lose in court because it's very difficult to argue that keeping art as a skilled craftsman's trade is worse for its progress than lowering the barriers to individuals expressing what they see. I think bad AI makes bad output and so a few people are worried it will replace good human art with bad AI art. Realistically, the stuff it's replacing now is bad human art: stock photos and clipart stuff that weren't really creative expression to start with. As it improves, we'll be increasingly able to go do a targeted inpaint to create images that more closely match our creative vision. There's a path here that lowers the barriers for someone getting his ideas into a visual form and that's an unambiguous good, unless you're one of the "craftsmen" who invested time to learn the old way. It's almost exactly the same as AI development. As an experienced dev who knows the ins and outs really well I look at AI code and say, "wow, that's garbage." But people are using it to make unimportant webshit frontends, not do "serious work". Once it can do "serious work" that will decrease the number of jobs in the field but be good for software development as a whole.

cratermoon 1y ago

> Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something I disagree. There are many laws on the books codifying social distastes. They keep your local vice squad busy.

_bin_ 1y ago
I thought most people supported moving away from that and towards a more socially liberal model. If we're no longer doing that I have a whole stack of socially conservative policies I guess I'll go back to pushing. I don't think y'all really want to go down this road; it leads straight back to the nineties republicans holding senate hearings on what's acceptable content for a music album.
- fc417fc802 1y ago
  Many laws come down to distaste at the root. There's usually an alternative angle about market efficiency or social stability or whatever if you want to frame it that way. The same applies in this case as well. For but a few examples consider laws regarding gambling, many aspects of zoning, or deceptive marketing. What's the purpose of the law if not providing stability? Why should social issues be exempted from that?

computerthings 1y ago

[dead]

weregiraffe 1y ago

>Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_obscenity_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_obscenity_law