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Comment by gridlockd | Hacker News Reader

> Jaron Lanier is a frustrating thinker.

I agree. Like Slavoj but without the Zizek.

> He gave a rambling answer about we need to pay all the human involved in producing that model (even those that are consumed as opensource models) and that AI is fundamentally anti-human.

I do think this raises a very valid point in terms of intellectual property. If I train an AI to paint in the style of an artist whose art I scraped, does that artist have any claim as to its licensing? If not, should they not?

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Are you saying that DeepMind should have to pay royalties to the Go players whose games were used as training material for AlphaGo? Should the same apply to human players who study others' games as training material?

(Obviously, it's a moot point for AlphaZero which was trained solely via self-play, and kind of puts a spanner in the works for Jaron Lanier's views particularly if unsupervised machine learning displaces supervised machine learning as the dominant tool)

If you were to train a person to paint in the style of another artist, does the original artist have any claim to its licensing?

Does Disney have a right to any cartoon that looks like a Mickey Mouse cartoon, but doesn't actually depict Mickey Mouse, regardless of its source?

There is something fundamentally different about an AI, though. Perhaps the ability to produce output at scale. Perhaps that its creator/owner may not have the ability it trains the AI to perform.

I'm not sure. But I feel that comparing AI to humans here is disingenuous or naive.

That zizek reference made me chuckle!

Derivative works are allowed under copyright law. Though the interpretation is steadily being constrained especially on site like Youtube.

His claim is more extreme. Essentially any individual involved in producing the data (annotators, aggregators, that grad student, etc) should be compensated for any downstream profit produced by any model that consumed that data. It's an interesting interpretation of Marxist critiques that workers are separated from the products they produce and alienated from the value produced by the fruits of their labor. A car factory workers don't get any more compensated for the sale, resale, and any other subsequent profit made the use of a vehicles they helped produce.

While it sounds great in theory I have no idea how you'd even begin to implement that. Ironically the best means we have available to developing that solution is the technology that he critiques as anti-human.

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