415 karma · joined November 1, 2014
The equivalent final state in theorem proving is unique to each theorem so such a system would need to handle an additional layer-of-generalization.
I'd be curious about the difference in success w/ drafts on a new 2/2 bear with a different name, and cards with a new keyword 'fizzbangitude 7' as well.
On HN, while it's def the minority, I am seeing some pro-board positions.
On Twitter, I agree with the article, I see almost universally con-board positions.
I wonder if the promotion of blue checkmark responses is distorting, perhaps significantly. When the reception to news is news itself, does it make sense to use a pay-for-visibilty listing as a source?
I'm guessing you might be referring to infinite sets of reals being potentially unordered under zfc w/o the axiom of choice. In that case, you made up this word 'infinite' so you have to say what it means. I guess calling that a word game is one way to think about it.
It seems like you could calculate how much data is within X% error of a 5GB model, and what X% should be for 'visual data'.
I bet it's pretty big.
One could describe llms similarly.
I don't have strict definitions for any of the quoted terms because I don't think we really understand them yet.
It seems very possible that human generative content shares much in common with 'stochastic parroting'. But I'd hypothesize there's a filtering process, sometimes at the individual level, sometimes at a group or even civilization level that (so-far-over-long-enough-timescales) tends to cull some information that has low 'value' and propagates other data that has higher 'value'.
When an AI system can do the same, that's a big inflection point as you can give it energy and time and it will self-improve indefinitely.
It's pretty clear humanity has this capability. It's not clear whether AI does (or ever will). Or, perhaps it might already be there, and we just don't understand enough to know for sure.
This is a hedge against courts deciding scraping data for training purposes is valid.
Maybe you're allowed to scrape data, but with this, now you are applying a filter (creating a derivative work) to defeat a copyright protection mechanism, both clearly prohibited in current law (US jurisdiction at least). For any serious player scraping this opens your buisness up to huge lawsuits. For any serious player making tools, you'll specifically avoid defeating these techniques. For any minor player you'll now have to go to the backwaters of the internet for tools to do this that you hope won't steal your bitcoins.
Every notable artist will be only upload their art to sites that offer something like this, paid at first, but when the cost are low enough, pretty much every site that wants art content will offer it.
This isn't a technical solution to this problem, it's a political solution that happens to use tech.
That being said, I agree with most of your statements and concerns. I probably don't weigh them quite as highly compared to creators interests as you do, but I appreciate that you are invested in the issue.
I think it'd be very reasonable to have an institution responsible for archiving you could submit works to (maybe must in some cases?) I know in the us to register a copyright you have to submit the work already, though I would guess it could be the work with drm included. Seems like something in that direction could satisfy archivism without needing to resort to piracy.
So re ipaddresses what characteristic differentiates the from property? For them to be useful it would seem they must have pretty much all the same characteristics.
I agree there could be a world where people could torrent whatever w/o repercussion, in the same way there could be a world where we didn't have to wear pants. It's not where we are, but we can imagine and reason about it.
But even in such a world, should a singer not be allowed to make a contract where they sing but won't be recorded, or a contract where they are recorded only if the folks follow copyright law? Effectively isn't this what many trade agreements are, one country will give another favorable trade conditions X in exchange for Y which includes 'your population can't torrent'. The country voluntarily does so because X is worth it. In fact elsewhere in this thread someone said exactly this happened in their country. Should this contract not be allowed, why not?
So I feel like even if you started in a world that allowed torrenting, if you allowed contract law, you would inevitably evolve to a world that disallowed torrenting, because that's a contract some people would want.
I agree to harvest your crops in exchange for 50% of the yield.
I agree to sing if you give me supper.
I agree to sing if you give me supper and not record me.
I agree to sing if you give me supper and subscribe to all the rules of copyright law.
I agree to sing if you give me supper and subscribe to all the rules of copyright law and all people in your jurisdiction also subscribe to copyright law. (And then some folks who wanted a singer got together and passed a law that satisfied the singer's requirements).
All these seem reasonable to extensions of the previous and it seems like we've ended up at the latter.
You might say 'well I didn't agree to that contract', but there are plenty of things in the world that we are bound by that individuals that we didn't explicitly agree to. I didn't explicitly agree to not dump motor oil in the ocean, or hunt deer on a certain day or that 50 decibels as the bound for noise during the night, or that children of age 12 can't vote, or that I have to wear pants in public.
You might argue that the last step is invalid, and instead the world should be a place where individuals can pick and choose which laws they are interested in subscribing too. I don't really want to put much effort into that path because my intuition is that's equivalent to anarchy, but maybe there's an alternate argument here.
So it seems to have a world w/o copyright law, you have to throw out contract law, or convince everyone to stop somewhere on that chain, perhaps not to make the contracts that mimic copyright law, or make a law making such contracts invalid. The later two options seem fairly artificial, impinging on folks self determination. So we're left with having to eliminate contract law, which seems pretty limiting.
There's a couple cases I'm having trouble with. For example, is an ip address property? Seems so because it represents a physical scheme about the routing of ip packets. Similarly an email address or physical address seems like property. If any of these were replicated/spoofed by someone else, they would disrupt the ability to physically route whatever (bits, packages). Ok.
But then what about trademarks? In some ways those are 'pull' addresses - I go to the store, and buy a Coke and I'm expecting that thing labeled Coke to be the physical product I expect, not some spoofed version of Coke. But that label and what not is just a picture, and the original picture wasn't harmed in any way when the spoofed version was created. Is this concept just not allowed and we accept that inefficiency? Or maybe trademarks are allowed as property because they represent the physical concept of the systems the Coke corporation has put in place to create and produce Coke.
But if that's the case, then what about a non-trademark painting? If I go to the store and see a painting by an artist I like, and want to support them and the physical systems the went into generating that painting, and not be spoofed should that be supported?
(Though maybe all this could be solved with a QR code or DOP label or something. Though somewhat inconvenient to have to robustly check that all the time).
Or maybe one particular state had more value than another?
So maybe when other people value different entropic states over others, perhaps that has value?
- Archivism is an important goal
- Often cannot be accomplished in a way that meets the creators interests
- Important enough that sometimes it supersedes the interest of the creators
- Therefore, when all these preconditions hold, piracy is justified to accomplish the goal of archivism.
The other way:
- Morally, piracy is preservation
The former is a line of reasoning I think most people could get behind. I think we could work to outline what cases meet the criteria at each stage, handles cases that other goals might have more precedence (for example the right to privacy might trump the right to archive). This is a lot of work. I would expect multiple lifetimes of energy and activism would be necessary meaningfully move the needle on copyright law in a way that benefited society over all.
The later is a dogmatic statement that steamrolls over any other interests. While there are clearly exceptional cases where the current system fails (that you point out), it's not clear that clinging to this position above all others will result in a net benefit.
It's hard to imagine an expert in Archivism doesn't have some understanding of the moral boundaries of their field. As such, I would expect most experts to take the former approach.
So when the second approach is _exactly what you say_, it's hard to take the "Piracy is preservation" as a meaningful stance to advance Archivism, and instead leads me to interpret it as talking point to justify piracy.
And this isn't to say an individual _couldn't_ start from a dogmatic position, do a ton of work and make the world a better place. Stallman for example has taken a pretty extreme position with free software, done a ton of work, contributed to ton of valuable institutions. All this swimming upstream into much of the rest of societies existing policies. But it seems the exception. And I think in most of these cases the burden of 'demonstrating net societal value' correctly falls on the activist, for example in areas other than free software, Stallmans dogmatic positions haven't been well received and I think appropriately so. (And to be fair, I think most great activists have some of this approach, at least in the storied version of their work, but as Ziwe would say, "How else do you compare yourself to Martin Luther King?")
So yeah, if Archivism is your life's work, good luck. I hope you can find ways to increase the net value of society.
But really I think most people just want free stuff and will say whatever to justify it.
In my experience, most artists will gladly list out the artists that they've admired and studied from int their training, and specifically say what pieces or styles influenced any particular work. And then most of the time if you were to communicate that influence to the source artist(s) they would be overjoyed that someone appreciated their work so much that they contributed to the success of the new work.
This is all part of training for and being an artist. These boundaries are set more in (artist) culture than in law, and of course there are those that violate those boundaries, but I think for the most part artists buy in to this shared creative experience, particularly the more invested and successful you get within the field.
There are points of strife of course, the very extended copyright windows we're seeing, the concerns over sampling in music, (particularly a few decades ago when the technology to sample became widely available, though mostly resolved at this point).
I'm not super familiar with all disciplines, but I know within art/drawing, there is a ton of discourse and training to communicate to new artists what appropriate study/remix/use of reference is, and what crosses the line. While there are different viewpoints, I have confidence that for the most part these discussion are based on good faith arguments in ways that serve the artists and those that consume art. Not saying any of this is perfect or couldn't be improved, but the institutional knowledge is significant and dismissing and overriding is probably going to be a lot of work.
On the flip side, there are those that 'justify' whatever they are doing as... well, as whatever argument suits whatever they are doing. This commonly happens with piracy ("I don't want to support big-co XX", or "DRM is evil" or "This is just for personal use"). Any of these would hold a lot more water if anyone who had this opinion actually did any work to to solve whatever problem they were having, while respecting the creators interest (maybe by say, strengthening IP laws so DRM was unnecessary), but that almost never seems to be the case, because turns out the argument isn't actually an argument to modify the concepts of intellectual property to enhance society, it's just an excuse to justify stealing.
This is what I'm seeing constantly with regard to the current round of AI data scraping, people spouting "it's ok because of XX" but then not really having any interest in propagating XX, instead just having an interest in using other people work without paying them to advance their AI product.
Your original post didn't seem to express which camp your interests lie, so I responded as if it could be in either camp.
All that says is you should focus your energy on the increasing the value of .1%. It's not actually an argument to not spend any energy.
It's like saying 'Astronauts only spend .1% of their time in space' or 'tomatoes only spend .1% of their existence being eaten' - that .1% is the whole point.
You can debate how best to maximize that value, more features or more performance. The OP is suggesting folks are just leaving performance on the floor and then making vacuous arguments to excuse it.
Notice neither your or my comments connect any of this to learning.
After numerous times making chicken broth, something will change about your brain/body and we will say 'you learned how to season broth.' We have basically no idea what this process is, or whether it relies on gradient descent or anything else.
Until then maybe we shouldn't just assert that it's true.
Asserting legal rights based on a naming quirk seems pretty unfounded.
Let's try that statement again: 'It is the same as executing gradient descent over multiple artists works' That sounds a heck of a lot closer to running a Photoshop filter than learning anything now doesn't it.