4 ms·

Hopefully the spread of AI will make more people realise that everything is a derivative work. If it wasn't an AI, it was a human standing on the shoulders of g

Hopefully the spread of AI will make more people realise that everything is a derivative work. If it wasn't an AI, it was a human standing on the shoulders of giants.

CamperBob2 1y ago
I'll give you the only upvote you'll probably get for that sentiment around here. Enjoy your trip to -4 (Dead)!
hu3 1y ago
This. AI is a magnificent way to make the entire world's codebase available as a giant, cross-platform, standard library. I welcome AI to copy my crap if that's going to help anyone in the future.
- alganet 1y ago
  You forgot to mention that if things continue as they are, a very small group of people will have complete control over this giant library.
  - hu3 1y ago
    It's a concern. But there are open source models.
    - zdwolfe 1y ago
      I find it odd that any LLM could be considered open source. Sure the weights are available to download and use, but you can't reasonably reconstruct the output model as it's impractical for an individual to gather a useful dataset or spend $5,000,000+ of GPU time training.
      - _ea1k 1y ago
        Distillation can extract the knowledge from an existing model into a newly trained one. That doesn't solve the cost problem, but costs are steadily coming down.
        goku12 1y ago
        That's still a crude repurposement of an inscrutable artifact. Open source requires you to share the source data from which that artifact (the model parameters) was created.
    - alganet 1y ago
      No, there aren't. There is open source training and inference software. And there are open weights. Those things are not enough to reproduce the training. Even if you had the hardware, you would not be able to recreate llama (for example) because you don't know what data went into the training. That's a very weird library. You can get their summaries, but you don't have access to the original works used when creating it. Sounds terrible, open source or not.
    - vineyardmike 1y ago
      Open source model, created at great expense… by a still small cohort of people. There are like a dozen organizations globally creating anything close to state of the art models. The fact that you can use some for free on your own hardware doesn’t change that those weights were trained by a small cohort of people, with training data selected by those people, and fine-tuning and “alignment” created by those people. Sure you can fine-tune the smaller ones yourself, but that still leaves you at the will of original creator.
    - ares623 1y ago
      Are you able to build these models from source?
- beeflet 1y ago
  Except closed source software which it isn't trained on.
smj-edison 1y ago
Yeah, this is where I find the copyright argument a little weak. Because how do artisans learn their craft? By observing others' work. Instead, I feel like the objections are (rightly) these two issues: 1. GenAI operates at a much larger scale than an individual artist. I don't think artists would have an issue with someone commissioning a portrait say in the style Van Gogh (copyright argument). They would have an issue if that artist painted 100,000 pictures a day in the style of Van Gogh. 2. Lack of giving back: some of the greatest artists have internalized great art from previous generations, and then something miraculous happens. An entirely new style emerges. They have now given back to the community that incubated them. I don't really see this same giving back with GenAI. Edit: one other thought. Adobe used their own legally created art to train their model, and people still complain about it, so I don't buy the copyright argument if they're upset about Adobe's GenAI. Edit 2: I'm not condoning blatant copyright infringement like is detailed in this post.
- alganet 1y ago
  Copyright is a nightmare. It's just that it sounds like a gentler nightmare than hyperscaled algorithms controlled by a few.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  >Lack of giving back I disagree. There is a ton of free AI generated text, code, images, and video available for completely free for people to learn from.
  - chrisldgk 1y ago
    Which is just laundered from real material that real humans put work in to create, only to be regurgitated by a krass homonculous of 1s and 0s for free without any mention of the real work that has been put into creating that information. I’m not a big fan of the copyright system we have myself, but there’s a reason it exists. AI companies illegally training their AI on copyrighted content to reap the spoils of the hard work of other people that never get recognition for their work is the opposite of „giving back“.
- 1y ago
add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
Nothing subverts my defense of human creativity more than the cliched human defenses of AI.
- monero-xmr 1y ago
  For those of us who exceed the AI, it raises our value enormously. You see it in the pay of the AI engineers. But in the high interest rate world, those of us who continue to be employed, are commanding higher wages, as far as I can tell. It is a culling of the lesser-than. One unfortunate side-effect is the junior engineers who cannot immediately exceed the AI are not being hired as often. But this era echos the dotcom boom, where very low-skilled people commanded very-high wages. Universities, which have always been white collar job training but pretended they weren't, are being impacted greatly. https://registrar.mit.edu/stats-reports/majors-count https://registrar.mit.edu/stats-reports/majors-count 24% of undergraduate MIT students this year have Computer Science in the title (I asked chatgpt to calculate this from the difficult-to-parse website). 1/4 of all MIT undergraduates are not being trained to be future PhD researchers - they, like all other schools, are training the vast majority of their students for private sector workforce jobs. The culling is happening all over. We will likely go down to < 1000 colleges in America from 4000 now over the next 15 years. This is a good thing. The cost of university degrees is far too high. We are in the midst of a vast transition. College should return to being the purview of the truly intelligent and the children of the rich, as it was for all time before WW2. This very weird experiment in human history is ending, and it cannot happen soon enough
  - nhinck3 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - sciencejerk 1y ago
    > College should return to being the purview of the truly intelligent and the children of the rich, as it was for all time before WW2. You're likely correct that we're witnessing a reconsolidation of wealth and the extinction of the middle class in society, but you seem happy about this? Be careful what you wish for...
as1mov 1y ago
The offending repository is copying files verbatim while removing off the license header from the said files. It's not "standing on the shoulder of giants".
- typpilol 1y ago
  That doesn't even seem like ai but just direct copy pasting lol
  - em-bee 1y ago
    looks to me like they are using AI to refactor the code, not to generate it. even if we allow code to be used to train AI to generate new code, copying code and refactoring it is something entirely different.
croes 1y ago
AI makes it easy for others to claim they did the work so others are less likely to do the real work. Means the giants won’t grow.
dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
This is a very intriguing statement because it looks like it contains a truism but something is off. Yes, everything is a derivative work of some kind, what matters is the amount of added value - if it gets close to 0 as in this case, we've got bare plagiarism. [As a side note, the problem with LLMs (sorry, the term "AI" became so muddy I prefer not to use it) is that they tend to be extremely uncreative and just average to mean. So I wouldn't expect added value in creativity itself, just helping humans with more menial tasks just like antirez is doing.]

Hopefully the spread of AI will make more people realise that everything is a derivative work. If it wasn't an AI, it was a human standing on the shoulders of giants.

CamperBob2 1y ago

I'll give you the only upvote you'll probably get for that sentiment around here. Enjoy your trip to -4 (Dead)!

hu3 1y ago

This. AI is a magnificent way to make the entire world's codebase available as a giant, cross-platform, standard library. I welcome AI to copy my crap if that's going to help anyone in the future.

alganet 1y ago
You forgot to mention that if things continue as they are, a very small group of people will have complete control over this giant library.
- hu3 1y ago
  It's a concern. But there are open source models.
  - zdwolfe 1y ago
    I find it odd that any LLM could be considered open source. Sure the weights are available to download and use, but you can't reasonably reconstruct the output model as it's impractical for an individual to gather a useful dataset or spend $5,000,000+ of GPU time training.
    - _ea1k 1y ago
      Distillation can extract the knowledge from an existing model into a newly trained one. That doesn't solve the cost problem, but costs are steadily coming down.
      - goku12 1y ago
        That's still a crude repurposement of an inscrutable artifact. Open source requires you to share the source data from which that artifact (the model parameters) was created.
  - alganet 1y ago
    No, there aren't. There is open source training and inference software. And there are open weights. Those things are not enough to reproduce the training. Even if you had the hardware, you would not be able to recreate llama (for example) because you don't know what data went into the training. That's a very weird library. You can get their summaries, but you don't have access to the original works used when creating it. Sounds terrible, open source or not.
  - vineyardmike 1y ago
    Open source model, created at great expense… by a still small cohort of people. There are like a dozen organizations globally creating anything close to state of the art models. The fact that you can use some for free on your own hardware doesn’t change that those weights were trained by a small cohort of people, with training data selected by those people, and fine-tuning and “alignment” created by those people. Sure you can fine-tune the smaller ones yourself, but that still leaves you at the will of original creator.
  - ares623 1y ago
    Are you able to build these models from source?
beeflet 1y ago
Except closed source software which it isn't trained on.

smj-edison 1y ago

Yeah, this is where I find the copyright argument a little weak. Because how do artisans learn their craft? By observing others' work. Instead, I feel like the objections are (rightly) these two issues: 1. GenAI operates at a much larger scale than an individual artist. I don't think artists would have an issue with someone commissioning a portrait say in the style Van Gogh (copyright argument). They would have an issue if that artist painted 100,000 pictures a day in the style of Van Gogh. 2. Lack of giving back: some of the greatest artists have internalized great art from previous generations, and then something miraculous happens. An entirely new style emerges. They have now given back to the community that incubated them. I don't really see this same giving back with GenAI. Edit: one other thought. Adobe used their own legally created art to train their model, and people still complain about it, so I don't buy the copyright argument if they're upset about Adobe's GenAI. Edit 2: I'm not condoning blatant copyright infringement like is detailed in this post.

alganet 1y ago
Copyright is a nightmare. It's just that it sounds like a gentler nightmare than hyperscaled algorithms controlled by a few.
charcircuit 1y ago
>Lack of giving back I disagree. There is a ton of free AI generated text, code, images, and video available for completely free for people to learn from.
- chrisldgk 1y ago
  Which is just laundered from real material that real humans put work in to create, only to be regurgitated by a krass homonculous of 1s and 0s for free without any mention of the real work that has been put into creating that information. I’m not a big fan of the copyright system we have myself, but there’s a reason it exists. AI companies illegally training their AI on copyrighted content to reap the spoils of the hard work of other people that never get recognition for their work is the opposite of „giving back“.
1y ago

add-sub-mul-div 1y ago

Nothing subverts my defense of human creativity more than the cliched human defenses of AI.

monero-xmr 1y ago
For those of us who exceed the AI, it raises our value enormously. You see it in the pay of the AI engineers. But in the high interest rate world, those of us who continue to be employed, are commanding higher wages, as far as I can tell. It is a culling of the lesser-than. One unfortunate side-effect is the junior engineers who cannot immediately exceed the AI are not being hired as often. But this era echos the dotcom boom, where very low-skilled people commanded very-high wages. Universities, which have always been white collar job training but pretended they weren't, are being impacted greatly. https://registrar.mit.edu/stats-reports/majors-count https://registrar.mit.edu/stats-reports/majors-count 24% of undergraduate MIT students this year have Computer Science in the title (I asked chatgpt to calculate this from the difficult-to-parse website). 1/4 of all MIT undergraduates are not being trained to be future PhD researchers - they, like all other schools, are training the vast majority of their students for private sector workforce jobs. The culling is happening all over. We will likely go down to < 1000 colleges in America from 4000 now over the next 15 years. This is a good thing. The cost of university degrees is far too high. We are in the midst of a vast transition. College should return to being the purview of the truly intelligent and the children of the rich, as it was for all time before WW2. This very weird experiment in human history is ending, and it cannot happen soon enough
- nhinck3 1y ago
  [flagged]
- sciencejerk 1y ago
  > College should return to being the purview of the truly intelligent and the children of the rich, as it was for all time before WW2. You're likely correct that we're witnessing a reconsolidation of wealth and the extinction of the middle class in society, but you seem happy about this? Be careful what you wish for...

as1mov 1y ago

The offending repository is copying files verbatim while removing off the license header from the said files. It's not "standing on the shoulder of giants".

typpilol 1y ago
That doesn't even seem like ai but just direct copy pasting lol
- em-bee 1y ago
  looks to me like they are using AI to refactor the code, not to generate it. even if we allow code to be used to train AI to generate new code, copying code and refactoring it is something entirely different.

croes 1y ago

AI makes it easy for others to claim they did the work so others are less likely to do the real work. Means the giants won’t grow.

dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago

This is a very intriguing statement because it looks like it contains a truism but something is off. Yes, everything is a derivative work of some kind, what matters is the amount of added value - if it gets close to 0 as in this case, we've got bare plagiarism. [As a side note, the problem with LLMs (sorry, the term "AI" became so muddy I prefer not to use it) is that they tend to be extremely uncreative and just average to mean. So I wouldn't expect added value in creativity itself, just helping humans with more menial tasks just like antirez is doing.]