3 ms·

You need better arguments than "you don't like to use it yourself and prefer writing yourself" or some metaphysical voodoo-like theory (analogous to tribes that

You need better arguments than "you don't like to use it yourself and prefer writing yourself" or some metaphysical voodoo-like theory (analogous to tribes that refuse to be captured on a photo) whereby feeding your words to a training algorithm somehow corrupts your pure Platonic words or whatnot. Your utterances are not yours to grab on to. Copyright is about expression and derivatives. You could never copyright your style, or else any music band that copies the general style of another band could have been sued and then the development of music would also have gone quite differently. No, ideas, styles, claims, knowledge are by default part of the commons. The narrow carveouts are for incentivizing more creative work and are targeted and specific, time limited. You can't generally, by default, restrict what others can do with ideas that you've put out. Patents are a narrow exception. And copyright for non-transformative derivative works or copies. And trademarks to protect consumers from mis-identifying the creator of something. ----- > clearly upset about the economic impact this will have on him So readers will read AI generated books because they are better than his writing? People can't invest ten bucks or however much into reading a good book? How about piracy? It exists. I bet I could download all his books in less than 5 minutes. If someone insists on not paying for that book, they can easily get it. > he has written in support of very long copyright durations that can be inherited This whole copyright and intellectual "property" idea is extremely new in human history. More people should know this fact. This has not been how people thought about culture before the ~1800s, or, well before the printing press. Copyright is a narrow exception to the general rule that people are free to listen to others and use the ideas and spread the ideas. There are exceptions like trade secrets and various dangerous information about nuclear topics and whatnot, but generally preventing others from talking about what they heard is tyrannical. If anything, copyright should be reduced to something like the creation of the work + 20 years. Not lifetime +X. That's plenty enough to be the sole distributor and to block others from building on top of it. After that it's time to let people use culture as it's always been. Changing, mixing, remixing, retelling, combining, etc. The whole thing is often wrongly framed, with verbs like "consume", like "consuming content", which is just Orwellian language to describe having your eyes or ears open and remembering what you saw and heard. It doesn't consume a pdf to look at the words and read them. It doesn't consume a film to look at it being projected on a canvas. It doesn't consume a painting to step close and look.

ben_w 3mo ago
> You need better arguments than "you don't like to use it yourself and prefer writing yourself" Nobody needs a better argument than that to explain the title "On the non-use of AI in my writing process" > You could never copyright your style, or else any music band that copies the general style of another band could have been sued and then the development of music would also have gone quite differently. You cant copyright style or facts, but somehow the combination of the two is what newspapers rely upon. > No, ideas, styles, claims, knowledge are by default part of the commons. I can say this about 100% of things banned by laws. The laws are what changes us away from the default. > This whole copyright and intellectual "property" idea is extremely new in human history. More people should know this fact. This has not been how people thought about culture before the ~1800s Everything pre ~1800s was awful, so this is not a useful argument for or against anything. > preventing others from talking about what they heard is tyrannical Are you saying an AI is in the same category as a human in terms of what it is "tyrannical" to forbid it to produce? This is not a widely held position, even amongst people very impressed with what they can do. The justification given for why AI should be able to read all the things and write new outputs from them is that nobody objected when the same models working the same way were worse at it and could only produce e.g. (c. 2020) Google Translate. If they were reliant on some model being allowed to act like a human, they would be (and indeed frequently are anyway) facing questions about how to punish the models for breaking rules like humans get punished for breaking rules. (Separately: For humans I kinda agree with what I just quoted from you, however it does also mean that NDAs and non-disparagement agreements should also be voided; the 'kinda' on my part says NDAs should have a maximum duration equivalent to a patent). > The whole thing is often wrongly framed, with verbs like "consume", like "consuming content", which is just Orwellian language to describe having your eyes or ears open and remembering what you saw and heard. It doesn't consume a pdf to look at the words and read them. It doesn't consume a film to look at it being projected on a canvas. It doesn't consume a painting to step close and look. IMO, that's like criticising the use of "master" in a git repo.
- bonoboTP 3mo ago
  > You cant copyright style or facts, but somehow the combination of the two is what newspapers rely upon. You can start a shitty newspaper by looking at all the stories in some other newspaper, then writing about the same facts while imitating a similar register and style. > Are you saying an AI is in the same category as a human in terms of what it is "tyrannical" to forbid it to produce? The AI is not an independent entity as of today. The tyranny is against humans who want to use computation to process information they have gathered by listening to public discourse, public art releases and so on. > how to punish the models for breaking rules like humans get punished for breaking rules. Again, AI is not an independent agent today, so the person who is using an AI program in a way that is illegal is the one that gets punished. > however it does also mean that NDAs and non-disparagement agreements should also be voided; the 'kinda' on my part says NDAs should have a maximum duration equivalent to a patent It's a matter of discussion whether such voluntary agreements should be allowed where someone agrees to refraining from such actions. We don't allow contracts about selling your organs, but this may not go as far. > IMO, that's like criticising the use of "master" in a git repo. No there is no similarity at all. "Consume content" is novel marketing language, because to them it's easier to think of everyone as "consumer" because sometimes they sell hamburgers or ice cream to them, sometimes they sell subscriptions to cable TV, sometimes subscriptions to SaaS, and they don't care too much what they sell. So from their POV it's all the same. Since the consumer is paying for access to something, they must be consuming that thing. When they watch TV, it's like eating the burger, from the point of view of someone optimizing sales. But this is pushing the entirety of humanity to see everything from such a narrow lens as advertisement. The same is with the word "content". There used to be musicians and authors, now you have "content creators". "Content" is a marketing word. It means all the stuff that's not an ad. In marketing, you interface with your "consumers" primariy by making them watch ads. But to watch the ad, they need some lure, and the catchall term to all that icky stuff a marketing person has to handle or touch, even briefly, that's not a warm and fuzz little ad, is "content". It's like "payload" in the shipping industry. Imagine if tomorrow we called everything phyiscal simply "payload". You are not a carpenter, you're a payload creator. You're not a car wash company, you're a payload cleaning company. etc.

ben_w 3mo ago

> You need better arguments than "you don't like to use it yourself and prefer writing yourself" Nobody needs a better argument than that to explain the title "On the non-use of AI in my writing process" > You could never copyright your style, or else any music band that copies the general style of another band could have been sued and then the development of music would also have gone quite differently. You cant copyright style or facts, but somehow the combination of the two is what newspapers rely upon. > No, ideas, styles, claims, knowledge are by default part of the commons. I can say this about 100% of things banned by laws. The laws are what changes us away from the default. > This whole copyright and intellectual "property" idea is extremely new in human history. More people should know this fact. This has not been how people thought about culture before the ~1800s Everything pre ~1800s was awful, so this is not a useful argument for or against anything. > preventing others from talking about what they heard is tyrannical Are you saying an AI is in the same category as a human in terms of what it is "tyrannical" to forbid it to produce? This is not a widely held position, even amongst people very impressed with what they can do. The justification given for why AI should be able to read all the things and write new outputs from them is that nobody objected when the same models working the same way were worse at it and could only produce e.g. (c. 2020) Google Translate. If they were reliant on some model being allowed to act like a human, they would be (and indeed frequently are anyway) facing questions about how to punish the models for breaking rules like humans get punished for breaking rules. (Separately: For humans I kinda agree with what I just quoted from you, however it does also mean that NDAs and non-disparagement agreements should also be voided; the 'kinda' on my part says NDAs should have a maximum duration equivalent to a patent). > The whole thing is often wrongly framed, with verbs like "consume", like "consuming content", which is just Orwellian language to describe having your eyes or ears open and remembering what you saw and heard. It doesn't consume a pdf to look at the words and read them. It doesn't consume a film to look at it being projected on a canvas. It doesn't consume a painting to step close and look. IMO, that's like criticising the use of "master" in a git repo.

bonoboTP 3mo ago
> You cant copyright style or facts, but somehow the combination of the two is what newspapers rely upon. You can start a shitty newspaper by looking at all the stories in some other newspaper, then writing about the same facts while imitating a similar register and style. > Are you saying an AI is in the same category as a human in terms of what it is "tyrannical" to forbid it to produce? The AI is not an independent entity as of today. The tyranny is against humans who want to use computation to process information they have gathered by listening to public discourse, public art releases and so on. > how to punish the models for breaking rules like humans get punished for breaking rules. Again, AI is not an independent agent today, so the person who is using an AI program in a way that is illegal is the one that gets punished. > however it does also mean that NDAs and non-disparagement agreements should also be voided; the 'kinda' on my part says NDAs should have a maximum duration equivalent to a patent It's a matter of discussion whether such voluntary agreements should be allowed where someone agrees to refraining from such actions. We don't allow contracts about selling your organs, but this may not go as far. > IMO, that's like criticising the use of "master" in a git repo. No there is no similarity at all. "Consume content" is novel marketing language, because to them it's easier to think of everyone as "consumer" because sometimes they sell hamburgers or ice cream to them, sometimes they sell subscriptions to cable TV, sometimes subscriptions to SaaS, and they don't care too much what they sell. So from their POV it's all the same. Since the consumer is paying for access to something, they must be consuming that thing. When they watch TV, it's like eating the burger, from the point of view of someone optimizing sales. But this is pushing the entirety of humanity to see everything from such a narrow lens as advertisement. The same is with the word "content". There used to be musicians and authors, now you have "content creators". "Content" is a marketing word. It means all the stuff that's not an ad. In marketing, you interface with your "consumers" primariy by making them watch ads. But to watch the ad, they need some lure, and the catchall term to all that icky stuff a marketing person has to handle or touch, even briefly, that's not a warm and fuzz little ad, is "content". It's like "payload" in the shipping industry. Imagine if tomorrow we called everything phyiscal simply "payload". You are not a carpenter, you're a payload creator. You're not a car wash company, you're a payload cleaning company. etc.