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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Sounds to me like you've decided that AI veganism is not for you!

I've thought about this comparison to human artists taking inspiration from each other a bit. The problem becomes the scale. A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour.

Consider facial recognition technology. At an individual level, empowering people to quickly see all of the photos they have taken of their spouse through running facial recognition against their photos is useful and harmless. Allowing governments to run the exact same technology against every photo uploaded to Facebook is a massively harmful expansion of the surveillance state.

I don't think training models against 5bn unlicensed images is in the same scale of harm as running facial recognition against an entire country's worth of people. But this example does show that things that are fine on a small scale can be harmful at a big scale.

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> Sounds to me like you've decided that AI veganism is not for you!

I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not similar, and this one is frankly much weaker.

> I've thought about this comparison to human artists taking inspiration from each other a bit. The problem becomes the scale. A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour.

A human can mimic something with a single reference. It might not be good, but that can hardly matter for a discussion of ethics. The morality cannot depend on whether or not humans can do something poorly or not.

> Consider facial recognition technology. At an individual level, empowering people to quickly see all of the photos they have taken of their spouse through running facial recognition against their photos is useful and harmless. Allowing governments to run the exact same technology against every photo uploaded to Facebook is a massively harmful expansion of the surveillance state.

Entirely different issue that happens to utilize a similar tech.

> But this example does show that things that are fine on a small scale can be harmful at a big scale.

It does not.

> I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not similar, and this one is frankly much weaker.

I agree. This would more accurately be called "AI Luddism", opposing a new technology because of fears related to its immense productivity over humans. It has nothing to do with veganism

EDIT: that said, vegan is used in the sense of the article as "a really obvious and strong stance that people do not follow even though all the information about how it is bad is readily available"

I think calling it "AI Luddism" would offend people who are opposed to generative AI a lot more than calling it "AI veganism" offends vegans.

Why? The argument is very similar to the one that Luddites used: that the increased efficiency is harmful to artists

Try even hinting at calling them Luddites and see how they react!

So basically, they want to be called vegans, because that's a historically virtuous label, but not Luddites, because that's a historically maligned one? Even though they are literally not vegans, and literally are much closer to Luddites?

The argument is slightly different. This isn't about taking away a person's job. This is about eroding something that we as humans had previously thought was uniquely ours, intellectual creativity. The point of art was to express something by humans for other humans. The point was not to make a pretty picture, or a pleasant sounding song. When an AI does this it is and likely always will be a mere imitation of what art is supposed to be. The sad thing is that this imitation will be good enough and cheap enough that it will flood our daily lives. AI image and song generation will do what mobile did to computer games. Endless piles of low effort useless output and concepts distilled to the smallest possible set of features necessary for us to be suckered into purchasing them.

Is the argument of Luddism not also the erosion of transforming material things with your hands, something we also thought was uniquely human?

As more labor was automated, these exact arguments were made. It was thought that no machine could capture the beauty and skill of human craftsmen as creation was a fundamentally human task. It was thought to be "sad" that low-effort, mass-produced, standardized goods would be "good enough" to satisfy human needs, that there was some inextricable timeless beauty to human output that elevates over machine output. Time has shown us that machine output has become even more precise and skillful than human labor. These arguments feel almost 1:1.

At times this whole thing feels hypocritical. Generations of laborers grew up with the reality that their work was essentially a commodity. Now that it's our turn, we raise the age old arguments again.

Those "generations of laborers" had the option to earn more for less (and less dangerous) work most of the time. It doesn't seem this will be the case now.

Not at all. The changes were sudden and extreme. Look at the original Luddite rebellion for its oldest incarnation, but just look at the mechanizing of factories in the 60s with the introduction of CNCs or protests against automation at ports.

Automation of labor has been an ongoing force for decades and a reality laborers have had to live with for years.

This is of course not true (for ports in particular the writing had been on the wall for more than a decade) but even if it were, there eventually were other jobs. There won't be this time around.

That's not really what Luddites were about though. They were poor people in a reactionary and anti-democratic country, that was fighting (and winning) wars to stop democracy spreading while people at home starved:

https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/17/napoleon-d...

> In one conversation on St Helena, Napoleon was asked by his doctor what he would have done if he had managed to invade southern England in 1805. Napoleon’s reply was an absolute cracker: “I would have hastened over my flotilla with two hundred thousand men, landed as near Chatham as possible and proceeded direct to London, where I calculated to arrive in four days from the time of my landing. I would have proclaimed a republic and the abolition of the nobility and the House of Peers, the distribution of the property of such of the latter as opposed me amongst my partisans, liberty, equality and the sovereignty of the people.”

They smashed machines because that hurt the people oppressing them, not because they hated the machines.

Britain at the time wasn't as democratic as it is today certainly, but it was far more democratic than Napoleon's Empire that it was fighting against. Napoleon liked to pretend that he defended the French Revolution's ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, but in fact he went around creating new kingdoms and making his relatives monarchs.

I wasn't really trying to make the case that Napolean was a great guy, but he rose to power by winning battles in a war between the French Republic and a bunch of Monarchies, so there was a fairly clear democratic side.

Admittedly, the UK was warring againt the French Monach as well before, so it's not a clear cut thing, but things like Luddites and the 'Peterloo' show that Britain was not speeding towards greater democracy. They very slowly gave ground over centuries of struggle.

> The Tory Prime Minister in 1830, Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington, was resolutely opposed to parliamentary reform. However, there was growing support for limited change within his party, primarily because partially extending the franchise would allow the wealth and influence of Britain's growing middle class to be exploited.

That's 20 years later, a small extra step of democracy.

I was just trying to point out that smashing some stuff was a fairly reasonable thing to do when you don't have a vote and you're hungry, by providing some political context on the era.

I agree that this analogy is (mildly) insulting to veganism.

This is another example of an ethical choice that I made!

Is the harm here that is caused by being offensive to veganism outweighed by the value of sparking useful conversations about personal approaches to AI ethics?

I think that it is.

It's similar to the ethics of attaching a click-bait headline to a valuable piece of journalism. Is it OK to do that? That depends, both on the specific case and on the opinions of individuals who observe that decision.

Seems like a disproportionate number of these comments are about using the vegan analogy. So setting aside offense or ethics, do you think it was a good idea to go with this analogy, or is it detracting from "the value of sparking useful conversations about personal approaches to AI ethics"? (emphasis mine)

I've been trying unsuccessfully to have good conversations about AI ethics for quite a while. This thread has 59 comments, and more than half of them aren't about veganism - so yeah, I think it worked.

And to be honest, if it hadn't worked I would have thought "well, it was worth a shot". The analogy genuinely works well for me.

> I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not similar, and this one is frankly much weaker.

There are many, many, many people out there who believe it's fine to eat meat but not fine to e.g. feign attribution on intellectual work. Asserting that objections to this kind of tech are much weaker than various vegan arguments without explanation is odd.

> A human can mimic something with a single reference. It might not be good, but that can hardly matter for a discussion of ethics. The morality cannot depend on whether or not humans can do something poorly or not.

Asserting this without argument suggests you have a particular unstated idea of how ethical determinations are supposed to be made that you are projecting out onto the discussion. This would be important to lay out.

Murdering (or being complicit in the factory farming model), and then consuming another living conscious being is on a very different moral plane than remixing intellectual work.

It's hard to imagine the mental gymnastics required to think the two are in the same league.

Deciding that "living conscious being" is the category that merits moral status is one framework of justification for veganism – the Western originated-in-the-1970s-one. https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/rights/moralstatus_1.sh... I'm not saying that it's wrong, but to act like it should be taken as the default prior without requiring laying out its context is a very narrow view.

>It's hard to imagine the mental gymnastics required to think the two are in the same league.

It's really not hard. You just have to care more for the harm to the well-being of human artists than for the harm for the well-being of farmed animals. It may surprise some people but speciesism is the default position for the vast majority of the population.

Wait. When you say well being you're aware that killing them is close to the ultimate harm we can inflict on them.

What you're saying is that you think intellectual property is more valuable, to you, than the life of other conscious non human beings.

I think for most people, this is a stretch.

It really isn't. Most people don't consider farming murder and do not care about the well-being of non-cute, non-immediately present animals at all.

Redefining words like “murder” to include killing animals for food requires some pretty impressive mental gymnastics too.

But I don’t find either one hard to imagine.

Eating animals is kind of what our species has been doing for millenia.

The mental gymnastics are required to rationalize the act of eating meat and murder being the same thing.

> There are many, many, many people out there who believe it's fine to eat meat but not fine to e.g. feign attribution on intellectual work. Asserting that objections to this kind of tech are much weaker than various vegan arguments without explanation is odd.

The vegan argument is that factory farms are literal lifetime torture pins. This isn't much up to debate. You can shrug and choose to eat meat anyway, but co-opting their name for your argument on ip seems incredibly shallow. Even if you believe that ip violations are worse than animal cruelty. I'm not a vegetarian at all fwiw. Not too dissimilar from trying to frame this as the holocaust of artists or any other strongly held event / movement by many others.

> Asserting this without argument suggests you have a particular unstated idea of how ethical determinations are supposed to be made that you are projecting out onto the discussion. This would be important to lay out.

If your ethical framework suggests ip violations are immoral, unless you think the execution was bad that's just silly.

> The problem becomes the scale. A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour.

Can you say more about the scale argument? It reads as if you're saying that an entity that has an advantage shouldn't use that advantage.

If you reduce the comparison to human scale, do you still have a problem with the competition? I.e., if one artist has a working memory of 5 inspirational artworks (unlicensed) and another artist has a working memory of 3, is that wrong if they both compete to produce new artwork based on what they know of existing art?

If the answer to that question is no, then I don't see how the scale question is applicable.

I'm saying that one artist walking around an art gallery and being inspired by the art they see there (or even visiting hundreds of galleries over a lifetime) is operating at such a minuscule scale compared to an AI that trains itself on 5bn images that the similarities between the two do not necessary mean that if one is OK then the other is OK as well.

Why though? Scale in and of itself isn't a bad thing just because we can't do it with our puny human minds. I'm open to the argument but I don't see it.

Computers have scale benefits that no human has. An industrial controller can control all the machines in a factory all at once, and make them move faster than a human can react. A script can send out communications to hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of humans at once. A machine controlling door locks in a building can lock every door at once. No human can compete. It's unclear to me why art generation is unique in this regard unless there's a human status-quo bias at play. I'm increasingly inclined to think that it's ennui over the fact that creative work isn't unique anymore and can be automated, a reality that many laborers have already dealt with and accepted.

One of the computer's "super powers" is its ability to run at scale.

I think more and more humans are seeing this as a serious disadvantage that creates an ever greater asymmetry between companies and humans. The most egregious example is spam, but these days almost every large company communication essentially uses this "scale advantage".

Very few people are happy with that.

Therefore, if there was some way to eliminate this sort of advantage, especially for very large organisations like the government, that would be excellent.

To me this seems to similar to old fashioned luddites. The machines back then that improved the productivity of labourers mostly displaced the societal role of skilled craftsmen. Of course using the machine is different to doing it by hand, but we did have some benefits from improving our productivity using machines, as well as some downsides. The interesting thing is that in this case we are moving from using machines to improve productivity of material objects, into sociocultural objects (art), and it's not clear what that will "do" exactly.

> But this example does show that things that are fine on a small scale can be harmful at a big scale.

Right but of course, the words "can be" are there. I don't think anyone is claiming that scaling a given thing up is always harmless, but generally with these kinds of technological developments you really need a super strong, clear, and concrete (for this specific case) argument to stop them. I haven't seen any such arguments, except the traditional luddite one I posted above.

Simonw, we are about to have much worse problems from bot swarms. Sleeper bots trained on “get more upvotes” will amass karma points and then be unlesshed as implacable crowds of “people” pushing public opinion around. They will amass capital and social capital to the point where regular humans represent a vashingly small sliver of online capital.

This idea of CAPTCHAs and “human only, no bots” networks is only for a decade or two, until bots just become more desirable members of every community, to humans and other bots.

What people don’t get is that their individual decisions in their own self interest doom the group. Dad works 10 hours a day to provide for family. Then mom does too. Now they both neglected their kids and each other.

Similarly, you choose a bot for its wittier comebacks and impeccably romantic style of talking. Your husband chooses a bot for its better sexual techniques and never complaining. Ultimately, neither of you needs the other and you’re one step away drom NO ONE IN SOCIETY needing you.

You would become the Borg. Except why have the drone bodies at all?

> A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour.

It's just another step on the path towards AI being better than humans at certain activities. We've already gone through this with things like math, chess, imitating voices, translating languages, and lately visual art seems to be coming close to a point where the AI will have an edge over humans. We will have to learn to cope, one way or another, because eventually, AI will be better at everything, as we are limited by our biological bodies.

Humanity will create its own synthetic god, and the consequences will be interesting.

The argument about differences in scale constituting differences in kind is compelling, and yet I'm not sure how to evaluate any particular instance of this type of argument without just deferring to my existing opinion on the topic at hand.

For example, it's easy to construct hypothetical scenarios where a difference in scale seem to clearly constitute a difference in kind and where suppression of a new technology seems clearly reasonable. An easy hypothetical (but not implausible) example is some new kind of extremely deadly weapon that would be much easier to build than existing weapons if the "recipe" was made public.

But it's also easy to make the same argument for things like, say, the printing press. And indeed there has always been intense opposition from many to the printing press and subsequent technologies that make distributing written language much easier, with opponents often presenting arguments in this same form. Yet it feels wrong to me to apply the argument this way.

Is that just because I have existing opinions that generally oppose restrictions in the ability to distribute ideas, but I don't generally oppose restrictions on very deadly weapons? Or is there some other way to distinguish between valid and invalid instances of this form of argument, perhaps by attempting to estimate the overall risk versus reward?

These problems of scale aren't unique to recent leaps in technology, or even to automation or technology at all. Government intelligent agencies can, given certain goals and management, do a great deal of harmful and disturbing things without using any secret or advanced technology. A team of 1,000 people with, say, basic PC office equipment from the early 2000s, could do a great deal if they were competently trained and managed and told to, say, investigate and attempt to undermine some group that the agency doesn't like for whatever reason. In my opinion the technology has little to do with the problem, even though the potential for harm is unique to the scale of resources dedicated to it, and even though they would be a lot less effectively if they didn't have that technology (i.e. imagine if they no longer had access to personal computers at the office).

But author of the article says he would be fine with AI trained on licensed images, which could be also on bigger scale than a single human is capable of. Looks like some people doesn't like it because the data it was trained on but others are worried about the technology and its capabilities over humans.

"vegan / not-vegan" is a false and harmful dichotomy

"meat-based" vs "plant-based" is a spectrum we are all on; no reason to make it all-or-nothing

If the AI is looking at 5bn images, that means it's drawing inspiration from individual ones even less than a human would.

What if the AI was trained entirely on a corpus of artwork in a style you've uniquely developed over decades? The AI did not do any of the legwork or market testing but it would theoretically be making your art form at scale better than you could. Knowing AI would be deployed to rip-off your efforts will you pursue art?

People can already do that, and copyright law doesn't really protect it. It's hard to copyright a style. Whoever first painted that multi-colored landscape of a couple walking through a park, it's been copied a million times. Even parodies, which often use a lot of the source material, are explicitly legal. And then there's the Hyundai Genesis.

To the last question: No, but I wouldn't pursue art either way.

> Allowing governments to run the exact same technology against every photo uploaded to Facebook

We should allow _everybody_ to run the exact same technology. Governments are not special. Power to the people.

I don’t own my own supercomputer to run the same analysis the NSA can, though.

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