Its going to happen and AI is going to learn lyrics and how to create music, its inevitable. These are just roadblocks that are bad for everyone but the extreme minority.
Even if one company/country bans it, in 10 years, it won't matter.
There are a bunch of for-profit American AI companies. Why on Earth would another for-profit company, especially one based in another country, be ok with other people making money from their content. They can either look at developing their own AI platform, or build deals with the existing AI companies. It would be just plain stupid to give it all away for free, or any price that isn't determined by themselves.
I think that's nowhere near obvious. But we will see. At this point, everyone is just guessing.
Like artists, sculptors, writers, photographers, narrators, musicians, composers, and so forth? The very same industries AI requires to exist for training?
They will disappear. And we will be poorer for that.
And even if the assumption proves to be true, the volume will decrease dramatically as people are no longer allowed to make a living to create their art.
And no, Patreon and its ilk is not a sufficient replacement, not for full time jobs. It mostly doesn't even replace a job for the (comparatively few) people on it today.
EDIT: I for one will miss movies like "Everything Everwhere All At Once", which could not have been made as an "impulse" project.
It's a fact as old as humanity itself. People will create because that's what people do. What isn't guaranteed is the existence of the billion dollar copyright industry.
> an artist could sell their painting.
Still perfectly possible to sell the physical canvas you applied paint to.
> the volume will decrease dramatically as people are no longer allowed to make a living to create their art
So what? That's a good thing. The market is filled with cheap art that's made just to sell copies, stuff that wouldn't even exist at all if not for the profit. I don't consider that a big loss at all.
And yet you're cheering on AI that will dramatically increase the amount of cheap art that's made just to sell copies.
The results of their work is not IP though, which makes the comparison too weak to serve as proof that artistic works that create only IP will continue unabated.
There’s probably one in your city.
However, the shared delusion makes the world go round as-is.
OK, "copyright bad", "intellectual property rights bad", so what's the alternative?
I already do. Dollars? It's just paper, not even backed by anything. People believe in it so it has value for the time being. It will literally go to zero if people stop believing in it though.
It was hard for me to accept these truths. I don't post them here lightly.
> However, the shared delusion makes the world go round as-is.
People who choose to believe in delusions don't get to complain when reality inevitably comes creeping in.
> OK, "copyright bad", "intellectual property rights bad", so what's the alternative?
Post scarcity. Automate everything and provide abundance, eliminating the need for an economy to begin with.
The same governments that let you 'own' physical items are the ones who say you can 'own' IP as well.
If they didn't - and didn't back it up with force - you wouldn't 'own' anything at all. Cherry picking which version of ownership is 'absurd' is an exercise in futility, since it's not up to you.
Whether or not the world conforms to their made up copyright reality isn't really up to them either. The simple fact is: information, once discovered, is infinitely copyable. No amount of lobbying is ever gonna change that. People are still gonna train AI models with "their" data and there's nothing they can do about it short of destroying free computing as we know it by making it so we can only execute software they approve. Surely you don't want that, fellow Hacker News user, given that such tyranny is the antithesis of everything the word "hacker" stands for.
You seem to be confusing possession with ownership.
Ownership is the social relationship by which you exert control independent of immediate possession, but you’ve just described how you can maintain possession.
You know what's funny? In my country, Apple's security is more effective at deterring criminals than any of this "ownership" crap. A stolen iPhone is basically a brick that's worthless to anyone else. So they'd rather target Android phones instead which they can more easily reset and pass off as some used phone they own.
But they may not publicly release it. I've already removed my works from the public web, and I've heard from several others that have done the same.
The only other alternative would be to withdraw from society entirely, which is obviously not feasible.
I released some software as GPL but truth be told I couldn't care less if someone violates it. I'm certainly not gonna waste my limited time on this earth going to court over it.
Indeed. Which I consider to be a real loss.
To offset that nitpicky line above a genuine question: if I were to produce a work and share it with you directly, in private, and perhaps for good measure clarify to you that I am only sharing it with you personally to hopefully get your feedback on whatever it is that I made, and that I do not want you to do anything else with it than the minimum that would be required to fulfil that purpose.
Wouldn't you then see any natural wrong in sharing my work with others or even the broader public, regardless?
Every single piece of idea is public domain from their inception. Actually, all ideas already exist, we humans just discover them. Ideas are information, information is bits and bits are numbers. All numbers already exist, and all "creation" is merely discovering those numbers.
Any assignment of ownership obviously happens after the fact and are completely ineffectual, especially in the 21st century, the age of information and networked computers with infinite ability to copy bits at negligible costs. The technology really exposes that sham for what it really is and it's a shame how everyone reacts by trying to destroy the perfectly good technology instead of fixing the fraud that is "intellectual property".
> Wouldn't you then see any natural wrong in sharing my work with others or even the broader public, regardless?
I'd see it as a very rude thing to do to you personally. Simply because you asked me not to do it and I generally try to be nice and respect people.
A natural universal ideological wrong though? No. Plenty of people publish the private communications they receive. It's just information. Publishing it might hurt my social standing with you buf I personally don't believe in anyone ever going to jail over it.
It would require an unthinkable near unanimous societal willingness and cooperation, such comprehensive planning to the likes of which I believe humanity is practically incapable of today with currently available tools and mindsets, an ultra-careful and yet pertinacious iterative implementation process that will probably need to take place over a multi-generational timeframe.
If, however, we would somehow pull all that off and manage to rework our world into one that is entirely formed around the philosophy you describe above, then I am fully convinced that not only humanity, but also our planet and in fact the rest of the universe too would be better off for it.
AI won't be able to automate anything if we use the legal system to forcefully reduce the size of its training set by 99.999%
thankfully Moore's law is dead
> That way there's nothing they can do about it unless they up the tyranny 1000x and destroy our freedom to execute any software we want on our own machines.
I'd probably prefer this to a world where all knowledge workers become permanently destitute
and I suspect the vast majority of the world's electorates will agree
(do people prefer being able to eat over some ability to run software on their computer? I suspect so)
If someone said “for the sake of progress we just REALLY need to use this GPL’d code in our proprietary closed source app”, I don’t think that would fly around here.
Best dynamite all the bridges because I sure haven't paid any of the (now quite-long-dead) people who put them up.
Arguably that's because putting GPL code in a proprietary app is making a free thing closed. FWIW, I don't like proprietary AI models either, but I think open-source ones shouldn't be hampered by the copyright mafia.
Musicians don't pay royalties to every other musician they've ever listened to, but that's literally their training data, the brain is just a large neural network.
They used content as training data and now selling access to model based on this training data. How this is not "making profit off other people work"?
A musician is just a big neural network, and they sell content that is nothing but the product of all their influences, of all the music they listened to.
I don't see a difference between a musician making music after having listened to thousand of hours of music throughout their lives and an AI generating music.
It's the same thing, in one case you have neurons made out of flesh, in the other neurons made of transistors and code.
"siphoning knowledge and effort off of millions of others."
how is a regular artist not doing the exact same thing?
Why it should be the same for one regular person and for profit-aimed corporation that did not bother to get consent from authors?
Compare that to AI. It doesn't do any actual "art" work to become an artist, nor do the people who train it, it just sucks up what's fed into it, without the consent of the creators. Then, it can create much, much faster than an artist without breaks and without pay, and it is owned and directed by a huge faceless company as, effectively, a fleet of mindless slaves, diminishing the livelihoods of the very people absolutely essential in training the model.
From a moral perspective, all you really need to ask is, would these artists have consented to this training if they knew mindless AI slaves would replace them?
Why is everyone in AI so open to stealing people's work and why do y'all think "ai" is something with a mind of its own that just runs about and does things? It's a software product and the companies owning it must play by the rules. Period.
> why do y'all think "ai" is something with a mind of its own that just runs about and does things?
Because GPT-4 is already capable of doing this (very poorly) if incorporated into a larger system that provides it with REPLs, internet access, an initial goal, and some form of memory. GPT-5 will be more capable, and AI will only get better at this.
However the difference between ai and nfts is that ai is powerful and much needed. But there needs to be rules to the game.
Also playing by these rules means better ai. It means that instead of spewing content it would actually have to learn, and the result would be a far more accurate and far more reliable output.
That's where we should be.
Because it is no more "stealing" than when a human learns from other people's work, and then makes a profit off of it.
> the companies owning it must play by the rules
Nobody has proven that they are breaking any rules.
I'd like you to learn more about LLMs then, because under the definition you want to make, you are 'software'.
Also, we made libraries so people could learn for free without being beholden to their capitalist masters.
Naturally. If you copy the "free" content from those libraries and resell it you are committing plagiarism.
Just because something can mimick humans it doesn't meant they are humans. ML is just that, software. There's too much pareidolia out there in AI. Sad, because it's a great concept gradually getting bastardised.
I swear that people on this thread want to create the world envisioned in 'the right to read'.
I am not saying that it is exactly the same.
Instead, I am saying that if a human can profit from other people's work, by learning from it, then there are clearly exceptions to this idea that using other people's work, for any reason at all, is "stealing".
It is perfectly legal to use other people's work, for all sort of things. Its not stealing, in many situations.
This hard rule that you have made up, is clearly not the situation, and using your hard rule, where you just call all of it "stealing" would similarly apply to all sorts of other, completely allowed behavior that nobody thinks is "stealing".
> but humans also pay to learn
Nobody is going to successfully be able to sue you, because you downloaded their publicly accessible work, and learn from it, actually.
If you release your creative works, for people to consume, and people consume it, then they are similarly allowed to learn from it.
For the most part it's covered by contracts, terms, agreements, laws, and so on. Except where it doesn't really matter.
Ai is software. Data models are software. It's output is a product.
Actually, its mostly covered by the "laws" part, and the laws allow people to use other people work, all of the time, even if the person doesn't want you to use and, and there was no agreement to allow it.
That is what I am saying. I am saying that it is legal, in all sorts of situations, to use other people's work even if they object/don't want you to.
No, actually there are many situations where the terms and conditions can be completely ignored, and people can use other people's works without permission, or without caring about the terms and conditions.
> They are more than welcome to use content within their constraints.
No, they can ignore the constraints, because the law allows people to use other people's works, without getting permission, and without following the constraints of the original creator.
> The people that build data models are required to follow laws
The point is that the law allows people to ignore the wishes of the original creators, and use their creative work, in many situations, while ignoring what the original creators want or has authorized.
That's how people comparing ai to humans sound.
- Entirely remove intellectual property protection granted by copyright,
- Music is freely copiable. Not like we’re making much money with it anymore.
- Software is free by default. Use SAAS if you don’t want to give away your IP. Did you disclose your code? Too bad, ideas can’t be prevented from being copied.
- No more patent trolls. Find another way to fund drug research.
- AI can train on anything. We make a big leap forward.
What a lot of AI folks don't understand is that the joy is frequently in the process itself, very seldom in the outcome/result of a process.
That's fine if you prefer that.
But other people prefer a different process (such as using AI), and that's totally OK.