1,297 karma · joined October 3, 2015
https://github.com/martin-t/rec-wars
https://github.com/rustcycles/rustcycles
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Blog: https://martin-t.github.io/
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If you wanna talk, my email can be easily found from my commits. We can arrange something reasonably secure/private too. I am not a huge fan of Overton windows but they make a very satisfying sound when a brick flies through them.
If facebook/twitter/reddit are perfectly OK with intentionally increasing addictivity but are restricted by having to show you only existing stuff, what do you think will happen when LLM companies can generate new stuff tailored to each individual person?
[0]: in ancient times when server meant an actual server
The second issue is surveillance does not affect all crime[0] equally. It works best against organized or planned action. It does little to prevent crimes of passion or spur of the moment decisions. States are more likely to be affected of the first kind, normal people are much more likely to be affected by the second.
[0]: It should go without saying, crime does not mean bad/harmful/evil but merely against the law. Slavery used to be legal, as was the holocaust.
[0]: I don't like the word protest because words are meaningless. A mass gathering of people is a demonstration of force because manpower means firepower and firepower means simple power as all real world power comes from violence.
Just this alone is incredibly naive. People don't choose where they are born and they don't uproot their entire family and social connections when laws change.
Look at consent in sex and how long it took to make everyone accept it's something you need to have sex with someone. Some places are still not there yet.
I firmly believe using other people's work should require the same level of consent.
So how do you propose to fix that without a law similar to copyright? (At least similar to the intent of copyright, the specific implementation leaves much to be desired, obviously.)
> patents
Patents, unlike copyright, are not automatic. Which indicates that the people who expended their limited lifetime to invent the algorithms explicitly did not want you using them, at least not unless you came to an agreement with them first.
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re rewriting:
There's your real problem. Copyright should belong to the people doing the actual work, not owners/employers who perform no useful work.
If that was the case, the person who did the original work would have no reason to prevent you from using it, as long as he could also benefit from the fruits of your combined labor. For him, the work was already done, it would be extra reward. For you, it would be profitable as long as his reward was less than the cost of you doing it from scratch. You'd most likely meet somewhere in the middle.
Same situation when rewriting your own work.
As often happens, a system was put in place for good. Rich people found a way to exploit it. Now, instead of trying to fix the system, you're arguing to remove it entirely, not realizing you'll be worse off in the end. LLM want to replace all programmers by using their work against them. This is not for your benefit, it's for theirs.
As I often say, what should be protected isn't creativity or expression but work. People should benefit from their work and it should not be used against them. It should also not be possible for someone to benefit without doing useful work.
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Would you work for a company which develops software to detect homosexuals using public cameras and eye tracking? What about a company discovering and selling Android exploits to governments? Does it matter which governments? What about a company which tracks employee movements and productivity to such a level they have to pee in bottles to meet quotas?
The world is full of these examples but at least you had the choice of not helping them. Now you don't.
The people who own them are some of the most anti-social people on the planet and you think they should be able to use our work as they wish...
"Sounds like a no."
This level of discussion does not belong on HN.
They admit it themselves. We also know how aggressively they scrape everything they can get their hands on because projects like Anubis[0] exist
> And if so what percentage of your work constitutes the model?
That should absolutely be quantified, yes. My part is tiny but together with other people whose work was taken without consent, we make the vast majority. Last time I napkinned the math, I estimated making the models took 10^12 hours of work (nearly all being scraped public and possibly even private projects), out of which only 10^6 was paid (work by the employees of the LLM companies). So roughly 10^12 remains unpaid.
But it begs the question why you chose (A)GPL instead of a permissive license in the first place. If you are OK with people training and using LLMs on top of your work not giving users the right to inspect and modify, you must have logically been OK with it before. The existence of LLMs or even AI is irrelevant to your position.
I did not spend 10 years writing (A)GPL code for all of it to be stripped of its license, remixed and sold for profit.
Of course in a truly just world, the LLM companies who took my code without permission would beg with offers of owning a share of them because if I didn't consent their models would have to be destroyed.
Since my work is apparently so valuable that they just have to have it, it should count towards my retirement age too.
It's not just about fines, many countries have support for families with children. I don't think the rich should get more money per child. For fines, it absolutely makes sense.
A harsher alternative is to stop using fines altogether and instead give "prison micro-sentences" - a few hours or days in prison. It makes perfect sense - when you pay a fine, you lost a bit of your life by working and not having anything to show for it at the end. So why not make it direct and just take a bit of time directly from the person. It nicely sidesteps various tricks how the rich hide their assets, too.
Of course, the administrative overhead would be much larger, but then the offenders could take some part in maintaining the prison. Nothing would be more humbling to a privileged person than cleaning the prison toilet.
Imagine the alternative that once in a while the government says it needs more money and just subtracts it from your bank account. There'd be riots.
It's laundering in any reasonable meaning of the word. Whether it's legal according to the letter of the law is being decided.
Please differentiate morality and legality as well as intent and letter of the law.
> If anything AI code is cheap enough to even things out.
1) Do you think people have and will have access to the same models as large corporations internally, especially those who train LLMs themselves? Nothing stopping Google from excluding its own source code from the publicly available models but including it for internal models.
2) It's not just about the code, it's about the whole pipeline from nothing to a finished product and revenue stream. Did you know half the price of a new car is marketing? How much you can spend on ads, legal, market research, sales reps, etc. In some areas, especially B2B, nobody will even talk to you if you're a single guy in a shed, companies want stability, predictability and long term support.
3) More crudely, if you wanted to influence product selection or government elections, how many tokens could you afford for LLMs to influence online discussions, how many residential IPs could you afford, how much data could you buy about users to target each one specifically? Rich people will clearly have an advantage there.
Basically, if the cost of code goes towards zero, other factors will play a larger role.
> I think a lot of those people are consistent!
Only if they're consistently applying the rules to others but not themselves. Otherwise "permanent and total control over any idea they have" means they could never base anything on other people's ideas.
And at that point it wouldn't be a stretch for most people to make the connection that some people are more privileged than others and fines should be relative to personal wealth and income.
Imagine if laws were written by people who know what a function is...
For starters because you can't own humans. If it's possible to launder copyrighted work through something which can be owned, then rich people get an advantage because they can own more of it.
> so I think it's a bad idea to rely on intuition here
Yep, that's why I said we should only concern ourselves with those which are internally consistent. If people want to apply rules to others which they don't intend to or cannot follow themselves, they lose the right to be taken seriously.
Yes, this is sarcasm but that's how it should work. These models cannot be created without ingesting vast amounts of code created by human labor. The proponents of this kind of stealing argue that the models "generalize" and that somehow makes it right and legal. And here we have counterexample to their generalization argument.
Doesn't change the fact labor theft is still labor theft but it might make a difference to the letter of the law, hopefully.
I say hopefully because I believe all people who contribute to technical progress should be compensated according to their amount of work and skill level. But of course many "temporarily embarrassed trillionaires" disagree. I don't understand why but I am happy to know that if the tides turn they will be perfectly A-OK with me taking their work without credit or compensation.
As for checking outputs - I don't believe that's sufficient. Maybe the letter of the law is flawed but according to the spirit the model itself is derivative work.
A model takes several orders of magnitude more work as training data than it takes to code the training algorithm itself, to any reasonable and sane person, that makes it a derivative work of the training data by nearly 100% - we can only argue how many nines it should be.
> precedent
Yeah but the US system makes me very uneasy about it. The right way to do this is to sit down, talk about the options and their downstream implications, talking about fairness and justice and then deciding what the law should be. If we did that, copyright law would look very different in the first place and this whole thing would have an obvious solution.
And that's why copyright has exceptions for humans.
You're right copyright was the wrong tool for code but for the wrong reasons.
It shouldn't be binary. And the law should protect all work, not just creative. Either workers would come to a mutual agreement how much each contributed or the courts would decide based on estimates. Then there'd be rules about how much derivation is OK, how much requires progressively more compensation and how much the original author can plainly tell you what to do and not do with the derivative.
It's impossible to satisfy everyone but every person has a concept of fairness (it has been demonstrated even in toddlers). Many people probably even have an internally consistent theory of fairness. We should base laws on those.
> abusing the copyright laws and the patent laws have been the most significant blockers of technical progress during the last few decades
Can you give examples?
> copyrights on non-open-source programs are almost never owned by creators, but by their employers
Yes and that's another thing that's wrong with the system, employment is a form of abusive relationship because the parties are not equal. We should fix that instead of throwing out the whole system. Copyright which belongs to creators absolutely does give creators more leverage and negotiating power.
You could even say it strongly would very strongly incentivize the LLM companies to be on their best behavior, otherwise people would start revoking consent en-masse and they'd have to keep training new models all the time.
If you want something more realistic, there would probably be time limits how long they have to comply and how much they have to compensate the authors for the time it took them to comply.
There absolutely are ways to make it work in mutually beneficial ways, there's just no political will because of the current hype and because companies have learned they can get away with anything (including murder BTW).
I don't think you understand how children work.
You probably imagine some Brave New World kind of conditioning. Not to mention, those people will want their kids to have those traits.
> Hopefully, your code helped someone. That's a good enough reason to do it.
No. That's like saying that the V2 rocket program helped keep a bunch of people out of the gas chambers.
We should absolutely do our best to make sure our work does more good than harm, not just that it does some good.
EDIT: I am sad to see your other comment below flagged/dead. HN does not like the idea that a lowly open source contributor could take their phones and computers away from them for petty things like genocide, murder or rape...
If/when superhuman AI is achieved, those limitations will all go away. An owner will just give it money and control and tell it to optimize for more money or political power or whatever he wants.
That's a much scarier future than a paperclip maximizer because it's much closer and it doesn't require complete takeover first, it'll be just business as usual, except more somehow more sociopathic.
But you shouldn't be right. I mean, morally.
The law is a compromise between what the people in power want and what they can get away with without people revolting. It has nothing to do with morality, fairness or justice. And we should change that. The promise of democracy was (among other things) that everyone would be equal, everybody would get to vote and laws would be decided by the moral system of the majority. And yet, today, most people will tell you they are unhappy about the rising cost of living and rising inequality...
The law should be based on complete and consistent moral system. And then plagiarism (taking advantage of another person's intellectual work without credit or compensation) would absolutely be a legal matter.
1) The financial aspect: As you say, more and more advanced DRM requires more and more advanced tools. Even assuming advanced AI can guide any human to do the physical part, that still means you have to pay for the hardware. And the hardware has to be available (companies have been known to harass people into giving up perfectly moral and legal projects).
2) The legal aspect: Possession of burglary tools is illegal in some places. How about possession of hacking tools? Right now it's not a priority for company lobbying, what about when that's the only way to decompile? Even today, reverse engineering is a legal minefield. Did you know in some countries you can technically legally reverse engineer but under some conditions such as having disabilities necessitating it and only using the result for personal use?[0]
3) The TOS aspect: What makes you think AI will help you? If the company owning the AI says so, you're on your own.
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You need to understand 2 things:
- Just because something is possible doesn't mean somebody is gonna do it. Effort, cost and risk play huge roles. And that assumes no active hostile interference.
- History is a constant struggle between groups with various goals and incentives. Some people just want to live a happy life, have fun and build things in their free time. Other people want to become billionaires, dream about private islands, desire to control other people's lives and so on. People are good at what they focus on. There's perhaps more of the first group but the second group is really good at using their money and connections to create more money and connections which they in turn use to progress towards their primary objectives, usually at the expense of other people. People died[1] over their right to unionize. This can happen again.
Somebody might believe historical people were dumb or uncivilized and it can't happen today because we've advanced so much. That's bullshit. People have had largely the same wetware for hundreds of thousands of years. The tools have evolved but their users have not.
[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/16/whittle-a-webserver/ - "... aren't tools exemptions, they're use exemptions ... You have that right. Your mechanic does not have that right."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)
Ultimately LLMs (the first L stands for large and for a good reason) are only possible to create by taking unimaginable amounts of work performed by humans who have not consented to their work being used that way, most of whom require at least being credited in derivative works and many of whom have further conditions.
Now, consent in law is a fairly new concept and for now only applied to sexual matters but I think it should apply to every human interaction. Consent can only be established when it's informed and between parties with similar bargaining power (that's one reason relationships with large age gaps are looked down upon) and can be revoked at any time. None of the authors knew this kind of mass scraping and compression would be possible, it makes sense they should reevaluate whether they want their work used that way.
There are 3 levels to this argument:
1) The letter of the law - if you understand how LLMs work, it's hard to see them as anything more than mechanical transformers of existing work so the letter should be sufficient.
2) The intent of the law - it's clear it was meant to protect human authors from exploitation by those who are in positions where they can take existing work and benefit from it without compensating the authors.
3) The ethics and morality of the matter - here it's blatantly obvious that using somebody's work against their wishes and without compensating them is wrong.
In an ideal world, these 3 levels would be identical but they're not. That means we should strive to make laws (in both intent and letter) more fair and just by changing them.