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Comment by bitzun | Hacker News Reader

NYT's ask and my own are never going to happen, but I think forcing the models to be public domain would be the best outcome. It was trained on the creative output of a substantial portion of everyone online going back decades, including my own.

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I think royalty and licensing fees are more likely. Some formula will be invented to calculate the value of the training data, and model makers will have to pay that out. But that only works for people with the ability to leverage the legal system. The rest of us will get told to pound sand.

NYT and similar publishers are just looking for a new income stream. Rent seeking in the new AI age will probably be more profitable than producing new content.

I don't mind if there's a little piece of me somewhere in that model!

Me neither, as long as I get to own it along with everyone else!

Speak for yourself. People who make their living in (actually) creative fields don’t have the luxury. We’ll see how all the brogrammers feel about industrial scale plagiarism 5 years from now when Gen AI models code better than any human.

Isn’t this the case already with the Industrial Revolution where we began mass-producing (mostly) better day-to-day utility items rather than getting from a specific craftsman?

I’d think that the clothing industry went through something similar already.

I'm in an "(actually) creative" field, not a brogrammer, 20 years of writing code, and have a vastly different opinion than you do.

I've been writing code professionally for about 45 years now. People have cribbed my code and ideas since the beginning. At some point, I just stopped caring about it.

I no longer sell code, just my services.

I did have one case where someone stole my code, and then tried to sue me for copyright infringement. Too bad for him that I had a registered copyright on it :-)

As do many “creatives” who don’t understand the technology, much less the endgame of those who will control it.

Sorry do we know each other? I understand the technology fine.

No, just noting that you are in good company.

I think a substantial number of us don’t care or are happy to see it. It’s just another level of abstraction to work with. I think some artists feel the same although I understand those who don’t.

Presumably the "brogrammer" will still be the one feeding data into the model and stitching together the code it produces, vetting it, and deploying it because it is going to be massively more effective to have him do it vs the manager whose area of expertise is managing people and finance.

This will drastically increase the total output of all the "brogrammers" maybe even enough to replace some of the spagetti code out there with more reliable work.

Human progress has always been about building upon and extending the work of others.

Besides, AI only produces a sort of "average" of what is already out there. Is it really creative work to produce an equivalent of that average?

I remember when the "typing pool" was a thing. Word processors utterly destroyed that category of work, as well as the jobs for typesetting and layout, back in the 1980s.

I would argue that the analogy rests on an incomplete consideration of the dimensions of the matter. Such tools amplified a worker’s inherent utility. The name given to the new tool reflects its nature: processor of words. Whose words? The typist. “Other peoples’ words processor” vs “word processor”.

More generally, AI introduces yet another systemic mechanism for wealth extraction by the wealthy. The wealth here is creative power of the !wealthy. More sinister than the grand larceny by a thousand minor borrowings is the fact that meaning, ideals, motivating energy to move masses is taken away from the candidate pool — anyone of us can be the next demagogue, it’s not too late yet — which may include genuine thought leaders are going to be buried by the electric demagogue working for the proverbial man. “We need to hire more copyrighters for our propaganda using these ‘word processors’” becomes “Who could resist the onslaught of “our” creative efforts? Surrender now Dorothy.”

tldr:

Humanity has reached the absolute limit of the utility of ancient means of governance. New technology demands that we comprehensively review socio-economic order in society. Failure to do so will gift the current “winning” players in the ‘zero-sum-game’ of the du jour regime near guarantee of perpetual habitation in their very very special social perch.

“Think of the children”

In the 1800's Germany started behind Britain and raced ahead of it in industrial might. One factor in this was Germany did not recognize copyrights. Printers went looking for something, anything, to print and printed up a storm of technical literature that enabled this rapid industrialization and the increase in wealth of its ordinary citizens.

Bless you Walter, you are a positive man. Let’s “hope” so buddy.

The typing pool converting one format to another is not equivalent. It’s more like the demise of administrative support professionals. That work just got shifted to the people they used to work for because it was now supposedly “easier” to manage themselves with more advanced information technology. Which is why we all have to waste massive amounts of time figuring out our HR stuff, arranging work travel, etc.

> I think forcing the models to be public domain would be the best outcome.

I would seriously consider to take it even further. Require that all copyrighted material be made available for public model training.

This is nitpicky, but that includes the diary you keep under your bed. You probably mean something closer to "published".

The kulaks shouldn't be hoarding that grain. I think forcing the surplus to be public would be the best outcome.

I'm not sure the analogy really fits. As I see it, hypothetical farmers aren't an elite class that gets rich from copying and transforming the communications and creative output of billions(?) of unknowing people.

The Bolsheviks would beg to differ on whether the kulaks were an elite class.

When LLMs reproduce someone else's work, it is theft and appropriation, and our tech culture is rationalizing it out of hatred of the laptop class -- the kulaks, in my analogy. These traditional media do have their faults, and it's fine to point those out. But reporting is work, consisting of more than just "copying and transforming", and stealing it is wrong. "[F]orcing" it into the public domain is no more a "best outcome" than forcing the farms to collectivize.

There's a trivial solution here. Stick all the NYT's still-in-copyright text in a big database. Every time the chatbot produces a paragraph, check it against the NYT-censor. If it's more than 70% similar to anything in the database (mythical 30% rule), have the chatbot rephrase it. Thus, the chatbot is no longer reproducing someone else's work.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that solution wouldn't be acceptable to the NYT, which is why I think they're trying for a land grab. They're trying to extend copyright beyond what was intended.

I would go one step further. retrain without any NYT data and any references to the NYT. As afar as any LLM user is concerned, NYT would not exist.

I understand what you're saying now, my comment was pretty flippant in retrospect. I didn't mean to devalue the NYT's work, my suggestion was hypothetically intended to liberate the free moat OpenAI got from the fruit's of NYT's labor. In retrospect it's obvious that putting GPT's model in the public domain is also putting NYT's work in the public domain, but that hadn't occurred to me. Thanks for the food for thought. Now I kind of like the idea of destroying the existing models if a royalty system can't be figured out, sort of a "reset" to force them to do it properly.

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