The IP system, which goes to great lengths to block things like open-access scientific publications, is borked borked borked borked borked.
If OpenAI and other generative AI projects are the means by which we finally break it so we can have culture and a public domain again, well, we had to nail Capone with tax evasion.
Yes, industrialists want to use AI [exactly they way they want to use every other idea – plausible or not] to automate more of their industries so they can pay fewer people less money for more productivity. And this is a problem of which generative AI figures centrally, but it’s not really all that new, and eventually we’re going to have to force our society to recognize that it works for the public and not money. I don’t think AI is going to break the system and lead us to communist revolution ( The owning class will tremble…! ) But eventually it will be 1789 all over again. Or we’ll crush the fash and realize the only way we can get the fash to not come back is by restoring and extending FDR’s new deal.
I am skeptical the latter can happen without piles of elite heads and rivers of politician blood.
If this ends with LLMs getting shutdown to some degree, I wonder if it’s going to result in something like a Pirate Bai.
Not to be confused with, “Pirate Bae”, the pirate dating site for those endowed with abundant doubloons.
Are there any historical examples of a technology as valuable as LLMs being effectively shut down?
I pirated 90% of the texts I used to write my thesis at university, because those books would have cost me hundreds of euros that I didn’t have.
Fuck you, capitalism.
What really breaks the suspension of disbelief in this reality of ours is that fucking advertising is the most privacy invasive activity in the world. Seriously, even George Orwell would call bullshit on that.
AFAIK the individual researchers who get their work pirated and put on Sci-Hub don’t seem to particularly mind.
Check out blog post critical of sci-hub and how it appeals to academic faculty:
By freeing published scholarship from the chains of toll access and copyright protection and making them freely available to all, it can feel like you are helping a Robin Hood figure rob from the rich and give to the poor.
It goes on to explain potential security issues, but it doesn’t even try to attack the concept of freely providing academic papers to begin with.
I’m starting to think the term “piracy” is morally neutral. The act can be either positive or negative depending on the context. Unfortunately, the law does not seem to flow from morality, or even the consent of the supposed victims of this piracy.
Don’t mind? Hell, we want people to read that shit. We don’t profit at all if it’s paywalled, it hurts us and hurts science in general. This is 100% the wishes of scientific for profit journals.
I’m starting to think the term “piracy” is morally neutral. The act can be either positive or negative depending on the context. Unfortunately, the law does not seem to flow from morality, or even the consent of the supposed victims of this piracy.
The morals of piracy also depend on the economic system you’re under. If you have UBI, the “support artists” argument is far less strong, because we’re all paying taxes to support the UBI system that enables people to become skilled artists without worrying about starving or homelessness - as has already happened to a lesser degree before our welfare systems were kneecapped over the last 4 decades.
But that’s just the art angle, a tonne of the early-stage (i.e. risky and expensive) scientific advancements had significant sums of government funding poured into them, yet corporations keep the rights to the inventions they derive from our government funded research. We’re paying for a lot of this stuff, so maybe we should stop pretending that someone else ‘owns’ these abstract idea implementations and come up with a better system.
I follow a few researchers with interesting youtube channels, and they often mention that if you ask them or their colleagues for a publication of theirs, chances are they’ll be glad to send it to you.
A lot of them love sharing their work, and don’t care at all for science journal paywalls.
Other than be happy for that attention and being curious of what extra things you can find in their field, they get quoted and that pushes their reputation a little higher. Locking up works heavily limits that, and the only reason behind that is a promise of a basic quality control when accepting works - and it’s not ideal, there are many shady publications. Other than that it’s cash from simple consumers, subscriptions money from institutes for works these company took a hold of and maybe don’t have physical editions anymore just because, return to fig. 1, they depend on being published and quoted.
Sure, that’s a motivation too, but they were also talking about random people who’d find a reference and were curious about their work, not just other researchers who may quote them. It’s not all about h-index.
When a guy literally makes, among other things, regular paleontology news reports and whole videos of his own university course material during summer breaks, and puts all that to youtube it’s safe to assume he just likes popularizing his subject.
Academics don’t care because they don’t get paid for them anyway. A lot of the time you have to pay to have your paper published. Then companies like Elsevier just sit back and make money.
It’s so ridiculous when corporations steal everyone’s work for their own profit, no one bats an eye but when a group of individuals do the same to make education and knowledge free for everyone it’s somehow illegal, unethical, immoral and what not.
Using publically available data to train isn’t stealing.
Daily reminder that the ones pushing this narrative are literally corporation like OpenAI. If you can’t use copyright materials freely to train on, it brings up the cost in such a way that only a handful of companies can afford the data.
They want to kill the open-source scene and are manipulating you to do so. Don’t build their moat for them.
And using publicly available data to train gets you a shitty chatbot…
Hell, even using copyrighted data to train isn’t that great.
Like, what do you even think they’re doing here for your conspiracy?
You think OpenAI is saying they should pay for the data? They’re trying to use it for free.
Was this a meta joke and you had a chatbot write your comment?
If the data has to be paid for, openAI will gladly do it with a smile on their face. It guarantees them a monopoly and ownership of the economy.
Paying more but having no competition except google is a good deal for them.
Eh, the issue is lots of people wouldn’t be willing to sell tho.
Like, you think an author wants the chatbot to read their collected works and use that? Regardless of if it’s quoting full texts or “creating” text in their style.
No author is going to want that.
And if it’s up to publishers, they likely won’t either. Why take one small payday if that could potentially lead to loss of sales a few years down the row.
It’s not like the people making the chatbits just need to buy a retail copy of the text to be in the legal clear.
The publisher’s will absolutely sell imo. They just publish, the book will be worth the same with or without the help of AI to write it.
I guess there is a possibility that people start replacing bought books with personalized book llm outputs but that strikes me as unlikely.
Was this a meta joke and you had a chatbot write your comment?
if someone said this to me I’d cry
The point that was being made was that public available data includes a whole lot amount of copyrighted data to begin with and its pretty much impossible to filter it out. Grand example, the Eiffel tower in Paris is not copyright protected, but the lights on it are so you can only using pictures of the Eiffel tower during the day, if the picture itself isn’t copyright protected by the original photographer. Copyright law has all these complex caveat and exception that make it impossible to tell in glance whether or not it is protected.
This in turn means, if AI cannot legally train on copyrighted materials it finds online without paying huge sums of money then effectively only mega corporation who can pay copyright fines as cost of business will be able to afford training decent AI.
The only other option to produce any ai of such type is a very narrow curated set of known materials with a public use license but that is not going to get you anything competent on its own.
EDIT: In case it isn’t clear i am clarifying what i understood from Grimy@lemmy.world comment, not adding to it.
That’s insane logic…
Like you’re essentially saying I can copy/paste any article without a paywall to my own blog and sell adspace on it…
And your still saying OpenAI is trying to make AI companies pay?
Like, do you think AI runs off free cloud services? The hardware is insanely expensive.
And OpenAI is trying to argue the opposite, that AI companies shouldn’t have to pay to use copyrighted works.
You have zero idea what is going on, but you are really confident you do
I clarified the comment above which was misunderstood, whether it makes a moral/sane argument is subjective and i am not covering that.
I am not sure why you think there is a claim that openAI is trying to make companies pay, on the contrary the comment i was clarifying (so not my opinion/words) states that openAI is making an argument that anyone should be able to use copyrighted materials for free to train AI.
The costs of running an online service like chatgpt is wildly besides the argument presented. You can run your own open source large language models at home about as well as you can run Bethesda’s Starfield on a same spec’d PC
Those Open source large language models are trained on the same collections of data including copyrighted data.
The logic being used here is:
If It becomes globally forbidden to train AI with copyrighted materials or there is a large price or fine in order to use them for training then the Non-Corporate, Free, Open Source Side of AI will perish or have to go underground while to the For-Profit mega corporations will continue exploit and train ai as usual because they can pay to settle in court.
The Ethical dilemma as i understand it is:
Allowing Ai to train for free is a direct threat towards creatives and a win for BigProfit Enthertainment, not allowing it to train to free is treat to public democratic AI and a win for BigTech merging with BigCrime
That is very well put, I really wish I could have started with that.
Though I envision it as a loss for BigProfit Enthertainment since I see this as a real boon for the indie gaming, animation and eventually filmmaking industry.
It’s definitely overall quite a messy situation.
I didn’t want any of this shit. IDGAF if we don’t have AI. I’m still not sure the internet actually improved anything, let alone what the benefits of AI are supposed to be.
You don’t have to use it. You can even disconnect from the internet completely.
Whats the benefit of stopping me from using it?
It doesn’t matter what you want. What matters is if corporations can extract $ from you, gain an efficiency, or cut their workforce using it.
That’s what the drive for AI is all about.
No doubt.
The point is the entire concept of AI training off people’s work to make profit for others is wrong without the permission of and compensation for the creator regardless if it’s corporate or open source.
I think I’ve decided to not publish anything that I want to keep ownership of, just in case. There’s an entire planet’s worth of countries, which will all have their own sets of laws. It takes waay too long to polish something, only to just give it away for free haha. Someone else is free to do that work if it is that easy. No skin off my back.
I think it’s similar to many other hand-made crafts/items. Most people will buy their clothes from stores, but there are definitely still people who make beautiful clothing from hand better than machines could.
Don’t even get me started on stuff like knitting. It already costs the creator a crap ton of money just for the materials. It takes a crap ton of time to make those, too. Despite the costs, many people just expect those knitted pieces for practically free. The people who expect that pricing are also free to go with machine-produced crafts/items instead.
It comes down to what people want, and what they’re willing to pay, imo. Some people will find value in something physically being put together by another human, and other people will find value in having more for less. Neither is “wrong” necessarily, so long as no one is literally ripped off. (With over 8 billion people, it’s bound to happen at least once. I feel bad for whoever that is.)
That being said, we’ll never be able to honestly say that the specific skills and techniques that are currenty required are the exact same. It would be like calling a photographer amazing at realism painting because their photo looks like real life. Photographers and painters both have their place, but they are not the exact same.
I think that’s also part of what’s frustrating so many artists. Coding AI is not the same as using the colour wheel, choosing materials, working fine motor control, etc. It’s not learning about shadows, contrast, focal points, etc. I can definitely understand people not wanting those aspects to be brushed off, especially since it usually takes most of a lifetime to achieve. A music generator and a violin may both make great music, but they are not the same, and they require different technical skills.
I’ll never buy AI art if I have any say in the matter. I’ll support handmade stuff first, every time.
There is definitely more value in hand made art. Even the fanciest prints on canvas can’t compare and I don’t think AI art will be evoking the same feelings a john waterhouse exhibit does any time soon.
On the subject of publishing, I’ve chosen to embrace it personally. My view is that even the hidden stuff on our comp ends up in a Chinese or US databases anyways.
We have a mechanism for people to make their work publically visible while reserving certain rights for themselves.
Are you saying that creators cannot (or ought not be able to) reserve the right to ML training for themselves? What if they want to selectively permit that right to FOSS or non-profits?
Essentially yes. There isn’t a happy solution where FOSS gets the best images and remains competitive. The amount of data needed is outside what can be donated. Any open source work will be so low in quality as to be unusable.
It also won’t be up to them. The platforms where the images are posted will be selling and brokering. No individual is getting a call unless they are a household name.
None of the artists are getting paid either way so yeah, I’m thinking of society in general first.
They want to kill the open-source scene
Yeah, by using the argument you just gave as an excuse to “launder” copyleft works in the training data into permissively-licensed output.
Including even a single copyleft work in the training data ought to force every output of the system to be copyleft. Or if it doesn’t, then the alternative is that the output shouldn’t be legal to use at all.
100% agree, making all outputs copyleft is a great solution. We get to keep the economic and cultural boom that AI brings while keeping the big companies in check.
OpenAI is definitely not the one arguing that they have stole data to train their AIs, and Disney will be fine whether AI requires owning the rights to training materials or not. Small artists, the ones protesting the most against it, will not. They are already seeing jobs and commission opportunities declining due to it.
Being publicly available in some form is not a permission to use and reproduce those works however you feel like. Only the real owner have the right to decide. We on the internet have always been a bit blasé about it, sometimes deservedly, but as we get to a point we are driving away the very same artists that we enjoy and get inspired by, maybe we should be a bit more understanding about their position.
Thats basically my main point, Disney doesn’t need the data, Getty either. AI isn’t going away and the jobs will be lost no matter what.
Putting a price tag in the high millions for any kind of generative model only benefits the big players.
I feel for the artists. It was already a very competitive domain that didn’t really pay well and it’s now much worse but if they aren’t a household name, they aren’t getting a dime out of any new laws.
I’m not ready to give the economy to Microsoft, Google, Getty and Adobe so GRRM can get a fat payday.
If AI companies lose, small artists may have the recourse of seeking compensation for the use and imitation of their art too. Just feeling for them is not enough if they are going to be left to the wolves.
There isn’t a scenario here in which big media companies lose so talking of it like it’s taking a stand against them doesn’t make much sense. What are we fighting for here? That we get to generate pictures of Goofy? The small AI user’s win here seems like such a silly novelty that I can’t see how it justifies just taking for granted that artists will have it much rougher than they already have.
The reality here is that even if AI gets the free pass, large media and tech companies are still primed to profit from them far more than any small user. They will be the one making AI-assisted movies and integrating chat AI into their systems. They don’t lose in either situation.
There are ways to train AI without relying on unauthorized copyrighted data. Even if OpenAI loses, it wouldn’t be the death of the technology. It may be more efficient and effective to train them with that data, but why is “efficiency” enough to justify this overreach?
And is it even wise to be so callous about it? Because it’s not going to stop with artists. This technology has the potential to replace large swaths of service industries. If we don’t think of the human costs now, it will be even harder to make a case for everyone else.
I fully believe AI will be able to replace 50% or more of desk jobs in the near future. It’s definitely a complicated situation and you make good points.
First and foremost, I think it’s imperative the barrier for entry for model training is as low as possible. Anything else basically gives a select few companies the ability to charge a huge subscription fee on all our goods and services.
The data needed is pretty heavy as well, it’s not very pheasible to go off of donated or public domain data.
I also think any job loss is virtually guaranteed and trying to save them is misguided as well as not really benefiting most of those affected.
And yea, the big companies win either way but if it’s easier to use this new tech, we might not lose as hard. Disney for instance doesn’t have any competition but if a bunch of indie animation companies and groups start popping up, it levels the playing field a bit.
Cue the Max Headroom episode where the blanks (disconnected people) are chased by the censors because the blanks steal cable so their children can watch the educational shows and learn to read, and they are forced to use clandestine printing presses to teach them.
what’s this? an anti-corporate message that sneers at cable TV companies??? CANCEL THAT SHOW!!!
that show was so amazingly prescient: the theme of the first episode was how advertising literally kills its viewers and the news covers things up. No wonder they didn’t get renewed. ;)
This is different. AI as a transformative tech is going to usher the US economy into the next boom of prosperity. The AI revolution will change the world and allow people to decide if they want to work for money or not (read UBI). In case you haven’t caught on, am being sarcastic.
All this despite ChatGPT being a total complete joke.
So, I feel taking an .epub and putting it in a .zip is pretty transformative.
Also you can make ChatGPT (or Copilot) print out quotes with a bit of effort, now that it has Internet.
man this cyberpunk present fucking sucks
this is because the technocrats are allowed to steal from you, but when you steal from them what they’ve stolen from actual researchers that’s a problem
Time to make OpenASci?
/rimshot
OpenAI isn’t really proven as legal. They claim it is, and it’s very difficult to mount a challenge, but there definitely is an argument that they have no fair use protection - their “research” is in fact development of a commercial product.
And people wonder why there’s so much push back against everything corps/gov does these days. They do not act in a manner which encourages trust.
