Ex-Amazon exec claims she was asked to ignore copyright law in race to AI
theregister.com
theregister.com
So she was an L6 manager, maybe a lower-end L7 manager, but my guess is still L6. That's not even anywhere close to "exec" level. It's the entry-level management position at Amazon.
The sexism claims sounds brutal, but it grinds my gears when some news outlet tries to make it sound like some middle-manager grunt was "an executive". And if you take away the "Ex-Amazon exec" claim, this story really just becomes "yet another ex-Amazon person that was put on a performance improvement plan and feels wronged by it", which is understandable and maybe there's a valid case here for retaliation... but it's not newsworthy, and certainly doesn't fit the title.
edit: just read the complaint, she reported to an an L6, which means 99.9% she was an L6.
For example, the first goal required her to create a plan to reduce data storage costs across the entire AmazonBot web crawling organization by 75 percent in just eight workdays.”
If that is true, that’s pretty absurd.
In all seriousness, I’m not sure the particulars of the plan even matter since the purpose is to get rid of an employee, not to actually be achieved.
If those are the comments you are willing to complain about in a lawsuit I am absolutely sure that you have been demoted for the right reasons.
Have you never met an engineer who is arguing heavily over a topic with you, purely because they believe you are wrong, with zero other motivation?
Come on. Not everything is done for some benefit or gain. There are plenty of people here who would argue for certain positions despite having nothing material to gain from it (and having quite a few things to lose).
Sometimes, you know, people just genuinely disagree with your takes. Let’s not delve into the “if someone defends the position of a company, it means they are simping for them” territory.
Oh sure, no big deal.
If true and if this description is accurate, this doesn't sound like a goal that Amazon could explain as anything other than a setup that's guaranteed to see her fail. If this goes to trial I'd be curious to hear how they justify setting this kind of goal.
That’s the crux of it
Big tech has collectively decided to go for the “ask forgiveness later” approach and society hasn’t shown any coherent resolute decision either way.
In the absence of that it’s pretty much genie out of the bottle and every day that passes more so. Meaning legal system will have to bend towards reality and copyright is dead in LLM context and thus many other contexts as well.
I certainly hope so. There are already a few text and data mining exemptions in place in Japan, Israel and Europe. The US has fair use, so we'll see what ends up being covered and what needs to be licensed. In my view just scaling up llms with more data isn't the future either way. We see this with llama 3, Claude 3, coheres model and gpt 4 being all pretty close together on llm leaderboards. If anything progress seems to be slowing down.
Maybe. I can see strong arguments for both sides.
Clumsy as the copyright system is it does attempt to solve an actual problem. I do feel for the true artists getting their style ripped off for half a penny in image gen tokens for example.
The stated goal is to encourage creation of the arts, but looking at how hit-driven arts are, and also at how much more is created than bought[0], there's too much content being made.
Most people want to read books in the top 100 best seller list, of which there are necessarily 100 in whatever period that list is re-calculated; or to watch the latest blockbusters, whose number in any given month I don't know but assume isn't much higher than the number of screens in a large cinema complex.
But that doesn't mean get rid of it entirely; my (admittedly just a) gut feeling is that 20 years should be enough to claim a monopoly on derivative works, even if we retain an average human lifespan for the original and direct translations. This is separate to trademarks: I think by this point, I should be able to combine Short Circuit and The Matrix into a shared universe if I want to, but it's still a matter of consumer protection to make sure nobody mistakes such a creation for either of the source materials.
One thing I absolutely I don't buy is the arguments for copyright protection being "life plus 70 years", which seem to circulate around authors wanting their kids to inherit their residual income. Most people don't get to inherit almost anything, but even if they did, someone's kids will probably[1] live for as many years after the parent's death as the parent lived before that child's birth, not usually 70 years after the parent dies.
[0] with exceptions; furry artists report viable income.
[1] barring radical changes to life expectancy from global thermonuclear war and/or post-singularity life extension.
What is your reasoning here? Copyright law doesn’t seem to do that at all. Are you thinking of Patent law?
It's not just about science, but those goals have to work together. If a relatively narrow* section of copyright blocks much larger sections of science, something has gone wrong.
* When I say narrow, one benchmark is the original stable diffusion, which has fewer parameters than there are images in the training set. Or at least, a hypothetical version without overtraining mistakes. At that point it's remembering next to zero specifics from each image.
This line covers both: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”
Arts > Authors > Writings > Copyright
Science > Inventors > Discoveries > Patents
It’s arguable how effective this is, but I doubt anyone is spending 100’s of millions making a movie if there’s no copyright protection or something similar.
Mr Beast is pushing the limits of what you can spend per minute of video to ~150-250k, but he’s subsidizing that with in your face advertisements. With just product placement you’re down to perhaps ~10-15 million for a 90 minute blockbuster which just isn’t enough.
Mr. Beast spends over 2 million per video btw, not 250k
The point I'm making is that while copyright based business models might be the prevalent for high expenditures productions, that doesn't mean aggregate spending is increased. It may just mean that copyright incentives higher spending inequality and higher concentration of production, while aggregate spending remains the same.
> that doesn't mean aggregate spending is increased
But the actual spending does. An Olympic Games costs as much as total aggregate compensation from YouTube for an entire year. They have multiple revenue streams but it just shows the scale we are talking about.
Netflix spends roughly as much on content as YouTube pays content creators. Add global OTA TV, cable, Movies, pay per view, and the other streaming services like D+ and you’ll get some idea of just how much is being supported by copyright. Hell, even some of YouTube’s compensation goes to old movies because of copyright.
Seems like that's an incomplete sample. I'm sure I can get lower revenue numbers for movies by ignoring major revenue sources.
Now YouTube itself might volunteer to pay something to actually get new content because that’s in its own self interest. But that’s going to be at roughly current levels rather than an extra “blockbuster” rate because again any website could trivially have the top 10,000 videos on YouTube so they can’t gatekeep the content behind a paywall etc.
Unless somehow it's AI-related.