bioemerl

> Suppressing dissent isn't just bad because it helps a government maintain a monopoly on power. It's bad because it creates an intellectual monoculture

My short response to this is that you can let people speak freely while not trusting them to run platforms where there are clear conflicts of interest.

I do not care that tankies exist. They can have their communities, they can run their communities, they can have their platform and try to make their point. That is fine, that is good, that is healthy.

They should not, however, be running the platform that you are trying to speak on. Lemmy is a platform that you are going to be trying to speak on, and it is a platform that they have control and power over.

As people who support authoritarian control, that power is going to lead to the sort of authoritarian monoculture that you do not want to see happen.

So you support the platforms that are actually pro free speech, that are actually not having this massive conflict of interest. You support platforms which you can trust to actually care about the values they are promoting.

Lemmy is not such a platform, you should not support it. Because if you do, they will close that door and they will empower the sort of authoritarianism that you fear will occur.

Adamantly defend their right to exist and speak freely, adamantly defend your own right to ensure they never hold any form of power, because they will take it and they will destroy you with it.

> Your position is that the people you despise are so bad that

Well, no, I've given a very specific and reasonable reason. They support authoritarian censorship and control, states that perform authoritarian censorship and control.

They're trying to run an open message platform.

It's not just because they're bad people, it's because they support states that are involved in the active censorship of speech.

You're trusting them with a message platform that's supposed to promote free speech.

It's not emotional, that's not just them being bad. It is a hilarious and obvious conflict of interest.

> code is itself tainted

Yeah. If you can't trust the authors you can't trust the code. You can perform a audit on it, you can create a team that maintains it as a fork, and at that point it's safe.

Unless you're willing to do that work, and nobody's willing to do that work, it's not safe.

> In order to achieve a purity in your view would require a line-by-line political Bill Of Materials that includes the political beliefs at the time of the coders at time of each commit. It is nonsensical.

No, I just don't want the developers to be obvious and blatant supporters of what are basically fascist nations.

If they really love mixed housing developments I don't really care. It's not about their politics, it's about the fact that they have specifically very extreme politics that are a conflict of interest with the very software they're developing.

Authoritarian control.

The Chinese government reserves the right to ban censor and shut down any form of online speech going on in the country.

In fact, they reserve the right to throw you in jail for doing it.

Where is ever an event or a situation or a topic of discussion which the state does not like they flip a couple of switches and all across the country firewalls begin blocking words, banning access to VPNs, and generally preventing those topics from being able to be discussed.

They believe this is good because it promotes social stability, when in reality it's just a massive system that empowers the government and ensures that the people can never easily disagree with it.

Anyone who supports such a system or a country who runs such a system should not be running and open source message board.

Not when the people who run that software happily support China.

I've said it elsewhere in this thread, but unless you want to audit the whole network stack, maintain that software going forward, and somehow totally disconnect the name Lemmy from the people who wrote the software, you're empowering them by using it.

And while China does not support free speech within their country, sure they would be ecstatic to have the opportunity to own run or maintain or have people friendly to them owning running and maintaining software that other countries use to have speech within themselves.

It would be very foolish to give them that ability.

> You're free to not use it if you disagree with how it's moderated.

Yes, and I urge everyone reading this thread to also not use it. I'm telling them why they should opt not to use it.

I disagree, and I disagree to the extent that I think it would be counterproductive for anyone who believes in open source or freedom of speech to go use an instance run by people who clearly hold positions counter to those values.

Because at the end of the day you don't trust people who support authoritarian censorship with the stack that you try to speak freely on.

You're asking this in bad faith, but...

First off, I'm opting to not use Lemmy.

I've swapped my whole computer stack except for one gaming PC to Linux. I adamantly avoid any hardware whose stack is owned by anyone in China, and I run a pretty tight ship when it comes to my firewall and networking.

Next on my list is getting my phone de googled.

I never said they are funded by China. I didn't say but they were corrupted by them either. I also didn't say they should be banned from the internet.

You basically invented three things that I never said here.

I said they support China, and implicitly support the sort of authoritarian control that China represents.

That authoritarian control is fundamentally incompatible with open source, and free speech, and democracy, and most human rights.

If you support any of those things you would be a fool to support Lemmy.

Yes, you could, if you want to also audit their code base and maintain their code base going into the future indefinitely.

There's a fine line between not liking something going on in the US, and turning around to do a full 360 and adamantly supporting a state and its practices when those practices involve regular and very strict authoritarian censorship, state control of society and media, the total subversion of basic human rights protections like open courts and democracy.

From what I've seen these people are very much on the other side of that line.

It takes like 10 minutes for you to go look at the Lemmy.ml instance and see what's going on there.

Someone else linked to the GitHub project and said just click on some of their profiles. You'll see it right away.

You can ask for sources if you're curious, that's understandable, but it seems to me more like you're just trying to discredit here.

Anyone reading this, I urge you, go to lemmy.ML, look at one of the threads they have about China.

> To punish them in one area because of political views in another is another toxic manifestation of cancel culture.

More like basic common sense. Are you going to trust people who support authoritarian censorship with the open source platform you speak on?

That would be as silly as trusting the NSA to build it. There is a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict of interest there.

This isn't punishing someone in one area because of their views in another, this is an area in which those views are simply not acceptable at all.

There are a few examples elsewhere in this thread where people have linked to supporting evidence. It's really obvious as well if you just go to the website and browse for a bit but it's infested with tankies, and has the support of the developers.

You don't remove images that are overfit, you adjust parameters like model size, add error functions for exact reproductions training data, etc.

You can deduplicate images that are overfit if you have hundreds of them in your data set, which makes it much less likely overfitting happens.

Let me respond on a higher level then.

I think you're doing here is connecting two very disconnected things.

I agree with you entirely that cases were a model is overfitting are copyright violations. I think you should have the right to sue open AI or whoever it is that made the model over the violation of distributing what is basically a copy of your code when you can go in there and reproduce it so exactly.

I do not agree is the idea that you think that this means that training on your data is a copyright violation.

If the model was trained properly and set up so that it didn't overfit and it didn't reproduce your exact code, you would have absolutely zero right to any claim of copyright.

The fact that your data was trained on is not the problem, the fact that your data is reproduced (without a sufficiently detailed explanation that would cause it to be reproduced by any sufficiently capable model) is the problem.

Open AI and friends should be dinged for the fact that they've allowed this to happen, they should pay that liability, and that should encourage them to very strongly police their models and make sure the sort of overfitting is very very rare to non-existent.

But you, nor anyone else, should have what I believe to be the egregious right to say that no one can learn on the data from your work on the internet.

And I understand that's technically not what you're claiming, but when you say that you can deny the right to train models on your data, that's basically what you're saying.

You do have claim to also sue the shit out of GitHub for letting people host your code on their service without your permission, and the guy who originally uploaded it.

So keep in mind here as you respond to me, that I am drawing a line now between properly training a model where it does not overfit, and the example you have where it did produce your copyright material.

> The model is literally trained on my picture; how can it _not_ be a derivative of my work?

In the same way that when a person looks at your code and sees some technique you used and goes oh that's neat I'm going to do that too, that's also not a derivative work.

An AI model does not copy chunks of your code and just sort of haste that code occasionally when it does other things.

An AI model actually learns patterns, builds real working knowledge of connections between things, and uses that knowledge to do new things.

An AI model is going to look at your work and learn things like "oh, I can use an if statement."

You don't have copyright to that. The data contained in your code? The ability to observe facts about how to program? You don't own those. You only own your specific code.

A trained AI model is larger than the sum of its training data. It's not like your code and everyone else's code is sort of bunched into a search engine or something like that, it's actually doing real thinking in there.

And that knowledge? It's just not yours to claim.

> Photoshop analogy is still not really working

It works, again, when you consider what I was talking about above. When the AI model is trained so that it does not overfit.

In the case there is no overfit, the tool doesn't compress your work. It doesn't contain your work. It's just trained on it.

The point of the analogy is to point out that even if you can create something with a tool, you don't own the copyright claim for that tool.

Even with a properly trained AI model, if I were to give it a description of your work, it's probably going to create something that's basically a copyright violation, but that's going to be on the person making that prompt, not the model.

So I think that's where our disparity is. My analogy works because I'm thinking of a model on the average where it doesn't overfit.

You're thinking of the model in the "exceptional" times where it does overfit.

And I do think they are exceptional times. The people making these models really don't want them to overfit so they're using all sorts of techniques to make it happen as little as possible. Clearly not enough, but as a result the average output of these models is actually novel stuff.

So when I see a model I see something more like Photoshop. I see it not as a collection, or a compression of other people's work. Rather, it is something that knows how to write code (or roughly knows the patterns in which words need to be arranged to make code a thing), and there are exceptions within that where you can get it to reproduce what was in its training data.

So when you say this

> Would a very clever compression algorithm suddenly strip from its output the copyright protections of its input?

You're imagining me agreeing to something I don't agree with. I think that when a model reproduces an original work, it's a copyright violation.

But I don't think that abstracts to the whole picture. I do not think that proves training a model on data is compression.

> Photoshop will not regurgitate someone else's program practically line-by-line when you type the first 7 words of it into a prompt

You could argue that the people who have that specific bit of code would have a decent right to sue, because they have real definitive proof that their works are in that model in some form.

But unless you have managed to make such an output for (insert work here), You have no real claim to copyright on that model.

Which is why I made that Photoshop analogy. You can use it and get it to output someone's copyrighted work. The fact that you can do that doesn't make photoshop itself a problem. The act of making it spit out that copyrighted work, then distributing it, is the problem.

The liability for that is going to have to be figured out in the court system.

> A person with a camera and/or a copy of the original code, if anything.

No, the model doesn't have a copy of the original code when it's running. It only has what it was trained on, as if you read a bunch of stuff on GitHub and later on use what you saw in there while you were writing your own stuff.

And people totally do this as well, they will see things and learn from them and accidentally or unintentionally reproduce them when they are working later.

Which is another reason I think you should treat the output of these models as if someone has actually done it themselves. If you can prove there was violation there, there was violation there. Otherwise, you can't claim the model just like you can't claim the person who learned from your stuff.

> The fact that it compresses very well

It doesn't. The data of these things are trained on is absolutely massive and the final files are not nearly so large. The compression ratio would be absolutely bonkers if that was what was going on here.

What you're seeing is the effects of overfitting on specific examples, which doesn't represent the whole at all. This is finding an exception to the rule and taking it out of context.

To say that the model itself is a derivative work is absurd. You've got a picture and you're going to claim that this AI model that was trained on 7 billion pictures or something like that is derivative of your work?

> This is no different that compressing my program

It is very very different than compressing your program. A compressed file is a compressed file, builds to be compressed and then decompressed to get the original file back.

Again, except for the example where you own a work that is being reproduced by one of these models, proven, this is more like claiming a hash of your file in a folder with 100,000 other files is a derivative work of your file.

I don't think they've lacked understanding of their value proposition. They thought they had something worthy of capitalizing on, kind of like YouTube.

And they could have capitalized quite a lot on Reddit, but I think they've screwed themselves over the last couple of years by pushing a bunch of features no one liked and not actually focusing on anything that would make them money.

Like, I should be able to pay Reddit to be able to post high quality images and have them posted to all the users of the website without reliance on their shitty mobile app. I shouldn't be able to upload high quality images without paying, and that incentivizes me to give them money.

What are they doing instead? They incentivize their shitty mobile app.

I think they've dramatically overestimated their ability to make money and they've expanded the site to the point that they cant actually sustainably continue to maintain it.

I have half a mind to believe they actually expected the third party developers to pay the outrageous fees and that that would help cover the costs of them running the website.

I think Reddit is unsustainable and it's going to collapse in on itself and go into bankruptcy eventually.

They will continue to fail to make money to support the bloated and shitty infrastructure and hiring practices they've put in place, and when they inevitably fail they will blame these terrible moderators and users for ruining the website.

In reality it was their own greed and shameless lack of self-restriction the wind in terms of establishing their bloated and terrible infrastructure.

But hey, they have an office in San Francisco so they're quite the lovely san francisco high-tech company that's making all sorts of money. And by money I mean investments.

I don't believe they are the same.

A derivative work is something like making a collage or a video game modification/sequel.

An AI isn't really either of those. It doesn't contain the original artwork in any sense, and as a trained numerical model it's not a derivative of any other works it was trained on. No more than you looking at the artwork and learning aspects of it at least.

In the copyright sense it should be treated like you treat a person. If it produces something that is clearly a derivative copy of something. Hit it for copyright. Otherwise, treat the output as novel output.

If you use an AI you need to be held liable for whatever you take from it and distribute, if you violate copyright you violate copyright.

But the AI itself is no such thing. It's a model trained on billions of examples which fundamentally cannot contain all of the works it was trained on because it's just too small of a model and too large of a data.

To sue over that containing artwork would be like to sue over Photoshop containing artwork because you can produce a derivative work based on it.

I think people are putting the cart way before the horse here.

Yes there will be bot content online.

However, all these scraped datasets are extensively parsed and pruned and filtered and analysed by humans who work on the data to get a good result. If AI data screws the data up and makes the AI incoherent, ways will be found to make that data no longer do that, either by improving the AI or pruning the data set.

We are making wild and negative predictions here without remembering the number one rule of life.

Things change.

People adapt.

Yeah, not only is this crazy a slap in the face to Reddit users who have wanted it for ages, it's also a slap in the face to people who make subs for their own stuff.

So if I made a sub and I post to it, I build the content on it, some group of users can just vote me out randomly?

Fuck that. They do such a thing and reddit becomes salted earth for anyone wanting to post their content on it, and for anyone wanting to run a community where they aren't popular/don't have an opinion in line with the hive mind.

They needed to allow a more flexible moderation system and separate names of groups from the communities so that /r/games could dynamically change with time, but allowing the community to evict people from what they created is downright asinine.

Reddit is starting to seem genuinely spooked by what's happening here.

Confidence implies inaction, so the fact they want to undelete things says to me that it's having a real impact and they are scared of it.

Mister "this will pass" certainly doesn't seem to believe it's going to pass.

They definitely suppress web forums. There are a few I frequent that are prevalent on bing but nowhere to be seen on Google.

Maybe it's just a difference in phrasing. Promoting clean SEO companies is suppressing web forums.

I hope this is finally a wakeup call to Google to try to start to prioritize non reddit user content on the internet again. Web forums have been suppressed by their results for ages now and Google's choice to do that has been a big part of what killed the internet.

This is exactly my problem. They are doing quite well, and closing the door behind them. Open AI isn't your friend and reserves the right to screw you down the line.

It's actually not bad, the hard part is getting the hardware. Kobold will install itself most of the time with a double click.

> . I need to shell at least 25k (possibly much more for GPT-4) before I can run these models for even inference

Give it a decade and you might be able to, but without the model you'll never have the option.

I hate seeing these guys succeed because everyone of their successes is a new day that AI becomes less accessible to the average person and more locked behind their APIs.

It was hilariously and recklessly irresponsible for these guys to basically use a regulation to put a geoengineering experiment into play that is the exact opposite of what we want to be doing right now.

All you have to do is do something like sneak in telemetry, add some sort of back door, who knows.

There are near infinite opportunities for a bad actor to sneak bad code in, so when you're dealing with a bad actor you just don't trust anything they do.

Running code from people who are tied to an authoritarian government is not something you should be doing ever.

Software updates.

The fact that they own the main domain and the main server means they can choose who to federate with cut off large parts of the network at a whim.

The fact they own the software means they can make it easier or harder to surprise or spread certain messages, and do so in very subtle ways.

Do not confuse open source with safe, something can be open source and be abused even if it's able to be self-hosted.

There are literally advocates for a genocidal state. Their politics are going to bleed over into the software eventually. To think otherwise is deeply naive.

You don't have to, but bye joining and supporting the platform you're joining and supporting the developers.