You got a source for this?

Yeah, fair enough.

I’m sorry, but it’s not my responsibility to educate you about copyright law, even though I have done what I could. I wish you the best. Good day.

When i write a sentence then do i have a copyright upon it which i can defend in law?

Umm… Yes. Yes, you do. That’s how copyright works…

The current models are all trained with data which at least some larger creator (book writer or whatever) does not want a model to be trained on.

Is this not antithetical to your stance? Or are you saying that only those entities large enough to defend themselves against the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic are deserving of being paid for use of their works?

The current models are under the current law unsustainable.

I completely agree with you here, but something like a class action lawsuit is not a viable solution.

You understand the scale right? This is a combinatorial problem: the plaintiffs in this case would be every individual and company that has ever existed, and the defendants would be not only the AI companies, but also anyone who has ever used or published AI generated content. That’s a wishful thought, not a realistic solution.

Holy shit! What an excellent idea.

I always advocate for putting AI models under UNESCO stewardship

As now will I.

Copyright isn’t something you “get.” It’s something that comes with the production, no extra steps required.

You’ve accidentally come upon the other reason why your example doesn’t hold in the training data case. How do you suss out who actually holds the copyright on that data.

Take my shitpost for example. Whonis the copyright holder? Me the author? Reddit the platform I published on? What if the source was an Internet Archive snapshot?

Do you earnestly believe this could work in practice?

And we are talking about meaningful data not your shitpost, like licensed code or a book you wrote and anthropic pirated.

Ah ha! You see, that’s the problem. My shitpost is meaningful data. This is something people seem to have a really hard time understanding. Scaling laws and the size of the search space in AI training means that the datum is not valuable. It’s only the data (in conglomerate) that is value for training, and my shitpost would be a part of that.

Once you understand this, you should see what I meant when I said it’s not feasible. How do you determine and then fairly distribute the payout to everyone who has ever written or recorded anything in digital format? This is not a simple supply vs demand equation, like your bakery example assumes.

Also I have no idea what Netflix has to do with this discussion.

How do you suggest an individual should go about this?

Do I go down to my local courthouse and file a suit against Anthropic so I can ask the judge to subpoena them to determine if my Reddit shitpost from 2012 is in their training set?

I don’t think it’s really possible to do this.

I mean speaking just logistically, how would you determine who gets how much? If it’s based on quality, how do you determine what is of high quality? Otherwise, does everyone who has every written anything that finds its way into a training dataset get like a tenth of a cent?

Alternative proposal: all AI models must be released as open weights, available to everyone.

AI, through its use of training data, has benefited from the sum total of human knowledge, therefore the results of this training should be given back for the use of all humanity.

That seems fair to me.

Pretty sure that was “lost” as in, “needing a map.” Not everything needs to be about winning or losing.

You got a reference for that?

Yeah, that is a pretty shitty consequence, but it’s nothing new or different from the strandard clean room techniques the industry has been using for decades.

Does the cost outweigh the benefits?

No.

I fail to see how this has anything to do with the Harry Potter lady or the YouTube tech guy.

I think you are making a category error.

For your argument to be coherent, it must be the case that low-skilled individuals would otherwise go on to become domain experts if not for their use of large langue models. While the reality is that these individuals would likely never rise to the level of expertise in any case.

You and your interlocutor were essentially talking past one another. LLMs have a disproportionately negative effect on low-skilled, low-intelligence, or uncritical individuals. LLMs improve personal and professional development while being extremely useful to highly-skilled, high-intelligence, or critically thinking individuals. These two statements are not mutually exclusive.

The point that’s being danced around is that LLMs multiply the divide between those who blindly consume and those who think criticality for themselves, and this is a problem. The larger question of whether it shifts more of the later group into the former, is yet to be studied.

Yeah, I think you’ve nailed it.

There’s no stopping the Holocene extinction. Our only hope as a species is to try to survive it and to position ourselves so that we end up in the best-possible position on the other side. I see continued, rapid technological progress (including AI development) as the most realistic means to accomplishing these ends.

I don’t think Ishmael was wrong, I just think the viewpoint isn’t realistically actionable.

I think I’m (unfortunately) starting to really understand what Frank Herbert meant when he wrote, “Fear is the mind killer.” It’s very disheartening to see legitimate concerns snowball into lemming-like behavior.

When in the throws of despair or grieving for a society in decline I’d typically appeal to the classic MiB quote:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.

But as the years go by it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find solace there — mostly because my experience is showing me that it’s simply no longer true. I feel like I’m living in a world where everyone read Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity and most people responded with, “Where do I sign?”

I’ve observed this behavior from both doomers and AI evangelists.

However, in the effort of full-disclosure, I must admit that I am a staunch accelerationist. That’s because, when viewed from a cosmological perspective, the only rational way to describe the last few hundred years of human development would be as an explosion, and I firmly believe the only path out is forward. Standing against the tide of technological progress at this point would be akin to standing against a blast wave.

That’s really damn scary.

The real sticking point seems to be that increased knowledge does not alleviate the existential dread. On the contrary, in many ways it exacerbates the mortal fear. Knowledge without power or prescience is impotent. Not that it would make a difference anyway.

If we had developed the concept of The Great Filter before the steam engine, would the world have responded to Watt’s machine in the same way it’s responding to Dario’s now? And would that have even made a lick of difference?

(Although part of me feels like reverse-engineering binary blobs might in fact be a valid use case for LLM’s)

Except the resulting packages would no longer be allowed in AlpineBSD.

Yeah, just like most other things that are not computationally verifiable, this has basically zero Byzantine fault tolerance.

Don’t forget about the personalized propaganda advertising! When the whole populous hits the same API endpoint, you get recon, generation, and delivery all through the same platform. Very resource-efficient.