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Comment by CityOfThrowaway | Hacker News Reader

This is very impressive!

OpenAI’s tech opens an ethical Pandora’s box:

1. It’s clear that the raw inputs to all of OpenAI’s outputs originated with real, human creativity.

2. So, in a sense, OpenAI is laundering creativity. It reads in creative works, does complicated (and, yes, groundbreaking) transformations, and produces an output that is hard to trace to any particular source.

3. Yet, isn’t that effectively what human brains do too? Perhaps OpenAI lacks the capacity for true invention, but I’d argue that most people live their whole lives without a meaningful creative contribution as well.

All told, I don’t have a good framework for thinking about the ethics here. So instead, I’ll simply say:

Wow.

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> Yet, isn’t that effectively what human brains do too?

If I want to watch a bunch of movies, I have to pay the theater for each movie, or pay netflix, or whatever. The screenplay I write afterwards belongs to me, but the learning process involved me paying for access to others' work. That's what's often missing here. But at the same time, if you train on legally public data, there's no 'theater' to be paid.

(Often, people train on illegally public data though, like the eleuther folks. That's a whole extra can of worms I've ranted about plenty).

Maybe we'll start seeing licenses with a section saying "not for use as training data for commercial models."

> Maybe we'll start seeing licenses with a section saying "not for use as training data for commercial models."

Considering that the impact of a single example is extremely small in training a model, and that it is trained on an ungodly amount of examples, then I wonder if the effort of forbidding its use has any real benefits.

I would change your question from “does it have any real benefits” to “does it have a practical effect on the model”

Benefits to me are clear: giving a developer choice over how their source code is used with for-profit, opaque, next generation ML models.

But yes, drop in the ocean in terms of the full data set. But that shouldn’t be an excuse to remove user choice.

Yes, of course it does, because if every user opted out then the model would not work as well as it does, and github would not be able to profit off the work of others to the degree they are (or will be). Just because they are taking code on a massive scale does not mean the outcome is inevitable: don't get it twisted, copilot only works because of the code human beings have written.

What are some ethical problems that could emerge from the box? Maybe unfair competition from having very good tools compared to other programmers, or havin irresponsibly shallow understanding of what the produced code does?

> What are some ethical problems that could emerge from the box?

Being put out of job by an AI trained on your own code?

It's really the same ethical problem of all automation ... and will be as long as we need a job to fulfill basic needs like food, housing and medical care.

I wonder if HLL compiler authors had fears about this back when writing assembly and machine code was the norm.

But good point about the ambivalent result of eliminating busywork. Food, housing and medical care is available in most western countries for people who choose to not get a job... I think the social status problem and guilt of freeriding are also big factors preventing prople from living more leisurely lives in these countries.

Everyone gets into programming for their own reasons.

But to my personal philosophy: if I'm not coding to put myself out of a job, I'm thinking about the problem wrong.

When there are no more lines of code to be written, I shall do something else, content that I have done my part to free humanity from the burden of human-machine interfacing. I hear dairy farming is a demanding and rewarding challenge.

Dairy farmers aren't really looking for workers ... ironically, it is a job that has been almost eliminated by automatic milking machines and robotic harvesters.

https://www.thebullvine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Figur...

Programmers change jobs like socks and are open to learning new things all the time. Software has been automating itself for 70 years and look how many people have jobs in this field.

Also, human desire is a bottomless pit, where automation saves we spend even more.

There are some really weird licensing problems. Like does your code license say they can use the your code to train AIs that then reproduce very similar code to you but with no attribution etc in someone else's codebase.

s/OpenAI/Photoshop

Reads similarly :)

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