8 ms·

Why are we glossing over the fact that it's all trained on stolen code, stolen art, stolen books? It's unethical to use it, it's unethical to take money for it.

by czpl 6d ago

Why are we glossing over the fact that it's all trained on stolen code, stolen art, stolen books? It's unethical to use it, it's unethical to take money for it. It should be either free or killed. I really don't understand why we just collectively accepted that.

flexagoon 6d ago
> stolen code, stolen art, stolen books Copyright violation is not theft
- wartywhoa23 6d ago
  War is peace, ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery!
sdcfgy 6d ago
Not all of us did.
mapontosevenths 6d ago
I gloss over it because it's an argument that makes no sense to me. Copyright exists to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. Not to enrich artists or scientists. Ai is progress. Further, the works it creates are fully transformative. It isn't just spitting out Harry Potter verbatim, it's making new things from it. To me, this argument is like staying that if you read Winnie The Pooh as a child then Milne owns your artistic output for life, because one of your many influences might have been his work. It just seems obvious at face value.
- pydry 6d ago
  >Copyright exists to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. Not to enrich artists or scientists. Is impoverishing them supposed to encourage progress in the arts and sciences? Whatever it started out as (and I have my doubts it was ever a tool to help artists), it's now primarily a tool corporations use to milk creativity for profit and squash it where it might interfere with that profit.
  - mapontosevenths 6d ago
    > Is impoverishing them supposed to encourage progress in the arts and sciences? No, but that needs new laws. Not an abuse of the old ones justified under the thinnest of pretenses. I don't think that folks stop to consider what bending copyright law into these weird shapes to meet their ends will do to other aspects of copyright. For example, sampling in music. How is that different from AI generated music? If anything AI uses LESS of any individual song. You can't just say "no derivative works." That would fully halt progress on many fronts.
    - czpl 6d ago
      If a song was made purely of samples with no original input I'd argue it's in the same category. Maybe AI uses less of any individual song, but does AI make something actually original and transformative or is it just bits and pieces of all the things it learnt on (in simplified terms)? I think that's where the discussion lies.
      - mapontosevenths 6d ago
        Entirely new works are often created entirely from samples, and can be amazing. See "Frontier Psychiatrist" by The Avalanches for one example done entirely by humans. There are many others.
        czpl 6d ago
        Amazing or not, that is not the discussion. LLM output can look amazing as well but that's not what I'm arguing about. Also with LLM's we'll reach a point when everything is made out of samples (metaphorically speaking), where do we fit original content then, or who will make it if it means it's going to be consumed by data centers immediately.
        mapontosevenths 6d ago
        > Also with LLM's we'll reach a point when everything is made out of samples We reached that point with humans long ago. There's nothing new under the sun. Only remixes of dead peoples greatest hits. The pentatonic scale, for example, was not invented by the people who use it. Science and art would have to start over from scratch if you expect things to all be genuinely new from first principles. > who will make it if it means it's going to be consumed by data centers immediately People who enjoy making it.
- kg 6d ago
  The frequency with which AI boosters leap to "clearly once you've read a book the author owns everything that comes out of your brain" still shocks me a little bit. It's obviously not the same as somebody torrenting books2 or libgen or whatever and training on it for profit.
  - mapontosevenths 6d ago
    I see no argument here. Just a note that it seems to be obvious to you. It must not be as obvious to me, or millions of others or we wouldn't be on the opposite side of it.
- czpl 6d ago
  How is it progress if it stops people from sharing. It just reduces everything to the lowest common denominator. Or how is it progress if the data centers just eat up all the components skyrocketing the prices for regular people.
- kazinator 6d ago
  You might be confusing patents and copyright. Copyright squarely exists so that authors of can get paid. Patents exist so that the secrets behind inventions are revealed in exchange for a limited time protection, promoting collaboration and progress.
  - edanm 6d ago
    Quoting the US constitution: "The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." It's about promoting science and art, not "paying authors". Paying authors is of course the mechanism by which art is promoted.
    - kazinator 6d ago
      That clause is the basis for both copyright and patents. Note that not all Arts are "useful" and not all Arts are "Writings". Most art is not intended to be an open-ended product to be further collaborated upon and extended in order to drive progress. Protections are purely so that the creators can get paid in some shape. There is still art if they don't get paid. Copyright somewhat stifles that activity in art which consists of imitation; imitate too closely and you invite accusations of infringement. A work of art being copyrighted is not what motivates and encourages activity revolving around copying that work's style. That's what it would mean for the work to promote Art as such: the work gets studied and it style becomes part of the artistic vocabulary. This will happen copyright or not; the only difference is the conditions for compensation.
      - mapontosevenths 6d ago
        > Protections are purely so that the creators can get paid in some shape. That's not what the founding fathers said, and it's not what they wanted. Madison thought that the two things were really the same saying: "The utility of this power will scarcely be questioned. The copyright of authors has been solemnly adjudged, in Great Britain, to be a right of common law. The right to useful inventions seems with equal reason to belong to the inventors. The public good fully coincides in both cases with the claims of individuals. The States cannot separately make effectual provision for either of the cases..." — Federalist No. 43 (1788) Whereas Jefferson, who not only helped draft the consititution, but was the first patent examiner, was deeply suspicious of them and wanted a restriction on length directly spelled out at length in the constitution itself. "I like it [the Constitution], as far as it goes; but I should have been for going further. For instance, the following alterations and additions would have pleased me... Article 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding — years, but for no longer term, and for no other purpose." — Letter to James Madison (August 1789) They all agreed that the purpose was progress for everyone, not one mans enrichment. They disagreed a bit about how best to accomplish that.
- ruraljuror 6d ago
  That it’s illegal for employees to use copyrighted work that they dont have permission to use to build a product seems much more obvious at face value than comparing an llm to a human artist.
LewisVerstappen 6d ago
Because it’s not a “fact”, it’s an argument that you are making.
rezaprima 6d ago
IMHO, if they purchased the books etc, it's fair because, for me, it's like a biological neural network (i.e human) reading and watching the contents and memorizing them. CMIIW
survirtual 6d ago
Your heart is in the right place but your conclusion is not. Because it was trained unethically we have a few moral obligations: 1) USE IT. Do not let only unethical people use a force amplifier on our collective efforts. 2) STOP PUBLISHING HUMAN GENERATED CONTENT. The more original human thought = the more they harvest our thinking. 3) Generate only known things in novel combinations. Do not provide new insights. I could go on but strategically thinking AI is not going to be stopped in the way you are thinking. So you need to think a bit deeper on methods of optimizing the situation.
- cindyllm 6d ago
  [dead]
Touche 6d ago
Humans are trained by reading things. Why is it unethical for another form of intelligence to learn the same way.
- czpl 6d ago
  there is nothing intelligent about an LLM
- rDr4g0n 6d ago
  AI is big data. AI companies generate the big data from obscene volumes of materials they did not produce. then they charge rent for access. legally i have no fucking clue, but morally, this is stealing humanity to produce a profit. realistically the toothpaste is outta the tube, so the second best option is accept LLMs, but do not enrich AI companies.
- deleted 6d ago
  [deleted]
socketcluster 6d ago
I'm an open source dev and I appreciate AI. I'm glad it exists and I have no problem with people being rewarded for their work on AI. That said, I also think everyone who contributed content online deserves to be rewarded for their contribution, especially since OpenAI (which made the largest contribution) was a non-profit in the beginning. So there should be some kind of tax. Otherwise I agree, it's not ethical. It's not 'fair use' of copyrights.
alansaber 6d ago
Realpolitik moment
ChickeNES 6d ago
> I really don't understand why we just collectively accepted that. Because none of what you said is true.
kazinator 6d ago
That's where the intelligence lies. It is not artificial intelligence; it's a hallucinative, interpolative search system through information produced by natural intelligence. The interpolation is all that is artificial.

by czpl 6d ago

flexagoon 6d ago

> stolen code, stolen art, stolen books Copyright violation is not theft

wartywhoa23 6d ago
War is peace, ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery!

sdcfgy 6d ago

Not all of us did.

mapontosevenths 6d ago

I gloss over it because it's an argument that makes no sense to me. Copyright exists to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. Not to enrich artists or scientists. Ai is progress. Further, the works it creates are fully transformative. It isn't just spitting out Harry Potter verbatim, it's making new things from it. To me, this argument is like staying that if you read Winnie The Pooh as a child then Milne owns your artistic output for life, because one of your many influences might have been his work. It just seems obvious at face value.

pydry 6d ago
>Copyright exists to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. Not to enrich artists or scientists. Is impoverishing them supposed to encourage progress in the arts and sciences? Whatever it started out as (and I have my doubts it was ever a tool to help artists), it's now primarily a tool corporations use to milk creativity for profit and squash it where it might interfere with that profit.
- mapontosevenths 6d ago
  > Is impoverishing them supposed to encourage progress in the arts and sciences? No, but that needs new laws. Not an abuse of the old ones justified under the thinnest of pretenses. I don't think that folks stop to consider what bending copyright law into these weird shapes to meet their ends will do to other aspects of copyright. For example, sampling in music. How is that different from AI generated music? If anything AI uses LESS of any individual song. You can't just say "no derivative works." That would fully halt progress on many fronts.
  - czpl 6d ago
    If a song was made purely of samples with no original input I'd argue it's in the same category. Maybe AI uses less of any individual song, but does AI make something actually original and transformative or is it just bits and pieces of all the things it learnt on (in simplified terms)? I think that's where the discussion lies.
    - mapontosevenths 6d ago
      Entirely new works are often created entirely from samples, and can be amazing. See "Frontier Psychiatrist" by The Avalanches for one example done entirely by humans. There are many others.
      - czpl 6d ago
        Amazing or not, that is not the discussion. LLM output can look amazing as well but that's not what I'm arguing about. Also with LLM's we'll reach a point when everything is made out of samples (metaphorically speaking), where do we fit original content then, or who will make it if it means it's going to be consumed by data centers immediately.
        mapontosevenths 6d ago
        > Also with LLM's we'll reach a point when everything is made out of samples We reached that point with humans long ago. There's nothing new under the sun. Only remixes of dead peoples greatest hits. The pentatonic scale, for example, was not invented by the people who use it. Science and art would have to start over from scratch if you expect things to all be genuinely new from first principles. > who will make it if it means it's going to be consumed by data centers immediately People who enjoy making it.
kg 6d ago
The frequency with which AI boosters leap to "clearly once you've read a book the author owns everything that comes out of your brain" still shocks me a little bit. It's obviously not the same as somebody torrenting books2 or libgen or whatever and training on it for profit.
- mapontosevenths 6d ago
  I see no argument here. Just a note that it seems to be obvious to you. It must not be as obvious to me, or millions of others or we wouldn't be on the opposite side of it.
czpl 6d ago
How is it progress if it stops people from sharing. It just reduces everything to the lowest common denominator. Or how is it progress if the data centers just eat up all the components skyrocketing the prices for regular people.
kazinator 6d ago
You might be confusing patents and copyright. Copyright squarely exists so that authors of can get paid. Patents exist so that the secrets behind inventions are revealed in exchange for a limited time protection, promoting collaboration and progress.
- edanm 6d ago
  Quoting the US constitution: "The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." It's about promoting science and art, not "paying authors". Paying authors is of course the mechanism by which art is promoted.
  - kazinator 6d ago
    That clause is the basis for both copyright and patents. Note that not all Arts are "useful" and not all Arts are "Writings". Most art is not intended to be an open-ended product to be further collaborated upon and extended in order to drive progress. Protections are purely so that the creators can get paid in some shape. There is still art if they don't get paid. Copyright somewhat stifles that activity in art which consists of imitation; imitate too closely and you invite accusations of infringement. A work of art being copyrighted is not what motivates and encourages activity revolving around copying that work's style. That's what it would mean for the work to promote Art as such: the work gets studied and it style becomes part of the artistic vocabulary. This will happen copyright or not; the only difference is the conditions for compensation.
    - mapontosevenths 6d ago
      > Protections are purely so that the creators can get paid in some shape. That's not what the founding fathers said, and it's not what they wanted. Madison thought that the two things were really the same saying: "The utility of this power will scarcely be questioned. The copyright of authors has been solemnly adjudged, in Great Britain, to be a right of common law. The right to useful inventions seems with equal reason to belong to the inventors. The public good fully coincides in both cases with the claims of individuals. The States cannot separately make effectual provision for either of the cases..." — Federalist No. 43 (1788) Whereas Jefferson, who not only helped draft the consititution, but was the first patent examiner, was deeply suspicious of them and wanted a restriction on length directly spelled out at length in the constitution itself. "I like it [the Constitution], as far as it goes; but I should have been for going further. For instance, the following alterations and additions would have pleased me... Article 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding — years, but for no longer term, and for no other purpose." — Letter to James Madison (August 1789) They all agreed that the purpose was progress for everyone, not one mans enrichment. They disagreed a bit about how best to accomplish that.
ruraljuror 6d ago
That it’s illegal for employees to use copyrighted work that they dont have permission to use to build a product seems much more obvious at face value than comparing an llm to a human artist.

LewisVerstappen 6d ago

Because it’s not a “fact”, it’s an argument that you are making.

rezaprima 6d ago

IMHO, if they purchased the books etc, it's fair because, for me, it's like a biological neural network (i.e human) reading and watching the contents and memorizing them. CMIIW

survirtual 6d ago

Your heart is in the right place but your conclusion is not. Because it was trained unethically we have a few moral obligations: 1) USE IT. Do not let only unethical people use a force amplifier on our collective efforts. 2) STOP PUBLISHING HUMAN GENERATED CONTENT. The more original human thought = the more they harvest our thinking. 3) Generate only known things in novel combinations. Do not provide new insights. I could go on but strategically thinking AI is not going to be stopped in the way you are thinking. So you need to think a bit deeper on methods of optimizing the situation.

cindyllm 6d ago
[dead]

Touche 6d ago

Humans are trained by reading things. Why is it unethical for another form of intelligence to learn the same way.

czpl 6d ago
there is nothing intelligent about an LLM
rDr4g0n 6d ago
AI is big data. AI companies generate the big data from obscene volumes of materials they did not produce. then they charge rent for access. legally i have no fucking clue, but morally, this is stealing humanity to produce a profit. realistically the toothpaste is outta the tube, so the second best option is accept LLMs, but do not enrich AI companies.
deleted 6d ago
[deleted]

socketcluster 6d ago

I'm an open source dev and I appreciate AI. I'm glad it exists and I have no problem with people being rewarded for their work on AI. That said, I also think everyone who contributed content online deserves to be rewarded for their contribution, especially since OpenAI (which made the largest contribution) was a non-profit in the beginning. So there should be some kind of tax. Otherwise I agree, it's not ethical. It's not 'fair use' of copyrights.

alansaber 6d ago

Realpolitik moment

ChickeNES 6d ago

> I really don't understand why we just collectively accepted that. Because none of what you said is true.

kazinator 6d ago

That's where the intelligence lies. It is not artificial intelligence; it's a hallucinative, interpolative search system through information produced by natural intelligence. The interpolation is all that is artificial.