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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

To me that’s the wrong question.

Everyone knew it was trained on copyrighted material and capable of eerily similar outputs.

But it’s already done. At scale. Large corps committing fully. There is no chance of that toothpaste going back in the tube.

It’s a bit like when big tech built on aggressive user data harvesting. Whether it’s right, ethical or even legal is academic at this stage. They just did it - effectively without any real informed consent by society. Same thing here - 9 out of 10 people on street won’t be able to tell you how AI is made let alone comment on copyright.

So the right question here is what now. And I suspect much like tracking the answer will be - not much.

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> There is no chance of that toothpaste going back in the tube.

I disagree - we've been here before. The same could be said of many technologies, like cheap music recording/manufacture. You can record an artist once and make records at scale. However no one would think you could record Taylor Swift once and make unlimited copies without paying her.

You should read up on the musicians strike of 1942. [0]

[0[ https://jacobin.com/2022/03/1940s-musicians-strike-american-...

This comment is ignorant of history

It happened with Napster, then Apple Music, now streaming services

There is no widespread file sharing in the general public, instead we have devices that we don’t own, and streaming subscriptions

Apple didn’t just copy all the music onto iPods and sell it — it took them a decade of deal making and lots of money to acquire the rights to the content

I’m not saying what’s right or wrong, just saying that this comment has very little understanding of these battles

The difference is the comment was about large corps. Napster wasn't that.

> Apple didn’t just copy all the music onto iPods and sell it — it took them a decade of deal making and lots of money to acquire the rights to the content

I recaly iPod being a hard drive that I could connect to a computer and just copy music directly to.

Pretty sure it was never like that, it was always gated by iTunes.

It was an integrated system, not an open one.

Definitely is today. It's difficult to copy mp3 files directly to an iPhone and play them. Even from a Mac, but even more so from a PC or Linux.

I bet less than 1% of iPhone and iPad users do that. They mostly pay for streaming. (Again, not saying that's better, but just that the general public doesn't do Napster-like file sharing.)

> Pretty sure it was never like that, it was always gated by iTunes.

Then you need to recalibrate your certainty assessment. Not only did I do this personally with both music and videos, it is incredibly easy to find documentation of the steps. First google result: https://www.alphr.com/add-music-to-ipod-without-itunes/

Apple's ipod sales absolutely benefited significantly from music piracy. Especially early on when nobody hard large itunes collections yet and music torrents were much more common.

The genius of the ipod / itunes play is that they got to do both. They benefited from the demand from people with non-itunes libraries, while also offering a low friction sales platform that was easier than piracy.

I looked through the instructions

I guess I'll just say "meh" -- it doesn't negate the main point, which is that Apple spent a lot of money and time to acquire rights, and they have a music store.

It is gated by iTunes, just not 100%

I know some people side load stuff on devices -- there's no device where that's impossible.

You just can't admit being wrong huh?

The ipod was launched two years before the itunes store. Even after the itunes store launched, you could just still load your other music into itunes if you wanted. All music was sideloaded (i.e transfered directly over USB) onto ipods at this point

You don't seem to know any of this history and are just making things up. I don't think Apple had to pay any money for the right to sell music via the iTunes store. What they did do was add DRM to music sold through the store, at least until they were big enough to renegotiate in 2009.

I had an iPod filled with music that I ripped from CDs and downloaded. It was absolutely a thing.

> It is gated by iTunes, just not 100%

I bought an iPod Mini in '04 that I used for a summer photography course as an external hard drive. An actual external hard drive would have been cheaper, but after my summer trip was over and I no longer needed the additional storage space — hey, I had an iPod Mini! I copied photos onto it from a CF card via USB. It was literally drag and drop. There was no iTunes gating. You're just... wrong here.

Considering that buying 'licensed' copies of Hollywood movies and Billboard chart music is possible in maybe 10-20% of the world, I can guarantee that pirated consumption (bootleg CD-Rs and DVDs, but also 'alternative' streaming sites) outnumbers 'licensed' sales for most successful films. And it's 'licensed', as opposed to 'legal', because a large proportion of the world doesn't really care about American copyright.

I've was never willing to riot over Napster - this is different.

This is one of the substantial jumps, I refuse to be cut out of this innovation.

Seriously, use Bing, try your free Photos built in generation system, they are rolling out GPT built into Word. Microsoft is easily the advanced tech company right now, as far what services can be provided to a consumer at scale. This is still like the alpha phase of all this. Apparently I talk to Copilot soon - that levels that up so much and it's already the best assistant I've ever had.

This is equivalent to trying to keep us all off smartphones and stuck on dumb phones I guess - I think you get what mean.

The NYT decided for all of us, the new smartphone equivalent thing is bad and we can't have it... that is something I'll riot over.

Just now I asked Copilot why my keyboard RGB lights were turned off every time I opened a game, that's almost verbatim - it told me exactly where to go and exactly what to turn off, took about 10 seconds to entirely search and correct the problem.

That's a really eloquent way of saying "It's already happening, so give up on it." I'm sure it works out great for taking action and solving problems.

It's already happening and most people like having AI more than the DMCA. Selling people on the idea that ML training is piracy to people who on average pirate content with no moral quandary will go nowhere.

Exactly. People don’t like the DMCA at all. People would be happier in a world with very few IP restrictions at all.

But businesses do like it, and profits are what drive these legal decisions. This will always be the case as long as money is more important than humans in politics.

People liked having Napster, but it didn't stop file sharing going from a big mainstream app to underground sites run out of Russia (or other places that ignore copyright law). Sure, you can download music/movies still, but it's not like the Napster days.

"Generative AI" is obviously copyright infringement, so owners of the copyright will win in court. Either Microsoft will have to fight a mass of legal cases, some with very deep pockets themselves, or ChatGPT will be crippled for public use.

The un-crippled models will exist if you know where to look (and have the hardware), but using them for anything apart from hobby projects would be a legal risk.

Certain specific tools may be easier to deal with from a legal standpoint, like code completion maybe. Or models for a specific purpose, like training on a law firm's case history.

It looks like Adobe has the right idea with their image generation that is trained on images which they know they have the rights to use.

> "Generative AI" is obviously copyright infringement

You're saying this as a matter of fact when it's not clear at all. We'll see what happens with the NYT case because it touches on all the major points.

It's gonna call into question all web scraping and indexing because they're also distillations of copyrighted content in the same manner.

Everything you said right here is entirely accurate.

> It looks like Adobe has the right idea with their image generation that is trained on images which they know they have the rights to use.

The C2PA includes Microsoft as one of the alliance members [0]. Microsoft knows that there is a way of tracing the outputs of the generated source images which is with the C2PA standard.

The fact that many AI proponents and their companies don't do this tells us that they are uncooperative and not very transparent in how they train their own AI systems despite having the experts to do so.

It's not that hard to disclose the training data. What else are they hiding?

[0] https://c2pa.org/

>People liked having Napster, but it didn't stop file sharing going from a big mainstream app to underground sites run out of Russia (or other places that ignore copyright law). Sure, you can download music/movies still, but it's not like the Napster days.

Definitely, but that's not because as society we managed to put an end to piracy. It's because people are just not as interested as they were before. Piracy networks for media are alive and well, I'd even say that some are in the best shape they've ever been.

Isn't this what most of the world is saying to environmental activists who argue that we should go back to pre-industrial levels of production to "save the Earth"?

I for one think that indeed there are many cases like this where the only feasible way out is forward. The film GATTACA expressed this very human sentiment well:

> You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back.

Which environmental activists are saying that? That's a pretty specific claim.

Thankfully not that many these days, but it was a core element of Ted Kaczynski's (The Unabomber) manifesto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Fut...

> "It's already happening, so give up on it." I'm sure it works out great for taking action and solving problems.

It's an observation & prediction, not a problem solving attempt...

So you're saying this is a fait accompli. Like many great innovations in tech, break the law because the law is silly; remember when Uber and AirBnB were illegal in most major cities and achieved market dominance anyway?

I say, good riddance. I never believed in any such thing as "intellectual property" anyway, I say, get rid of it all, patents, copyright, and the whole pile of imaginary "rights". More than half the world (i.e. the Global South) don't recognize these rights anyway, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to enforce it without draconian legal overreach and monopolistic centralization.

this comment has already aged poorly because cities are starting to push airbnbs out and taxi usage is at least somewhat up

> taxi usage is at least somewhat up

When's the last time you phoned an operator to book a taxi? If taxis are doing better, it's only because they learned from Uber (and the likes) what the job-to-be-done actually is.

Mytaxi (freenow) was founded the same year as Uber.

I'm unclear what your point is, weren't mytaxi an "outsider" startup like Uber too, rather than being organized by the taxi companies?

Or they can be forced to destroy or retrain their models without any copyright materials for which they don't have or do not now attain licenses for. These are multi-billion/trillion dollar companies. They can afford to be responsible members of society here, however much their shareholders and C-suite might hate it.

Those weights are never coming out of the BitTorrent network though.

This. The models are out there. Maybe they will just be illicitly shared but even if no new models are trained from scratch I suspect there will be many ways to use extend existing models without going back to scraped images.

I always felt that we already had a solution - I can already get all those images from a web search. Where the law currently intervenes is when I try and distribute works based on close copies of them. Why is this insufficient?

Sure. And neither are mp3s of the same songs that were blowing up on Napster.

The existence of widespread illegal means to procure something doesn't mean that we don't and shouldn't require legitimate businesses to abide by the law or require them to make amends for their current transgressions.

>Or they can be forced to destroy or retrain their models

Perhaps.

The media industries have been quite successful in going after kids torrenting movies.

I suspect they'll have less luck going after big tech & an industry drowning in money inflows.

Keep in mind various large techs have already issued blanket indemnities on infringement to their customers. They're absolutely committed & are gonna throw enough lawyers at this to keep everyone busy until 2030.

>They can afford to be responsible members of society here

oh absolutely agree, but they're not going to do that. This is an industry built on questionable practices like tracking after all

making sure that a dataset is clean and not full of material that's improperly sourced, copyrighted, unfit for use due to licensing or ethics, is not nearly hard enough nor "impossible" for it to be a situation where people should just "give up".

and yes, while open source models might be harder to regulate, those big corporations that currently use those things without distinction, exist as pretty established entities, and profit from services they offer in millions of dollars. there's more of a substantial existence, and more of a substantial scale of money they actually move. and they don't just "make a tool available", or have users do unambiguous actions where it would be the users that are infringing on anything, but do indeed use questionably sourced data and turn that into a model and offer that as a service. dirty data is very much a part of the deal with those.

You’re right, we should all just give up at the first hurdle, because “they’ve” already gotten away with it, hell, let’s just feed our children to the machine and elect openAI as the rulers of the world, after all, they’ve already succeeded, so we should just give up entirely. Definitely a good attitude to take.

Napster hit scale too.

And that tech was not destroyed by regulation. It was replaced by the superior tech of torrents.

The company, however, was destroyed. Along with any possibility for a similar company to exist (for very long).

Good. Truly powerful ideas do not need to be an appendage of a corporation in order to succeed.

https://www.napster.com/us/

Napster was for sharing mp3s.

Torrents are not better at sharing mp3s.

F500 companies didn't integrate Napster into their software and data stacks left and right.

Data is dynamic. Ok for old data. What about new data?

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