Thread

1. jacquesm · 1789726316 · focus · HN ↗

   It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.

   It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.

   1. brookst · 1789733709 · focus · HN ↗

      Musicians and writers build new works on top off millennia of literary and musical history, then copyright their works and sell it back to us. Is this so bad? If Taylor Swift, consciously or subconsciously, gets an harmonic idea from a 1970's song and a fragment of a melody from some 1990's song... is that theft?

      I'm ambivalent about AI and, like all gold rushes, many of the players are terrible, dishonest, egomaniacal jerks.

      But I am deeply skeptical of the idea that aggregation of knowledge and culture is itself wrong. That's literally how culture has worked since the dawn of time, and our modern era obsession with credit and perpetual copyright is unhealthy. \

      It's only in the past 100 years or so that this idea of "if you create it, it's yours alone and nobody can build on it without paying you" became current, and it was largely driven by the megacorps that AI haters used to hate (remember the despite for RIAA? I do). It's bizarre to think that someone's life work is entirely their property, as if they grew up in a box and did not build on hundreds of generations of other peoples' lives work.

      I don't object to disliking these companies; I object to the idea that you, me, anyone remixing culture is committing a crime. What the hell happened to the hacker ethos?

      1. sicher · 1789734625 · focus · HN ↗

         I agree with you, but there is one aspect that is different here - the scale that is way beyond what any human can do.

         I don't know what to think about that though.

         1. brookst · 1789734777 · focus · HN ↗

            Fair point. Think of it this way: the scale is more than any human, but it is probably akin to what humanity in general can do.

            1. sicher · 1789735346 · focus · HN ↗

               Yes. And even if (when) AI surpasses humanity in general I don't know it that changes the argument.
            2. sicher · 1789735602 · focus · HN ↗

               You might argue that since those LLMs build on all of humanity's knowledge, they should belong to everyone. But where do you draw the lines? Or make a practical case.

               1. brookst · 1789736404 · focus · HN ↗

                  They kind of do belong to everyone. The technology and majority of training corpus is available to essentially everyone.

                  The training and inference infra are owned and operated, but I can't see an argument that any machine that processes public domain (or stolen, if you prefer) info should be available to everyone for free.

                  But those training and inference costs will go to zero. Think about your cell phone today versus $1m+ supercomputers in the 1980's.

                  We're living in a transitory blip where capitalists and gold rushers are getting rich arbitraging the cost of processing against the non-cost of corpus. We can argue about morals (it doesn't bother me much) but it is a narrow window and it will be remembered the way Compuserve is: a precursor to the actual revolution, worth a footnote.

                  1. sicher · 1789737265 · focus · HN ↗

                     No, that's what I mean by where to draw the line. An artist taking inspiration from others is not obliged to give up the work to the public.

                     Sidenote: It may be tricky/impossible in the future to uphold intellectual property laws. If anyone is able (for instance) to prompt-create all their software, a software patent is worthless.

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