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Comment by gumballindie | Hacker News Reader

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Physical property is a consequence of the laws of physics. If I have a gold coin in my hand, then you don't have that gold coin in your hand. If you want the coin then you can either trade for it or fight me, but either way only one of us can have the coin. Even a bird with a worm knows a concept of physical property.

Copyright is something that was invented relatively recently, a few hundred years ago, because of a new technology back then: the printing press. Before the printing press there was no need for copyright.

Now today we again have a new technology in neural networks, and it's entirely possible that the realities of this technology push us back in the other direction, undoing what the printing press did.

The world you describe is that which turned former communist countries in the underdeveloped entities they are today. By not respecting people’s right to own property you disincentivise them from adding value. The printing press analogy is relevant. Similar to how we made rules on how that tool can be used we now need rules in how to protect people’s creations from being taken away by force using ai. Physical property rules are not the result of “physics”. Are the result of evolving beyond the savagery of taking that which doesnt belong to you by force. If it wasnt protected by law it would be protected by the sword. I get that some people would prefer that type of living but by and large civilised humans dont.

> Physical property is a consequence of the laws of physics. If I have a gold coin in my hand, then you don't have that gold coin in your hand.

So do you believe people should only be able to own real estate that they are currently physically occupying? By your reasoning, no one could ever own a piece of land larger than what they were currently standing or lying on. So no one could own land. So abolition of all property rights, essentially.

I'm hella down for this, but then we should also be able to walk into the OpenAI offices and inspect their source code, cause that shit won't fit in any one hand afaik.

This is incredibly naive misunderstanding of how property rights work: they are 100% a social and conceptual construct. IANAL, but I believe you are confusing property with possession.

But, yeah. I'm down: no one can own anything that isn't currently in their hand. Let's go liberate a lot of fake property that is "owned" in violation of the laws of physics!

and more than that: even if we would agree that works should not be protected, we're currently in a highly-asymmetrical position where big players like Microsoft can take people's hard work but give nothing back. The only way to survive under a copyright regime is viral licensing.

You probably didn't mean to, but implying that's how the whole of humanity works is a bit out there.

It's the local rules (geographically and temporally), sure. But rules can be changed.

Sure, for reasonable copyright terms. Currently, if you create something when you’re young and live long, a 150 year long copyright term is reasonably possible. (Life + 70 years)

Much as I appreciate someone’s rights to their work, things should enter the public domain in something more like 10 to 20 years. Even then, copyright protections are too strong when in force. You published something so people would use it, your ability to limit how should be quite restricted to protecting you from folks selling it as their own. I am also in favor of forced standard licensing terms.

Like say after five years there should be a standard streaming licensing fee for films and shows such that anyone can broadcast/stream/sell copies for a flat rate.

We also have to consider the cost of enforcement. We can’t be soaking up millions and billions of taxpayer dollars to protect copyrights or field complaints that aim to protect mutated copies of said works…just like you don’t send a swat team to enforce parking tickets, we have to consider what is at loss for the New York Times or other copyright holders before clogging up the courts.

There’s a reason lawyers are so quick to file a suit and it’s because it cost nothing to sic the dogs of the American justice system on others.

Kim Dotcom’s adventure calmed things down for the last wave of digital ip theft. Once that happens with one or two ai copyright disbelievers the rest will calm down.

But is it really a problem if the AI is transmitting the information in its own words? And even if that is considered illegal, doesn’t it significantly diminish said crime?

AI doesnt transmit information in its own words. It has no “own” no “self”. It does what it was programmed to do, just like any other type of software. Turns out that some people using ai have made it ingest content without permission so they can resell it for profit. That should not be permitted. My property is not yours to take unless you agree to my terms. I did not give you permission to download my data, art, code or text, to ingest in a token database and then resell it in any shape or form derived or not. No ifs no buts. If you want it you have to pay for it or respect terms. The bulk of ai companies respect that. A handful of sociopaths dont. They are the issue.

I wouldn't call ANYONE disrespecting terms and conditions they may have agreed to a sociopath. Not everything in a contract is enforceable just because it's written there, whether or not both parties signed it. And unless it's spewing out copyrighted materials "verbatim" there is an argument to be made that the LLM learned to talk from an open source and inserted knowledge from a copyrighted one.

However this turns out for private AI, I hope at the very least it can be considered fair use. Monetized LLMs can be forced to pay up or follow terms but individuals should be able to pool together and create open source models. I'm not saying I have the exact legal arguments for why this would work but LLMs in their current forms need to exist.

I absolutely agree that LLMs should exist. Torrents still exist and have their purpose. Criminals always argued that their crime is not really a crime and found all kinds of arguments in favour of it. Similarity people developing ai that doesnt respect people’s property use all sorts of wild arguments in their favour - ai learns like a human, it benefits society, other countries will use it against us, and so on. That doesnt mean we should give into their demands to destroy society and people’s lives so they can have a competitive advantage over honest people. The fact that they want to steal, destroy entire industries they take from, and demolish norms so they can make their software appear intelligent, makes them sociopaths.

A significant portion of the training set for most image generation tools is stuff made in the last 10-20 years harvested from the internet, if not the last 5 years. We're not talking about 150 years of copyright protection here, we're talking about the time frames you suggest. Artists want to protect their own work and their livelihood, and AI is being trained on the work they're actively putting out right now. You would have to shorten copyright duration to something like 5 years to come remotely close to making modern image generation models possible without violating artist copyrights.

Text is different and much less difficult since its history as a medium is much longer - if you excluded the last 10-20 years of prose from your LLM it would probably still be very good at writing. But excluding the last 20 years of digital illustration and photography would be limiting yourself to a much lower-fidelity training set.

Your work is not free from derivation which is what GPT4 does in the overwhelming number of cases. If there are small outliers and it regurgitates something word for word, we can handle it like most other instances of copyright infringement as we do now. File a takedown notice and that particular phrase can be explicitly filtered out post output generation. Easy.

I agree about the derivation bit, but “File a takedown notice for every NYT article ever published after proving GPT can reproduce each one” is not what I would call a clean solution. That’s basically a regulatory DDOS attack.

Current copyright law is simply not equipped to handle LLMs, I think.

It’s what they do anyways. The file suit after takedown after DMCA and never ever hesitate to drag court cases out over months and years, wasting everybody’s time to make sure grandma pays up because someone in her house was using Napster.

I, for one, will enjoy watching lawyers and AI fight to the death.

I already love AI too much to enjoy it.

No, no one gets to get away with breaking the law over and over and over again with a simple "whoopsies" each time they get caught. There needs to be penalties.

So YouTube should be shut down the first time a copyrighted work is uploaded to it?

Yeah, except I paid for the work i derived mine from. I paid taxes to learn in school, i paid for textbooks, i paid to see a painting, i paid to watch a movie, and i paid even to learn how to speak and do math. Stop stealing, and pay what you owe. Easy.

Are you really suggesting that learning from watching others, going to library, taking in the public domain, etc. is a form a theft?

>Corporate communism want to take that away

contentless, thrashing drivel

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