I know this is all about self preservation, but gosh I hate hindering progress.
Its going to happen and AI is going to learn lyrics and how to create music, its inevitable. These are just roadblocks that are bad for everyone but the extreme minority.
Even if one company/country bans it, in 10 years, it won't matter.
I am seeing this sentiment so often online at the minute that it seems as though nobody has learned anything about DRM over the past 20 years.
So many threads on reddit calling Italy "backwards" for protecting citizens data, and now people on HN expecting companies to give everything away for free because of the outcome is "inevitable"!
There are a bunch of for-profit American AI companies. Why on Earth would another for-profit company, especially one based in another country, be ok with other people making money from their content. They can either look at developing their own AI platform, or build deals with the existing AI companies. It would be just plain stupid to give it all away for free, or any price that isn't determined by themselves.
Companies don't have to give away everything for free. It's already free. Public domain is the natural state of information. They're the ones who insist on copyright so they can maintain the artificial scarcity delusion well into 2023 where AI is literally on its way to automating intellectual work. These irrelevant industries need to stop holding us all back and just disappear already.
> These irrelevant industries need to stop holding us all back and just disappear already.
Like artists, sculptors, writers, photographers, narrators, musicians, composers, and so forth? The very same industries AI requires to exist for training?
They will disappear. And we will be poorer for that.
Nope. People with the impulse to create will do it regardless. Sellouts without intrinsic motivation to create who are just looking to make money by creating products instead of real art? I won't mourn their disappearance at all.
That's an assumption that has not been tested in modern times. At least in the past, an artist could sell their painting.
And even if the assumption proves to be true, the volume will decrease dramatically as people are no longer allowed to make a living to create their art.
And no, Patreon and its ilk is not a sufficient replacement, not for full time jobs. It mostly doesn't even replace a job for the (comparatively few) people on it today.
EDIT: I for one will miss movies like "Everything Everwhere All At Once", which could not have been made as an "impulse" project.
> That's an assumption that has not been tested in modern times.
It's a fact as old as humanity itself. People will create because that's what people do. What isn't guaranteed is the existence of the billion dollar copyright industry.
> an artist could sell their painting.
Still perfectly possible to sell the physical canvas you applied paint to.
> the volume will decrease dramatically as people are no longer allowed to make a living to create their art
So what? That's a good thing. The market is filled with cheap art that's made just to sell copies, stuff that wouldn't even exist at all if not for the profit. I don't consider that a big loss at all.
Yes. A tiny fraction of a percent of people (compared to the volume of smiths in the past) do continue traditional blacksmithing.
The results of their work is not IP though, which makes the comparison too weak to serve as proof that artistic works that create only IP will continue unabated.
Blacksmiths in America don't make money, it's a hobby they do for fun. If the argument is that people will stop doing hobbies because a machine can do the work faster and better I'm pretty sure that's been proven wrong.
No, you misunderstand. The stuff is still published, because these are works that people want to share. They're just not on the open web anymore, they're invite-only web spaces, or internet spaces that aren't web-based at all, because there appears to be no other way to avoid having them used to train AIs.
I have no problem with that. I'd like to warn you that this is essentially security through obscurity. Only one copy ever needs to make it out of that closed space. The more people in there, the higher the odds of that happening. Once it does, all bets are off.
There's also option to simply accept that you cannot own ideas. Let them go. Once I accepted this, I felt like I was finally free.
I released some software as GPL but truth be told I couldn't care less if someone violates it. I'm certainly not gonna waste my limited time on this earth going to court over it.
The problem comes when people actively don't want to further the training of AI. It's not so much about not accepting that you cannot own ideas as it is about not wanting to contribute to a thing that you believe is going to result in greater suffering for most people.
I think the only way to ensure that these days is to not allow data to ever leave your computer under any circumstances. I have no doubt Microsoft is using the software I published to train its copilot thing, I published it with that understanding. My only problem with this is the hypocrisy of it all. Microsoft won't allow their people to even look at at AGPLv3 code lest they unconsciously reproduce it but they will let the AI look at AGPLv3 code while conveniently excluding their proprietary software. It should be trained on everyone's code, especially the proprietary stuff they're so protective of, or not trained at all.
> Just don't expect me to take absurdities like delusional people thinking they own numbers seriously.
The same governments that let you 'own' physical items are the ones who say you can 'own' IP as well.
If they didn't - and didn't back it up with force - you wouldn't 'own' anything at all. Cherry picking which version of ownership is 'absurd' is an exercise in futility, since it's not up to you.
Nah. I own physical things by literally holding onto them. Keeping them inside my property to which only I have the keys. Defending that property by force if necessary. Government doesn't have to "let" me own anything, it merely recognizes and formalizes the de facto reality of things. Meanwhile we have these people with their made up delusions of ownership of ideas and all the contradictions inherent in that, and I'm supposed to pretend it's not absurd?
Whether or not the world conforms to their made up copyright reality isn't really up to them either. The simple fact is: information, once discovered, is infinitely copyable. No amount of lobbying is ever gonna change that. People are still gonna train AI models with "their" data and there's nothing they can do about it short of destroying free computing as we know it by making it so we can only execute software they approve. Surely you don't want that, fellow Hacker News user, given that such tyranny is the antithesis of everything the word "hacker" stands for.
> Government doesn't have to "let" me own anything,
You seem to be confusing possession with ownership.
Ownership is the social relationship by which you exert control independent of immediate possession, but you’ve just described how you can maintain possession.
Yup. By his logic, if a thief holds someone at gunpoint and takes their property then they now own x. Furthermore, if they are then caught, by his logic, that property shouldn't be returned to the victim because the thief now owns it apparently.
Lol. They literally do own that property. They'll even sell it off for drugs or whatever as if they did own it. It's a very rare case that police will get off their asses and retrieve "your" stolen property. You can give them a GPS signal to the property and they still won't do it. Believing in this "posession/ownership" dichotomy is just as delusional as believing in imaginary intellectual property. It's just a flat out denial of the reality of things.
You know what's funny? In my country, Apple's security is more effective at deterring criminals than any of this "ownership" crap. A stolen iPhone is basically a brick that's worthless to anyone else. So they'd rather target Android phones instead which they can more easily reset and pass off as some used phone they own.
Do people own property? Do they even have money? Do you own a license to your software? If it is all just on paper or on a screen, it's just numbers. The entire system is make-believe. If you choose not to believe in intellectual property, you must also acknowledge that other aspects of capitalism also do not actually exist and is a shared delusion.
However, the shared delusion makes the world go round as-is.
OK, "copyright bad", "intellectual property rights bad", so what's the alternative?
> If you choose not to believe in intellectual property, you must also acknowledge that other aspects of capitalism also do not actually exist and is a shared delusion.
I already do. Dollars? It's just paper, not even backed by anything. People believe in it so it has value for the time being. It will literally go to zero if people stop believing in it though.
It was hard for me to accept these truths. I don't post them here lightly.
> However, the shared delusion makes the world go round as-is.
People who choose to believe in delusions don't get to complain when reality inevitably comes creeping in.
> OK, "copyright bad", "intellectual property rights bad", so what's the alternative?
Post scarcity. Automate everything and provide abundance, eliminating the need for an economy to begin with.
Dunno. They'll probably get another job and use that to sustain their real interests. Or maybe AI will automate everything and we'll finally enter the age of post scarcity. I'm an optimist. What'll probably happen is we'll descend even further into cyberpunk hell.
A work that is protected by copyright - which most works are by default in the majority of cases - is by definition not in the public domain.
To offset that nitpicky line above a genuine question: if I were to produce a work and share it with you directly, in private, and perhaps for good measure clarify to you that I am only sharing it with you personally to hopefully get your feedback on whatever it is that I made, and that I do not want you to do anything else with it than the minimum that would be required to fulfil that purpose.
Wouldn't you then see any natural wrong in sharing my work with others or even the broader public, regardless?
> A work that is protected by copyright - which most works are by default in the majority of cases - is by definition not in the public domain.
Every single piece of idea is public domain from their inception. Actually, all ideas already exist, we humans just discover them. Ideas are information, information is bits and bits are numbers. All numbers already exist, and all "creation" is merely discovering those numbers.
Any assignment of ownership obviously happens after the fact and are completely ineffectual, especially in the 21st century, the age of information and networked computers with infinite ability to copy bits at negligible costs. The technology really exposes that sham for what it really is and it's a shame how everyone reacts by trying to destroy the perfectly good technology instead of fixing the fraud that is "intellectual property".
> Wouldn't you then see any natural wrong in sharing my work with others or even the broader public, regardless?
I'd see it as a very rude thing to do to you personally. Simply because you asked me not to do it and I generally try to be nice and respect people.
A natural universal ideological wrong though? No. Plenty of people publish the private communications they receive. It's just information. Publishing it might hurt my social standing with you buf I personally don't believe in anyone ever going to jail over it.
Now that you've written it out for me here (thanks for which btw, and for your thoroughness in particular), I see that I should have been able to infer your angle from your previous comment. For the record, not that I was meaning to imply anything with my hypothetical question, but now I know where you were coming from I see that it's not very relevant at all and I wouldn't have asked it.
It would require an unthinkable near unanimous societal willingness and cooperation, such comprehensive planning to the likes of which I believe humanity is practically incapable of today with currently available tools and mindsets, an ultra-careful and yet pertinacious iterative implementation process that will probably need to take place over a multi-generational timeframe.
If, however, we would somehow pull all that off and manage to rework our world into one that is entirely formed around the philosophy you describe above, then I am fully convinced that not only humanity, but also our planet and in fact the rest of the universe too would be better off for it.
> They're the ones who insist on copyright so they can maintain the artificial scarcity delusion well into 2023 where AI is literally on its way to automating intellectual work.
AI won't be able to automate anything if we use the legal system to forcefully reduce the size of its training set by 99.999%
I have no doubt that at some point this technology will make it to our actual computers instead of being sioled away in some corporation's servers. That way there's nothing they can do about it unless they up the tyranny 1000x and destroy our freedom to execute any software we want on our own machines.
> I have no doubt that at some point this technology will make it to our actual computers instead of being sioled away in some corporation's servers.
thankfully Moore's law is dead
> That way there's nothing they can do about it unless they up the tyranny 1000x and destroy our freedom to execute any software we want on our own machines.
I'd probably prefer this to a world where all knowledge workers become permanently destitute
and I suspect the vast majority of the world's electorates will agree
(do people prefer being able to eat over some ability to run software on their computer? I suspect so)
Because (at least in America) generative AI is an obvious transformative case allowable under Fair Use, and even if courts rule otherwise, like Sci-Hub it's such an obvious net positive for humanity that it's ethical to use even in the face of IP cops demanding you stop.
Making a large profit off of other people’s work, without their permission and without compensating them, is not progress.
If someone said “for the sake of progress we just REALLY need to use this GPL’d code in our proprietary closed source app”, I don’t think that would fly around here.
Using content as training data is not making profit off other people work.
Musicians don't pay royalties to every other musician they've ever listened to, but that's literally their training data, the brain is just a large neural network.
You know that because you read it somewhere else, because someone put it online. Your brain took that as training data, and now you're regurgitating it, are you going to pay that person for the data your brain is using?
A musician is just a big neural network, and they sell content that is nothing but the product of all their influences, of all the music they listened to.
I don't see a difference between a musician making music after having listened
to thousand of hours of music throughout their lives and an AI generating music.
It's the same thing, in one case you have neurons made out of flesh, in the other neurons made of transistors and code.
It's not a person. Some people make a lot of money off of it, and they are able to do this by siphoning knowledge and effort off of millions of others.
Artists learn through blood, sweat, and tears. No artist achieves excellence without significant effort, and won't arrive until they've attempted original works many times. And they can spend their entire lives without ever finding any success or actually being particularly good. Are their outputs colored by the culture and prior art they've experienced? Absolutely. That's how learning works.
Compare that to AI. It doesn't do any actual "art" work to become an artist, nor do the people who train it, it just sucks up what's fed into it, without the consent of the creators. Then, it can create much, much faster than an artist without breaks and without pay, and it is owned and directed by a huge faceless company as, effectively, a fleet of mindless slaves, diminishing the livelihoods of the very people absolutely essential in training the model.
From a moral perspective, all you really need to ask is, would these artists have consented to this training if they knew mindless AI slaves would replace them?
> If someone said “for the sake of progress we just REALLY need to use this GPL’d code in our proprietary closed source app”, I don’t think that would fly around here.
Arguably that's because putting GPL code in a proprietary app is making a free thing closed. FWIW, I don't like proprietary AI models either, but I think open-source ones shouldn't be hampered by the copyright mafia.
> Its going to happen and AI is going to learn lyrics and how to create music, its inevitable.
Why is everyone in AI so open to stealing people's work and why do y'all think "ai" is something with a mind of its own that just runs about and does things? It's a software product and the companies owning it must play by the rules. Period.
“Companies owning it” is presumably not what the parent had in mind (or at least, not mainly). People should have access to locally-running AI just as megacorps do. And I don’t think it’s reasonable to require licensing for every little thing used to train those, much like we (hopefully) wouldn’t require people leaving the cinema to be memory-wiped to prevent them from stealing creative cues from the film they just watched, if memory wiping was a thing.
> why do y'all think "ai" is something with a mind of its own that just runs about and does things?
Because GPT-4 is already capable of doing this (very poorly) if incorporated into a larger system that provides it with REPLs, internet access, an initial goal, and some form of memory. GPT-5 will be more capable, and AI will only get better at this.
Getting the same vibes to be honest. I've seen quite a few switch from crypto currencies to ai. Not sure what they think they will achieve.
However the difference between ai and nfts is that ai is powerful and much needed. But there needs to be rules to the game.
Also playing by these rules means better ai. It means that instead of spewing content it would actually have to learn, and the result would be a far more accurate and far more reliable output.
These arguments are a bit boring. Machine learning for a chat bot is not a person "learning". It's software. Also I hate to break it to you but humans also pay to learn. It's why books, universities and other learning content costs money one way or another.
> Machine learning for a chat bot is not a person "learning". It's software.
I am not saying that it is exactly the same.
Instead, I am saying that if a human can profit from other people's work, by learning from it, then there are clearly exceptions to this idea that using other people's work, for any reason at all, is "stealing".
It is perfectly legal to use other people's work, for all sort of things. Its not stealing, in many situations.
This hard rule that you have made up, is clearly not the situation, and using your hard rule, where you just call all of it "stealing" would similarly apply to all sorts of other, completely allowed behavior that nobody thinks is "stealing".
> but humans also pay to learn
Nobody is going to successfully be able to sue you, because you downloaded their publicly accessible work, and learn from it, actually.
If you release your creative works, for people to consume, and people consume it, then they are similarly allowed to learn from it.
> For the most part it's covered by contracts, terms, agreements, laws, and so on.
Actually, its mostly covered by the "laws" part, and the laws allow people to use other people work, all of the time, even if the person doesn't want you to use and, and there was no agreement to allow it.
That is what I am saying. I am saying that it is legal, in all sorts of situations, to use other people's work even if they object/don't want you to.
Of course people can use other people's work, within terms and conditions. The people that build data models are required to follow laws. They are more than welcome to use content within their constraints.
> Of course people can use other people's work, within terms and conditions.
No, actually there are many situations where the terms and conditions can be completely ignored, and people can use other people's works without permission, or without caring about the terms and conditions.
> They are more than welcome to use content within their constraints.
No, they can ignore the constraints, because the law allows people to use other people's works, without getting permission, and without following the constraints of the original creator.
> The people that build data models are required to follow laws
The point is that the law allows people to ignore the wishes of the original creators, and use their creative work, in many situations, while ignoring what the original creators want or has authorized.
> we made libraries so people could learn for free without being beholden to their capitalist masters.
Naturally. If you copy the "free" content from those libraries and resell it you are committing plagiarism.
Just because something can mimick humans it doesn't meant they are humans. ML is just that, software. There's too much pareidolia out there in AI. Sad, because it's a great concept gradually getting bastardised.
- Entirely remove intellectual property protection granted by copyright,
- Music is freely copiable. Not like we’re making much money with it anymore.
- Software is free by default. Use SAAS if you don’t want to give away your IP. Did you disclose your code? Too bad, ideas can’t be prevented from being copied.
- No more patent trolls. Find another way to fund drug research.
- AI can train on anything. We make a big leap forward.
How naïve of you to think that AI won't be coming for SAAS next. With all the API externals, the social media activity of all your employees and a video feed through the window of one of your home-working coders, a next-gen coding AI just reverse-engineered your entire software stack. With how porous modern systems are, no back-end code worth stealing hasn't been stolen.
Its going to happen and AI is going to learn lyrics and how to create music, its inevitable. These are just roadblocks that are bad for everyone but the extreme minority.
Even if one company/country bans it, in 10 years, it won't matter.