Hacker News Reader

Comment by gspr | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure about this?

An alternative near future is that what you're describing is used to undermine/rightswash strong copyleft free software for use in proprietary products, while owners of proprietary software (and big movie studios and record labels) start protecting themselves with EULAs forbidding ingestion of the works into LLMs.

Another possibility is the one others sketched, where truly user-controlled models are legislated away.

Do we really believe that Rockstar would be ok with someone feeding GTA6 to a hypothetical LLM and get a "free" reimplementation out? If that world were to come to fruition, I'd maybe buy the "best thing to happen to free software" story. Otherwise, my bets are on "complete and utter stomping of small IP rights holders in favor of giant ones". In that world, free software is in real trouble. Together with indie artists and writers. I lament how many people don't seem to take this scenario seriously.

View on HN

They can write any EULA they want but it's not like they will be able to enforce it in a meaningful way, to be fair. You can't legislate modding away, that's like legislating piracy away, which has famously failed. Music piracy wasn't killed by banning it, it has shrunk in importance because Spotify is fairly cheap and easy. Despite that, many people do still pirate music.

In the hypothetical GTA VI case, what can they do about it? Take just about any historical data leak, in pretty much zero cases anyone has been able to scrub all copies of it from the internet. There's plenty of lost media, the stuff no one cares about. But if enough people care about, it can't really be scrubbed away.

I'm so worried when the retort here is essentially "but nobody gets caught breaking the law". What have we become?

Sorry, I'm just being realistic. "Whenever there's a will there's a way" and so on. People have tried to legislate all sorts of various things, even stuff like "PI = 3" without much success because they weren't viable.

Don't be ridiculous. The fact that it's dumb to legislate mathematical falsehoods doesn't mean we can't successfully legislate things.

I said it's not possible to legislate some things away, i.e. unviable legislation. A hard ban on modding / AI reimplementation isn't viable, because you can't really keep data off the internet, evidenced by things like leaks, Anna's Archive etc. remaining online. People can always reupload the remade GTA or whatever onto noname fileshares, code forges, torrent and so on.

Fact Check: π != 3 https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alabamas-slice-of-pi/

[Usenet: talk.origins; 1 Apr 1998]

Free software is already used in proprietary products and without any washing. Go and buy any phone and then try to get a copy of the source code of all the GPL software on it. The phone maker will just laugh at you all the way to the bank.

"The law isn't being properly enforced" is still way better than "let's ignore the law".

The law is whatever gets enforced.

This is such a bad take. It really isn't. For example, an unenforced or poorly enforced law can at any moment start to be enforced. Or powers can threaten to enforce it to compel behavior.

This is vastly different from a law that doesn't exist.

> An alternative near future is that what you're describing is used to undermine/rightswash strong copyleft free software for use in proprietary products

So what? It's a future where software can be created on demand with the push of a button. Why care about some dinky little Free Software tool getting abused when everybody can rewrite it from scratch in an instant?

> Another possibility is the one others sketched, where truly user-controlled models are legislated away.

Even that isn't going to stop people from just paying a few dollar and writing whatever software they want or releasing it under Free Software license.

> Do we really believe that Rockstar would be ok with someone feeding GTA6 to a hypothetical LLM and get a "free" reimplementation out?

They can't stop you from feeding a few photos of Miami into the AI and instructing it to make a game with gangsters and car theft out of it. Astra can already one-shot a GTA1-style game, give it another year and they might be able to do GTA3 and sooner or later they'll work their way up to GTA6. All of this will happen in a time frame much shorter than what it took to go from GTA5 to GTA6 the old way.

> my bets are on "complete and utter stomping of small IP rights holders in favor of giant ones".

Of course small IP holders will be stomped on, but not because of copyright, but simply because their IP is worthless now. AI is making creation so easy that there will a oversupply of everything. With the budget of a single big Hollywood blockbuster you can make around 1000 full length AI movies at current prices. When there is 1000x as much stuff out there, it's just going a lot harder to stand out. And cost is only going to go down.

> Why care about some dinky little Free Software tool getting abused when everybody can rewrite it from scratch in an instant?

Three primary reasons:

1) Human, individual control. If you don't see that, you've probably not thought warmly of the FOSS movement even today.

2) These models never write stuff from scratch. They were trained on a huge body of FOSS work! "From scratch" is an enraging lie!

3) Even if all the technological innovations you wish for come to fruition, your comparison is as dumb as "why paint paintings when there are cameras" or "why run when their are cars" or "why lift weights when there are forklifts". It's like you've never met a human.

Before I engage with your points further, it'd be nice to know where you stand re the big IP holders. You kinda avoided my question. In the world you sketch, will it be OK to feed a model GTA6 or the latest hollywood movie and have it "rewrite them from scratch in an instant" (your wording, I would never call this "from scratch")?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com