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Comment by slowmovintarget | Hacker News Reader

The real issue should not be whether they're paying the government. The issue is whether they're paying us for taking the human content of the last two thousand years and baking it into their generators.

How do we get royalties on this, like our share of the oil proceeds if we were citizens of Qatar? How do we trade our share of the contribution? There's twenty years of my posting on Reddit, Slashdot, HN, and other forums, that we know for a fact has been used in these frontier models. Great... where's my royalty check?

Pay us, not the government. We'll have to pay taxes regardless, and yes, close the tax loopholes on security-based capital gains (don't tax me for all the investment in my primary residence, that's a double dip).

I heard this called "Coasian" economics (as in Coase). I'm not sure what that actually means, though.

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> where's my royalty check?

I support the idea of UBI with zero conditions, but not this. You didn't get royalties before AI when someone was heavily influenced by your work/content and converted that into money. If you expected compensation, then you shouldn't have given away your work for free.

The work was given to other humans. They paid taxes.

> The work was given to other humans. They paid taxes.

Says who? I mean what if black artists said they gave blues to black people, and white people making rock'n'roll? Black people spent money in black communities, now it's white people making it and spending it in theirs.

In essence they are the same point about outflows of value from the originating community. How you define a community, and what is integral is subjective.

I'm not convinced either way, but this line of reasoning feels dangerous.

I'd rather say that all ownership is communal, and as a community we allow people to retain some value to enable and encourage them further.

Still humans giving to humans. "White rock n roll artists" in your example paid taxes and those taxes benefited everyone.

That is your distinction because you chose to draw the line around all humans. But who is to say that the line shouldn't be drawn around black-people, or just men, or just Christians?

And no, taxes don't just magically benefit everyone. It's actually the point of them, that they are redistributive.

Who is to say the line should be drawn using discrimination?

Taxes fund the state. The state provides a minimum set of services - law and order, border security, fire safety - to everyone regardless of ability to pay. That others may derive additional state benefits is beside the point. Everyone gets something.

originally we all posted online to help each other, with problems we mutually have. it was community, and we always gave since we got back in a free exchange.

now, there is an oligarchy coming to compile all of that community to then serve it at a paid cost. what used to be free with some search, now is not and the government of the people is allowing no choice by the people (in any capacity).

once capital comes for things at scale (with the full backing of the government), and they monetize that and treat it as "their own" i would consider that plagiarism.

how can we be expected to pay taxes on every microtransaction, when we get nothing for equally traceable contributions to the new machine?

> you shouldn't have given away your work for free.

Almost none of the original work I've ever posted online has been "given away for free", because it was protected by copyright law that AI companies are brazenly ignoring, except where they make huge deals with megacorporations (eg openai and disney) because they do in fact know what they're doing is not fair use. That's true whether or not I posted it in a context where I expected compensation.

> Almost none of the original work I've ever posted online has been "given away for free", because it was protected by copyright law that AI companies are brazenly ignoring.

I just don't think the AI is doing anything differently than a human does. It "learns" and then "generates". As long as the "generates" part is actually connecting dots on its own and not just copy & pasting protected material then I don't see why we should consider it any different from when a human does it.

And really, almost nothing is original anyway. You think you wrote an original song? You didn't. You just added a thin layer over top of years of other people's layers. Music has converged over time to all sound very similar (same instruments, same rhythms, same notes, same scales, same chords, same progressions, same vocal techniques, and so on). If you had never heard music before and tried to write a truly original song, you can bet that it would not sound anything like any of the music we listen to today.

Coding, art, writing...really any creative endeavor, for the most part works the same way.

Conjecture on the functional similarities between LLMs and humans isn't relevant here, nor are sophomoric musings on the nature of originality in creative endeavors. LLMs are software products whose creation involves the unauthorized reproduction, storage, and transformation of countless copyright-protected works—all problematic, even if we ignore the potential for infringing outputs—and it is simple to argue that, as a commercial application whose creators openly tout their potential to displace human creators, LLMs fail all four fair use "tests".

It's not just "heavily influenced" though, it's literally where the smarts are coming from.

I don't think royalties make sense either, but we could at least mandate some arrangement where the resulting model must be open. Or you can keep it closed for a while, but there's a tax on that.

Ronald Coase. https://economics.com.au/2013/09/03/coasian-thinking/ ; more broadly he has some great writing on the "theory of the firm".

Mmm, Coase is my jam.

> The issue is whether they're paying us for taking the human content of the last two thousand years and baking it into their generators.

Payment for content access is a sure way to limit progress and freedom. Should I pay you based on quantity, quality, or usage that relates to your content? How about the ideas you took from other people, should you pay them? Where does it stop?

I think the copyright system as it exists today is just absurd - a complete inversion of what it was supposed to do. It was meant to promote progress by protecting expression. Now look at what's happened: total concept and feel protects aesthetic gestalt, Structure and Srrangement protects how elements relate, Whelan Test protects the entire logical skeleton while AFC (abstraction filtration comparison) enables hierarchical abstraction protection.

Each rung up the ladder takes us further from "I wrote this specific thing" toward "nobody else can solve this problem in similar ways". This is how platforms get rich while common people, readers and creators, lose their freedoms and are exploited.

"How do we get royalties on this, like our share of the oil proceeds if we were citizens of Qatar?"

Alaska as a state managed to do just that and more or less has an annual UBI.

This nails my primary frustration with all gen AI - why are we all seemingly okay with a few massive companies and their billionaire CEOs training models on the output of all human civilization and then selling it back to us with the promise of putting all workers out of a job? How’s that not theft?

Well, you as a human train and live as a human on the output of all human civilization and if you are very efficient put people out of work. 99% of human jobs were physical labor and now machines do the work of thousands with one human superviser (oil tanker, machine loom, dump truck, train, etc). If humans are put completely out of the loop, that is a new problem for humans (super intelligent AI that takes over will likely be very bad for us) but avoiding that problem is another ball of wax.

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