It's sad seeing peers become luddites over AI. It's never been the right side of history to be on.
But it’s not AI that’s making me shift my views. It’s the mess of unresolved problems brought about by the last major generation of tech that gives me pause. Tech that is causing real harms. We still haven’t figured out how to survive the algorithmic social media hellscape we created, and now we’re hurtling towards opening more boxes that would make Pandora proud.
The recent AI explosion has crystallized this view, but did not cause it. My personal view is that tech is nearing some of the very dangerous end points that we’ve only been able to speculate about throughout most of human history.
The atomic bomb completely changed warfare. There are developments past which all old mental models no longer apply. Reducing this to “sides” is a distraction.
I still think technology is part of the solution to the world’s future problems, including the ones brought about by “AI”, but I think it’s foolish to downplay or oversimplify the concerns.
Take the atomic bomb for example: it pretty much ended large scale industrial warfare on the level of the world wars. There are still wars but not ones in which entire continents are destroyed and entire generations across dozens of countries are lost. All things told the nuclear bomb saved the world a lot of suffering.
For the most part I tend to think of social media such as facebook etc as something that will soon be used mostly by out touch old people and hobbyists participating in hobby groups. All things told social media has probably helped the world more than harmed despite enabling Google and others to get filthy rich off private data, in the long term I suspect it will be a flash in the pan caused by the newness of seemless online communication.
Yet. Nuclear weapons are an existential threat and may yet destroy human civilization. We've come very close many times already to starting a nuclear war and we're all basically lucky to be alive. Pour one out for Stanislav Petrov and take a look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls
One of the only reasons MAD has held up is because we've successfully restricted the reach of nuclear weapons, i.e. if every country that wanted them could get them, the average person would have a lot more reasons to be paranoid.
It wasn't always this way. The early Internet was a very different place. I credit some of those early communities with helping me escape a complicated childhood. But that Internet no longer exists, and it hasn't for quite some time. So while I'm willing to agree that social media has provided quite a bit of benefit, I don't believe it continues to do so, nor will it until people categorically reject the current generation of social sites and their business models. This is to say nothing of the privacy and data harvesting issues inherent to these sites in 2024, which by themselves are a threat to democracy when you factor in the overreach we already know is occurring by our governments.
Regarding AI, I think there's a very real concern about social upheaval as entire categories of work are eliminated if not introduced with care. I think it's deeply concerning that fewer and fewer people will prioritize the cultivation of first hand expertise and instead opt to just let various AIs handle things. I think it will lead to the further erosion of independent thought, and to a future where fewer and fewer people know how to reason about things.
The misinformation landscape will be changed forever. People will/are already starting to worship AIs. AIs will be constructed that know how to radicalize people more effectively than any YouTube algorithm ever could. AIs will be implemented as experts (this is already happening now), and we will increasingly defer to these "experts" for critical decisions despite their flaws/biases.
> in the long term I suspect it will be a flash in the pan caused by the newness of seemless online communication
I hope you're right, but this also seems like a very optimistic take. Seamless online communication is here to stay, but we still know very little about the long term impact of this kind of communication ability on humans. The group dynamics in play when our brains evolved look nothing like the group dynamics enabled by this kind of tech.
I should say I don't necessarily think we'll see the worst of every one of these concerns come to fruition, i.e. I'm not just an AI doomer, but I also expect we'll encounter issues we haven't thought about yet, and that the societal impact of even just a subset of these issues could be immense.
Luddites weren't fighting against technology as such, they were fighting against the negative effects it had: factory owners treating workers in ways that would net you many years in prison today.
And it's the same with AI; people generally don't hate the concept as such, they oppose or are concerned with the effects it has or might have. You can disagree with that, that's fine and by all means let's have that discussion! But you can't just brush people aside as "Luddites", as if that's somehow an argument, because it's not.
There's a difference between staying out from under boot and laissez-faire letting a new tech harm your people. The analogy that comes to mind is weapons research: if weapons were regularly tested on civilians to accelerate the R&D, and to enrich huge corporations, yeah, don't call us luddites for being unhappy about it
Eventually, it's going to be the end of humans being able to work in the arts. That's horrific. The most valuable part of the arts isn't consumption, it's the joy of production, subsidized by sales and consumption--and that's going to be gone
Maybe if they trained OpenAI on Microsoft's internal code, or if """Open"""AI released their own source code for free, or anything of the sort maybe less people would be so skeptical, but to anyone without a vested interest in these AI tools it's obvious that they're playing the game of steal everyone else's data without their own data falling into everyone else's hands. After all, if they're so confident these models are safe and won't reproduce Your (the royal You) intellectual property verbatim, why aren't they feeding the Windows internal code to it? Why is it they want everyone else's data, when they have so much of their own?
Many people publish their software under the GPL because they want to enforce that their work remains open and free for everyone. ChatGPT slurping up the source and emitting something based on it, that is then used in a non-free project makes it impossible to guarantee that your work will remain free.
I personally would be ok with my source code being trained on and used as long as the output from the AI is used within the rules of the license I choose.
It would also be a little different if we could train our own "AI", or if ChatGPT and friends were trained on something like Windows source code and the rest of the non-free code on Github. At least then it would be easier to believe that it's actually ok to slurp up code without respecting the license.
The GPL was designed specifically so that you could publish source code without the license being stripped from it by somebody else, that it will remain free no matter who or what uses it or derives from it. Giving the ability to strip the GPL from software as seen fit is something that should be scary and considered very deeply before thinking that it's ok.
They wouldn't, and that's the issue. If I looked at a thousand drawings done in a certain, specific style and used my findings to make my own unique product in that same style, you'd be hard-pressed to find any reasonable people who'd accuse me of plagiarism.
Not to mention that this flavor of "profiting" is something we've been seemingly fine with until specifically generative AI came about. Google profits off of your content directly by using their machine learning algorithms to scrape your website and use its contents in search results, next to their ads. It was found legal, so why should generative AI pay a fee?
Clean room reverse engineering is a thing that exists exactly for this reason but it doesn't seem to apply to "AI".
Also "AI" is not a human, and there is no proof that it "learns like humans". or that it should be even compared to humans in any way, so none of this matters anyways.
It already is. The Windows source code is proprietary data, having unauthorized access to it is already disallowed. You already can't legally use proprietary or pirated data in AI training for the same reasons why you can't use it anywhere else. But this conversation is about the use of publicly posted information that's already out on the internet. It's the equivalent of Microsoft openly publishing the MS-DOS source code and then suing people for viewing it and potentially getting ideas from it.
> Also "AI" is not a human, and there is no proof that it "learns like humans". or that it should be even compared to humans in any way, so none of this matters anyways.
It makes absolutely no sense that a ruling would apply to automation and not humans. If I can legally do a thing myself, can you come up with an argument why I can't build a machine that does that thing for me? The only exception that I can think of is cases where human health and safety is at stake, which is an edge case that doesn't apply to generating text or images.
This is a common fallacy, that having access to the source gives you the legal right to do what you want with it, and that is not correct. The license must be followed regardless of whether it's accessible to the public.
Having access to or viewing Windows source code and pirated content isn't disallowed. The thing that isn't allowed is copying it. That's what copyright laws are about.
The same laws that make it illegal to copy Windows source code are exactly what the GPL are based on, copyright laws.
So why do copyright laws only apply to one side here?
I think there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about how copyright and software licenses work here. Windows is able to state that the Windows source code is proprietary because it is their IP, my software is also my IP, so my terms must also be followed in order to legally use my software.
>can't legally use proprietary or pirated data in AI training for the same reasons why you can't use it anywhere else.
This is the same reason why you can't use GPL code in proprietary projects!
The mechanisms that allow something to be proprietary are the same mechanisms that the GPL are based on, this is why it's sometimes called "copyleft".
This isn't what the conversation was about. You started out by drawing comparisons to seeing limited-access information and clean-room reverse engineering, but what you're saying now is drastically different. Do you concede the original point? And yes, just having public access to information doesn't mean that you can do anything with it, but it contradicts the point you made originally.
Besides, the way you describe licensing here makes it sound like the licensee can just ask for anything and everyone will be obligated to follow the rules. This is the crux of the argument, because copyright law has bounds and it only gives authors specific privileges, not a right to dictate anything they like. Seeing past precedent on use cases that are similar to AI, it's not unreasonable to expect restrictions on AI use to not be legally actionable - in the same way how I can't write a license to forbid my hypothetical book from being lent in libraries, or how I can't charge you $100 for reading this comment by adding fine print in the end - a court won't enforce it.
> Having access to or viewing Windows source code and pirated content isn't disallowed. The thing that isn't allowed is copying it. That's what copyright laws are about.
What? No, there are definitely situations in which you don't have to outright copy something to get into trouble. Source code for proprietary software can be legally treated as a trade secret, which gives it a lot of "forbidden knowledge"-type protections that don't require copying.
> my software is also my IP, so my terms must also be followed in order to legally use my software
Again, I'm not arguing against this, there's no double standard in that big corps can have IP, but you can't. Refer to the beginning of my post - the argument isn't whether you can have a license, but whether a licensee can ask people to not use their publicly available work in AI and have it be actionable. This isn't settled law, but you also can't just ask for anything you want in your license and have a court actually uphold it.
> This is the same reason why you can't use GPL code in proprietary projects!
Copying code wholesale from a GPL project is different from having that data be present in a dataset, thereby creating a barely noticeable influence on the production of new content by the algorithm. All this applies very cleanly to direct copying, but with AI, it gets a lot more complicated.
The whole anti-AI self-righteous craze will die down soon enough (as will the "feel the AGI" craze) and Transformer models will be just another tool in the toolbox
Again AI doesnt have any of these hallmarks
This AI wave of which we speak may be slightly different in that it has already proven to solve a certain class of problems, while I'm not sure cryptocurrencies ended up solving any problems in the end, but they both share a similar hallmark of people believing that early promise will lead to complete game changes in the coming years.
That is quite ripe for scams to take hold. It would hardly be the first time where we saw some incremental progress in AI, only to see it stall out and interest wane, but with the grifters trying to latch onto the early hype, convincing others that they have something magical to offer.
It still seems like the whole AI hype is absolutely overblown just as much as the cynical anti-AI hype which I frankly see more of. I really do think it will all die down, we will have another tool in the toolbox and maybe down the road at some point that tool will be instrumental in another hypeworthy breakthrough but whos to say.
It is likely that these tools can make most everyone a programmer, like how improved elevator designs has made everyone an elevator operator. But how game changing is that, really? Tools like Excel have already made great strides in that direction, and with coding now standard fare in public school curriculums, everyone being a programmer is a game already well underway.
Basically - the things you brought up were largely spawned from existing technologies and have very dubious use cases outside of extracting money. AI is neither - it's obviously not a monetary scam as a category, and it has lots of uses by itself.