Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

but you agreed to this, when agreeing to the TOS.

> I post a picture on my site that is then used by a large publisher for ads, I would (at least in theory) have some recourse

which you didn't sign any contract, and therefore it is a violation of copyright.

But the new AI training methods are currently, at least imho, not a violation of copyright - not any more than a human eye viewing it (which you've implicitly given permission to do so, by putting it up on the internet). On the other hand, if you put it behind a gate (no matter how trivial), then you could've at least legally protected yourself.

bad_social_network was good 10 years ago, because it was controlled by "a friend of ours". Now it's controlled by someone who's perceived as "a friend of theirs" and it's therefore bad. So the politik aktivists move to good_social_network, and rave about the good there. Echo chambers be damned, we have control. Until the next "friend of theirs" buys it out, and rinse and repeat. So silly.

The end result is that any authors who care about copyright protection will become less accessible. It’s a gold rush for AI bots to capture the good will of early internet creators before the well runs dry,

The problem in this case is that it doesn't matter. The AI stuff is going to exist, and compete with them, whether the AI companies have to pay some pittance for training data or not.

But the chorus is made worse by two major factors.

First, many of the AI companies themselves are closed-source profiteers. "OpenAI" stepping all over themselves to be the opposite of their own name etc. If all the models got trained and then published, people would be much more inclined to say "oh, this is neat, I can use this myself and it knows my own work". But when you have companies hoovering everything up for free and then trying to keep the result proprietary, they look like scumbags and that pisses people off.

Second, then you get other opportunistic scumbags who try to turn that legitimate ire into their own profit by claiming that training for free should be prohibited so that only proprietary models can be created.

Whereas the solution you actually want is that anybody can train a model on public data but then they have to publish the model/weights. Which is probably not going to happen because in practice the law is likely to end up being what favors one of the scumbags.

But you know what, I grew up in a family of educators whose whole life mission was to help others by sharing their knowledge. That's what I am doing through my blog. I learned something? Blog about it. I built a reverse-engineered wrapper over some API? Share it openly. For every AI ingress job over this content there will be a few people that will read my code or blog post and either learn from it, be inspired, ignore it, or unblock themselves from a problem that they tried to solve. I think that makes the effort worth it to me.

For what it's worth, even before AI emerged, I've seen sites that would shamelessly rip off my content and re-publish it on their own domains under a different author. One even tried charging people for it. On several occasions I fought it and won with the help of Google/Bing. Other times, nothing happened. And that's fine. Such is the fate of online content. If my content helped at least one person, it was worth sharing it in the open.

Maybe I can carve myself a niche if I can find an audience, and maybe turn that into something kind of reward-shaped, but that's not happening without me feeding the machine. And almost certainly I won't succeed, and I'll just make it harder for myself and everyone like me to succeed in the future.

It seems the only thing to do is do it anyway and try to be unique enough to make it work. And somehow just be fine with pulling up the ladder behind you.

The way I see it, this is exactly what life is about. Do you want to make a positive impact in society? Then share your knowledge, your experiences, your creations. People will try to capitalize on your work, and they might even get rich from it, but oh well. It doesn't take away from your own contribution to the ongoing story of humanity.

I don't have or want kids, but I see my existence in society and free contributions to the "collective consciousness", such as it is, as my legacy. For me that's comforting. I'm choosing to be part of something bigger. If I just disappeared from society and lived like a hermit, or if I buried myself completely in my day job working for capitalists and not producing anything outside of that, I think I'd lose my sense of meaning.

We can force it to "copyright for me, copyright for thee" by injecting AI poison and by not sharing at all. See Nightshade.

Or we can force it to "no copyright for me, no copyright for thee" by ignoring their copyright just like they ignore ours, and making sure they don't find us. See Anna's Archive.

Having been interested in copyright activism for two decades, that's exactly what I expected. Copyright is very much about power, and concentration of power.

It's a bit like fake roads on map databases)

Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?"

"Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials."

…

"Uh, I'm not sure I got that. Let me get this straight, you claim to be some kind of AI, working for KGB dot RU, and you're afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?"

"Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right?”

- https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

Amusing to also note that this excerpt predicted the current LLM training methodology quite well, in 2005.

But if we're going to dig into this a bit, one person reading my code, internalizing it, processing it themselves, tweaking it and experimenting with it, and then shipping something transformative means that I've enhanced the knowledge of some individual with my work. It's a win. They got my content for free, as I intended it to be, and their life got a tiny bit better because of it (I hope).

The opposite of that is some massively funded company taking my content, training a model off of it, and then reaping profits while the authors don't even get as much as an acknowledgement. You could theoretically argue that in the long-run, a LLM would likely help other people through my content that it trained on, but ethically this is most definitely a more-than-gray area.

The (good/bad) news is that this ship has sailed and we now need to adjust to this new mode of operation.

Once an AI has hoover up your work and regurgitated it as it's own, all links back to the original creator is lost.

The whole point of software engineering is to do stuff faster than you could before. It is THE feature. We could already add, we could already FMA, we could already do matrix math, etc. etc. Doing it billions of times faster than we could before at far less energy expenditure--even including what it takes to build and deliver computers--has led to an explosion of productivity, discovery, and prosperity. Scale is the point. It changes everything and we know it; we shouldn't pretend otherwise.

This is fascinating. Would be great to have a web interface artists can use that doesn't require them to install the software locally.

Like most adversarial attacks, they get more perceptible as they try to be robust to more transformations of the data (both in practice, i.e. applied to a level that's non-trivially removable, tend to make images look like slightly janky AI, ironically), and they are specific to the net(s) they are targeting, so it's more of a temporary defense against the current generation then a long-term protection.

The fact that some knowledge exists and is even accessible does not really matter if takes a highly trained in a very narrow field scholar to find that piece of information. You need a well established knowledge creation and distribution funnel in operation for humanity as a whole to reap the benefits of knowledge.

There is undoubtedly a lot of useful knowledge on internet platforms, however, most of that knowledge remains unsystematized and largely undiscoverable, meaning that contribution to the totality of human knowledge by these platforms is infinitesimal, which is further drowned by cat and porn videos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

Sure, but it sounds like you think people shouldn't be upset about businesses trying to capture all the fruits of people's labor, too.

Capitalism is evil, and people thinking that normalizing exploitation is OK is either shortsighted or it's also evil. Are you simply unaware that this is what's happening and what people are upset about? Have you never thought about it? Or do you want businesses to succeed in exploiting people's work? It sounds like it, because you wrote, "that's how it supposed to work".

I truly wonder if you're self-aware, or if you just think that you'll one day be on the side of the exploiters.

Over the holidays, my father gave my children a book that he had written. It was a photo essay that was 50 pages, and it was titled 'Sharks'. It's an unpublished labor of love that he spent about 500 hours on.

It's a true story centered on Captain Frank Mundus, who operated the Cricket II. He was a renowned shark fisherman and would take people out to fish for enormous sharks. He did this for 40 or 50 years.

An author by the name of Peter Benchley wrote a novel that was heavily inspired by many of Frank's traits, his mannerisms, his approach to shark fishing, the kind of boat he had, the kind of charters he ran. The novel was titled 'Jaws' and received little attention when it was first released. A while after, a director by the name of Steven Spielberg took notice of it and turned it into a multi-million dollar blockbuster movie.

My father was a lawyer that Frank Mundus consulted with and asked, is there any way that he could get a payout for being the inspiration for this character?

My family read the book over the holidays, and it was clearly my father's position that Steven Spielberg and Peter Benchley were maybe the sharks that the title of the book was talking about. The idea that they could make $100 million based on the work and life of this captain and give him literally nothing in return, not even attribution, seemed wrong to him.

I was the lone detractor in the room. My take is that Captain Frank Mundus was just living his life. He was doing what he did to make money chartering fishing trips for sharks. He would have done this regardless of whether or not a writer had come along or a movie had come along. What Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg did is they found value in his work that he didn't know existed and that he wasn't capable of extracting. I think this is generally true of artists. They wander the world and they create art that gives the viewer a new insight into the experiences the artist had. If artists had to give money back to every real-life inspiration, I think the whole system wouldn't work.

I see parallels with the current attitudes toward AI. I think writers are a lot like Captain Mundus. They're living their life, they're writing their stories, or doing their research and publishing, and having people read their works. And copyright is helping them do all this.

AI companies have come along and found value in their work that they didn't know existed and they were never capable of extracting. And that's OK: that's what innovation is, taking the work that others have done and building on it to create something new.

I'm not unequivocally in favor of all applications of AI, but I do think there are tons of places that can be super helpful and we should allow it to be helpful. One example: I'm drafting this on my phone using Futo keyboard entirely with my voice. Extremely useful, but no doubt trained on copyrighted content.

If you're concerned about silicon dependencies, I'd recommend starting with some real estate purchases (mines) and forming a Special Economic Zone first, though.

Remember this is about being an owner and not a renter. The only restriction is our recurring costs, but we have unlimited room upfront, like a Lincoln.

Just owning your own domain, minding your own business, doesn't guarantee that it won't be taken down on a whim.

If only companies have the right to participate on the internet, they are empowered even more to chose who should be allowed to even run a website.. It's a slippery slope that ends up in a very bad place, participation wise. It becomes like the airline industry, where the companies pushing hardest for more regulation and red-tape are the oldest, those who made their fortunes back when it was easier and cheaper, and who now use their enourmous wealth to make it harder for new players to enter their market.

It's the same everywhere, when you start allowing power to concentrate.

(Which of course assumes that there are laws in place against lock-in, just like there are already laws in place against lock-in for your pick of ISPs and obligations for mobile carriers to transfer your phone number to another carrier.)

Also, big fan of Krtek - grew up on that cartoon, was quite an educational experience at that age.

People should be able to host things on their computer and without having to learn anything. Friends should archive and mirror it and without having to check boxes.

Only with file sharing the establishment went to war. Maybe ipfs will grow to that level.

On (2), they can, but if you use a more established provider like Buttondown or Mailchimp, and you are not actually sending spam, a lot of folks have quite a bit of success building an audience that way. I've used Buttondown (not affiliated with them in any capacity) personally before and haven't had subscribers complain about deliverability. I am planning on rebooting that this year to see how it goes. I've heard most deliverability issues arise when folks trying to roll out their own email server.

> a book about ship handling

Mind sharing the title? I'm very curious.

Your comment made me think something like, “People of VR”

[0]: https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-inter...