Ok. They are not talking about AI broadly, but LLMs which require insane energy requirements and benefit off the unpaid labor of others.
Deciding not to enable a technology that is proving to be destructive except for the very few who benefit from it, is a fine stance to take.
I won't shop at Walmart for similar reasons. Will I save money shopping at Walmart? Yes. Will my not shopping at Walmart bring about Walmart's downfall? No. But I refuse to personally be an enabler.
I wish I had Walmart in my area, the grocery stores here suck.
People who believe it's a net detriment don't want to be a part of enabling that, even at cost to themselves, while those who think it's a net benefit or at least neutral, don't have a problem with it.
If your goal is to not contribute to community and leave when it dries up, sure. Walmart is great short term relief.
I started my career in AI, and it certainly didn’t mean LLMs then. some people were doing AI decades ago
I would like to understand where this moral line gets drawn — neural networks that output text? that specifically use the transformer architecture? over some size?
The immoral thing about gen-AI is how it's trained. Regardless of source code, images or audio; the disregard of licenses and considering everything fair-use and ingesting them is the most immoral part.
Then there comes the environmental cost, and how it's downplayed to be able to pump the hype.
I'm not worried about the change AI will bring, but the process of going there is highly immoral, esp. when things are licensed to prohibit that kind of use.
When AI industry says "we'll be dead if we obey the copyright and licenses", you know something is wrong. Maybe the whole industry shouldn't build a business model of grabbing whatever they can and running with it.
Because of these zealots, I'm not sharing my photos anymore and considering not sharing the code I write either. Because I share these for the users, with appropriate licenses. Not for other developers or AI companies to fork, close and do whatever do like with them.
I'm a strong believer on copyleft. I only share my code with GNU/GPLv3+, no exceptions.
However, this doesn't allow AI companies to scrape it, remix it and sell it under access. This is what I'm against.
If scraping, closing and selling GPLv3 or strong copylefted material is fair use, then there's no use of having copyleft if it can't protect what's intended to be open.
Protecting copyleft requiring protecting copyright, because copyleft is built upon copyright mechanism itself.
While I'm not a fan of a big media company monopolizing something for a century, we need this framework to keep things open, as well. Copyright should be reformed, not abolished.
Yes, copyleft exists as a response to copyright, but it builds something completely different with respect to what copyright promises. While copyright protects creators, copyleft protects users. This part is generally widely misunderstood.
Deregulation to prevent regulatory capture is not a mechanism that works when there's money and a significant power imbalance. Media companies can always put barriers to the consumption of their products through contracts and other mechanisms. Signing a contract not to copy the thing you get to see can get out of hand in very grim ways. Consumers are very weak compared to the companies providing the content, because of the desirability of the content alone, even if you ignore all the monetary imbalance.
Moreover, copyleft doesn't only prevent that kind of exploitation; it actively protects the user by making it impossible to close the thing you get. Copyleft protects all the users of the thing in question. When the issue is viewed in the context of the software, it not only allows the code to propagate indefinitely but also allows it to be properly preserved for the long run.
Leaving things free-for-all again not only fails to protect the user but also profits the bigger companies, since they have the power to hoard, remix, refine, and sell this work, which they get for free. So, it only carries water to the big companies' water wheels. Moreover, even permissive licenses depend on the notion of copyright to attribute the artifact to its original creator.
Otherwise, even permissively licensed artifacts can be embedded in the works of larger companies and not credited, allowing companies to slightly derive the things they got for free and sell them to consumers on their own terms, without any guardrails.
So abolishing copyright not only will further un-democratize things, but it'll make crediting the creators of the building blocks the companies use to erect their empires impossible.
This is why I will always share my work under strong copyleft or non-commercial/share-alike (and no-derivatives, where it makes sense) licenses.
In short, I'm terribly sorry to tell you that you didn't convince me about abolishing copyright at all. The only thing you achieved was to think further on my stance, fill the mental gaps I found in my train of thought, and fill them appropriately with more copyleft support. Also, it looks like my decision not to share my photos anymore is getting more concrete.
The industry joke is: What do you call AI that works? Machine Learning.
I trust in your ability to actually differentiate between the machine learning tools that are generally useful and the current crop of unethically sourced "AI" tools being pushed on us.
I think there is ethical use cases for LLMs. I have no problem leveraging a "common" corpus to support the commons. If they weren't over-hyped and almost entirely used as extensions of the weath-concentration machine, they could be really cool. Locally hosted llms are kinda awesome. As it is, they are basically just theft from the public and IP laundering.
You can be among a a swamp and say "but my corner is clean". This is the exact opposite of the rotten barrel metaphor. You're trying to claim your sole apple is so how not rotted compared to the fermenting that is came from.
Not going to go back and forth on thos as you inevitably try to nitpick "oh but the chatbot didn't say to do that"
LLMs are approximately right. That means they're sometimes wrong, which sucks. But they can do things for which no 100% accurate tool exists, and maybe could not possibly exist. So take it or leave it.
No, but the companies have agencies. LLMs lie, and they only get fixed when companies are sued. Close enough.
It kind of is that clear. It's IP laundering and oligarchic leveraging of communal resources.
2. Open source models exist.
The only thing worse than intellectual property is a special exception for people rich enough to use it.
I have hope for open source models, I use them.
Also, we clearly aren't prioritizing cancer research if Altman has shifted to producing slop videos. That's why sentiment is decreasing.
>Make it make sense.
I can't explain to one who doesn't want to understand.