The copyright clause in the US constitution (1789) also frames it in terms of granting rights to authors to "promote the progress of ... useful arts". Strictly speaking author protection is not the origin of copyright but also I was snarkily responding to a person who was arguing in favor of AI-training-as-fair-use and implying copyright was 120 years old, not trying to do a detailed explication of the origins of copyright law
I'm sorry for my imprecise wording, I was feeling flippant and I know what I said isn't totally accurate. not a big history person here honestly. I'll try and stick to joke-commenting next time. but also can you just say what you mean instead of darkly hinting.
iirc even though the origin of copyright is not really specifically about author protection, part of the broad-strokes motivation for its existence involved "we need to keep production of new works viable in a world where new copies can be easily produced and undercut the original," which was what I was trying to get at. maybe they picked a bad way to do that idk I'm not here to make excuses for the decisions of 16th-century monarchs
also again I'm not a copyright fan/defender. in particular copyright as currently constituted massively and obviously sucks. I just don't think copyright-in-the-abstract is like the Greatest Moral Evil either, bc I'm not a libertarian. sorry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
heck yeah I love Physics Jenny Nicholson Angela Collier
I mean, it seems like you're reading my argument as a defense of copyright as a concept. I'm ambivalent on the goodness or badness of copyright law in the abstract. Like a lot of laws, it's probably not the ideal way to fix the issue it was designed to solve, and it comes with (many) issues of its own, but that doesn't necessarily mean we'd be better off if we just got rid of it wholesale and left the rest of society as is. (We would probably be left with excitingly new and different problems.)
As I see it, the actual issue at hand with all of this is that people are exploiting the labor/art/culture of others in order to make a profit for themselves at the expense of the people affected. Sometimes copyright is a tool to facilitate that exploitation, and sometimes it's a tool that protects people from it. To paraphrase Dan Olson, the problem is what people are doing to others, not that the law they're using to do it is called "copyright."
That seems bad but also not super relevant to the point under discussion! Unless your point is that it's bad when a cultural commons is exploited for business profits -- in which case, I agree, but, well...
Haha, sounds like we might have to agree to disagree on this one.
Copyright is much older than 1904, though! It dates back to the printing press, when it became necessary because the new technology made it possible to benefit off writers' work without compensating them, which made it hard to be a writer as a profession, even though we want people to be able to do that as a society. Hey, wait a minute...
Yeah but this presumes "the best way to beat 'em is to join 'em," right? Like, when all the operating systems or databases are proprietary, that's bad because those things are really useful and help you do things better and faster than you would otherwise.
But this argument applied here is like, oh no, what if large entertainment companies start making all their movies out of AI garbage, and everyone else can't do that because they can't get the content licensed? Well... what if they do? Does that mean they're going to be making stuff that's better? Wouldn't the best way to compete with that be not to use the technology because you'll get a higher-quality product? Or are we just giving up on the idea of producing good art at all and conceding that yes we actually only value cheapness and quantity?
Also, just on a personal level, for me as a J. Random Person who uploads creative work to the internet (some of which is in common crawl), but who doesn't work for a major entertainment corporation that has rights to my work, I would really prefer to have a way to say "sorry no, you can't use my stuff for this." I don't really find "well you see, we need to be able to compete with large entertainment companies in spam content generation, so we need to be able to use your uncompensated labor for our benefit without your permission and without crediting you" particularly compelling.
Yeah, I think his ideological commitment to "all intellectual property rights are bad forever and always amen" kind of blinds him to the actual issue here, and his proposed solution is kind of nonsensical in terms of its ability to get off the ground.
More broadly, (ie not just in relation to Cory Doctorow), I've seen the take floating around that's like "hey, what the heck, artists who were opposed to ridiculous IP rights restrictions when it was the music industry doing it are now in favor of those restrictions when it's AI, what gives with this hypocrisy?" which I think kind of... misses the point?
A lot of artists generally are in favor of using their work for interesting collaborative stuff and aren't going to get mad if you use their stuff for your own creative endeavors. This is why we have things like Creative Commons. The actual things artists tend not to like are things like having their work used for commercial purposes without permission and/or having their work taken without credit. (This is why CC licenses often restrict these usages!) With that in mind, a lot of the artist outrage over AI feels much more in line with artists getting mad about, say, watermark-removal tools, or people reposting art without credit, than it does with the copyright battles of the 00s. (You may remember one of the big things artists were affronted by about AI art was the way it would imitate an artist's signature, because of what that represented.)
In this case, artists are leaning on copyright not out of any particular ideological commitment but just because it's the blunt instrument that they already have at their disposal. But I think Cory Doctorow's previous experience in "getting mad at the MPAA" or whatever kind of forces him to analyze this using the same framing as that issue, which doesn't really make sense in this case. And ironically saying "copyright shouldn't count for AI" aligns him with the position of the MPAA so it really does feel like a "live long enough to see yourself become the villain" scenario. :/
First: our sessions and guests were mostly not controversial — despite what you may have heard
Man, you invite one Nazi to speak at your conference and suddenly you're "the guys who invited a Nazi to speak at their conference." How is that fair? :-(
Except it's not really being automated out of our lives, is it? I find it hard to imagine how increasing the rate at which bullshit can be produced leads to a world with less bullshit in it.
Even with good data, it doesn't really work. Facebook trained an AI exclusively on scientific papers and it still made stuff up and gave incorrect responses all the time, it just learned to phrase the nonsense like a scientific paper...
"I know not with what technology GPT-6 will be built, but GPT-7 will be built with sticks and stones" -Albert Einstein probably
I think they were responding to the implication in self's original comment that LLMs were claiming to evaluate code in-model and that calling out to an external python evaluator is 'cheating.' But actually as far as I know it is pretty common for them to evaluate code using an external interpreter. So I think the response was warranted here.
That said, that fact honestly makes this vulnerability even funnier because it means they are basically just letting the user dump whatever code they want into eval() as long as it's laundered by the LLM first, which is like a high-school level mistake.
Look, you gotta forgive this guy for coming up with an insane theory that doesn't make sense. After all, his brain was poisoned by testosterone, so his thinking skills have atrophied. An XXL hat size can only do so much, you know.
Like, seriously, get a hobby or something.
For real. I don't even necessarily disagree with the broad-strokes idea of "if you're comfortable, it's good to take on challenges and get outside of your comfort zone because that's how you grow as a person," but why can't he just apply this energy to writing a terrible novel or learning to paint watercolors or something, like a normal person? Why does the fact his life is comfortable mean he has to become a Nazi? :/
Wow, he seems so confident and secure in his masculinity! No one's gonna think this guy has issues with his sexuality after he made this tweet, that's for darn sure.
When I was a kid (Nat Nanny)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Nanny] was totally and completely lame, but the whole millennial generation grew up to adore content moderation. A strange authoritarian impulse.
Me when the mods unfairly ban me from my favorite video game forum circa 2009
(source: first HN thread)