7 ms·

There’s a fallacy that gets used a whole lot to justify things like this (not just with LLMs), and I see it in many of the comments here: If it’s OK (or at leas

There’s a fallacy that gets used a whole lot to justify things like this (not just with LLMs), and I see it in many of the comments here: If it’s OK (or at least negligible on a small scale), then it must be OK on a large scale. It usually goes something like: If I can make money by learning something from a web page, why does a computer making money by learning everything from everyone upset people so? It’s the same thing! It’s like if I go to Golden Gate Park and pick one flower, I shouldn’t do that, but no one cares. But if I build a machine to automatically cut every flower in the park because I want to sell them, that’s different. “You say I can pick one flower, but you get upset when I take a bunch. That’s inconsistent. Check and mate.” But quantitative changes in an activity produce qualitative changes. Everyone knows this, but sometimes they seem to find it inconvenient to admit it. Not that effects of the qualitative change are always bad, but they are often different, and worth considering rather than dismissing.

inetknght 4mo ago
If one person is murdered, that's bad. If a million people are murdered, that's war. If one word is stolen by AI, that's bad. If a million words are stolen by AI, that's business.
- bogrollben 4mo ago
  this made me oof. well said.
- gruez 4mo ago
  >If one word is stolen by AI, that's bad. If a million words are stolen by AI, that's business. Where are all the instances of "one word" being "stolen by AI", and people getting mad over it?
- insane_dreamer 4mo ago
  more like If one word is stolen by Joe, that's bad. If a million words are stolen by Meta, that's business. AI isn't the problem, is corporations using AI that are the problem
kogus 4mo ago
quantitative changes in an activity produce qualitative changes Well said!
- tyleo 4mo ago
  It reminds me of a Stalin* quote: "Quantity has a quality all its own." * Note that it may be misattributed to him
jongjong 4mo ago
This is a great point. I think for coding, the wording of the MIT open source license makes it clear that copying and distributing the software is authorised on a small scale and it's very clear that the act of copying must involve a person. It provides distribution and modification rights to "any person obtaining a copy of the software" and explicitly requires attribution for any significant parts. Mass-ingesting the code with a script without any human even reading the licence is a very different kind of copying mechanism and there is no person involved... The contract was bypassed completely. A contract requires consent from both parties to be binding. When ingesting code into the AI training set, nobody even read the license. There was no agreement; neither explicit nor implicit... Because the consumer, a script, never read the contact for that specific project. There was nobody present when the copying occurred; on neither side! It cannot possibly constitute an agreement between two parties.
- quantummagic 4mo ago
  That's like saying you're not allowed to load the source code into an editor, because it's not a person. Or that you're not allowed to run a global search-replace on the entire code base, because it's a script and not a person.
  - jongjong 4mo ago
    But in this case, a human has awareness of what software they are copying or modifying and that's how the original software author receives credit. The contract requires some degree of human awareness to be valid. This is the critical difference.
    - quantummagic 4mo ago
      Sorry that's nonsense. There's human awareness when ingesting MIT code into an LLM too. In both cases it's a human that says $ excute-global-replace or $ ingest-into-llm Both operations require some degree of human awareness. What you appear to be saying is, a human can only use a limited algorithm to access this source code, not a sophisticated one. And where do you draw that line? Who should get to say what is too sophisticated? Error: your algorithm is too sophisticated to proceed, please provide more human awareness, it's a critical difference.
svachalek 4mo ago
We ran into a lot of stuff like this in the early days of the web. For example, there was a lot of information that was "public" in that anyone could go to the city courthouse and ask to see the documents. But it changed in nature when you could suddenly look up anyone in the country by typing their name in your browser.
- nitwit005 4mo ago
  For a practical example of that, a lot of documents used to have things like social security numbers, and they started stripping that information off once it was visible online.
- mswphd 4mo ago
  we used to ship mass lists of addresses and phone numbers to people in each town and it was fine/appreciated.
  - _doctor_love 4mo ago
    You ever had a bump in the night my guy? Or a stalker?
  - disposition2 4mo ago
    You could also easily opt out with the single entity that shipped that information.
    - jhbadger 4mo ago
      Yes, but getting an unlisted number was considered weird and against the norm even if possible. Even in the early 2000s when I dropped my landline, my parents were aghast - "if you do that, you won't be in the phone book! How will anyone get in contact with you?"
      - bigbuppo 4mo ago
        And you often had to pay for the privilege... A dollar a month for them to not put your name and number in the phonebook.
wang_li 4mo ago
My complaint with your argument is that the word learn means one thing when we are talking about a person learning something from a webpage or book and something completely different when a webpage or book is used to adjust some weights in a matrix. Calling that learning is a distraction from the real copyright violations going on.
- gruez 4mo ago
  >when we are talking about a person learning something from a webpage or book and something completely different when a webpage or book is used to adjust some weights in a matrix What material differences exist between the two besides "humans good, computers bad"? >Calling that learning is a distraction from the real copyright violations going on. Most courts so far have ruled that it counts as fair use.
  - mark336 4mo ago
    I thought fair use was dead after Napster
    - gruez 4mo ago
      No, only the type of "fair use" that people slap on their youtube uploads, thinking them it gives them a "get out of jail free" card for copyright infringement. Fair use was repeatedly affirmed in the 2010s, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
nate 4mo ago
ugh. yeah. the tragedy of the commons
- hungryhobbit 4mo ago
  It's funny, the way that term gets used now is actually a wild distortion of the true history. "The commons" was an incredibly successful system, and medieval (and prior) villages used it to great success, for the entire village's benefit! "Commons" are a great thing for everyone to have! The real history is that as advances in technology (like the Industrial Revolution) changed things, certain rich villagers were suddenly able to manage more animals than they could before. Those (specific/rich) people over-used the commons, creating the "tragedy" we all know of. The real lesson of history is not that commons fail: to the contrary, they worked great and helped everyone for centuries! The real lesson is "watch the fuck out for the new rich (especially when they just became rich because of recent technology advancements): those bastard will steal from everyone for their own benefit!"
psychoslave 4mo ago
Of course quantity makes emerge it’s own quality. If you kill a single person, you are a murderer, if you genocide "others" and distribute the spoliation wealth to those unscathed you are a national hero. If you steal small material you are a theft and go to prison, if you hog some billions you can enact laws to grab even more.
- gruez 4mo ago
  >If you kill a single person, you are a murderer, if you genocide "others" and distribute the spoliation wealth to those unscathed you are a national hero. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how laws work. It's not the scale that makes it okay, it's that it's done through some official process. Trump's raid to grab Maduro killed less than 100 people. Pretty modest by "genocide" standards, and is easily eclipsed by gang/cartel violence. Yet nobody is going after Trump because he didn't meet some kill quota to get special protection, nor are people condoning cartel violence because they killed far more than Trump.
  - psychoslave 4mo ago
    That's exactly how laws work then. International Right for those who don't have all the nukes and lobotomized cannon meat bag ready to invade on a whim, and on the other side doing all the crimes and atrocities, straight transgress all legal processes ever invented, and expecting no possible punishment in return. Number of directly killed people is not something that can be eclipsed by bigger number of killed people. Not in a mind that keeps empathy high in its value.
  - whattheheckheck 4mo ago
    Who is sir Francis drake
superkuh 4mo ago
No. It's more like, "You say I can take a photo of one flower in your flowerbed you put next to the public street, but you get upset when I take a bunch of photos of many public flowerbeds. That's both an over-reach and inconsistent."
rurp 4mo ago
Yes absolutely, when automation increases the rate of something many orders of magnitude that often is a qualitative difference. It's weird to me how often on HN of all places I see arguments that can be refuted with "scale matters". I commonly see arguments on all sorts of topics that make the same mistake you're calling out.
8note 4mo ago
In general tech has sat in the opposite paradigm: identify when doing something at a small scale is bad, but at a large scale is not unauthorized plagiarism on the individual level is bad, at the medium scale is ick, but at the ultragigantic scale is meh. laundering through an llm takes away the real moral ick from the plagiarism - the lying and building of ego by the person reboxing somebody else's ideas and work.
- wffurr 4mo ago
  >> the lying and building of ego by the person reboxing somebody else's ideas and work. Instead the bot lies to people who use its output to boost their ego. Not sure it's really changing the moral calculus here.
nonethewiser 4mo ago
Can you map this more directly to claims made about AI? It's impossible to agree or disagree with you. You've just given us an analogy - but to what?
- dbalatero 4mo ago
  Not sure what you're missing here. The other comment replies don't seem to be missing it. See the article, etc.
  - nonethewiser 4mo ago
    What is the claim? A little plagiarism is OK therefore a lot is also OK?
micromacrofoot 4mo ago
data brokers lean into this too... you can go to the city hall and get someone's public information pretty easily, that does not mean you should make all of that information available to everyone else all the time from anywhere
mullingitover 4mo ago
> why does a computer making money by learning everything from everyone upset people so? It’s the same thing! The majority of the population, sitting outside the VC bubble, views AI unfavorably. That's not my hot take, that's a fact from the NYT survey published today. It's going to be hilarious when VCs, having expropriated the IP of the entire internet, build The Layoff Machine That Does Everything Without Workers, and then the voters decide to just...enthusiastically expropriate that, and we end up with Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
- llm_nerd 4mo ago
  >The majority of the population, sitting outside the VC bubble, views AI unfavorably. Sure, where AI means threatens my job or my skills, people view it unfavourably. But then they use it. They're all using it. People's rhetoric seldom matches their actions. >enthusiastically expropriate that, and we end up with Fully Automated Luxury Communism Maybe in other countries, initially, but the US is very firmly a plutocracy, and has a populace that will very happily vote against their own interests because the plutocrat-owned media told them to. And yeah, it is very rapidly approaching the point where there is going to be zero chance of a revolution even if people opened their eyes. Which is precisely why the US is now threatening other countries as well, because plutocracy is threatened by rational, educated, better managed countries. Canada, for instance, is an example that country doesn't have to revert to being an idiocracy, so it's first in the crosshairs.
  - mullingitover 4mo ago
    > But then they use it. They're all using it. People's rhetoric seldom matches their actions. I don't see any contradiction. I criticize the hell out of guns and want them strictly controlled, and yet I own one. `¯\_(ツ)_/¯` People can use AI and still demand that all of society receive the benefits, instead of a small group of oppressors.
  - danaris 4mo ago
    > They're all using it. [Citation needed] I know many more people who do not use AI than who use it, and many more who refuse to use AI than people who are enthusiastic about it. Given your username, you are almost certainly in a bubble—an echo chamber—that makes it seem to you as though "everyone is using it." I recommend getting outside that bubble and talking to non-technical people outside your usual circles, especially people in the arts and humanities.
Meph504 4mo ago
> It’s like if I go to Golden Gate Park and pick one flower, I shouldn’t do that, but no one cares. But if I build a machine to automatically cut every flower in the park because I want to sell them, that’s different. The problem here is, in your example the small scale example, and the large scale example are both unacceptable behavior. Learning from others at a small scale is not only socially acceptable, but is the foundation of how advancement works. So this concept of the issue of the scale being the issue isn't at its core the problem, its that something that that is desired behavior in a human, is not socially acceptable because of a machine is doing it.
- LunicLynx 4mo ago
  Wasn’t his point about plagiarism? That is also not ok on a small scale.
  - boringg 4mo ago
    I think the difference here is that you guys are talking ethics. And in fact what were talking about is enforcement. While its unethical to pick one flower (in it's purest form, robbing the commons of the beauty of a flower), it won't be enforced.
    - LunicLynx 4mo ago
      Fair. AI might also not be the problem, but how it is utilized. Suddenly everyone and their grandma are specialist at everything and the actual value of understanding is not appreciated anymore.
      - thedevilslawyer 4mo ago
        Ok, what is so special about understanding anyway? we understand way less things than we do no understand. IMO, we're just giving special weight to understanding just because it gives people wages. Someone's specific brain structure should not privilege them over others. UBI or something equitable on those lines is the answer.
soerxpso 4mo ago
> It’s like if I go to Golden Gate Park and pick one flower, I shouldn’t do that, but no one cares. But if I build a machine to automatically cut every flower in the park because I want to sell them, that’s different. It's not like that, because flowers are a physical object and moving them to one place deprives their original location of the flowers. When an LLM learns something from a webpage, the webpage is still there. Whatever 'theft' you perceive is entirely in your head; you were deprived of nothing by someone else making a copy of your thing.
- LunicLynx 4mo ago
  This is not true. Because the copy is a devaluation of the original, so even though the web page is still there it’s value has decreased.
- kerkeslager 4mo ago
  When the LLM presents what it learned as its own thoughts without any attribution, that's the theft. And you understand that. You're not stupid. This is the thing: AI is convenient for corporations, so you'll make dishonest arguments to justify your unethical behavior. Maybe you even believe what you say, but that's because people will hold on to any flimsy thing that lets them feel like they're good people, not because the reasoning actually makes any sense. This is why people talking about AI get booed at speeches. There's no conversation to be had: you're not interested in the truth, or what's right, or what's good for anyone but yourself.
- abustamam 4mo ago
  It's not like that, because flowers are a physical object and moving them to one place deprives their original location of the flowers. When an LLM learns something from a webpage, the webpage is still there. Whatever 'theft' I perceive is entirely in my head; I was deprived of nothing by someone else making a copy of my thing.
  - ToValueFunfetti 4mo ago
    I get that the intention here is to plagiarize and thus cause the parent to feel the harm of it and realize the error in their ways, but I don't think it works. Plagiarism's harm to the plagiaree (?) is that it robs them of credit and payment, but nobody is viewing your reply in isolation of the parent's attribution and parent wasn't expecting to make money off of an HN comment. The harm to the rest of society where you gain false esteem for another's work is also not carried out in this instance. The harm to the plagiarizer where they fail to learn because they copied instead is likewise absent. If someone were to feel harm just from a copy of their words existing, they wouldn't need you to do it- google has hastily indexed this along with every other HN comment and we all know that this whole thread will make its way into LLM training sets eventually.
waynesonfire 4mo ago
Of course it's robbery. I don't think anyone is truly arguing it's not. The issue is that, if we don't do it, China will. Game over. I'm surprised I hvan't seen more economist scholars exploring this topic; it's a fastincating phenomenon. I've seen folks try and re-visit history and compare what's happening with AI to some historic event--but, we've never seen anything quite like it. As much as history repeats itself; at the forefront of innvotaion it doesn't. I suspect that there will one day be an AI tax as society tries to reclaim the value of the theft; maybe even UBI of some form. Until then, buy the stocks and ride the theft wave. The economsits are certainly exploring the K shaped economy, and this is why.
- proofofcontempt 4mo ago
  This argument of "if we don't do it, someone else will" to justify theft is so tiring. The companies doing the stealing are collectively the same ones that have power to prevent it, if they were incentivised to do so.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- evenhash 4mo ago
  > The issue is that, if we don't do it, China will. These AI companies aren’t state enterprises. How is geopolitics a justification? If it were just the military training them, probably no one would care about the copyright infringement angle, it makes sense that the government could ignore those rules for national security. But Mark Zuckerberg isn’t training his models to protect us from China. He’s doing it to make himself even more ridiculously wealthy.
keeda 4mo ago
> But quantitative changes in an activity produce qualitative changes. Interesting take. I think a corollary is that the qualitative changes are in the economics of things. And more than the scale, it is the value of those economic effects that determines how "accepted" that activity becomes. Take Uber as an example; it basically enabled mass avoidance of taxi regulations, and naturally existing taxi drivers and lawmakers cried foul. But enough people found value in the service and kept using it that gradually and inexorably society and laws adjusted to it. On the other hand, copyright infringement is an interesting case. While pretty much everyone and their dog pirates content to some extent, the % of people who think it's acceptable to do so is surprisingly small (22% apparently, up from only 14% in 2019). Furthermore the media industry, especially including ads, is a significant % of US GDP. I think those reasons, more than any RIAA/MPAA lobbying, are why copyright laws have remained as stringent as they have. As such at a social level, I don't think these effects were dismissed, rather they were considered and formally internalized. I suspect the same thing is happening with AI companies. They get away with devouring and training on the sum of human knowledge largely because existing laws are insufficient to stop them. So stopping this would require new laws but... well, given the early economic impact LLM technology is having my hunch is new laws will be brought in to protect it rather than restrain it.
- danaris 4mo ago
  > gradually and inexorably society and laws adjusted to it. But in many places, the ways that society and laws adjusted to it were to make extra clear in their local ordinances that Uber was required to operate as an actual taxi service, or get out. It's very disingenuous to imply that the public broadly decided Uber was Right, Actually, when both in its case and in that of many of the other gig economy companies, what really happened is that gradually and inexorably, they had to adjust to society and laws.
  - keeda 4mo ago
    I didn't mean to imply Uber was "right" or it unilaterally got laws adjusted in its favor. Both sides had to adapt, but very clearly regulations had to be significantly adjusted as well: https://www.blackcarnews.com/article/the-uber-taxi-partnership-regulatory-evolution-spawns-a-new-transportation-species https://www.blackcarnews.com/article/the-uber-taxi-partnersh... I followed this evolution peripherally as it happened, because while I appreciated the convenience of Uber, I disliked that it was unfair towards existing taxi drivers who had very onerous requirements like taxi medallions, which, note, never became a requirement for rideshare drivers. I remember at one point Uber drivers at the airport would ask me to pretend I'm a friend being picked up to avoid trouble with the cops, and then a couple of years later there was a dedicated, official "Uber pickup lane." My underlying point was that the whole system -- including Uber, incumbents, society and laws -- adapted to a new economic reality.
hughw 4mo ago
Honestly that's what's wrong with capitalism and property rights. We can understand what it means to own a thing like a piece of furniture, or a house, and "a person's home is their castle" rings true. But scale that up to individuals controlling resources that affect a neighborhood, a city, a country, or the world -- at each step their army of voters supports their right to own 800 billion dollars or whatever, same as they own their own houses -- it's only fair! And if they want to build a starbase and launch some rockets near your house and sensitive ecology they're just exercising the same rights you or I have, and attack on their ability to inflict damage on the community is an attack on all. [edit] and the same goes for corporations owning "means of production". It's not the same as owning an iPhone.
eboy 4mo ago
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Rekindle8090 4mo ago
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blks 4mo ago
But also a person is a person, not a commercial product, and usually we learn from sources within their licensing agreements.
timoth3y 4mo ago
> There’s a fallacy that gets used a whole lot to justify things like this ... FWIW, this is the Fallacy of Composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition
alexwwang 4mo ago
The era before internet, the gaps among information and knowledges could make money and power. The era after internet and before LLM, the information and knowledge gaps have been largely leveled theoretically, but the recognition wall stops most of us to understand and make use of them. The era after LLM, the wall is being destroyed and people should think about how to use these information and knowledge differently to make money and power.
fsckboy 4mo ago
if it's a fallacy that if it’s OK (or at least negligible on a small scale), then it must be OK on a large scale, then the alternative "it's ok at a small scale but not at a large scale" starts to slide us down a slippery slope... fallacy.
panda-giddiness 4mo ago
There is already a term for this, and ironically enough, it's often thrown around in discussions of machine learning; it's called emergence. As scales change, new properties appear, which is why we can describe a Chimpanzee as "swinging between the trees" even though at the level of quantum field theory there is no such thing as trees, Chimpanzees, or swinging. Likewise, people shouldn't be surprised that as AI compute scales up, new forms of harm can be created, thereby introducing new moral quandaries. It's like comparing GPT-1 against today's frontier models. One is a fun albeit useless toy. The other is effecting categorical changes in the way knowledge work is done. In both cases the underlying technology is the same, but their impacts are totally different.
DeusExMachina 4mo ago
I think that the problem arises because people equate things that are not the same. One person learning something is good. At scale, that becomes everyone learning something. That's even better. Machine learning is not scaling up people learning. It's completely different even if it's called "learning". As the article argues, it's plagiarism at scale. In that sense, one person plagiarizing content is bad. Everyone plagiarizing at scale by using LLMs is even worse.
rhubarbtree 4mo ago
But it’s not the same though. If I look at a webpage, it’s still there for other people to enjoy. That’s not the same as a flower being picked. Reasoning by analogy doesn’t work if your analogy isn’t well matched.
- rhubarbtree 4mo ago
  Let me double down on my downvote. The analogy proposed here is correct rewritten as: If one person uses an AI trained across copyrighted data, then that’s ok. But if everyone uses that AI, it’s not ok. Which is a bit of an irrelevant point.
crabsand 4mo ago
In other words, size matters.
therealpygon 4mo ago
I would say the difference there is: yes…you built a machine that “could” pick all the flowers. It did not, however, actually pick any flowers as you suggest. If you take the machine back and use it to pick the flowers, that should be a problem. I think the problem with these things is that if the same metric and methodology were reversed, it doesn’t look favorably on artists either with such inflammatory framing: “The way the artist learned was to effectively plagiarize every piece of art they viewed, extracting important details in the way light, color, shading, anatomy or otherwise look in order to steal from the other artists, then replicated and combined those things as part of every future work they created, stealing over and over again.” Handwaving away the small scale seems like it would ignore who has responsibility in the small scale. Metaphorically speaking, who in the small scale is responsible for plagiarism: the person making the paints or the person with the brush who sells them to an unsuspecting public? Point is, in this case, the user is the one holding the brush and trying to pass things off. To be clear, I don’t really disagree with the fact their copyrights were likely violatedc and they should likely be liable for damages, which is for a court to decide, not me. They should have sourced their data sets properly, certainly, and other companies have. I just think the arguments really need improvement without simply falling back on the tropes, and hopefully it helps make sense why some people will take issue with arguments that others want to simply dismiss as invalid.

inetknght 4mo ago

If one person is murdered, that's bad. If a million people are murdered, that's war. If one word is stolen by AI, that's bad. If a million words are stolen by AI, that's business.

bogrollben 4mo ago
this made me oof. well said.
gruez 4mo ago
>If one word is stolen by AI, that's bad. If a million words are stolen by AI, that's business. Where are all the instances of "one word" being "stolen by AI", and people getting mad over it?
insane_dreamer 4mo ago
more like If one word is stolen by Joe, that's bad. If a million words are stolen by Meta, that's business. AI isn't the problem, is corporations using AI that are the problem

kogus 4mo ago

quantitative changes in an activity produce qualitative changes Well said!

tyleo 4mo ago
It reminds me of a Stalin* quote: "Quantity has a quality all its own." * Note that it may be misattributed to him

jongjong 4mo ago

This is a great point. I think for coding, the wording of the MIT open source license makes it clear that copying and distributing the software is authorised on a small scale and it's very clear that the act of copying must involve a person. It provides distribution and modification rights to "any person obtaining a copy of the software" and explicitly requires attribution for any significant parts. Mass-ingesting the code with a script without any human even reading the licence is a very different kind of copying mechanism and there is no person involved... The contract was bypassed completely. A contract requires consent from both parties to be binding. When ingesting code into the AI training set, nobody even read the license. There was no agreement; neither explicit nor implicit... Because the consumer, a script, never read the contact for that specific project. There was nobody present when the copying occurred; on neither side! It cannot possibly constitute an agreement between two parties.

quantummagic 4mo ago
That's like saying you're not allowed to load the source code into an editor, because it's not a person. Or that you're not allowed to run a global search-replace on the entire code base, because it's a script and not a person.
- jongjong 4mo ago
  But in this case, a human has awareness of what software they are copying or modifying and that's how the original software author receives credit. The contract requires some degree of human awareness to be valid. This is the critical difference.
  - quantummagic 4mo ago
    Sorry that's nonsense. There's human awareness when ingesting MIT code into an LLM too. In both cases it's a human that says $ excute-global-replace or $ ingest-into-llm Both operations require some degree of human awareness. What you appear to be saying is, a human can only use a limited algorithm to access this source code, not a sophisticated one. And where do you draw that line? Who should get to say what is too sophisticated? Error: your algorithm is too sophisticated to proceed, please provide more human awareness, it's a critical difference.

svachalek 4mo ago

We ran into a lot of stuff like this in the early days of the web. For example, there was a lot of information that was "public" in that anyone could go to the city courthouse and ask to see the documents. But it changed in nature when you could suddenly look up anyone in the country by typing their name in your browser.

nitwit005 4mo ago
For a practical example of that, a lot of documents used to have things like social security numbers, and they started stripping that information off once it was visible online.
mswphd 4mo ago
we used to ship mass lists of addresses and phone numbers to people in each town and it was fine/appreciated.
- _doctor_love 4mo ago
  You ever had a bump in the night my guy? Or a stalker?
- disposition2 4mo ago
  You could also easily opt out with the single entity that shipped that information.
  - jhbadger 4mo ago
    Yes, but getting an unlisted number was considered weird and against the norm even if possible. Even in the early 2000s when I dropped my landline, my parents were aghast - "if you do that, you won't be in the phone book! How will anyone get in contact with you?"
    - bigbuppo 4mo ago
      And you often had to pay for the privilege... A dollar a month for them to not put your name and number in the phonebook.

wang_li 4mo ago

My complaint with your argument is that the word learn means one thing when we are talking about a person learning something from a webpage or book and something completely different when a webpage or book is used to adjust some weights in a matrix. Calling that learning is a distraction from the real copyright violations going on.

gruez 4mo ago
>when we are talking about a person learning something from a webpage or book and something completely different when a webpage or book is used to adjust some weights in a matrix What material differences exist between the two besides "humans good, computers bad"? >Calling that learning is a distraction from the real copyright violations going on. Most courts so far have ruled that it counts as fair use.
- mark336 4mo ago
  I thought fair use was dead after Napster
  - gruez 4mo ago
    No, only the type of "fair use" that people slap on their youtube uploads, thinking them it gives them a "get out of jail free" card for copyright infringement. Fair use was repeatedly affirmed in the 2010s, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

nate 4mo ago

ugh. yeah. the tragedy of the commons

hungryhobbit 4mo ago
It's funny, the way that term gets used now is actually a wild distortion of the true history. "The commons" was an incredibly successful system, and medieval (and prior) villages used it to great success, for the entire village's benefit! "Commons" are a great thing for everyone to have! The real history is that as advances in technology (like the Industrial Revolution) changed things, certain rich villagers were suddenly able to manage more animals than they could before. Those (specific/rich) people over-used the commons, creating the "tragedy" we all know of. The real lesson of history is not that commons fail: to the contrary, they worked great and helped everyone for centuries! The real lesson is "watch the fuck out for the new rich (especially when they just became rich because of recent technology advancements): those bastard will steal from everyone for their own benefit!"

psychoslave 4mo ago

Of course quantity makes emerge it’s own quality. If you kill a single person, you are a murderer, if you genocide "others" and distribute the spoliation wealth to those unscathed you are a national hero. If you steal small material you are a theft and go to prison, if you hog some billions you can enact laws to grab even more.

gruez 4mo ago
>If you kill a single person, you are a murderer, if you genocide "others" and distribute the spoliation wealth to those unscathed you are a national hero. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how laws work. It's not the scale that makes it okay, it's that it's done through some official process. Trump's raid to grab Maduro killed less than 100 people. Pretty modest by "genocide" standards, and is easily eclipsed by gang/cartel violence. Yet nobody is going after Trump because he didn't meet some kill quota to get special protection, nor are people condoning cartel violence because they killed far more than Trump.
- psychoslave 4mo ago
  That's exactly how laws work then. International Right for those who don't have all the nukes and lobotomized cannon meat bag ready to invade on a whim, and on the other side doing all the crimes and atrocities, straight transgress all legal processes ever invented, and expecting no possible punishment in return. Number of directly killed people is not something that can be eclipsed by bigger number of killed people. Not in a mind that keeps empathy high in its value.
- whattheheckheck 4mo ago
  Who is sir Francis drake

superkuh 4mo ago

No. It's more like, "You say I can take a photo of one flower in your flowerbed you put next to the public street, but you get upset when I take a bunch of photos of many public flowerbeds. That's both an over-reach and inconsistent."

rurp 4mo ago

Yes absolutely, when automation increases the rate of something many orders of magnitude that often is a qualitative difference. It's weird to me how often on HN of all places I see arguments that can be refuted with "scale matters". I commonly see arguments on all sorts of topics that make the same mistake you're calling out.

8note 4mo ago

In general tech has sat in the opposite paradigm: identify when doing something at a small scale is bad, but at a large scale is not unauthorized plagiarism on the individual level is bad, at the medium scale is ick, but at the ultragigantic scale is meh. laundering through an llm takes away the real moral ick from the plagiarism - the lying and building of ego by the person reboxing somebody else's ideas and work.

wffurr 4mo ago
>> the lying and building of ego by the person reboxing somebody else's ideas and work. Instead the bot lies to people who use its output to boost their ego. Not sure it's really changing the moral calculus here.

nonethewiser 4mo ago

Can you map this more directly to claims made about AI? It's impossible to agree or disagree with you. You've just given us an analogy - but to what?

dbalatero 4mo ago
Not sure what you're missing here. The other comment replies don't seem to be missing it. See the article, etc.
- nonethewiser 4mo ago
  What is the claim? A little plagiarism is OK therefore a lot is also OK?

micromacrofoot 4mo ago

data brokers lean into this too... you can go to the city hall and get someone's public information pretty easily, that does not mean you should make all of that information available to everyone else all the time from anywhere

mullingitover 4mo ago

> why does a computer making money by learning everything from everyone upset people so? It’s the same thing! The majority of the population, sitting outside the VC bubble, views AI unfavorably. That's not my hot take, that's a fact from the NYT survey published today. It's going to be hilarious when VCs, having expropriated the IP of the entire internet, build The Layoff Machine That Does Everything Without Workers, and then the voters decide to just...enthusiastically expropriate that, and we end up with Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

llm_nerd 4mo ago
>The majority of the population, sitting outside the VC bubble, views AI unfavorably. Sure, where AI means threatens my job or my skills, people view it unfavourably. But then they use it. They're all using it. People's rhetoric seldom matches their actions. >enthusiastically expropriate that, and we end up with Fully Automated Luxury Communism Maybe in other countries, initially, but the US is very firmly a plutocracy, and has a populace that will very happily vote against their own interests because the plutocrat-owned media told them to. And yeah, it is very rapidly approaching the point where there is going to be zero chance of a revolution even if people opened their eyes. Which is precisely why the US is now threatening other countries as well, because plutocracy is threatened by rational, educated, better managed countries. Canada, for instance, is an example that country doesn't have to revert to being an idiocracy, so it's first in the crosshairs.
- mullingitover 4mo ago
  > But then they use it. They're all using it. People's rhetoric seldom matches their actions. I don't see any contradiction. I criticize the hell out of guns and want them strictly controlled, and yet I own one. `¯\_(ツ)_/¯` People can use AI and still demand that all of society receive the benefits, instead of a small group of oppressors.
- danaris 4mo ago
  > They're all using it. [Citation needed] I know many more people who do not use AI than who use it, and many more who refuse to use AI than people who are enthusiastic about it. Given your username, you are almost certainly in a bubble—an echo chamber—that makes it seem to you as though "everyone is using it." I recommend getting outside that bubble and talking to non-technical people outside your usual circles, especially people in the arts and humanities.

Meph504 4mo ago

> It’s like if I go to Golden Gate Park and pick one flower, I shouldn’t do that, but no one cares. But if I build a machine to automatically cut every flower in the park because I want to sell them, that’s different. The problem here is, in your example the small scale example, and the large scale example are both unacceptable behavior. Learning from others at a small scale is not only socially acceptable, but is the foundation of how advancement works. So this concept of the issue of the scale being the issue isn't at its core the problem, its that something that that is desired behavior in a human, is not socially acceptable because of a machine is doing it.

LunicLynx 4mo ago
Wasn’t his point about plagiarism? That is also not ok on a small scale.
- boringg 4mo ago
  I think the difference here is that you guys are talking ethics. And in fact what were talking about is enforcement. While its unethical to pick one flower (in it's purest form, robbing the commons of the beauty of a flower), it won't be enforced.
  - LunicLynx 4mo ago
    Fair. AI might also not be the problem, but how it is utilized. Suddenly everyone and their grandma are specialist at everything and the actual value of understanding is not appreciated anymore.
    - thedevilslawyer 4mo ago
      Ok, what is so special about understanding anyway? we understand way less things than we do no understand. IMO, we're just giving special weight to understanding just because it gives people wages. Someone's specific brain structure should not privilege them over others. UBI or something equitable on those lines is the answer.

soerxpso 4mo ago

> It’s like if I go to Golden Gate Park and pick one flower, I shouldn’t do that, but no one cares. But if I build a machine to automatically cut every flower in the park because I want to sell them, that’s different. It's not like that, because flowers are a physical object and moving them to one place deprives their original location of the flowers. When an LLM learns something from a webpage, the webpage is still there. Whatever 'theft' you perceive is entirely in your head; you were deprived of nothing by someone else making a copy of your thing.

LunicLynx 4mo ago
This is not true. Because the copy is a devaluation of the original, so even though the web page is still there it’s value has decreased.
kerkeslager 4mo ago
When the LLM presents what it learned as its own thoughts without any attribution, that's the theft. And you understand that. You're not stupid. This is the thing: AI is convenient for corporations, so you'll make dishonest arguments to justify your unethical behavior. Maybe you even believe what you say, but that's because people will hold on to any flimsy thing that lets them feel like they're good people, not because the reasoning actually makes any sense. This is why people talking about AI get booed at speeches. There's no conversation to be had: you're not interested in the truth, or what's right, or what's good for anyone but yourself.
abustamam 4mo ago
It's not like that, because flowers are a physical object and moving them to one place deprives their original location of the flowers. When an LLM learns something from a webpage, the webpage is still there. Whatever 'theft' I perceive is entirely in my head; I was deprived of nothing by someone else making a copy of my thing.
- ToValueFunfetti 4mo ago
  I get that the intention here is to plagiarize and thus cause the parent to feel the harm of it and realize the error in their ways, but I don't think it works. Plagiarism's harm to the plagiaree (?) is that it robs them of credit and payment, but nobody is viewing your reply in isolation of the parent's attribution and parent wasn't expecting to make money off of an HN comment. The harm to the rest of society where you gain false esteem for another's work is also not carried out in this instance. The harm to the plagiarizer where they fail to learn because they copied instead is likewise absent. If someone were to feel harm just from a copy of their words existing, they wouldn't need you to do it- google has hastily indexed this along with every other HN comment and we all know that this whole thread will make its way into LLM training sets eventually.

waynesonfire 4mo ago

Of course it's robbery. I don't think anyone is truly arguing it's not. The issue is that, if we don't do it, China will. Game over. I'm surprised I hvan't seen more economist scholars exploring this topic; it's a fastincating phenomenon. I've seen folks try and re-visit history and compare what's happening with AI to some historic event--but, we've never seen anything quite like it. As much as history repeats itself; at the forefront of innvotaion it doesn't. I suspect that there will one day be an AI tax as society tries to reclaim the value of the theft; maybe even UBI of some form. Until then, buy the stocks and ride the theft wave. The economsits are certainly exploring the K shaped economy, and this is why.

proofofcontempt 4mo ago
This argument of "if we don't do it, someone else will" to justify theft is so tiring. The companies doing the stealing are collectively the same ones that have power to prevent it, if they were incentivised to do so.
deleted 4mo ago
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evenhash 4mo ago
> The issue is that, if we don't do it, China will. These AI companies aren’t state enterprises. How is geopolitics a justification? If it were just the military training them, probably no one would care about the copyright infringement angle, it makes sense that the government could ignore those rules for national security. But Mark Zuckerberg isn’t training his models to protect us from China. He’s doing it to make himself even more ridiculously wealthy.

keeda 4mo ago

> But quantitative changes in an activity produce qualitative changes. Interesting take. I think a corollary is that the qualitative changes are in the economics of things. And more than the scale, it is the value of those economic effects that determines how "accepted" that activity becomes. Take Uber as an example; it basically enabled mass avoidance of taxi regulations, and naturally existing taxi drivers and lawmakers cried foul. But enough people found value in the service and kept using it that gradually and inexorably society and laws adjusted to it. On the other hand, copyright infringement is an interesting case. While pretty much everyone and their dog pirates content to some extent, the % of people who think it's acceptable to do so is surprisingly small (22% apparently, up from only 14% in 2019). Furthermore the media industry, especially including ads, is a significant % of US GDP. I think those reasons, more than any RIAA/MPAA lobbying, are why copyright laws have remained as stringent as they have. As such at a social level, I don't think these effects were dismissed, rather they were considered and formally internalized. I suspect the same thing is happening with AI companies. They get away with devouring and training on the sum of human knowledge largely because existing laws are insufficient to stop them. So stopping this would require new laws but... well, given the early economic impact LLM technology is having my hunch is new laws will be brought in to protect it rather than restrain it.

danaris 4mo ago
> gradually and inexorably society and laws adjusted to it. But in many places, the ways that society and laws adjusted to it were to make extra clear in their local ordinances that Uber was required to operate as an actual taxi service, or get out. It's very disingenuous to imply that the public broadly decided Uber was Right, Actually, when both in its case and in that of many of the other gig economy companies, what really happened is that gradually and inexorably, they had to adjust to society and laws.
- keeda 4mo ago
  I didn't mean to imply Uber was "right" or it unilaterally got laws adjusted in its favor. Both sides had to adapt, but very clearly regulations had to be significantly adjusted as well: https://www.blackcarnews.com/article/the-uber-taxi-partnership-regulatory-evolution-spawns-a-new-transportation-species https://www.blackcarnews.com/article/the-uber-taxi-partnersh... I followed this evolution peripherally as it happened, because while I appreciated the convenience of Uber, I disliked that it was unfair towards existing taxi drivers who had very onerous requirements like taxi medallions, which, note, never became a requirement for rideshare drivers. I remember at one point Uber drivers at the airport would ask me to pretend I'm a friend being picked up to avoid trouble with the cops, and then a couple of years later there was a dedicated, official "Uber pickup lane." My underlying point was that the whole system -- including Uber, incumbents, society and laws -- adapted to a new economic reality.

hughw 4mo ago

Honestly that's what's wrong with capitalism and property rights. We can understand what it means to own a thing like a piece of furniture, or a house, and "a person's home is their castle" rings true. But scale that up to individuals controlling resources that affect a neighborhood, a city, a country, or the world -- at each step their army of voters supports their right to own 800 billion dollars or whatever, same as they own their own houses -- it's only fair! And if they want to build a starbase and launch some rockets near your house and sensitive ecology they're just exercising the same rights you or I have, and attack on their ability to inflict damage on the community is an attack on all. [edit] and the same goes for corporations owning "means of production". It's not the same as owning an iPhone.

eboy 4mo ago

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Rekindle8090 4mo ago

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blks 4mo ago

But also a person is a person, not a commercial product, and usually we learn from sources within their licensing agreements.

timoth3y 4mo ago

> There’s a fallacy that gets used a whole lot to justify things like this ... FWIW, this is the Fallacy of Composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition

alexwwang 4mo ago

The era before internet, the gaps among information and knowledges could make money and power. The era after internet and before LLM, the information and knowledge gaps have been largely leveled theoretically, but the recognition wall stops most of us to understand and make use of them. The era after LLM, the wall is being destroyed and people should think about how to use these information and knowledge differently to make money and power.

fsckboy 4mo ago

if it's a fallacy that if it’s OK (or at least negligible on a small scale), then it must be OK on a large scale, then the alternative "it's ok at a small scale but not at a large scale" starts to slide us down a slippery slope... fallacy.

panda-giddiness 4mo ago

There is already a term for this, and ironically enough, it's often thrown around in discussions of machine learning; it's called emergence. As scales change, new properties appear, which is why we can describe a Chimpanzee as "swinging between the trees" even though at the level of quantum field theory there is no such thing as trees, Chimpanzees, or swinging. Likewise, people shouldn't be surprised that as AI compute scales up, new forms of harm can be created, thereby introducing new moral quandaries. It's like comparing GPT-1 against today's frontier models. One is a fun albeit useless toy. The other is effecting categorical changes in the way knowledge work is done. In both cases the underlying technology is the same, but their impacts are totally different.

DeusExMachina 4mo ago

I think that the problem arises because people equate things that are not the same. One person learning something is good. At scale, that becomes everyone learning something. That's even better. Machine learning is not scaling up people learning. It's completely different even if it's called "learning". As the article argues, it's plagiarism at scale. In that sense, one person plagiarizing content is bad. Everyone plagiarizing at scale by using LLMs is even worse.

rhubarbtree 4mo ago

But it’s not the same though. If I look at a webpage, it’s still there for other people to enjoy. That’s not the same as a flower being picked. Reasoning by analogy doesn’t work if your analogy isn’t well matched.

rhubarbtree 4mo ago
Let me double down on my downvote. The analogy proposed here is correct rewritten as: If one person uses an AI trained across copyrighted data, then that’s ok. But if everyone uses that AI, it’s not ok. Which is a bit of an irrelevant point.

crabsand 4mo ago

In other words, size matters.

therealpygon 4mo ago

I would say the difference there is: yes…you built a machine that “could” pick all the flowers. It did not, however, actually pick any flowers as you suggest. If you take the machine back and use it to pick the flowers, that should be a problem. I think the problem with these things is that if the same metric and methodology were reversed, it doesn’t look favorably on artists either with such inflammatory framing: “The way the artist learned was to effectively plagiarize every piece of art they viewed, extracting important details in the way light, color, shading, anatomy or otherwise look in order to steal from the other artists, then replicated and combined those things as part of every future work they created, stealing over and over again.” Handwaving away the small scale seems like it would ignore who has responsibility in the small scale. Metaphorically speaking, who in the small scale is responsible for plagiarism: the person making the paints or the person with the brush who sells them to an unsuspecting public? Point is, in this case, the user is the one holding the brush and trying to pass things off. To be clear, I don’t really disagree with the fact their copyrights were likely violatedc and they should likely be liable for damages, which is for a court to decide, not me. They should have sourced their data sets properly, certainly, and other companies have. I just think the arguments really need improvement without simply falling back on the tropes, and hopefully it helps make sense why some people will take issue with arguments that others want to simply dismiss as invalid.