anileated

A law in a world where laws are updated when technologies evolve, and judicial system doesn’t just serve those with the most money?

IP theft involves deprivation of the holder of ownership claim. Observing a game before making your own game, listening to music before releasing your own track, viewing photos before making a go at the same composition, do not do that. Claiming them as your own, however, does do that. Using them to train a (commercial) system that allows anybody to recreate them and claim as your own does do that.

It is, actually, more of a problem than theft of physical items. The latter you can just buy again while the former robs you of intangible values that among other things may grant you the ability to just buy physical property. The latter doesn’t scale and is generally more difficult because it’s more visible, while the former can be (and is being, in fact) done at population scale without people realizing it until it’s too late. Also, expectation of ownership claim is a meta level of why people want to make more original things, including new and cool physical items.

Theft of IP permanently deprives the author of ownership claim. It’s quite a problem if you want people to innovate or create new stuff, because they usually do this with an expectation to be able to claim ownership and have a healthy degree of control over how the work is used and/or monetized.

Actually, IP theft is more of a problem than theft of physical property. The latter you can just buy again while the former robs you of intangible values that among other things may grant you the ability to just buy physical property. The latter doesn’t scale and is generally more difficult because it’s more visible, while the former can be (and is being, in fact) done at population scale without people realizing it until it’s too late.

Check ToS.

Unlimited generation of derivative works is not fair use.

Security audits are just theater. If they were not, you could not ever convince them that using a platform feeding unlicensed source (including apparently from private repositories) to their commercial LLM is ever a pass.

The difference between a currency and store of value is not an exact line, but however vague that line is it is somewhat clear on which side Bitcoin is, and it is not the currency side.

Fallback email = a vector to lose your domain.

That is not what they wrote, but what you describe sure sounds like an interesting design that I don't recall in countries other than Japan.

Turns out, I am intimately familiar with this service plan. There are metro trains with more frequent stops and service and there are distance trains with rarer stops (and yes, rarer service, the degree of which varies by country). What is new that I am missing?

Do you defend the subway vs. train terminology? Sometimes distance trains run underground, sometimes metro trains run overground, so it seems pretty pointless to me.

My comment said:

> > What's kinda interesting is does that train classify as metro transit that goes slightly beyond city to airport and such (making many stops all the way) or distance intercity train that happens to stop both at airport and city? Or does it change this classification? That would be actually unusual

Also, about this part:

> You typically schedule your trip based on the train’s schedule.

Many counterexamples to that around East Asia (and probably Europe?). Trains are frequent enough that you just come most of the day. Apart from late hours when it is the same for both metro and distance trains, you have to know when they depart because both become rare and you can be late for the last one.

Apparently in the US there are trains that use dual rail and overhead power, one for subway and another for overground portions.

I suppose a subway train with rail only supply that goes overground sometimes is more dangerous because it is easier to accidentally step on a rail and rail is powered?

Yes. Subway train that goes over ground is just train. Metro or long distance is an actual distinction. If they blend in Japan then that's rare.

> a train from the airport, which then turns into a subway, then later on it becomes a train again.

This is confusing.

Subway is already a kind of train.

You mean to say that the train partly runs underground? That is pretty common. I actually can't remember any city where airport connecting train does not do the same at some point or another.

What's kinda interesting is does that train classify as metro transit that goes slightly beyond city to airport and such (making many stops all the way) or distance intercity train that happens to stop both at airport and city? Or does it change this classification? That would be actually unusual.

> always use your own domain so if your email service locks you out, you can move to another instantly.

What to do if your domain is taken away legally (e.g. via trademark dispute) or due to a random combination of unlucky factors is bought before you can extend it?

Besides what email do you specify when buying domains? Where do you host that email? How do you deal if that email locks you out?

I hope don't say "use me@example.com to register example.com" because that circle seems like a fun thing to solve in a pinch.

> This is why I think it's just a more powerful version of "standard CGI"

It is a subset of CGI, a special case. I have never seen the term “standard CGI”, there is no standard.

> Many AI art creators use tools

Any sources?

> the average person wouldn't be able to replicate the results through a simple prompt

For how long? Do you think what these people post will somehow not be used to train Veo3 and thus make it capable of reproducing it through a simple prompt?

On a technical level, DTGI (diffusion-transformer generated imagery) is a subset of CGI (computer generated imagery). All DTGI is also CGI.

Computer is the medium, like painting on a canvas. You can paint, or you can pay someone to paint for you.

On a conceptual level, DTGI is a big change. From painting, or paying a creative to paint, to paying a faceless corp to generate a permutation of paintings by other people (who probably did not consent to that).

If creator is transparent about it, I would appreciate it, but as someone said once I’d prefer to just see the prompt since that is the extent of creative input.

There are many cases where laws that are made for humans before certain tech are not sufficient once certain tech arrives.

You don’t need the right to be forgotten outside of specific tech because human brain forgets by default, paper rots, and all of the above is restricted geographically and does not scale.

> The entire legal edifice around recognizing and protecting intellectual property is an entirely artificial construct

The presence of “natural” vs. “artificial” argument is a placeholder for nonexistent substantiation. There is never a case when it does anything else but add a disguise of objectivity to some wild opinion.

Artificial as opposed to what? Do you consider what humans do is “unnatural” because humans are somehow not part of nature?

If some humans (in case of big tech abusing copyright, vast majority, once the realization reaches the masses) want something and other humans don’t, what exactly makes one natural and another unnatural other than your own belonging to one group or the other?

> that goes against the nature of information and knowledge

What is that nature of information and knowledge that you speak about?

> forcing information to behave like physical goods, so it's not unfair to the creators in an economy that's built around trading physical goods

Its point has been to encourage innovation, creativity, and open information sharing—exactly those things that gave us ML and LLMs. We would have none of these in that rosy land of IP communism where no idea or original work belongs to its author that you envision.

Recognition of intellectual ownership of original work (coming in many shapes, including control over how it is distributed, ability to monetize it, and just being able to say you have done it) is the primary incentive for people to do truly original work. You know, the work that gave us GNU Linux et al., true innovation that tends to come when people are not giving their work to their employer in return for paycheck.

> IP laws were built on moral arguments, so it's only fair to change them on moral grounds too.

That is, perhaps, the exact point of people who argue that copyright law should be changed or at least clarified as new technology appears.

The fact that works are produced not by a human, not for private use, but by a for-profit tool commercially at scale is important.

> if OpenAI was downloading pirated copies of the Ghibli corpus then that act itself was copyright infringement, independently of the AI training and output.

On the contrary, having legally bought the works is irrelevant. You can buy a Disney movie and be liable if you screen it at a local mall you own.

Given an octopus[0] is worse at mimicking human output than an LLM, either you decide that the LLM has surpassed the octopus in thought capability and should enjoy higher protections against abuse and violence, or you decide that thought is irrelevant when exhibiting capability to mimic human output. (As a third option, you could decide that abusing a human-like thinking being is OK, but let’s assume you would not choose this path.)

[0] A protected species for its sentience.

Since you cannot (it is technically not possible) create an ML model reproducing a style without having it ingest original works in that style, and such a tool is producing derivative works based on original work (let’s say, by Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli) at scale and for profit, then I have difficulty seeing how copyright law is not involved.

The problem with LLMs is techbro crowd trying to pretend they are like thinking humans (all these analogies with us memorizing things) when it comes to rights like access to information and copyright abuse, but not thinking humans when it comes to using LLMs themselves.

You’d think any logical person would believe only one or the other is true, but big tech got many people believing this paradox because the industry depends on it. As soon as the paradox is over, the industry is revealed to be either based on IP theft or on slavery.

There is no problem to argue about, really: laws and basic rights and freedoms exist for humans; if %thing% (be it made of chips or brain cells) is not considered human then laws and rights apply to humans who operate it; if the thing is considered human then it itself has human rights to be reckoned with.

The ideas of FTL travel or existence of bearded people in the sky were also explored for a long time.

> as an echo of the past when people had the same debate about women and non-Europeans.

If you need help spotting the difference between skin color or gender variation and an imagined ability to imbue something we cannot even define (like consciousness) onto arbitrary substrates, I am not the right person for that.

> If we could incrementally update our own brains by swapping cells for chips, what percentage of our brain has to be chips before us learning from a book is a violation of copyright?

The same percentage at which you stop qualifying to be human and become an unthinking tool, fully controlled by its operator to do whatever they want, without free will of its own and without any ethical concerns about abuse and slavery, like is the case with all LLMs.

(Of course, it is a moot point, because creating a human-level consciousness with chips is a thought experiment not grounded in reality.)

> When learning to recite a recent children's poem in kindergarten, what level of accuracy can a child attain before their ability to repeat it privately to one other person at a time is a copyright violation?

Any level thanks to the concept called human rights and freedoms, famously not applied to machines and other unthinking tools.

> Do people really think a web server written in Go or Rust is unmaintainable?

Things are not black and white. It will be less maintainable relatively speaking, proper tool for the job and all that. That’s why you will be left in the dust.

Again, your competitor will get there faster and with fewer bugs. LLMs are trained on human input and humans do not do great at low level languages. They churn out better Python than C and especially when it comes to refactoring it (have observed that personally).

> Given LLM assistance, why wouldn't I write my web app layer in Rust or Zig?

Same reasons as with no LLM assistance. You would be choosing higher maintenance burden and slower development speed compared to your competitors, though. They will get it out faster, they will have fewer issues, and will be able to find people to support it more easily. Your product may run faster, but theirs will work and be out faster.

The fact that many software products are moving to lower-level languages is not a general point in favour of lower-level languages being somehow better—rather, it simply aligns with general directions of software evolution.

1. As products mature, they may find useful scenarios involving runtime environments that don’t necessarily match the ones that were in mind back when the foundation was laid. If relevant parts are rewritten in a lower-level language like C or Rust, it becomes possible to reuse them across environments (in embedded land, in Web via WASM, etc.) without duplicate implementations while mostly preserving or even improving performance and unlocking new use cases and interesting integrations.

2. As products mature, they may find use cases that have drastically different performance requirements. TypeScript was not used for truly massive codebases, until it was, and then performance became a big issue.

Starting a product trying to get all of the above from the get go is rarely a good idea: a product that rots and has little adoption due to feature creep and lack of focus (with resulting bugs and/or slow progress) doesn’t stand a chance against a product that runs slower and in fewer environments but, crucially, 1) is released, 2) makes sound design decisions, and 3) functions sufficiently well for the purposes of its audience.

Whether LLMs are involved or not makes no meaningful difference: no matter how good your autocomplete is, other things equal the second instance still wins over the first—it still takes less time to reach the usefulness threshold and start gaining adoption. (And if you are making a religious argument about omniscient entities for which there is no meaningful difference between those two cases, which can instantly develop a bug-free product with infinite flexibility and perfect performance at whatever the level of abstraction required, coming any year, then you should double-check whether if they do arrive anyone would still be using them for this purpose. In a world where I, a hypothetical end user, can get X instantly conjured for me out of thin air by a genie, you, a hypothetical software developer, better have that genie conjure you some money lest your family goes hungry.)

Before: I’m a lazy developer so I find the best libraries and abstract logic to write the least code and do least maintenance work.

Now: I’m a lazy developer, so I get a glorified autocomplete to write 10x code than what I have the willpower to. Of course, I won’t read all of it.