4 ms·

Maybe people will finally realize that allowing companies to gather private information without permission is a bad idea, and should be banned. Such informatio

by hedora 1y ago

Maybe people will finally realize that allowing companies to gather private information without permission is a bad idea, and should be banned. Such information is already used against everyone multiple times a day. On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it! This tradeoff has basically nothing to do with recent advances in AI though. Also, with the current performance trends in LLMs, we seem very close to being able to run models locally. That’ll blow up a lot of the most abusive business models in this space. On a related note, if AI decreases the number of mistakes my doctor makes, that seems like a win to me. If the AI then sold my medical file (or used it in some other revenue generating way), that’d be unethical and wrong. Current health care systems already do that without permission and it’s legal. Fix that problem instead.

heavyset_go 1y ago
> On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it! There's a difference between reading something and ripping it off, no matter how you launder it.
- MoltenMan 1y ago
  I think the line is actually much blurrier than it might seem. Realistically everything is a remix of things people have done before; almost nothing is truly brand new. So why specifically are people allowed to build on humanity's past achievements, but not AI?
  - chii 1y ago
    > So why specifically are people allowed to build on humanity's past achievements, but not AI? because those people seem to think that individuals building it will be too small a scale to be commercially profitable (and thus the publisher is OK to have them be a form of social credit/portfolio building). As soon as it is made clear that these published data can be monetized (if only by large corporations with money), they want a piece of the pie that they think they deserve (and not getting).
  - strogonoff 1y ago
    > why specifically are people allowed to build on humanity's past achievements, but not AI? Let’s untangle this. 1. Humanity’s achievements are achievements by individuals, who are motivated by desires like recognition, wealth, personal security, altruism, self-actualisation. 2. “AI” does not build on that body of work. A chatbot has no free will or agency; there is no concept of “allowing” it to do something—there is engineering it and operating a tool, and both are done by humans. 3. Some humans today engineer and operate tools, for which (at least in the most prominent and widely-used cases) they generally charge money, yet which essentially proxy the above-mentioned original work by other humans. 4. Those humans engineer and operate said tools without asking the people who created said work, in a way that does not benefit or acknowledge them, thus robbing people of many of the motivations mentioned in point 1, and arguably in circumvention of legal IP protections that exist in order to encourage said work.
    - TeMPOraL 1y ago
      That's a long-winded way of spelling out a a Dog in the Manger approach to society, coupled with huge entitlement issues: There is something valuable to others, that I neither built nor designed, but because I might have touched it once and left a paw print, I feel hurt no one wants to pay me rent for the valuable thing, and because of that, I want to destroy it so no one can have it. Point 2) operates on a spectrum, there's plenty of cases where human work has no agency or free will behind it - in fact, it's very common in industrialized societies. RE 3), "engineers" and "operators" are distinct; "engineers" make money because they provide something of immense value - something that exists only because of collective result of 1), but any individual contribution to it is of no importance. The value comes from the amount and diversity and how it all is processed. "Operators" usually pay "engineers" for access, and then they may or may not use it to provide some value to others, or themselves. In the most basic case, "engineers" are OpenAI, and "operators" are everyone using ChatGPT app (both free and paid tiers). RE 4) That's the sense of entitlement right there. Motivations from point 1. have already been satisfied; the value delivered by GenAI is a new thing, a form of reprocessing to access a new kind of value that was not possible to extract before, and that is not accessible to any individual creator, because (again) it comes from sheer bulk and diversity of works, not from any individual one. IMO, individual creators have a point about AI competing with them for their jobs. But that's an argument against deployment and about what the "operators" do with it; it's not an argument against training.
  - dmonitor 1y ago
    I put googly eyes on a camcorder and call it Bobby. Why can't Bobby watch a movie in the theater with me?
- protocolture 1y ago
  >There's a difference between reading something and ripping it off, no matter how you launder it. Yes but that argument cuts both ways. There is a difference, and its not clear that training is "Ripping off"
- danielmarkbruce 1y ago
  Just like there is a difference between genuine and disingenuous.
Zoethink 1y ago
[dead]
BlueTemplar 1y ago
> On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it! > This tradeoff has basically nothing to do with recent advances in AI though. I am surprised someone on HN would think this, especially considering the recent examples of DDoS via LLM crawlers compared to how websites are glad to be crawled by search engines. For the first part : why do you think that robots.txt even exists ? Or why, say, YouTube constantly tries (and fails) to prevent you to use the 'wrong' kind of software to download their videos ?

by hedora 1y ago

heavyset_go 1y ago

> On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it! There's a difference between reading something and ripping it off, no matter how you launder it.

MoltenMan 1y ago
I think the line is actually much blurrier than it might seem. Realistically everything is a remix of things people have done before; almost nothing is truly brand new. So why specifically are people allowed to build on humanity's past achievements, but not AI?
- chii 1y ago
  > So why specifically are people allowed to build on humanity's past achievements, but not AI? because those people seem to think that individuals building it will be too small a scale to be commercially profitable (and thus the publisher is OK to have them be a form of social credit/portfolio building). As soon as it is made clear that these published data can be monetized (if only by large corporations with money), they want a piece of the pie that they think they deserve (and not getting).
- strogonoff 1y ago
  > why specifically are people allowed to build on humanity's past achievements, but not AI? Let’s untangle this. 1. Humanity’s achievements are achievements by individuals, who are motivated by desires like recognition, wealth, personal security, altruism, self-actualisation. 2. “AI” does not build on that body of work. A chatbot has no free will or agency; there is no concept of “allowing” it to do something—there is engineering it and operating a tool, and both are done by humans. 3. Some humans today engineer and operate tools, for which (at least in the most prominent and widely-used cases) they generally charge money, yet which essentially proxy the above-mentioned original work by other humans. 4. Those humans engineer and operate said tools without asking the people who created said work, in a way that does not benefit or acknowledge them, thus robbing people of many of the motivations mentioned in point 1, and arguably in circumvention of legal IP protections that exist in order to encourage said work.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    That's a long-winded way of spelling out a a Dog in the Manger approach to society, coupled with huge entitlement issues: There is something valuable to others, that I neither built nor designed, but because I might have touched it once and left a paw print, I feel hurt no one wants to pay me rent for the valuable thing, and because of that, I want to destroy it so no one can have it. Point 2) operates on a spectrum, there's plenty of cases where human work has no agency or free will behind it - in fact, it's very common in industrialized societies. RE 3), "engineers" and "operators" are distinct; "engineers" make money because they provide something of immense value - something that exists only because of collective result of 1), but any individual contribution to it is of no importance. The value comes from the amount and diversity and how it all is processed. "Operators" usually pay "engineers" for access, and then they may or may not use it to provide some value to others, or themselves. In the most basic case, "engineers" are OpenAI, and "operators" are everyone using ChatGPT app (both free and paid tiers). RE 4) That's the sense of entitlement right there. Motivations from point 1. have already been satisfied; the value delivered by GenAI is a new thing, a form of reprocessing to access a new kind of value that was not possible to extract before, and that is not accessible to any individual creator, because (again) it comes from sheer bulk and diversity of works, not from any individual one. IMO, individual creators have a point about AI competing with them for their jobs. But that's an argument against deployment and about what the "operators" do with it; it's not an argument against training.
- dmonitor 1y ago
  I put googly eyes on a camcorder and call it Bobby. Why can't Bobby watch a movie in the theater with me?
protocolture 1y ago
>There's a difference between reading something and ripping it off, no matter how you launder it. Yes but that argument cuts both ways. There is a difference, and its not clear that training is "Ripping off"
danielmarkbruce 1y ago
Just like there is a difference between genuine and disingenuous.

Zoethink 1y ago

[dead]

BlueTemplar 1y ago

> On the other hand, blocking training on published information doesn’t make sense: If you don’t want your stuff to be read, don’t publish it! > This tradeoff has basically nothing to do with recent advances in AI though. I am surprised someone on HN would think this, especially considering the recent examples of DDoS via LLM crawlers compared to how websites are glad to be crawled by search engines. For the first part : why do you think that robots.txt even exists ? Or why, say, YouTube constantly tries (and fails) to prevent you to use the 'wrong' kind of software to download their videos ?