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The appropriation argument is somewhat unsound. Creative endeavors, by definition, build on what's come before. This isn't any different between code, creative writing, drawing, painting, photography, fashion design, music, or anything else creative. Creation builds on what came before, that's how it works. No one accuses playwrights of appropriating Shakespeare just because they write a tragic romance set in Europe.
The hyperbolic way you've made whatever arguments you had, though, is actively working against you.
It remains unclear if they needed permission in the first place. Aside from Meta's stunt with torrents I'm not aware of any legal precedent forbidding me to (internally) do as I please with public content that I scrape.
> They regularly speak explicitly about all the jobs they plan to destroy.
A fully legal endeavor that is very strongly rewarded by the market.
Most of the larger commercial entities seem to be doing the work themselves and being quite upfront about the entire thing.
Because all the litigation is currently ongoing.
> A fully legal endeavor that is very strongly rewarded by the market.
Yes let's sacrifice all production of cultural artifacts for the market. This is honestly another thing that's being litigated. So far these companies have lost a lot of money on making a product that most consumers seem to actively hate.
Who said anything about sacrificing production? The entire point of the tooling is to reduce the production cost to as near zero as possible. If you didn't expect it to work then I doubt you would be so bent out of shape over it.
I find your stance quite perplexing. The tech can't be un-invented. It's very much Pandora's box. Whatever consequences that has for the market, all we can do is wait and see.
Worst case scenario (for the AI purveyors) is a clear legal determination that the current training data situation isn't legal. I seriously doubt that would set them back by more than a couple of years.
I'd like to suggest that you might be better received on HN if you were a bit more direct about making an argument of substance regarding the ethics.
I disagree. When you publish your work, I can't copy it, but I can do nearly anything else I want to with it. I don't need your consent to learn from your work. I can study hundreds of paintings, learn from them, teaching myself to paint in a similar style. Copyright law allows me to do this.
I don't think an AI, which can do it better and faster, changes the law.
If I wrote a program that chose an image at random from 1000 base images, you’d agree that the program doesn’t create anything new. If I added some random color changes, it would still be derivative. Every incremental change I make to the program to make it more sophisticated leaves its outputs just as derivative as before the change.
Just a quick example, what's my proper compensation for this specific post? Can I set a FIVE CENTS price for every AI that learned from my post? How can I OPT-IN today?
I'm coming from the position that current law doesn't require compensation, nor opt-in. I'm not happy with it, but I dont see any easy alternative
You've yet to present a convincing argument regarding the ethics. (I do believe that such arguments exist; I just don't think you've made any of them.)
If you really can't think of a reason, I don't think anybody here is going to be able to offer you one you are willing to accept. This isn't a difficult or complex idea, so if you don't see it, why would anybody bother trying to convince you?
> (I do believe that such arguments exist; I just don't think you've made any of them.)
This is lazy and obnoxious.
The idea I expressed is also quite straightforward. That the act of copying something around in RAM is a basic component of using a computer to do pretty much anything and thus cannot possibly be a legitimate argument against something in and of itself.
The audience on HN generally leans quite heavily into reasoned debate as opposed to emotionally charged ideological signalling. That is presumably sufficient reason for someone to try to convince me, at least if anyone truly believes that there's a sound argument to be made here.
> This is lazy and obnoxious.
How is a clarification that I'm not blind to the existence of arguments regarding ethical issues lazy? Objecting to a lazy and baseless claim does not obligate me to spend the time to articulate a substantial one on the other party's behalf.
That said, the only ethical arguments that immediately come to mind pertain to collective benefit similar to those made to justify the existence of IP law. I think there's a reasonable case to be made to levy fractional royalties against the paid usage of ML models on the basis that their existence upends the market. It's obviously protectionist in nature but that doesn't inherently invalidate it. IP law itself is justified on the basis that it incentivizes innovation; this isn't much different.
Maybe because AI is ultimately nothing but a complicated compression algorithm, and people should really, really stop anthropomorphizing it.
You've presented all sorts of wild assumptions and generalizations about the people who don't share your vehement opposition to the use of this technology. I don't think it's the person you're responding to with the implicit bias.
You've conflated theft with piracy (all too common) and assumed a priori that training a model on publicly available data constitutes such. Do you really expect people to blindly adopt your ideological views if you just state them forcefully enough?
> If using AI is okay for the creative labor, why shouldn't the students also use it for the programming too?
They absolutely should! At least provided it does the job well enough.
Unless they are taking a class whose point is to learn to program yourself (ie the game is just a means to an end). Similar to how you might be forbidden to use certain advanced calculator features in a math class. If you enroll in an art class and then just prompt GPT that likely defeats the purpose.
This is the view of most people outside the industry.
The ones that pay attention to the markets appear to believe some very questionable things and are primarily concerned with if they can figure out how to get rich off of the associated tech stocks.