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IP is such a stupid concept. How does it make any sense of that an artist could own the right to let people learn from his music. The idea of an artist getting

• nemomarx 2y ago
  I mean this poisoning doesn't stop people from learning from the music at all, does it?
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    It is designed to stop AI from learning from it. It is intended to work as another form of copy protection.
    • nemomarx 2y ago
      Maybe, but AI isn't people and doesn't do learning, it does "training" which we can roughly anthropomorphize as learning. It doesn't really seem like an IP thing to me - it's like making music that's intentionally hard to classify in a particular genre on purpose or something. Maybe that defeats Spotifys recommendation algorithm but that's totally unrelated to any rights to stream it or so on.
      • constantcrying 2y ago
        I am against IP in general. It doesn't matter what the exact mechanism being used it. You should be able to use all data you can however you want.
    • pixl97 2y ago
      You cannot both have an algorithm that stops AI and allows humans to listen in the long run. Eventually encoders/classifiers will get an 'anthropomorphic' loop of human ear capabilities to use as a prefilter and identify when sounds differ from the expected human hearing and identify the noise. I mean this is what adversarial reinforcement learning is, humans cannot beat AI on this in the end.
• whimsicalism 2y ago
  it’s interesting to see the cultural realignment of this in real time - being skeptical of IP becomes the right wing position
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    What are you on about? How is it "right wing" to believe that artists do not have the right to tell someone that he isn't allowed to train on his song?
    • nice_byte 2y ago
      simple, political stances do not exist in a vacuum. the same position taken in different contexts can be both "right wing" and "left wing". it depends on who's interests are being served. in this particular case, the being anti-IP serves the ruling billionaire class and is therefore a right wing position.
    • KennyBlanken 2y ago
      Well, there is the small matter of a number of right-wing politicians in the US using musician's works without permission, not to mention those musicians not agreeing with said politician's extremist views. What's particularly funny is when that extremist politician is too stupid to understand the meaning of the song they're playing. I think the most famous example would be a certain somebody who kept playing Fortunate Son at his rallies, both him and the crowd oblivious to the fact that nearly every verse's criticism directly applies to him. A rich kid who got out of serving in Vietnam, cheated on his taxes at every opportunity, and is screaming about how great the country is while vilifying a demographic that has always been one of the strengths of our society. I'd say that "respecting the property rights of the creative class" is very much indeed a 'left wing' perspective, too. Not just on a moral issue of "stealing their work is wrong" but also because artists very often mock or satirize right-wing personalities and platforms - punching up. Right wing artists tend to just punch down at society's weakest.
  • daeken 2y ago
    As someone both extremely left and extremely anti-IP, it's been ... Interesting for sure. But a lot of the "pro-IP" positions I've seen are more about the ability for artists to continue earning living wages, or about the sheer level of control we're giving to tech companies, than about IP itself. In other words, they're pro-IP positions only because it aligns with the other things they actually care about. (This obviously doesn't cover every single person -- some are just legitimately pro-IP.)
• spacecadet 2y ago
  I had a client train an AI on images I created without extended usage and so added adversarial noise to the images next time around. The models I tested with misclassified the images and image generation seemed broken, so Im curious how it impacted their attempts, if they even attempted it again, I don't know. I don't expect them to come to me and ask why their model is so interested in ducks...
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    Companies put measures into place to make sure that their software only functions correctly with a paying customer. Some Video Games include intentional problem when the game believes IP laws are violated.
  • pixl97 2y ago
    If the client is sophisticated enough to realize that I don't believe it's difficult to prefilter to remove said noise.
    • spacecadet 2y ago
      For sure. It was a test to see what would happen. I heard nothing, but also didn't see my work appear again- who knows...
• ForHackernews 2y ago
  Not people, bots. He is not against people learning from his music.
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    Obviously. But it still a pretty strict form of IP protection.
    • Retric 2y ago
      Current AI is stuck imitating what it’s exposed to. If they actually learned the material they would understand to reject incorrect information in their training data. LLM’s etc can’t do that under current methodology, simply sucking up more training data and tossing more processing power at the algorithm doesn’t solve that issue. Leaning from music doesn’t mean imitating that music. People can for example learn from mistakes without imitating those mistakes.
      • constantcrying 2y ago
        I am against all IP. I do not care what algorithms are used or in what way it differs from human learning, it makes absolutely no difference to me.
        • Retric 2y ago
          If you actually rejected all forms of IP protection you’d insist AI companies freely share their source code, patroon can’t hide works behind a paywall, etc. Is that your stance? Or do you have some more limited rejection of IP in mind.
          • pixl97 2y ago
            >you’d insist AI companies freely share their source code Myself I don't see those as being related at all. Keeping something secret is allowed. What is not allowed is something being 'not-secret' yet special. Once you share the source code to the world there would be no closing the barn door.
• delusional 2y ago
  This is such a radical take on IP rights and AI "learning" that I can only assume you're consciously choosing to misunderstand both. On the off chance that you are not: IP-rights does not cover "learning from" a source. What ML does is not in any way akin to human learning in methodology. When we call it learning that's an analogy. You can not argue a legal case from analogy alone.
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    I believe that a creator has no right to dictate what other people do with his creations. I thought this was the most common anti-IP sentiment.
    • delusional 2y ago
      I'm glad I elaborated. A complete dismissal of all IP-rights is a very fringe very radical position. Most people have a more nuanced IP-rights view about which IP-rights ought to be protected and for how long. You'll find many more people of the opinion that authors life+70 years is too long, than you will dismissing it entirely.
    • 6P58r3MXJSLi 2y ago
      Isn't it the opposite: the author is the only one who has the right to dictate what other people do with his creation? An extreme example: I do not want my code to be used in weapons guidance systems. Am I not expressing my rights as an author?
      • constantcrying 2y ago
        I am against IP, so you should not have that right.
        • 6P58r3MXJSLi 2y ago
          I am against corporations profiting from others people works, for free. If that was not allowed, if people could only use my work for no profit purposes, I agree. That's what CC (creative commons) is for, though. I am also in favour of people "remixing" and even making money out of it, but the intent it's paramount to me. As a long time copyleft activist, I do not understand what limiting authors rights brings to the table, in your opinion. More than once I contacted the author of some work I liked and they gave me free license to use it, no questions asked (after explaining what I would use it for). IMO basic cooperation between good willing people goes a long way, without stripping authors of their rights. Edit: typos
• nkrisc 2y ago
  This is about AI, not people.
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    Obviously. How does that make IP legitimate. If you are against IP, you obviously are against artists policing which model is trained on their data and which isn't. As this very obviously assigns ownership to the creation of the artist, aka IP.
    • nkrisc 2y ago
      Are we talking about training AI models or about people learning? You are conflating those two as if they are the same.
      • constantcrying 2y ago
        I am against all IP. There is zero difference to me. Any use is acceptable to me.
• charonn0 2y ago
  Exclusive rights over their published work encourages artists and inventors to publish their work, which is a clear benefit to society at large. The period of time it should remain exclusive and the specific rights that are made exclusive can be debated, but the utility of IP rights in general is obvious. And generative AI is not a person in the first place, so I don't think the appeal to learning makes much sense here.
  • barbazoo 2y ago
    People have been publishing their work for thousands of years before IP even existed. We don't know if the system we have is the best one we could have, I doubt it though.
    • charonn0 2y ago
      Historically most artistic works, books, etc. were privately commissioned and one-of-a-kind. Publishing as we understand the idea came with the printing press and widespread literacy.
      • EvanAnderson 2y ago
        Publishing as we understand the idea came about at a time when physical scarcity was the limiting factor in dissemination of copies of works. That time has passed. We're in a completely different world now. The elevator operators and buggy whip manufacturers of the publishing industry would like things to remain the way they have been.
        • charonn0 2y ago
          I don't think the issue is the scarcity of copies, but rather the scarcity of artists. Not just anyone can write a book that people want to copy, and we should encourage and reward those that can and do.
          • EvanAnderson 2y ago
• SkyBelow 2y ago
  Even if we completely toss out IP, isn't an artist free to release whatever version of their content they want? I find that AI poisoning seems to be a speed bump at best, but I don't see an issue with artists using it if they wish. If anything, it gives a fun challenge for machine learning developers to try.
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    Of course. Just like a company is allowed to release software which whatever copyright measures in place. I also never said that artists should not be allowed to do this, just that I hoped their methods were defeated. The same way I hope copyright protections are defeated.
• SCdF 2y ago
  Use your ears to learn.
• jeremyjh 2y ago
  So you are against paying artists and musicians for their work? You are just entitled to it since it exists?
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    Yes. I also pirate every single book I read. Sometimes I buy them though. I also pirate every single show I watch. I never buy them. Music is a bit difficult, but I pay for Spotify, but I wouldn't mind paying for the service if Spotify had no rights to the songs and wasn't compensating the artists.
    • yoyohello13 2y ago
      This has to be bait. How can you possibly justify this? Do you propose professional artists/authors/musicians just shouldn't exist?
      • EvanAnderson 2y ago
        They wouldn't exist in the way they do now. It would be different. They existed before intellectual property. There are other models. You've been conditioned to believe the current model is the only one that works. I'd argue that this is, in large part, because a bunch of interests who aren't "creators" profit from this current regime.
        • voidhorse 2y ago
          I fully agree, but the vision is not practical unless you want to change the entire economy around the shift. Yes, artists existed before IP but they also existed before the internet and digital works. Prior to the internet, creative works met real material limits and real scarcity due to the limitations of physical media. In the digital age, these limits are obliterated. You then have two options: 1. You instate something like IP to make digital markets roughly (and admittedly arbitrarily) like real material markets. 2. You establish no such system. No property rights exist in digital space. I am a major fan of (2) myself, but history gave us (1). At this stage, too many people make a living off digital markets for us to just impose a radical shift—you're taking about reworking the entire global economy here. Without concomitant shifts toward socialism globally this would probably just result in digital space becoming sparse and people adopting "analog only" release models to try and sustain incomes off of creative work. If you want to abolish IP, go the full mile and abolish the principle of property period. The distinction between IP and physical goods is just an accidental feature of digital technology. If you are against the idea of IP you are against property. Period. And I'm in full agreement, but I also don't think it's easy to achieve this at this historical juncture. Go read Proudhon.
• visarga 2y ago
  > IP is such a stupid concept It's been struggling since the internet became a thing. People got more content than they can consume. For any topic there are 1000 alternative sites, most of them free. Any new work competes against decades of backlog. Under this attention scarcity mode, artists devolve into enshittification because they hunt ad money, while royalties are a joke. On the other hand, people stopped being passive consumers, we like to interact now. Online games, social networks, open source, wikipedia and scientific publication - they all run in a permissive mode. How could we do anything together if we all insisted on copyright protection? We like to make most of our content ourselves, we don't need the old top-down model of content creation. We attach "reddit" to our searches because we value comments more than official sources. It's an interactive world where LLMs fit right in, being interactive and contextually adaptive.
• kmeisthax 2y ago
  Benn Jordan is a musician who is probably one of the most critical of the current copyright regime in his space. For context, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4 Copyright exists to enrich the interests of the publishers of a work, not the artists they funded. A long time ago, copyright was a sufficient legal tool to bring publishers to artists' heels, but no longer. Long copyright terms and the imbalance of power between different wealthy interests allowed publishers to usurp and alienate artists' ownership over their work. And the outsized amount of commercial interest in current generative AI tools comes down to the fact that publishers believe they can use them to strip what little ownership interest authors have left. What Benn is doing is looking for new tools to bring publishers to heel. IP is fundamentally a social contract, subject to perpetual renegotiation through action and counter-action. If you told any game publisher in the early 2000s, during the height of the Napster Wars, that they'd be proudly allowing randos on the Internet to stream video of their games being played, they'd laugh in your face. But people did it anyway, and everyone in the games biz realized it's not worth fighting people who are adding to your game. Even Nintendo, notorious IP tightwads as they are, tried scraping micropennies off the top of streamers and realized it's a fool's errand. The statement Benn is making is pretty clear. You can either... - Negotiate royalties for, and purchase training data from, actual artists, who will then in exchange give you high-quality training data, or, - Spend increasing amounts of time fighting to filter an increasingly polluted information ecosystem to have a model that only sorta kinda replicates the musical landscape of the late 2010s. A lot of us are reflexively inclined to hate on anything "copyright-shaped" because of our experiences over the past few decades. Publishers wanted to go back to the days of copyright being a legal tool of arbitrary and capricious punishment. But that doesn't mean that everything that might fall afoul of copyright law is automatically good or that generative AI companies are trying to liberate creativity. They're trying to monopolize it, just like Web 2.0 "disintermediation" was turned into "here's five websites with screenshots of the other four". That's why so much money is being poured into these companies and why a surprisingly nonzero amount of copyright reformists also have deeply negative opinions of AI.
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    I am not against IP because it does or doesn't benefit artists. I am against the idea because it does not make sense. It gives ownership and control over imaginary things to people, a song you create and public isn't "yours". You do not get to decide what others do with it and how they use it. I believe that artists see the current IP laws critically, of course they do as it directly impacts how they finance themselves and how they bargain. But I do not care how good/bad the bargain for the artist is. IP laws should be abolished regardless of what artists want.
• aezart 2y ago
  How do you propose that artists make a living?
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    They can work for their living like I do or get a following/sponsors which pays for their creative output. The later works quite well in the case of YouTube. YouTubers generally have proven that it is absolutely possible to commercialize an artistic output that is given out for free, removing IP laws would have essentially zero effect on them. Nobody owes artists the ability to make a living just for being artists.
    • aezart 2y ago
      Art is labor. Just because the end result is an "idea" with no scarcity doesn't mean that time, energy, blood, sweat, and tears didn't go into making it. I consider profiting off someone else's art without compensating them for that work to basically be wage theft.
      • constantcrying 2y ago
        Almost all art is created without any compensation. Some failed rock band should not be given money because they "tried hard". Nobody owes artists commercial success for the act of making art. The idea that it is work theft not to compensate failed artist is ridiculous. Who is to pay, the state? Of course many of the most successful creators in the world give their creations away for free. They do not charge a single cent from their watchers and still can make enormous amounts of money. YouTube proved that you do not need IP protection to become wealthy from your creations. YouTubers make money in other ways, totally independent from policing their IP.
        • aezart 2y ago
          I don't know what you're arguing against but it's certainly not the point I was making. I didn't say "artists should be given money because they tried hard." I said that if you're profiting off someone's work, you should pay them.
• const_cast 2y ago
  > artist could own the right to let people learn from his music. They don't, what's happening here is their music is being fed to a computer program in a for-profit venture. This anthropomorphism of LLMs is concerning. What you're actually implying here is that you believe some computer programs should be awarded the same rights as humans. You can't just skip that like it's some kind of foregone conclusion. You have to defend it. And, it's not easy.
  • constantcrying 2y ago
    >They don't, what's happening here is their music is being fed to a computer program in a for-profit venture. I believe that no artist has the right to tell anyone what to do with the art they have published. It does not matter what happens inside the algorithm with that art. Whether NNs (LLMs, by definition are about language) learn like humans or not is totally irrelevant to my point.
    • const_cast 2y ago
      It may be irrelevant to your point, but most people are not as radical as you. Most people support copyrighting to some extent, and this argument against anthropomorphism does work on them.