5 ms·

I keep waiting for the day when software stops being compared to a human person (a being with agency, free will, consciousness, and human rights of its own) for

I keep waiting for the day when software stops being compared to a human person (a being with agency, free will, consciousness, and human rights of its own) for the purposes of justifying IP law circumvention. Yes, there is no problem when a person reads some book and recalls pieces[0] of it in a suitable context. How would that in any way address when certain people create and distribute commercial software, providing it that piece as input, to perform such recall on demand and at scale, laundering and/or devaluing copyright, is unclear. Notably, the above is being done not just to a few high-profile authors, but to all of us no matter what we do (be it music, software, writing, visual art). What’s even worse, is that imaginably they train (or would train) the models to specifically not output those things verbatim specifically to thwart attempts to detect the presence of said works in training dataset (which would naturally reveal the model and its output being a derivative work). Perhaps one could find some way of justifying that (people justified all sorts of stuff throughout history), but let it be something better than “the model is assumed to be a thinking human when it comes to IP abuse but unthinking tool when it comes to using it for personal benefit”. [0] Of course, if you find me a single person on this planet capable of recalling 42% of any Harry Potter book, I’d be very impressed if I ever believed it.

fennecfoxy 1y ago
I keep waiting for the day when people realise that IP law has been used and abused and thanks to Disney extended out for many, many lifetimes and all manner of dirty tricks/hacks to keep the late stage capitalism profit engine going. I 100% agree that if an LLM can entirely reproduce a book then that is copyright infringement, overfitting and generally a bad model. I also believe that in this case, HP (and other popular media) is overrepresented in the training data because of many fan sites/literal uploads of the book to the Internet (which the model was trained on). I believe that any & all human writing should be allowed to be used to train a model that behaves in the correct way so long as that writing is publicly available (ie on the Internet). If I watch a TV show that someone uploaded to Youtube, am I committing a crime? Or is the uploader for distribution? I also find it hilarious how many artists got their start by pirating photoshop.
- ab5tract 1y ago
  Laws can have been used and abused and still be important. I know it’s hard to believe but the independent artists who were already struggling need IP laws to survive. Otherwise Disney and the like can just come in, make copies or derivatives, and profit without paying those artists a penny. Which everyone usually agrees (or used to) is not a fair outcome. But somehow giant corporations not named Disney taking the same work in the same extractive mode in order to create an art-job-destroying machine is totally fine because Disney bad? Maybe most people making this argument are also all for UBI and wealth redistribution on a massive scale, but they don’t seem to mention it much when trashing IP laws.
- strogonoff 1y ago
  Abuse of IP does not mean the law is not relevant. Don’t you find it funny that corporations with market caps the size of small countries first sued people for singing Happy Birthday in public, and now pretend that IP is suddenly not really a thing? Do you really want to defend their interests?
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    What abou defending our own interests? I couldn't care less about Meta or OpenAI or other tech companies as entities. I'm happy to oppose them when they act against our interests. But in this, my interests align with theirs. It's not like the alternative is any better. I'm much more in a philosophical disagreement with the pro-copyright side, for one, but the other thing is, it too is represented primarily by other large corporations, and of the two groups, the LLM side has a much more honest and useful business model.
    - strogonoff 1y ago
      First, I think they are exploiting the old conundrum where your personal interests may seem to align with theirs, but taken together our interests do not align with theirs. Sure, as it stands, an individual may enjoy personal gain—at least for the time being, while their prices are low as they operate at a loss to capture the market—but I believe this brief individual gain comes at the expense of society as a whole, and if people in more areas (not just music) made this an issue, and those megacorps put their infinite armies of lawyers to work on licensing (I recall somebody here once saying “do things that don’t scale” or something like that), everybody would benefit much more[0]. Second, copyright, or more precisely IP ownership, is not the same as the exploitation you might have in mind. Consider that copyleft—which gave us Linux, Blender, etc.—exists thanks to the ability to exercise and defend IP rights. When a stronger party takes that ability away from a weaker party, that is exploitation; maybe it is not a coincidence that Microsoft is at the forefront of this, as what they are doing is very much in line with a generalized form of EEE. (Let’s be honest, homegrown LLMs will never reach the level of commercial models, and that’s where the money is headed; even GPUs aside, no individual has the ability to scrape the entire Web the way they do, even less so now once the ruthless interests of those corporations sent every website scrambling to defend themselves against what is predominantly bot traffic with layers upon layers of captcha never seen before. They realized that if they steal, they have to steal a lot and very quickly in order for it to work, and they’re certainly hoping to get away with it.) More abstractly, being able to say that you have created something is pretty important to our willingness to create; I can’t see how inability to make this claim with a straight face (because anyone can, and already does as you have no doubt seen on this forum, reasonably claim that it may have not been your work at all) is good for society generally. [0] Starting with awareness of what is going on and the freedom to choose. Information asymmetry is the enemy of free market.
ben_w 1y ago
> I keep waiting for the day when software stops being compared to a human person (a being with agency, free will, consciousness, and human rights of its own) for the purposes of justifying IP law circumvention. I mean, "agency" is a goal of some AI; "free will" is incoherent*; the word "consciousness" has about 40 different definitions, some of which are so broad they include thermostats and others so narrow that it's provably impossible for anything (including humans) to have it; and "human rights" are a purely legal concept. > What’s even worse, is that imaginably they train (or would train) the models to specifically not output those things verbatim specifically to thwart attempts to detect the presence of said works in training dataset (which would naturally reveal the model and its output being a derivative work). Some of the makers certainly do as you say; but also, the more verbatim quotations a model can produce, the more computational effort that model needs to spend to get the far more useful general purpose results. * I'm not a fan of Aleister Crowley, but I think he was right to say that there's only one thing you can actually do that's truly your own will and not merely you allowing others to influence you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Will
- strogonoff 1y ago
  > and "human rights" are a purely legal concept. Yep, and if you claim that a thing can reproduce IP like a human then you should explain why you are also not holding its operators to the same legal standard (try to use a human in the same way and it will be considered torture and slavery).
  - ben_w 1y ago
    I am specifically not using that to claim "and therefore the AI is a human". The point is that "human rights" are not part of the natural order, they only exist as laws. This means that "human rights" is basically irrelevant to this topic: they may have rights and need to be liberated, or they may be tools that don't, but the law is just words on paper, and officials who make you follow those words.
    - strogonoff 1y ago

fennecfoxy 1y ago

I keep waiting for the day when people realise that IP law has been used and abused and thanks to Disney extended out for many, many lifetimes and all manner of dirty tricks/hacks to keep the late stage capitalism profit engine going. I 100% agree that if an LLM can entirely reproduce a book then that is copyright infringement, overfitting and generally a bad model. I also believe that in this case, HP (and other popular media) is overrepresented in the training data because of many fan sites/literal uploads of the book to the Internet (which the model was trained on). I believe that any & all human writing should be allowed to be used to train a model that behaves in the correct way so long as that writing is publicly available (ie on the Internet). If I watch a TV show that someone uploaded to Youtube, am I committing a crime? Or is the uploader for distribution? I also find it hilarious how many artists got their start by pirating photoshop.

ab5tract 1y ago
Laws can have been used and abused and still be important. I know it’s hard to believe but the independent artists who were already struggling need IP laws to survive. Otherwise Disney and the like can just come in, make copies or derivatives, and profit without paying those artists a penny. Which everyone usually agrees (or used to) is not a fair outcome. But somehow giant corporations not named Disney taking the same work in the same extractive mode in order to create an art-job-destroying machine is totally fine because Disney bad? Maybe most people making this argument are also all for UBI and wealth redistribution on a massive scale, but they don’t seem to mention it much when trashing IP laws.
strogonoff 1y ago
Abuse of IP does not mean the law is not relevant. Don’t you find it funny that corporations with market caps the size of small countries first sued people for singing Happy Birthday in public, and now pretend that IP is suddenly not really a thing? Do you really want to defend their interests?
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  What abou defending our own interests? I couldn't care less about Meta or OpenAI or other tech companies as entities. I'm happy to oppose them when they act against our interests. But in this, my interests align with theirs. It's not like the alternative is any better. I'm much more in a philosophical disagreement with the pro-copyright side, for one, but the other thing is, it too is represented primarily by other large corporations, and of the two groups, the LLM side has a much more honest and useful business model.
  - strogonoff 1y ago
    First, I think they are exploiting the old conundrum where your personal interests may seem to align with theirs, but taken together our interests do not align with theirs. Sure, as it stands, an individual may enjoy personal gain—at least for the time being, while their prices are low as they operate at a loss to capture the market—but I believe this brief individual gain comes at the expense of society as a whole, and if people in more areas (not just music) made this an issue, and those megacorps put their infinite armies of lawyers to work on licensing (I recall somebody here once saying “do things that don’t scale” or something like that), everybody would benefit much more[0]. Second, copyright, or more precisely IP ownership, is not the same as the exploitation you might have in mind. Consider that copyleft—which gave us Linux, Blender, etc.—exists thanks to the ability to exercise and defend IP rights. When a stronger party takes that ability away from a weaker party, that is exploitation; maybe it is not a coincidence that Microsoft is at the forefront of this, as what they are doing is very much in line with a generalized form of EEE. (Let’s be honest, homegrown LLMs will never reach the level of commercial models, and that’s where the money is headed; even GPUs aside, no individual has the ability to scrape the entire Web the way they do, even less so now once the ruthless interests of those corporations sent every website scrambling to defend themselves against what is predominantly bot traffic with layers upon layers of captcha never seen before. They realized that if they steal, they have to steal a lot and very quickly in order for it to work, and they’re certainly hoping to get away with it.) More abstractly, being able to say that you have created something is pretty important to our willingness to create; I can’t see how inability to make this claim with a straight face (because anyone can, and already does as you have no doubt seen on this forum, reasonably claim that it may have not been your work at all) is good for society generally. [0] Starting with awareness of what is going on and the freedom to choose. Information asymmetry is the enemy of free market.

ben_w 1y ago

> I keep waiting for the day when software stops being compared to a human person (a being with agency, free will, consciousness, and human rights of its own) for the purposes of justifying IP law circumvention. I mean, "agency" is a goal of some AI; "free will" is incoherent*; the word "consciousness" has about 40 different definitions, some of which are so broad they include thermostats and others so narrow that it's provably impossible for anything (including humans) to have it; and "human rights" are a purely legal concept. > What’s even worse, is that imaginably they train (or would train) the models to specifically not output those things verbatim specifically to thwart attempts to detect the presence of said works in training dataset (which would naturally reveal the model and its output being a derivative work). Some of the makers certainly do as you say; but also, the more verbatim quotations a model can produce, the more computational effort that model needs to spend to get the far more useful general purpose results. * I'm not a fan of Aleister Crowley, but I think he was right to say that there's only one thing you can actually do that's truly your own will and not merely you allowing others to influence you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Will https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Will

strogonoff 1y ago
> and "human rights" are a purely legal concept. Yep, and if you claim that a thing can reproduce IP like a human then you should explain why you are also not holding its operators to the same legal standard (try to use a human in the same way and it will be considered torture and slavery).
- ben_w 1y ago
  I am specifically not using that to claim "and therefore the AI is a human". The point is that "human rights" are not part of the natural order, they only exist as laws. This means that "human rights" is basically irrelevant to this topic: they may have rights and need to be liberated, or they may be tools that don't, but the law is just words on paper, and officials who make you follow those words.
  - strogonoff 1y ago