3 ms·

Certainly it is literally derivative. But so are my memories of my time on the site. And in fact I do intend to make commercial use of some of those derivations

by delichon 11mo ago

Certainly it is literally derivative. But so are my memories of my time on the site. And in fact I do intend to make commercial use of some of those derivations. I believe it should be a right to make an external prosthesis for those memories in the form of a vector database.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
isodev 11mo ago
That’s not the same as using it to build models. You as an individual have the right to access this content as this is the purpose of this website. The content becoming the core of some model is not.
- delichon 11mo ago
  If it's OK to encode it in your natural neural net, why is it not OK to put it in your artificial one?
  - BHSPitMonkey 11mo ago
    It's the same distinction as making a backup copy of a movie to your hard drive vs. redistributing it to other parties.
    - delichon 11mo ago
      You mean like free speech for concepts and ideas? It's OK to think them but not to tell other people about them? LLMs are another media of thought exchange, in some ways worse and others better. Of course it's out of bounds from them to produce literal copies of copyrighted work. But as with a human brain it should be OK for artificial neural nets to learn from them and generate new work.
  - godelski 11mo ago
    Let's talk after you've read all hacker news comments. Meet back here in a thousand years?
    - delichon 11mo ago
      I hired a company called OpenAI to do it for me. They're done, and brand new comments are also in its search, at least within a few minutes, try it. Is now good? These modern brain prosthetics are darn good.
      - dylan604 11mo ago
        But they are not doing it for free. It's not like if you are on a paid account that they remove the HN portion of the training data that is used. For a forum of users that's supposed to be smarter than Reddit users, we sure do make our selves out to be just as unsmart as those Reddit users are purported. To not be able to understand the intent/meaning of "for commercial use" is just mind boggling to the point it has to be intentional. The purpose is what I'm still unclear though
      - anigbrowl 11mo ago
        Now you're just changing the argument. The mental copy of HN you have, besides being incomplete, is not copyable or resaleable.
      - godelski 11mo ago
        > I hired a company called OpenAI to do it for me. >>> If it's OK to encode it in your natural neural net, why is it not OK to put it in your artificial one? Well I guess that lines up. With that line of reasoning I have zero issue believing you outsourced your reading to them. You clearly aren't getting your money's worth.
  - ehnto 11mo ago
    Because the humans involved have decided they don't want that.
    - amelius 11mo ago
      This. You can anthropomorphize all you want, but AI is not a human and the law will not see it as such.
inkyoto 11mo ago
> Certainly it is literally derivative. I am not sure if it is that clear cut. Embeddings are encodings of shared abstract concepts statistically inferred from many works or expressions of thoughts possessed by all humans. With text embeddings, we get a many-to-one, lossy map: many possible texts ↝ one vector that preserves some structure about meaning and some structure about style, but not enough to reconstruct the original in general, and there is no principled way to say «this vector is derived specifically from that paragraph by authored by XYZ». Does the encoded representation of the abstract concepts represent the derivate work? If yes, then every statement ever made by a human being represents the work derivative of someone else's by virtue of learning how to speak in the childhood – they create a derivative work of all prior speakers. Technically, the3re is a strong argument against treating ordinary embedding vectors as derivative works, because: - Embeddings are not uniquely reversible and, in general, it is not possible reconstruct the original text from the embedding; - The embedding is one of an uncountable number of vectors in a space where nearby points correspond to many different possible sentences; - Any individual vector is not meaningfully «the same» as the original work in the way that a translation or an adaptation is. Please do note that this is the philosophical take and it glosses over the legally relevant differences between human and machine learning as the legal question ultimately depends on statutes, case law and policy choices that are still evolving. Where it gets more complicated. If the embeddings model has been trained on a large number of languages, it makes the cross-lingual search easily possible by using an abstract search concept in any language that the model has been trained on. The quality of such search results across languages X, Y and Z will be directly proportional to the scale and quality of the corpus of text that was used in the model training in the said languages. Therefore, I can search for «the meaning of life»[0] in English and arrive at a highly relevant cluster of search results written in different languages by different people at different times, and the question becomes is «what exactly it has been statistically[1] derived from?». [0] The cross-lingual search is what I did with my engineers last year to our surprise and delight of how well it actually worked. [1] In the legal sense, if one can't trace a given vector uniquely back to a specific underlying copyrighted expression, and demonstrate substantial similarity of expression rather than idea, the «derivative work» argument in the legal sense becomes strained.
amelius 11mo ago
> I believe it should be a right to make an external prosthesis Sure and some people would want a "gun prosthesis" as an aid to quickly throw small metallic objects, and it wouldn't be allowed either.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

isodev 11mo ago

That’s not the same as using it to build models. You as an individual have the right to access this content as this is the purpose of this website. The content becoming the core of some model is not.

delichon 11mo ago
If it's OK to encode it in your natural neural net, why is it not OK to put it in your artificial one?
- BHSPitMonkey 11mo ago
  It's the same distinction as making a backup copy of a movie to your hard drive vs. redistributing it to other parties.
  - delichon 11mo ago
    You mean like free speech for concepts and ideas? It's OK to think them but not to tell other people about them? LLMs are another media of thought exchange, in some ways worse and others better. Of course it's out of bounds from them to produce literal copies of copyrighted work. But as with a human brain it should be OK for artificial neural nets to learn from them and generate new work.
- godelski 11mo ago
  Let's talk after you've read all hacker news comments. Meet back here in a thousand years?
  - delichon 11mo ago
    I hired a company called OpenAI to do it for me. They're done, and brand new comments are also in its search, at least within a few minutes, try it. Is now good? These modern brain prosthetics are darn good.
    - dylan604 11mo ago
      But they are not doing it for free. It's not like if you are on a paid account that they remove the HN portion of the training data that is used. For a forum of users that's supposed to be smarter than Reddit users, we sure do make our selves out to be just as unsmart as those Reddit users are purported. To not be able to understand the intent/meaning of "for commercial use" is just mind boggling to the point it has to be intentional. The purpose is what I'm still unclear though
    - anigbrowl 11mo ago
      Now you're just changing the argument. The mental copy of HN you have, besides being incomplete, is not copyable or resaleable.
    - godelski 11mo ago
      > I hired a company called OpenAI to do it for me. >>> If it's OK to encode it in your natural neural net, why is it not OK to put it in your artificial one? Well I guess that lines up. With that line of reasoning I have zero issue believing you outsourced your reading to them. You clearly aren't getting your money's worth.
- ehnto 11mo ago
  Because the humans involved have decided they don't want that.
  - amelius 11mo ago
    This. You can anthropomorphize all you want, but AI is not a human and the law will not see it as such.

inkyoto 11mo ago

> Certainly it is literally derivative. I am not sure if it is that clear cut. Embeddings are encodings of shared abstract concepts statistically inferred from many works or expressions of thoughts possessed by all humans. With text embeddings, we get a many-to-one, lossy map: many possible texts ↝ one vector that preserves some structure about meaning and some structure about style, but not enough to reconstruct the original in general, and there is no principled way to say «this vector is derived specifically from that paragraph by authored by XYZ». Does the encoded representation of the abstract concepts represent the derivate work? If yes, then every statement ever made by a human being represents the work derivative of someone else's by virtue of learning how to speak in the childhood – they create a derivative work of all prior speakers. Technically, the3re is a strong argument against treating ordinary embedding vectors as derivative works, because: - Embeddings are not uniquely reversible and, in general, it is not possible reconstruct the original text from the embedding; - The embedding is one of an uncountable number of vectors in a space where nearby points correspond to many different possible sentences; - Any individual vector is not meaningfully «the same» as the original work in the way that a translation or an adaptation is. Please do note that this is the philosophical take and it glosses over the legally relevant differences between human and machine learning as the legal question ultimately depends on statutes, case law and policy choices that are still evolving. Where it gets more complicated. If the embeddings model has been trained on a large number of languages, it makes the cross-lingual search easily possible by using an abstract search concept in any language that the model has been trained on. The quality of such search results across languages X, Y and Z will be directly proportional to the scale and quality of the corpus of text that was used in the model training in the said languages. Therefore, I can search for «the meaning of life»[0] in English and arrive at a highly relevant cluster of search results written in different languages by different people at different times, and the question becomes is «what exactly it has been statistically[1] derived from?». [0] The cross-lingual search is what I did with my engineers last year to our surprise and delight of how well it actually worked. [1] In the legal sense, if one can't trace a given vector uniquely back to a specific underlying copyrighted expression, and demonstrate substantial similarity of expression rather than idea, the «derivative work» argument in the legal sense becomes strained.

amelius 11mo ago

> I believe it should be a right to make an external prosthesis Sure and some people would want a "gun prosthesis" as an aid to quickly throw small metallic objects, and it wouldn't be allowed either.