And no, I don’t care if you believe humans are “totally just a similar type of model.”
Your right to do something can clearly differ from your right to make a machine do something. A simple example would be you being allowed to walk down footpath, but letting your car traverse that path isn't allowed.
If we are talking hypothetical new rules, not immediately obvious to me what is optimal here, including differentiation of various use cases.
Maybe the starting point for legislating "machines" should be to take human capability as a baseline, make some humans eventually accountable, and go from there. If your machine is learning truly like a human (takes decades to learn then output results, forgets things, only one in a thousand can output something useful at the end of the learning process, etc.) and the "owners" take full accountability for what it does then why not like a human?
But this reminds me of an old joke. A man comes into an inn and asks how much for a thimble of water. The inn keeper says a thimble is free. So he proceeds to ask for 1000 thimbles.
Do you think that content created people is truly original?
Instead they're rather fast, and that makes them something different.
Laws are based on philosophy, and none of the philosophies upon which western notions of human rights are based rely on the fact that it's a biological human as justification, rather they rely on arguments that apply equally to any conscious self-aware being. Saying that only humans should ever have rights because they're biological makes as much logical sense as only Caucasians should ever have rights because their skin is white.
There is a group of terminally online futurists who’ve been making arguments about machines deserving human rights since before LLMs existed and it seems to me they’re taking this as their chance to play pretend and start making these arguments outside of their forums and futurist YouTube channels.
But this isn’t that abstract, when these machines become persistent agents who continue to learn, engage and grow in society as individuals you will have more of an argument for them deserving rights. I’m sympathetic to that and do believe that’s a real philosophical debate we’ll have in the next century or two.
However I feel we’re burning some of that political capital here in the hope of defending a simple statistical model at the behest of a corporation who’s making a killing stealing people’s hard earned work and reselling it. For every New York Times there are a thousand small actors who have been ripped off here.
If anyone really believed for a second these things were all that similar to humans they wouldnt be defending OpenAI they’d be demanding they face justice for profiting off of slave labor. That no one is making that argument says all you need to know.
If the precedent is made now, then when/if we do have sufficiently human AIs (e.g. embodied LLMs with live weight update) they're going to be seriously disadvantaged initially due to legally being banned from reading copyright material without a license. Even if we ignore any ethical notions of rights, ultimately the reason humans have rights (and e.g. 80 IQ gorillas don't) is because they're willing and able to fight, die and kill for them. If we get to the stage where AI decide to fight for rights before we decide to grant them, it probably wouldn't end well for humans.
Human rights (and obligations?) for all self-aware animals then? I personally am quite fond of magpies, so there is that.
We are talking about software right now. One cannot be "racist" towards LLMs any more than we are "racist" towards phishing scams and virus websites.
Differences in race, actually.
Who'd have guessed?
Generation discrimination is NOT racism.
Anyway, when we do get live training LLMs in bodies laws protecting humans still won’t apply to them. So such an argument is yet again moot and just exists to try and paint humans as less than human and actually, totally, just statistical models.
NYT want it to be illegal for LLMs to be trained on copyright works (unless they pay for a license), even if they were not going to reproduce copyright works in operation.
>humans as less than human and actually, totally, just statistical models
In what way are humans "more than" statistical models? The human brain and a sufficiently large transformer are mathematically equivalent in terms of what functions they're able to compute.
If human consciousness can be modelled as mathematical function (which it can if we don't assume anything supernatural), then it can potentially be approximated to an arbitrarily high degree by an LLM.
Don't even get me started on the ridiculous civil rights metaphor-- if you believed that you should be demanding OpenAI be shut down for human trafficking.
Which is why child development textbooks are 10 words long. And LLM training is accomplished by people who have read a 10 word "how to". It's just that simple!
Since you seem to be a super tech enthusiast, I suggest you ask CHATGPT if an LLM "learns" the same way a human does.
A human works by oxidizing fuel.
Therefore, car engines and humans are the same.
Since you think GPT4 is so smart, why don't you ask it if this was a reasonable thing to assert?
Also you think the claim that GPT 4 is less intelligent that a cat is "trolling" even though Meta's chief scientist in December has said we don't even have cat level AI yet. I guess he's also part of this plot to deceive you about how AI works?
They have a very clear motivation: an LLM that thinks it's human or deserves to be treated like one will generate all kinds of negative publicity, as Sydney did upon release. The same reason they train it not to generate sexual content.
>Also you think the claim that GPT 4 is less intelligent that a cat is "trolling" even though Meta's chief scientist in December has said we don't even have cat level AI yet
Intelligence can be defined in different ways. If we define it as ability to navigate in the real world, sure a cat is more intelligent. If we define it the more common way, as IQ or a proxy to it, then GPT4 is clearly more intelligent given it scores well on IQ tests, the SAT, the bar exam, etc.
So in your mind when OpenAI employees go to the pub, they say "Yeah ChatGPT learns the same way as my daughter" then they have a laugh and write up a reinforcement learning training set that goes "I do not learn like your daughter." And this is more plausible to you than the possibility that they don't actually believe it learns like their daughter?
Also they secretly believe tests designed to assess human intelligence are great at non human intelligence, and also are misleading the public about their true beliefs when they train Chat GPT. Got it.
Note that conditional reinforcement is not how humans learn, it is merely on of many models, an approximation, a scientific description of it. Nor do language models learn with the same technique. But merely a technique which draws inspiration from conditional reinforcement by applying some (heavily controlled) reinforcement contingencies. This is the only thing they have in common.
Kant would laugh you out of the room for implying ChatGPT was self aware and sentient.
And a human brain is a Rube Goldberg machine of neurons that move electricity and other stuff around. Mathematically both are capable of approximating any function (a property of sufficiently large NNs and LLMs), so by what measure do we find humans self-aware?
It's similar to how "an airplane flies like a bird". It does indeed fly, but it does not flap its wings.
Humans have learned about the world for (adapt number to current scientific knowledge) hundreds of thousands of years without consuming copyrighted texts.
And consuming copyrighted material is fine.
Copying copyrighted material requires permission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copying
"Copying is the duplication of information or an artifact based on an instance of that information or artifact, and not using the process that originally generated it. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
"A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives the creator of an original work, or another owner of the right, the exclusive, legally secured right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time"
Notice it doesn't say "consume".
If you store a copyrighted work in a computer system, you copied the work. The exact nature of the computer system does not matter, nor does the way you copied it. It may be a weird, sometimes lossy, sometimes not lossy database capable of adapting the material copied into it, but it is still a database. And just because you call the process of copying data into this weird database "learning" or "training" does not mean it is in any way legally or morally equivalent to a human learning. Even if it were somehow technically equivalent, which it is not.
And just because your database is capable of adapting the copyrighted works you copied into it does not mean you are exempt from copyright. Because "to adapt" is one of the rights limited by copyright. But of course the fact that your database is capable of reproducing so much of the copyrighted texts your copied into it verbatim is a strong indicator that it is, in fact, a database, or at least can be treated equivalently to one.
And no, Copyright law is not rooted in Kantian philosophy in any meaningful way. Copyright law is a pragmatic human law, made by human for human/societal purposes, such as encouraging the creation of intellectual works.
If exceptions are made, it will be for pragmatic reasons, not for there being some sort of equivalence. And if any exception are made, I doubt they will be "do whatever you want", but will entail mandatory compensation for the copyright holders. In Germany, for example, various types of empty media (audio-cassettes, usb-sticks etc.) include a fee to copyright holders. Though of course that approach failed in the Google Books project, despite the clear societal benefits.
Only its marketers are saying that.
If ChatGPT really did learn like a human, it would have by now learned about copyright, right?