So you'd prefer that only rich megacorporations and criminals have access to this technology, and not normal people and researchers?
But what is frustrating to me is that the second order effects of making the law more restrictive will be doing us all a big disfavor. It will not stop this technology, but it will just make it more inaccessible to normal people and put more power into the hands of the big corporations which the "they're stealing our data!" people would like to stop.
Right now I (a random nobody) can go on HuggingFace, download model which is more powerful that anything that was available 6 months ago, and run it locally on my machine, unrestricted and private.
Can we agree that's, in general, a good thing?
So now if you make the model creators liable for misuse of the models, or make the models a derivative work of its training data, or anything along these lines - what do you think will happen? Yep. The model on HuggingFace is gone, and now the only thing you'll have access to is a paywalled, heavily filtered and censored version of it provided by a megacorporation, while the megacorporation itself has internally an unlimited, unfiltered access to that model.
The models come from overt piracy, and are often used to make fake news, slander people, or other illegal content. Sure it can be funny, but the poison fruit from a poison tree is always going to be overt piracy.
I agree research is exempt from copyright, but people cashing in on unpaid artists works for commercial purposes is a copyright violation predating the DMCA/RIAA.
We must admit these models require piracy, and can never be seen as ethical. =3
'"Generative AI" is not what you think it is'
That's not how these models are used in the the vast majority of cases.
This argument is like saying "kitchen knives are often used to kill people so we need to ban the sale of kitchen knives". Do some people use kitchen knives to kill? Sure. Does it mean they should be banned because of that?
> I agree research is exempt from copyright, but people cashing in on unpaid artists works for commercial purposes is a copyright violation predating the DMCA/RIAA. We must admit these models require piracy, and can never be seen as ethical. =3
So, may I ask - where exactly do you draw the line? For the sake of argument, let's imagine something like this:
1. I scrape the whole internet onto my disk.
2. I go through the text, and gather every word bigram, and build a frequency table.
3. I delete everything I scraped.
4. I use that frequency table (which, compared to the exabytes of the source text I used to build it, is a couple hundred megabytes at most) to build a text generator.
5. I profit from this text generator.
This is illegal under theft-of-service laws, and a violation of most sites terms-of-service. If these spider scapers respected the robot exclusion standard under its intended use-case for search-engines, than getting successfully sued for overt copyright piracy and quietly settling for billions would seem unfair.
Note too, currently >52% of the web is LLM generated slop, so any model trained on that output will inherit similar problems.
> 2. I go through the text, and gather every word bigram, and build a frequency table.
And when (not if) a copyrighted work is plagiarized without citation it is academic misconduct, IP theft, and an artistic counterfeit. Copyright law is odd, and often doesn't make a distinction about the origin of similar works. Note this part of the law was recently extended to private individuals this year:
"OpenAI Stole Scarlet Johansson's Voice"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhgYMH6n004
> 3. I delete everything I scraped.
This doesn't matter if the output violates copyright. Images in jpeg format are compressed in the frequency domain, have been around for ages, and still get people sued or stuck in jail regularly.
Academic evaluation usually does fall under a fair-use exception, but the instant someone sells or uses IP in some form of trade/promotion it becomes a copyright violation.
> 4. I use that frequency table
See above, the how it is made argument is 100% BS. The statistical salience of LLM simply can't prevent plagiarism and copyright violations. This was cited in the original topic links.
> 5. I profit from this text generator.
Since this content may inject liabilities into commercial settings, only naive fools will use this in a commercial context. Most "AI" companies lose around $4.50 per new customer, and are a economic fiction driven by some very silly people.
LLM businesses are simply an unsustainable exploit. Unfortunately they also proved wealthy entities can evade laws through regulatory capture, and settling the legal problems they couldn't avoid.
I didn't make the rules, but do disagree cleverness supersedes a just rule of law. Have a wonderful day =3
'"Generative AI" is not what you think it is'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERiXDhLHxmo
And this paper proved the absurd outcome of the bubble is hype:
'Researchers Built a Tiny Economy. AIs Broke It Immediately'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUekLTqV1ME
It is true bubbles driven by the irrational can't be stopped, but one may profit from peoples delusions... and likely get discount GPUs when the economic fiction inevitably implodes. Best of luck =3
"Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852)
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm
I look forwards to buying the failed data center assets. LLM make great search engines, but are not the path to "AGI". Neuromorphic computing looks more interesting. Have a great day =3
I am not pro-AI, and I agree that the market will crash. But what I take issue with is this NIMBY mentality that we should nitpick proposals with a thousand fake reasons for why we can't build anything in this country. We can't do big engineering projects like china because they are too much of an eyesore or they use too much water or they're not zoned correctly.
We can't put up a new apartment block, it's too much of a strain on the local water supply. Okay can we collect more water, invest in a new reservoir? Of course not, it will endanger the tumbleweed population.
We can't let a new datacenter go up because it will cause everyone's power prices to increase. Okay maybe we can produce more power?? No, BECAUSE ENERGY IS FINITE AND THE SUN IS JUST GOING TO EXPLODE ANYWAYS SO WHY DO YOU EVEN CARE. WTF?
Why can't we build things? Because we just can't, and actually it's impossible and you are rude for suggesting we build anything ever. It's circular reasoning designed to placate suburban NPCs.
If you oppose AI because it is ruining art, or it will drive people out of jobs, just say that. Because these fake complaints about power and water are neither compelling nor effective (they are just technological and material problems which will be ironed out in the coming generations).
Consider most "AI" firms lost on average $4.50 for every new user, rely on overt piracy, and delusional boards sand-bagging for time... these LLM businesses are simply unsustainable fictions.
Many problems don't have simple answers, but one may merely profit by their predictable nature. I would recommend volunteering with a local pet rescue society if you find yourself getting upset about trivia. Have a great day. =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcwtV_bFp4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-8TDOFqkQA
These AI companies are paying for the reactors. As for waste, The Department of Energy handles spent nuclear fuel. Protests against the construction of yucca mountain have made this impossible. Nuclear power plants repeatedly sue the US Government for the cost of storing this nuclear waste on-site, because it's the DOE's problem.
And it is a totally artificial political problem. It is not even nessisarially "waste" in the sense that we ordinarily think: there is a significant amount of fissile isotope in spent fuel and countries like france recycle the majority of spent nuclear fuel. We could do the same with the right infrastructure, and it would vastly decrease the amount of waste we produce and uranium we need to mine.
My point is that complaints in these youtube videos you link (which I am very accustomed to, I have been following this for decades) present the argument that AI is politically dangerous, and this is totally separate from these material complaints (not enough water, not enough power, not enough chips, etc.) you pretend are a significant problem.
These are just extrinsic flaws which can be solved (and WILL be solved, if the USA is able to restore its manufacturing base, which it should). But my issue is purely with the intrinsic dangers of this tech, which are not fixable.
Some of the videos you link are just this suburban NIMBY nagging about muh noise pollution. You might as well get a video of people complaining about EMF pollution. The big issue here is that AI is going to take all of our jobs and will essentially harken the end of the world as we know it. It is going to get incredibly ugly very soon. Who cares about what some 50 year old boomer homeowner (who isn't going to live to see this unfold anyways) thinks about some gray building being built remotely nearby their suburb. They should go back to watching TV.
As for me, I am going to campaign to have my local pet rescue society demolished. It uses too much water and space and electricity, and for what? Something I don't care for? Seems unethical to me that I should bear the cost incurred through increased demand for these resources, even though I did not explicitly consent to the animal shelter being constructed.
This is demonstrably false with negative revenue, and when the gamblers default on the loans it is the public that will bear the consequences. Similar to sub-prime mortgages people on the con are getting tired.
Dismissing facts because you personally feel they are not important is silly. If you think the US will "win" the "AGI" race... than you are fooling yourself, as everything has already been stolen.
Have a great day, and maybe go outside for a walk to settle down a bit if you are uncomfortable with the way imaginary puppies, bunnies, and kittens make you feel. Community non-profit organizations offer tangible goodwill, and are very different from ephemeral LLM fads externalizing a suckers-bet on the public. =3
Arguing regulatory capture versus overt piracy is a ridiculous premise. The "AI" firms have so much liquid capital now... they could pay the fines indefinitely in districts that constrain damages, and already settled with larger copyright holders like it was just another nuisance fee. =3
Maybe a different comparison you would agree with is Stingrays, the devices that track cell phones. Ideally nobody would have them but as is, I’m glad they’re not easily available to any random person to abuse.
...and the lawyers win. =3