But in reality, everytime small entrepreneurs always thnk this will be the tech that let them usurp the big boys, and they end up selling out (not necessarily blaming them. I'd do it too). They have more resources, can scale up faster, produce more, and hire more people. It's a hopelessly risky gambit to think you can topple such advantage. And if you get an edge in, they just take it in for themselves and you're back at square one.
But you may not even get that far. They try to make use of this new commons and the Big Boys will litigate the gates back closed for them specifically. They got their value, made the next iteration, and then decided not to give back to the commons (a tragedy, if you will). They may even seem benevolent at first, but time goes on, priorities or leaders change, and the focus on market capture eclipses any public goodwill.
The same players as yester-decade are at the helm, so I don't know why anyone would want to trust them after giving decades of scrutiny as they gradually unmasked themselves. I don't necessarily fear the tech per se, I fear the same "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" playbook happening all over again, maybe in such a way to make the new gap insurmountable.
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: "Piracy reduction can be a source of Windows revenue growth." [1]
Current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: "Well, we’ve always had freemium. Sometimes our freemium was called piracy." [2]
[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/only-consumers-pressure-can-cu...
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/20/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcri...
Like… the entire idea of words like "society", "culture", "zeitgeist", etc. is that they imply a greater level of organization, shared values and ability to act as though one autonomous entity or whatever, than if you merely took "hundreds of millions or billions of" people and dumped them all in one place.
A society or zeitgeist can absolutely have 'hypocrisy'. If it can't, then it's not a culture, just a mass of hominids.
Plus, though it's hard to track, there's probably some degree of hypocrisy aggregated from an individual level too, where people who took one side before are taking the other side now.
AI for those people just make their jobs of seeking what's worth pirating that much harder. Especially for those that can now fire half their staff and put most of that remaining money into said SEO optimization for their spam.
Opinion articles.
It's been over a decade since an individual was prosecuted for digital piracy [1]. Longer since anyone was threatened with jail time.
When it was new, both individuals and companies were prosecuted. The tides shifted and law enforcement responded. This isn't a story of different standards, but one of evolving ones.
My point is it isn't. Individual copyright infringement is virtually unenforced today. To the extent it was in the last decade, the penalty was a fine. Meanwhile, OpenAI is being sued by the New York Times [1] and various writers [2].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-t...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/more-writers-sue-openai-c...
Fair enough, I'm talking about America. To my knowledge, individuals downloading pirated content have not been threatened with lawsuits. And to the degree seeders have been threatened, it's only that--threats. When was the last distributor actually sued?
But the fact that they're not being sued is a weird delineation to make. They're not being sued because they can't afford to defend so are settling. It's not a case that IP owners aren't enforcing copyright, they're just not escalating to actual lawsuits because they don't need to.
I’m asking for evidence of these settlements.
The claim is corporations are being given a free pass relative to how individuals are being treated. I’m not seeing that signal. What I am seeing is Americans becoming more sceptical about intellectual property as a result of the MPAA and RIAA overplaying their hands in the 90s.
Some lawsuits don't change that fact.
Over the last decade, individual indiscretions have not been punished. Wholesale scraping is being punished. Some lawsuits do challenge the hypothesis that corporates' copyright violations are being treated more leniently than individuals'.
You seem to be conflating a whole bunch of things, seems like misdirection.
I'm arguing that policy preferences around copyright infringement have changed in general. In general, in 1990s, copyright infringement meant "crime, reprehensible, police, prisons, etc." for both individuals and coporations. In general, in the past decade, it's meant none of those things for either individuals or corporations. Yet it's meant fines and lawsuits for corporations with virtually none I can find, in America, aimed at individuals.
Also, LLMs were basically invented less than a decade ago [1].
> seems like misdirection
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like" [2].
>I'm arguing that policy preferences around copyright infringement have changed in general.
Perhaps they have, and I take on your take on that. In the end you were replying to me and the original poster so respect the spirit of those posts.
Someone compared treatment of X 20 years ago to treatment of Y today -- seems pretty natural to bring up treatment of X more recently. You can't just say "the original comment didn't mention it so you can't mention it either".
I don't see how your accusations of bad faith are warranted.
I feel I have a pretty open view.
And, there's no definition of a 'valid' comment. I'll address points, raise points or whatever. Sorry, I'm not in the realm of 'valid' comments, never was.
GP made a comparison! How do you refute a comparison without criticising the comparison?
> I'm not in the realm of 'valid' comments, never was
Claiming misdirection is an argument about validity.
Objectively, yes. Paying a settlement in private is better than being publicly prosecuted and then put in jail.
That said, it's still no cakewalk. Do you have a source for individuals settling copyright claims? I'm not finding any recent stories nor surveys.
I want to gently reframe the debate, for while I agree with the hypocrisy it rather misses a very key point.
Intellectual law, as bedrock principle, explicitly doesn’t recognize nonhuman creators. So at the heart of the issue isn’t changing copyright laws or the death of IP, but what to do with non-human creativity? This is an interesting issue now, but most of the debates and options being debated thus far won’t survive an AGI let alone a world full of advanced AGIs.
But it’s a critical distinction between “so now it doesn’t matter when it was theft before,” and “what do we do with non-human intelligence when our entire system of creativity protection is build around humans and non-humans now exist?”
It’s a paradigm shift that gets somewhat denied by the hypocrisy argument. Most people look at AI as “technology” we have developed, but if any science fiction writers are right it’s actually a bona fide digital intelligence that’s getting developed here — essentially the possible digital twin of human intelligence — and that’s a whole different set of considerations.
Claims certainly get made, but they are subsequently shot down by future research. This has happened for discussions of emergence [1], reasoning [2], and other human attributes people have ascribed to LLMs.
[1]: https://neurips.cc/virtual/2023/poster/72117
[2]: https://m-cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/276268-can-llms-reall...
That’s the difference between seeing it as a technology vs a larger directional shift in human development. Put more directly we have been experiencing the age of miniaturization, and now we are entering the age of digital intelligences.
Very often early technology looks toy-like and lacks substantive real world application (despite the hype). It’s only later that deliver substantive applications and real-world change. This generation of AI is following the Gartner hype cycle perfectly thus far:
https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-artificial...
That said Gartner tends to be part of the hype cycle these days, but the pattern of new technology holds true.
So in short I would expect anything like a digital twin to emerge from post trough applications not the current generation, and I don't mean to imply that the current technology will create such a system but just that science fiction and futurists generally forecast or even predict this technology will generate a digital twin (in the form of an AGI) from this civilization-level line of technology exploration.
All that said, I don’t think many of us technologists were thinking we would be anywhere near this level of AI technology in 2018. In five or six years we have gone what people thought would take 10-20. So, as always, linear extension predictive and mental models of technology advancement once again fails to predict the true course of technology progress, which seems to be much more dynamic than people generally consider when talking about the future.
If you ask it to complete text and give it the first line, it will sometimes continue the lyrics. Seems to work best for particularly famous stretches of lyrics, like Lose Yourself by Eminem, Bohemian Rhapsody or Hurt.
When I told it to complete the text "Obie Trice, real name no gimmicks", it said I'm sorry I can't reproduce the lyrics to Without Me by Eminem. And offered to tell me more about Obie Trice.
When I just asked it to reproduce the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody, it once again refused and offered to analyse the lyrics.
Seems like there's clearly song lyrics in the training data, and that they've at least made attempts to prevent it from regurgitating them.
But look at this...
https://poe.com/s/Y73se7ueRrQy9xHRPuoh
I swear the chaps at OpenAI have it all as exact copies. Articles and whatnot. Why wouldn't they if they have the lyrics precisely cloned.
Microsoft has been arguably the largest beneficiary of software copyright. Gates argued for it in the early days of MicroSoft. Microsoft's anti-piracy campaigns are unparalleled. Anyone remember the "Business Software Alliance".
Now the company wants to be the largest beneficiary of "AI".
What happens when AI systems can work around IP?
This gets done all the time now. It is going to be way cheaper.