Comment by hatefulmoron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hatefulmoron | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> LLMs immediately and completely displace the bread-and-butter replacement-tier illustration and design work that makes up much of that profession

And so what? Tell it to the Graphviz diagram creators, entry level Javascript programmers, horse carriage drivers, etc. What's special?

> .. and does so by effectively counterfeiting creative expression

What does this actually mean, though? ChatGPT isn't claiming to have "creative expression" in this sense. Everybody knows that it's generating an image using mathematics executed on a GPU. It's creating images. Like an LLM creates text. It creates artwork in the same sense that it creates novels.

> Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have.

Programmers are very particular about licenses in opposition to your theory. Copyleft licensing leans heavily on enforcing copyright. Besides, I hear artists complain about the duration of copyright frequently. Pointing to some subset of programmers that are against IPR is just nutpicking in any case.

Oh, for sure. Programmers are very particular about licenses. For code.

I get it, you have an axe to grind against some subset of programmers who are "nerds" in a "piracy culture". Artists don't deserve special protections. It sucks for your family members, I really mean that, but they will have to adapt with everybody else.

I disagree with you on this. Artists, writers, and programmers deserve equal protection, and this means that tptacek is right to criticize nerd piracy culture. In other words, we programmers should respect artists and writers too.

To be clear, we're not in disagreement. We should all respect each other. However, it's pretty clear that the cat's out of the bag, and trying to claw back protections for only one group of people is stupid. It really betrays the author's own biases.

Doubt it is the same people. I doubt anyone argues that paintings deserve no protection while code does it.

I do have an axe to grind, and that part of the post is axe-grindy (though: it sincerely informs how I think about LLMs), I knew that going into it (unanimous feedback from reviewers!) and I own it.

I generally agree with your post. Many of the arguments against LLMs being thrown around are unserious, unsound, and a made-for-social-media circle jerk that don't survive any serious adversarial scrutiny.

That said, this particular argument you are advancing isn't getting so much heat here because of an unfriendly audience that just doesn't want to hear what you have to say. Or that is defensive because of hypocrisy and past copyright transgressions. It is being torn apart because this argument that artists deserve protection, but software engineers don't is unsound special pleading of the kind you criticize in your post.

Firstly, the idea that programmers are uniquely hypocritical about IPR is hyperbole unsupported by any evidence you've offered. It is little more than a vibe. As I recall, when Photoshop was sold with a perpetual license, it was widely pirated. By artists.

Secondly, the idea -- that you dance around but don't state outright -- that programmers should be singled out for punishment since "we" put others out of work is absurd and naive. "We" didn't do that. It isn't the capital owners over at Travelocity that are going to pay the price for LLM displacement of software engineers, it is the junior engineer making $140k/year with a mortgage.

Thirdly, if you don't buy into LLM usage as violating IPR, then what exactly is your argument against LLM use for the arts? Just a policy edict that thou shalt not use LLMs to create images because it puts some working artists out of business? Is there a threshold of job destruction that has to occur for you to think we should ban LLMs use case by use case? Are there any other outlaws/scarlet-letter-bearers in addition to programmers that will never receive any policy protection in this area because of real or perceived past transgressions?

Adobe is one of the most successful corporations in the history of commerce; the piracy technologists enabled wrecked most media industries.

Again, the argument I'm making regarding artists is that LLMs are counterfeiting human art. I don't accept the premise that structurally identical solutions in software counterfeit their originals.

> Adobe is one of the most successful corporations in the history of commerce; the piracy technologists enabled wrecked most media industries.

I guess that makes it ok then for artists to pirate Adobe's product. Also, I live in a music industry hub -- Nashville -- you'll have to forgive me if I don't take RIAA at their word that the music industry is in shambles, what with my lying eyes and all.

> Again, the argument I'm making regarding artists is that LLMs are counterfeiting human art. I don't accept the premise that structurally identical solutions in software counterfeit their originals.

I'm aware of the argument you are making. I imagine most of the people here understand the argument you are making. Its just a really asinine argument and is propped up by all manner of special pleading (but art is different, programmers are all naughty pirates that deserve to be punished) and appeals to authority (check my post history - I've established my bona fides.)

There simply is no serious argument to be made that LLMs reproducing one work product and displacing labor is better or worse than an LLM reproducing a different work product and displacing labor. Nobody is going to display some ad graphic from the local botanical garden's flyer for their spring gala at The Met. That's what is getting displaced by LLM. Banksy isn't being put out of business by stable diffusion. The person making the ad for the botanical garden's flyer has market value because they know how to draw things that people like to see in ads. A programmer has value because they know how to write software that a business is willing to pay for. It is as elitist as it is incoherent to say that one person's work product deserves to be protected but another person's does not because of "creativity."

Your argument holds no more water and deserves to be taken no more seriously than some knucklehead on Mastodon or Bluesky harping about how LLMs are going to cause global warming to triple and that no output LLMs produce has any value.

Well, I disagree with you. For the nth time, though, I also don't grant the premise that LLMs are violative of the IPR of programmers. But more importantly than anything else, I just don't want to hear any of this from developers. That's not "your arguments are wrong and I have refuted them". It's "I'm not going to hear them from you".

> For the nth time, though, I also don't grant the premise that LLMs are violative of the IPR of programmers.

I wish you all the best waiting for a future where the legislature and courts decide that LLM output is violative of copyright law only in the visual arts.

> I just don't want to hear any of this from developers.

Well, you seem to have posted about the wrong topic in the wrong forum then. But you’ve heard what you’ve wanted to hear in the discussion related to this post, so maybe that doesn’t really matter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com