Wait until they find out how much Google is valued at
> Finally, we turn to the real crime, the crime involving money.
I thought we were talking about privacy.
That said that line sounds like crap.
And in this case, the "AI" companies are literally trespassing on the property of almost everyone on the internet, using it without permission, in order to cash in. Freeloading on the work of the entire agora, privatizing the profits, and letting the costs of destroyed privacy fall on anyone but them.
IOW, standard exploitative capitalism. No different from stealing the minerals from under someone's land without compensation, and leaving them to cleanup the mess.
In this case, hijacking everyone's published work without permission, taking the profits, and ignoring any privacy damage for the people whose work was critical to the enterprise.
It would not have been hard to log the inputs and offer/issue fractional shares to everyone whose work was used, and the right to refuse. But, like costs of remediating mining, they'd rather not bother with that unprofitable part.
It's kind of important to notice when you are being abused and care about it.
https://www.carissaveliz.com/books
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita...
Just as when a human views many pictures and is influenced by them in creating their own work, so does, e.g., Stable Diffusion take ideas and influence from existing works to generate new works. And except in very extreme cases, nobody claims that being influenced by someone is a copyright violation.
Similarly, I can sit around reading articles on the web all day, then go to the local pub and pontificate, and nobody is going to claim that I should be paying those website I read just because I plan to talk about them later. Same way, these LLM AIs are "learning" from what they read, and then spouting off based on that later. I can't see any difference.
Indeed, the verisimilitude is heightened by the fact that these AIs often don't really know what they're talking about, and just make crap up - just like our hypothetical human, pontificating in the pub.
In the early days of software security there were a lot of analogies to physical penetration. These analogies mislead and confused statutory facts with moral claims. In the wholeness of time, at least the adults now know that computer security is different and understand how the CFAA and related statutes work in practice. We also understand how laws that pre-dated computers interact with our new technological realities. In computer security, there's usually no need for analogy at this point. At least not once you find yourself in a courtroom.
Models aren't human brains. The law will think of them differently and treat them differently. I'm not sure how these lawsuits and class actions will shake out, to be honest, but I know that the law will not think of LLMs the same way it thinks about a human at the pub.
Perhaps I am old and cynical, but I fear that we'll establish harsh new restrictions on LLMs—and then gradually apply those restrictions to humans over time.
"I am sorry, you have read too much science fiction, and it has indirectly inspired your own writing. You owe mandatory royalties to a trade association."
"Your paintings are clearly pointillist. You are infringing on the rights of the Monet estate."
Imagine Nintendo banning emulators as one example.
We're not dealing with an either/or case here. The system is dealing with the problem in it's own way.
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” -- Edsger W. Dijkstra
Previously people thought that non-human-systems couldn't win at Chess or Go either, or do mathematics, or understand speech. Just because a particular system doesn't work like a human, doesn't mean it can't meet or exceed (even dramatically exceed) human capabilities in some field.
LOL is this an actual response? What did you substantively say here? Because I don't see anything.
>Previously people thought that non-human-systems couldn't win at Chess or Go either, or do mathematics, or understand speech. Just because a particular system doesn't work like a human, doesn't mean it can't meet or exceed (even dramatically exceed) human capabilities in some field.
That's not a legal argument. I'm not sure how that isn't clear. But you can't go "Your honor, people thought no one would win at chess, therefore, this isn't copying because it is exhibiting thought" Do you read yourself at all?
I was not making a positive statement that machines can think. Rather I was refuting yours by arguing that whether or not machines can think is irrelevant.
Your statement was ... "Given that these are algorithms and not sentient beings capable of thought, it's clearly the case that [only taking the style or genre from a work] is not what is occurring."
This does not follow: you don't need to be a sentient being to do things that sentient beings also do. All through history people have made surprising mechanisms that have done things that were previously thought to be the domain of human intelligence. In fact, typically those mechanisms did those things very differently than humans did them, but that made them no less capable.
Simply stating that a system is not sentient is insufficient to prove that it is capable or incapable of doing X.
What the machine is actually doing here needs to be determined separately. But the particular argument "the machine can't do that because it is not sentient" does not hold.
That's because you are misrepresenting my point. My point wasn't anything that a sentient being does. My point was the thing that we only know to be done by sentient beings, aka, exhibit thought. So, from my perspective, it totally does follow.
>Simply stating that a system is not sentient is insufficient to prove that it is capable or incapable of doing X.
It's clearly sufficient to prove that it is incapable of exhibiting sentience.
>What the machine is actually doing here needs to be determined separately. But the particular argument "the machine can't do that because it is not sentient" does not hold.
It does hold, as I explained before. Perhaps there is something else it can be analogized to that would be more useful and productive than "thought" which completely end-runs the entire discussion, imo.
My response is that you are putting foward a novel hypothesis that is yet to be proven.
It has not been established that something needs to be sentient or capable of thought to be able to "only tak[e] the style or genre from a work".
How would you test this statement? What evidence do you have?
(The thrust of my thinking here is that whether or not a machine is capable of thought is a red herring. The rest is me trying different angles to see if I can get that across.)
(edit: to be fair: Ekidd WAS directly comparing with humans. I'm not saying Ekidd was wrong or right, but I'm not Ekidd of course. Here I'm responding to your argument as is.)
(edit2: If statement [1] is not actually what you are trying to say, then I may have misunderstood, and it would be my turn to apologize and say "my bad" )
My thought would be that in order to discern and therefore only copy style and genre, one must develop an understanding of it such that they only take the style and genre and not anything else. I haven't seen any evidence that indicates thats what these models do. It might be true that after a certain number of iterations, what is left is only the "genre" or "style", but I don't believe that's the same thing even though it might be a similar end result. It may be true that in the interim, on the way to the final product, the iterations do include rote copies. This would run counter to the often offered argument here that this is identical to how humans do work. Except humans don't just fill in every pixel and then repeatedly iterate over an image until they get the desired result. So I probably agree with you that it's a red herring whether or not the model thinks (at least as far as the fact that it doesn't think, so it's a moot question that leads nowhere imo) but nevertheless, so much of what I see here is focused around the idea that these models and the human brain are doing similar things. So, my apologies if my hyper-fixation ran this conversation aground. I've appreciated your responses.
by analogy:
* It is a known background fact that a functioning human arm is alive.
* I might make a claim "a robot arm can do similar things to a human arm".
* It is unlikely that I have made the claim that a robot arm is alive. My claim is more likely to be about other properties of (robot) arms. [1]
Now that this is understood, perhaps also consider re-evaluating statements by Dkidd and Filligree (and potentially others) in that light. Their statements appear to be rather orthogonal to what you previously imputed (the same as with me).
And thanks for taking the time to talk. You seem a bit nicer now. :-)
--
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. " .
As I expressed earlier, what is being said is that the similar thing that is being done is the process of thought, which therefore does imply that machines can think, though it's not a conclusion necessary to make anyone's argument.
I don't see it being advocated that the machines are doing some non-thought-like process where the end result is analogous to what would be produced by a thought-driven process. So I think my statement was fair and wasn't entirely orthogonal.
I also still disagree with Filligree, as I do not think anything about what the LLMs do is akin to my own thought process. I guess I cannot question Filligree's own thought process, but I'm highly skeptical that their thought process is anything like what the LLMs employ and I similarly reject any characterization of the creative process as being like that which is employed by LLMs wherein people just wholly copy something (like a genre or style - and I think this characterization of the creative process is incredibly ignorant and naive) and then iterate away from it. IMO that's a characterization that is a loose fit at the most abstracted scale, and doesn't even come close to being a fair representation of what goes in the creative process (again IMO) in actuality.
I still, as a copyright litigator, do not understand what Ekidd is getting at, and if anything, I think it reflects a misunderstanding of how copyright law is applied (and is also probably based in a false understanding of what LLMs do). There really isn't an issue with genre and style in copyright law (maybe the blurred lines case for the music context, but it's widely recognized as not following the jurisprudence on scene a faire doctrine). To whatever point he seems to be making, I think once again describing this as just copying style and genre is just a tautological end-run around the actual issue that doesn't make an inquisition into what is being done by the LLM to capture the "genre" or "style". As I've pointed out, I think this kind of perspective is reflective of a kind of naivety about how artists create that I often see expressed from technical individuals that do not partake in creative activities such as painting, authoring poetry, writing music, etc, let alone engaging with the centuries of human exploration on what the creative process entails.
To your point, sure, the machine doesn't think. If that's the case, what it is doing cannot be thoughtful. What is happening in the human brain when art is made is thoughtful, imo. I reject the notion that human creativity and art is just some sort of formulaic application of everything that came before it. I see this argument a lot now because it makes sense from the perspective of LLMs and why what they do must be a fair use (because it's inherently not different from that which a human does, which isn't considered infringing). While typically, it is the burden of the claimant to prove copying, here, I think it's a perverse reality wherein LLMs get to say to everyone "show me where they copy" meanwhile, nobody, including the LLMs creators, actually seem to understand how the LLMs use "style" or "genre". As far as I'm concerned, the LLMs can't just hide the needle in the haystack and then say "well we aren't infringing so long as you don't find the needle". To be more clear, when a human goes to a museum and looks at art, or lets say, studies it in university, I don't think what happens in the brain is in any way analogous to what happens when these models are "trained".
> As far as I'm concerned, the LLMs can't just hide the needle in the haystack and then say "well we aren't infringing so long as you don't find the needle".
I think that GPT 3.5 is capable of significantly more creativity than you're claiming here. Not consistently, and certainly not in the realm of legal writing. But it can compose cute little original stories in mostly grammatical Latin, stories that exist nowhere on the Internet. And the related model used by Copilot can write code using newly-created, unpublished APIs.
> To be more clear, when a human goes to a museum and looks at art, or lets say, studies it in university, I don't think what happens in the brain is in any way analogous to what happens when these models are "trained".
As I argue in the sibling comment, I strongly suspect that GPT models have stumbled across a weaker cousin of one of the major tricks underlying raw human creativity. Current LLMs can't "think", nor can they edit, introspect, persist, or have any non-trivial goals. They can't even grasp the difference between truth and confabulation. But I do think that they can create. And that the processes by which they do so are not entirely alien to what our brains do.
Your argument implicitly assumes that the model is doing anything like using imagination or creation of new ideas. It's my belief that when people refer to creativity, they mean more than just the act of manufacturing or producing a thing.
This is my fundamental issue with these models and the proponents that say they are doing human things. I don't see any arguments to substantiate this belief, just the misuse of words and the misapplication (i.e. anthropomorphizing) of computer processes to the most conveniently analogous human process, but without any substance. I admit, I don't have a substantive basis for my argument, but I believe it should be on the proponents of this tech to prove that it is similar to humans in these senses, and shouldn't be my burden to disprove.
- I strongly suspect that much of what I consider "me" physically exists inside my skull. That's a huge philosophical debate, but look at any Oliver Sacks book for cases of how physical brain damage can change a person's consciousness.
- Human intelligence is a brand new evolutionary innovation. We share an ancestor with chimps 6 to 8 million years ago. That suggests that human intelligence evolved in less than 500,000 generations, with the bulk of what we recognize as culture in the last 25,000 to 50,000 generations. Therefore, there's an upper limit on how much new "complexity" evolution could create in order to make humans intelligent. To use a simplistic technical metaphor, updating from chimps to H sapiens is probably a small-but-clever patch, not a total rewrite.
- Or to put it another way: most of what we do is probably clever applications of a few good tricks, applied to chimp-like ancestor.
- Specifically, I suspect that biological equivalents to LLMs are one of the "good tricks" that distinguish us from chimps. And similar mechanism likely underlie much of human creativity.
- Our biological LLMs are better than whatever Google and OpenAI are doing. I learned a foreign language to a respectable level as an adult with about 2-4 million words of input and some awkward practice. GPT and similar models, however, require vastly larger input to pull off their tricks. But I think they're on the correct path.
It's immaterial to me whether GPT "thinks." It has no consciousness, no continuity, and barely anything resembling goals. I could argue that it occasionally understands things. And it can create well enough to write funny little stories in Latin, things which exist nowhere in its input. Hell, it can do a pretty fair pastische of Dumas.
So my hypothesis is that GPT's creativity is a weaker than human creativity. But it's still probably doing something deeply similar to what we do.
The final piece of my hypothesis is that copyright maximalism has been pushed very hard by media companies and some IP lawyers for decades now. I've spoken to lawyers who believed that intellual property was great and we should create many new kinds of IP. Many of the things these people wanted sounded like horrible dystopias to me.
Since I believe that GPT is likely a close analogy to one of the major "tricks" underlying human creativity, and that certain influential IP maximalists will push for anything they can get, I fear that regulation of LLMs would open a potential path to eventually regulating human creativity in novel ways that I would consider terrible. Once an influential legal precedent exists, and there's enough money to be made, there will be strong incentives to apply that precedent in new ways.
As I said, I'm being cynical.
You can find plenty of cases where US Courts refused to do that, even if the copyright status quo was challenged. Sony vs Universal over VHS time-shifting. Lawsuits about ISPs permitting people to access copyrighted material illegally. Lawsuits about CD ripping. Lawsuits before DMCA 512 was a thing. All resulted in the copyright industry generally losing.
Here we are in 2022: ISPs aren't accomplices in copyright infringement for what you do online. CD ripping is legal for private use even if RIAA is still irritated about it. YouTube hasn't been smashed with claims of contributory infringement every time someone uploads one infringing video. Photoshop isn't considered responsible for abuses. And so forth...
Do you think the world is a better place if the value of all content flows primarily into a handful of hyper scale tech companies?
> Finally, OpenAI did not pay for the data it scraped from the internet. The individuals, website owners and companies that produced it were not compensated.
This is an argument that "proves too much." See if I switch terms with something more familiar:
> Finally, Google did not pay for the data it scraped from the internet. The individuals, website owners and companies that produced it were not compensated.
This is a classic "link tax" argument. The Conversation may also not have noticed that the US has repeatedly declared web scraping legal, as lately as last year.
I’ve talked about the HiQ case on here before. I wish we were able to come up with something more nuanced (probably not in the courts, though). Scraping people’s LinkedIns to snitch to their employers when they’re job hunting is obviously a thing we should limit as much as possible.
How do we legally differentiate that? Right now there is no legal differentiation as far as I can find. And an occasional verbatim paragraph or copied image does not overcome the "fair use" firewall in which intent (did ChatGPT intend to allow copyright infringement? Or is that just an occasional accident?) plays a huge factor. It almost brings back memories of Sony vs. Universal over whether VHS time-shifting was legal. The finding was that the device was legal, even though copyright-infringing use cases were possible and even likely.
You could argue that the internet, itself, would be a violation of similar standards. Tons of artists had their artwork posted online for profit without their permission in the early days. We worked through it and the internet wasn't declared illegal despite the abundance (and continued abundance) of copyright infringement. Even during the days of wild MP3 downloading, ISPs weren't legally considered enablers.
Yet another example I can think of - Photoshop. People who used Photoshop were culpable - but Adobe was never sued for making software that allowed celebrities to be digitally edited in horrific ways, or for copyrighted images to be remixed and edited en-masse. Intent matters - Photoshop clearly wasn't made with that intent, even though it is a possible outcome.
Care to explain how does what Google is doing compare to what OpenAI/Microsoft is doing? In context of ethics and legal uses of intellectual property, please. Otherwise I can’t see how this bears any relevance to my point.
> the second antitrust case that DOJ has filed against Google
There was an antitrust case against Microsoft too back in 2001, remember what came out of it?
They were found guilty as all hell by the EU, and were apparently nearly broken up. Pity they got to keep as one entity. :(
Their next go around by the EU would hopefully permanently solve them, though that's more wishful thinking than anything. ;)
In any case, it’s difficult to see how it’s even relevant. Google: monopolizes search. MS/OAI: straight up ignores copyright.
You can see how Google may be benefitting from being the largest search provider and others (Kagi, etc.) have difficult time competing, but my viewpoint is that surprisingly enough now we have a new villain in town compared to whom even Google seems to be playing fairly.
It does just that in many cases. Or did you think someone at Google writes those info boxes at the top of your search query?
https://support.google.com/knowledgepanel/answer/9163198?hl=...
This is what I mean by it preserving your opportunity to engage with your audience.
Second, you recall how even that, those answer snippets with attribution and all, have caused outrage over publishers and webmasters losing traffic and revenue[0]?
Now imagine Google only showed scraped content, no links or attribution, and you will begin to see the extent of shenanigans OAI/MS are attempting now.
[0] Cf. https://www.wired.com/story/australia-media-code-facebook-go...
If not, it's not "indexing".