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I believe that laundering licensed or copyrighted content for reuse that fails to recognize the original authors or usage restrictions is likely to be one of th

I believe that laundering licensed or copyrighted content for reuse that fails to recognize the original authors or usage restrictions is likely to be one of the biggest commercial applications of generative machine learning algorithms. I also believe this is where a lot of the hype about "rogue AIs" and singularity type bullshit comes from. The makers of these models and products will talk about those non-problems to cover for the fact that they're vacuuming up the work of individuals then monetizing it for the profit of big industry players.

circuit10 3y ago
"those non-problems" Why is that a non-problem? It's a really important concern that we need to take more seriously I pasted this from another comment I wrote but: The concerns about AI taking over the world are valid and important; even if they sound silly at first, there is some very solid reasoning behind it. See https://youtu.be/tcdVC4e6EV4 https://youtu.be/tcdVC4e6EV4 for a really interesting video on why a theoretical superintelligent AI would be dangerous, and when you factor in that these models could self-improve and approach that level of intelligence it gets worrying…
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I don't think the reasoning is solid at all. I mean yes, a theoretical superintelligent AI would be very dangerous, but I see exactly no reason to think that current models could get there.
  - circuit10 3y ago
    Well hardware and parameter count are scaling exponentially, so it seems very feasible that it could happen very soon. Of course it's possible that we'll hit a wall somewhere but it seems that just scaling current models up could be enough to get to the point where they can self-improve or gain more compute for themselves
    - blibble 3y ago
      as moores law is dead it's hard to see more exponential scaling they're also not going to find another 2, 4, 8, 16 ... internets worth of content to parasitise
      - circuit10 3y ago
        It’s still exponential, but a little slower. (edit: wait, is that still exponential if it slows down?) Anyway we only need to get to human level (or maybe a bit less) and we’re not that far off (maybe 10 or 20 years at current rates of progress?) Not all types of AI need external training data, you can train on how effectively a goal is achieved
        blibble 3y ago
        > maybe 10 or 20 years at current rates of progress? how can the rate be maintained? exponential chip scaling is over, and they've parasited, sorry, trained on the entirety of accessible human knowledge the rate may drop to zero the exponent may even go negative once LLMs start ingesting their own hallucinations
        circuit10 3y ago
        The training data thing is a problem mainly for LLMs, so it might be a limitation if we purely scale up LLMs but there are other types of AI around too Chip scaling still seems to be going pretty fast, and we may discover new ways to make better use of the chips we currently have, like better methods of quantisation, or just using more of them, which could get us just far enough to reach the self improvement threshold So we could end up hitting a wall with chip scaling or something but I don’t think it’s that likely
        blibble 3y ago
        > Chip scaling still seems to be going pretty fast it's not been exponential for years > So we could end up hitting a wall with chip scaling we did, years ago
  - manojlds 3y ago
    Yeah feels a bit like we invent planes and worry about wormholes and time travel.
    - circuit10 3y ago
      I don’t think we’re as far off as you think
  - tester457 3y ago
    People had no reason to believe that today's models would exist. We are on this part of the ai takeoff graph. https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      That's not exactly true. There was plenty of reason to believe that. The only question was what the timeline would be.
    - geraneum 3y ago
      > People had no reason to believe that today's models would exist. People had no reason to believe one day we would finally understand what causes the thunder. We finally did, and it is not made by Zeus.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    Personally, I wasn't expecting anything as good as GPT-4 so soon. So I no longer have any real confidence in how far away 'real AI' is, whatever that means. I would not be shocked to find out that AGI (using Altman's definition) is more than 50 years away, but I also would not be shocked if it came in 5. It's really hard to know how scared to be, I think that rationally I should be pretty terrified but I'm not.
- patch_cable 3y ago
  I watched the video. > has preferences over world states I think that part is a leap. I don't think is given that a super intelligent AI will "want" things. > presumably a machine could be much more selfish This feels like we're projecting aspects of humanity that evolution specifically selected for in our species with something that is coming about though a completely different process. > It's a mistake to think about it as a person. I agree, but I feel like that's what these concerns about AI are doing, because that's what people do. > (The whole stamp collector thing) It also seems to me there is a huge gap between a super intelligent AI and the ability to have a perfect model of reality along with the ability to evaluate within that model the effect of every possible sequence of packets sent out to the internet.
  - circuit10 3y ago
    > I think that part is a leap. I don't think is given that a super intelligent AI will "want" things. But if it has no goal then it can’t act rationally or intelligently. Something like an LLM might not appear to “want” anything, but it “wants” to predict the next token correctly which is still a goal (though since it’s only related to its internal state it might be a little safer) There’s another good video about why this would be the case here if you’re interested: https://youtu.be/8AvIErXFoH8 https://youtu.be/8AvIErXFoH8 > This feels like we're projecting aspects of humanity that evolution specifically selected for in our species with something that is coming about though a completely different process. That’s because evolution is a process that optimises for a goal. The only reason altruism is a thing is because it actually indirectly benefits the goal, which is for our genes to survive and be passed on, and fellow humans tend to share our genes, especially relatives (who we tend to be kinder to). AI training is also a process that optimises for a goal, but unless having humans around helps that goal it wouldn’t display any human empathy. In this case “selfishness” is just efficiency which a training process definitely selects for > I agree, but I feel like that's what these concerns about AI are doing, because that's what people do. I feel like they’re doing a pretty good job at modelling AI as a theoretical agent, which does share some similarities with humans because humans are agents, but the main mistake people make is assuming their goals will be similar to humans because human values are somehow a universal truth > It also seems to me there is a huge gap between a super intelligent AI and the ability to have a perfect model of reality along with the ability to evaluate within that model the effect of every possible sequence of packets sent out to the internet. That’s very true, it’s an unrealistic thought experiment, but it’s a a good introduction to the concept that something significantly more intelligent than us can be dangerous and pursue a goal with no regard to what we actually wanted
stingraycharles 3y ago
I think you underestimate just how careful “real” businesses are when it comes to violating the (copyright) law. Any legal advisor at any corp will strongly advice against using code that’s generated like this, until there is clear legal precedent that it’s OK to do this.
- sroussey 3y ago
  True, and that will cause a departure between companies large enough to worry, and all the startups that don’t.
- hnfong 3y ago
  Does that involve a ban of stackoverflow use as well? https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing I don't think I've heard anyone warn people not to copy code snippets from stackoverflow due to licensing issues, although "real" businesses should be rightfully concerned.
  - gkbrk 3y ago
    It's already a common practice to put a StackOverflow link as a comment when you copy code from them. It provides valuable context to future readers. That's probably enough for attribution, but I suppose one could copy the author name as well.
- formerly_proven 3y ago
  Doesn't Microsoft already use Copilot internally?
  - sublimefire 3y ago
    Yep they do, but I did not see anyone generating chunks of gpl'd .NET code yet.
    - pc86 3y ago
      Microsoft puts out a lot of non-.NET code, including internally.
ToValueFunfetti 3y ago
I don't think this theory holds up. Singularity concerns long predate LLMs and are mostly expressed by people who want OpenAI to stop what they're doing right now. Sam Altman has publically disagreed with AI doomers. If you're willing to believe that OpenAI is pretending not to be concerned but is quietly hyping the concerns up, I have to wonder what standard of evidence is letting you simultaneously write off the concerns as bullshit.
- krainboltgreene 3y ago
  For me personally it's that everyone who is expressing these concerns has clearly done less critical thinking about the subject than your average extremely high teenager. When you ask them about details they get defensive, resort to even stranger ground like "Well a human is nothing more than an autocomplete" (clearly not true).
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    I don't believe that rogue AIs are a threat for the next few years, but the claim that the likes of Geoffrey Hinton have done less thinking about the subject "than your average extremely high teenager" is absurd.
    - ok_dad 3y ago
      The fear I have isn't an AI doing things by itself, but being good enough so that if Joe Evil gets his hands on the AI, he can single-handedly (with AI help) break into secure databases, or something. You know how a lot of us on HN talk about how security is just a latent concern for companies, but luckily there aren't enough hackers to take advantage of the massive number of bugs in every bit of code ever written? Well, a future powerful coding AI running on second-hand Etherium mining rigs in some extremist's basement in Chicago can probably do a lot more damage than a handful of state sponsored hackers in Russian and North Korea!
      - krainboltgreene 3y ago
bioemerl 3y ago
It was already more than possible to just copy stuff, a court is not going to recognize a very convoluted way to copy stuff I don't believe. The same thing is preventing intentional use of AI tools if you copy as is preventing regular copying, the willingness of the owner to sue.
lhl 3y ago
It seems to me, from a copyright perspective, all commercial use of generative AI depends on whether the output is transformative fair use (vs derived work). While the courts will have its say, ultimately whether new rules are carved out or not is going to be again (as all copyright law is) based on commercial interests - I have the feeling that the potential productivity upside across all industries (and in terms of national interests) is going to be big enough that it'll work itself out largely in the favor of generative AI. That being said, IMO, that's completely separate from the safety issues (that exist now and won't go away even if somehow, all commercial use is banned): Urbina, Fabio, Filippa Lentzos, Cédric Invernizzi, and Sean Ekins. “Dual Use of Artificial-Intelligence-Powered Drug Discovery.” Nature Machine Intelligence 4, no. 3 (March 2022): 189–91. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00465-9 https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00465-9. Bilika, Domna, Nikoletta Michopoulou, Efthimios Alepis, and Constantinos Patsakis. “Hello Me, Meet the Real Me: Audio Deepfake Attacks on Voice Assistants.” arXiv, February 20, 2023. http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10328 http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10328 Mirsky, Yisroel, Ambra Demontis, Jaidip Kotak, Ram Shankar, Deng Gelei, Liu Yang, Xiangyu Zhang, Wenke Lee, Yuval Elovici, and Battista Biggio. “The Threat of Offensive AI to Organizations.” arXiv, June 29, 2021. http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15764 http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15764. I don't think most people have thought through all the ways perfect text, image, voice, and soon video generation/replication will upend society, or all the ways that the LLMs will be abused... As for AGI xrisk. I've done some reading, and since we don't know the limits of the current AI paradigm, and we don't know how to actually align an AGI, I think now is a perfectly cromulent time to be thinking about it. Based on my reading, I think the people ringing alarm bells are right to be worried. I don't think anyone giving this serious thought is being mendacious. Bowman, Samuel R. "Eight Things to Know about Large Language Models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.00612 (2023). https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00612 https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00612. Ngo, Richard, Lawrence Chan, and Sören Mindermann. “The Alignment Problem from a Deep Learning Perspective.” arXiv, February 22, 2023. http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00626 http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00626. Carlsmith, Joseph. “Is Power-Seeking AI an Existential Risk?” arXiv, June 16, 2022. http://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13353 http://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13353. I think Ian Hogarth's recent FT article https://archive.is/NdrNo https://archive.is/NdrNo is the best summary of where we are why we might be in trouble, for those that don't care for arXiv papers.
visarga 3y ago
> then monetizing it for the profit of big industry players Looks like LLMs are universally useful for individual people and companies, monetisation of LLMs is only incipient, and free models are starting to pop up. So you don't need to use paid APIs except for more difficult tasks.
codexb 3y ago
AI will just make non-permissive open source licenses more pointless than they already are. The GPL and similar licenses have been on a slow death march for over a decade. AI isn't doing anything that Human Intelligence isn't already doing. Every single developer has looked at non-permissive open source code for inspiration.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  Yup. gg, gpl
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  The reason people can use code for inspiration is because of GPL and similar, do you see the problem with the logic you provided? If all software starting being non-permissive and closed source, there would be no training data and no new innovation and even if there was, it would probably suck like it did before GPL and similar licensing was mainstream.
gumballindie 3y ago
> The makers of these models and products will talk about those non-problems to cover for the fact that they're vacuuming up the work of individuals then monetizing it for the profit of big industry players. Also why they claim these are "black boxes" and that they "don't understand how they work". They are prepping the markets for the grand theft that's unfolding.

circuit10 3y ago

"those non-problems" Why is that a non-problem? It's a really important concern that we need to take more seriously I pasted this from another comment I wrote but: The concerns about AI taking over the world are valid and important; even if they sound silly at first, there is some very solid reasoning behind it. See https://youtu.be/tcdVC4e6EV4 https://youtu.be/tcdVC4e6EV4 for a really interesting video on why a theoretical superintelligent AI would be dangerous, and when you factor in that these models could self-improve and approach that level of intelligence it gets worrying…

JohnFen 3y ago
I don't think the reasoning is solid at all. I mean yes, a theoretical superintelligent AI would be very dangerous, but I see exactly no reason to think that current models could get there.
- circuit10 3y ago
  Well hardware and parameter count are scaling exponentially, so it seems very feasible that it could happen very soon. Of course it's possible that we'll hit a wall somewhere but it seems that just scaling current models up could be enough to get to the point where they can self-improve or gain more compute for themselves
  - blibble 3y ago
    as moores law is dead it's hard to see more exponential scaling they're also not going to find another 2, 4, 8, 16 ... internets worth of content to parasitise
    - circuit10 3y ago
      It’s still exponential, but a little slower. (edit: wait, is that still exponential if it slows down?) Anyway we only need to get to human level (or maybe a bit less) and we’re not that far off (maybe 10 or 20 years at current rates of progress?) Not all types of AI need external training data, you can train on how effectively a goal is achieved
      - blibble 3y ago
        > maybe 10 or 20 years at current rates of progress? how can the rate be maintained? exponential chip scaling is over, and they've parasited, sorry, trained on the entirety of accessible human knowledge the rate may drop to zero the exponent may even go negative once LLMs start ingesting their own hallucinations
        circuit10 3y ago
        The training data thing is a problem mainly for LLMs, so it might be a limitation if we purely scale up LLMs but there are other types of AI around too Chip scaling still seems to be going pretty fast, and we may discover new ways to make better use of the chips we currently have, like better methods of quantisation, or just using more of them, which could get us just far enough to reach the self improvement threshold So we could end up hitting a wall with chip scaling or something but I don’t think it’s that likely
        blibble 3y ago
        > Chip scaling still seems to be going pretty fast it's not been exponential for years > So we could end up hitting a wall with chip scaling we did, years ago
- manojlds 3y ago
  Yeah feels a bit like we invent planes and worry about wormholes and time travel.
  - circuit10 3y ago
    I don’t think we’re as far off as you think
- tester457 3y ago
  People had no reason to believe that today's models would exist. We are on this part of the ai takeoff graph. https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    That's not exactly true. There was plenty of reason to believe that. The only question was what the timeline would be.
  - geraneum 3y ago
    > People had no reason to believe that today's models would exist. People had no reason to believe one day we would finally understand what causes the thunder. We finally did, and it is not made by Zeus.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  Personally, I wasn't expecting anything as good as GPT-4 so soon. So I no longer have any real confidence in how far away 'real AI' is, whatever that means. I would not be shocked to find out that AGI (using Altman's definition) is more than 50 years away, but I also would not be shocked if it came in 5. It's really hard to know how scared to be, I think that rationally I should be pretty terrified but I'm not.
patch_cable 3y ago
I watched the video. > has preferences over world states I think that part is a leap. I don't think is given that a super intelligent AI will "want" things. > presumably a machine could be much more selfish This feels like we're projecting aspects of humanity that evolution specifically selected for in our species with something that is coming about though a completely different process. > It's a mistake to think about it as a person. I agree, but I feel like that's what these concerns about AI are doing, because that's what people do. > (The whole stamp collector thing) It also seems to me there is a huge gap between a super intelligent AI and the ability to have a perfect model of reality along with the ability to evaluate within that model the effect of every possible sequence of packets sent out to the internet.
- circuit10 3y ago
  > I think that part is a leap. I don't think is given that a super intelligent AI will "want" things. But if it has no goal then it can’t act rationally or intelligently. Something like an LLM might not appear to “want” anything, but it “wants” to predict the next token correctly which is still a goal (though since it’s only related to its internal state it might be a little safer) There’s another good video about why this would be the case here if you’re interested: https://youtu.be/8AvIErXFoH8 https://youtu.be/8AvIErXFoH8 > This feels like we're projecting aspects of humanity that evolution specifically selected for in our species with something that is coming about though a completely different process. That’s because evolution is a process that optimises for a goal. The only reason altruism is a thing is because it actually indirectly benefits the goal, which is for our genes to survive and be passed on, and fellow humans tend to share our genes, especially relatives (who we tend to be kinder to). AI training is also a process that optimises for a goal, but unless having humans around helps that goal it wouldn’t display any human empathy. In this case “selfishness” is just efficiency which a training process definitely selects for > I agree, but I feel like that's what these concerns about AI are doing, because that's what people do. I feel like they’re doing a pretty good job at modelling AI as a theoretical agent, which does share some similarities with humans because humans are agents, but the main mistake people make is assuming their goals will be similar to humans because human values are somehow a universal truth > It also seems to me there is a huge gap between a super intelligent AI and the ability to have a perfect model of reality along with the ability to evaluate within that model the effect of every possible sequence of packets sent out to the internet. That’s very true, it’s an unrealistic thought experiment, but it’s a a good introduction to the concept that something significantly more intelligent than us can be dangerous and pursue a goal with no regard to what we actually wanted

stingraycharles 3y ago

I think you underestimate just how careful “real” businesses are when it comes to violating the (copyright) law. Any legal advisor at any corp will strongly advice against using code that’s generated like this, until there is clear legal precedent that it’s OK to do this.

sroussey 3y ago
True, and that will cause a departure between companies large enough to worry, and all the startups that don’t.
hnfong 3y ago
Does that involve a ban of stackoverflow use as well? https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing I don't think I've heard anyone warn people not to copy code snippets from stackoverflow due to licensing issues, although "real" businesses should be rightfully concerned.
- gkbrk 3y ago
  It's already a common practice to put a StackOverflow link as a comment when you copy code from them. It provides valuable context to future readers. That's probably enough for attribution, but I suppose one could copy the author name as well.
formerly_proven 3y ago
Doesn't Microsoft already use Copilot internally?
- sublimefire 3y ago
  Yep they do, but I did not see anyone generating chunks of gpl'd .NET code yet.
  - pc86 3y ago
    Microsoft puts out a lot of non-.NET code, including internally.

ToValueFunfetti 3y ago

I don't think this theory holds up. Singularity concerns long predate LLMs and are mostly expressed by people who want OpenAI to stop what they're doing right now. Sam Altman has publically disagreed with AI doomers. If you're willing to believe that OpenAI is pretending not to be concerned but is quietly hyping the concerns up, I have to wonder what standard of evidence is letting you simultaneously write off the concerns as bullshit.

krainboltgreene 3y ago
For me personally it's that everyone who is expressing these concerns has clearly done less critical thinking about the subject than your average extremely high teenager. When you ask them about details they get defensive, resort to even stranger ground like "Well a human is nothing more than an autocomplete" (clearly not true).
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  I don't believe that rogue AIs are a threat for the next few years, but the claim that the likes of Geoffrey Hinton have done less thinking about the subject "than your average extremely high teenager" is absurd.
  - ok_dad 3y ago
    The fear I have isn't an AI doing things by itself, but being good enough so that if Joe Evil gets his hands on the AI, he can single-handedly (with AI help) break into secure databases, or something. You know how a lot of us on HN talk about how security is just a latent concern for companies, but luckily there aren't enough hackers to take advantage of the massive number of bugs in every bit of code ever written? Well, a future powerful coding AI running on second-hand Etherium mining rigs in some extremist's basement in Chicago can probably do a lot more damage than a handful of state sponsored hackers in Russian and North Korea!
    - krainboltgreene 3y ago

bioemerl 3y ago

It was already more than possible to just copy stuff, a court is not going to recognize a very convoluted way to copy stuff I don't believe. The same thing is preventing intentional use of AI tools if you copy as is preventing regular copying, the willingness of the owner to sue.

lhl 3y ago

It seems to me, from a copyright perspective, all commercial use of generative AI depends on whether the output is transformative fair use (vs derived work). While the courts will have its say, ultimately whether new rules are carved out or not is going to be again (as all copyright law is) based on commercial interests - I have the feeling that the potential productivity upside across all industries (and in terms of national interests) is going to be big enough that it'll work itself out largely in the favor of generative AI. That being said, IMO, that's completely separate from the safety issues (that exist now and won't go away even if somehow, all commercial use is banned): Urbina, Fabio, Filippa Lentzos, Cédric Invernizzi, and Sean Ekins. “Dual Use of Artificial-Intelligence-Powered Drug Discovery.” Nature Machine Intelligence 4, no. 3 (March 2022): 189–91. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00465-9 https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00465-9. Bilika, Domna, Nikoletta Michopoulou, Efthimios Alepis, and Constantinos Patsakis. “Hello Me, Meet the Real Me: Audio Deepfake Attacks on Voice Assistants.” arXiv, February 20, 2023. http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10328 http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10328 Mirsky, Yisroel, Ambra Demontis, Jaidip Kotak, Ram Shankar, Deng Gelei, Liu Yang, Xiangyu Zhang, Wenke Lee, Yuval Elovici, and Battista Biggio. “The Threat of Offensive AI to Organizations.” arXiv, June 29, 2021. http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15764 http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15764. I don't think most people have thought through all the ways perfect text, image, voice, and soon video generation/replication will upend society, or all the ways that the LLMs will be abused... As for AGI xrisk. I've done some reading, and since we don't know the limits of the current AI paradigm, and we don't know how to actually align an AGI, I think now is a perfectly cromulent time to be thinking about it. Based on my reading, I think the people ringing alarm bells are right to be worried. I don't think anyone giving this serious thought is being mendacious. Bowman, Samuel R. "Eight Things to Know about Large Language Models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.00612 (2023). https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00612 https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00612. Ngo, Richard, Lawrence Chan, and Sören Mindermann. “The Alignment Problem from a Deep Learning Perspective.” arXiv, February 22, 2023. http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00626 http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00626. Carlsmith, Joseph. “Is Power-Seeking AI an Existential Risk?” arXiv, June 16, 2022. http://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13353 http://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13353. I think Ian Hogarth's recent FT article https://archive.is/NdrNo https://archive.is/NdrNo is the best summary of where we are why we might be in trouble, for those that don't care for arXiv papers.

visarga 3y ago

> then monetizing it for the profit of big industry players Looks like LLMs are universally useful for individual people and companies, monetisation of LLMs is only incipient, and free models are starting to pop up. So you don't need to use paid APIs except for more difficult tasks.

codexb 3y ago

AI will just make non-permissive open source licenses more pointless than they already are. The GPL and similar licenses have been on a slow death march for over a decade. AI isn't doing anything that Human Intelligence isn't already doing. Every single developer has looked at non-permissive open source code for inspiration.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago
Yup. gg, gpl
ChatGTP 3y ago
The reason people can use code for inspiration is because of GPL and similar, do you see the problem with the logic you provided? If all software starting being non-permissive and closed source, there would be no training data and no new innovation and even if there was, it would probably suck like it did before GPL and similar licensing was mainstream.

gumballindie 3y ago

> The makers of these models and products will talk about those non-problems to cover for the fact that they're vacuuming up the work of individuals then monetizing it for the profit of big industry players. Also why they claim these are "black boxes" and that they "don't understand how they work". They are prepping the markets for the grand theft that's unfolding.