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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

This litany is already getting old and it's just 2 month in.

All intellectual property is inherently stolen. Just let it go.

The reason intellectual property was invented was to encourage people to go and create new things and share them, the logic being that having a monopoly on your own work by default means you can make money from being creative and therefore people will choose to do it. The reverse is already happening, people are deciding (privately) not to publish things they have created because they rightly assume it will be stolen by an AI, monetised and used to destroy their own job. It is not merely complaining for its own sake. There is a good amount of theft and a bad amount of theft. As theft increases unchecked the amount of new output is poised to decline.

All true.

I don't see any world where it matters in the slightest. When it comes to how we deal with currently available training data nothing will change, first because of politics but also because people want the LLMs superpower more than they want to protect IP of a few individuals. And I firmly believe that no human training data that has not been produced and publishes today will play any significant role in future AI development.

We are simply too slow.

The topic's biggest cop-out. Intellectual property doesn't exist in a vacuum. I have limited-to-zero sympathy for corporate entities like Getty images that hoard IP, but our society's social contract says labor isn't free unless people donate it. We need to implement some sort of alternate compensation system before entirely disregarding IP so we don't pull the rug out from under perfectly honest independent creatives with kids and mortgages and medical bills plying their craft in an established system. Until then, taking the fruits of creative labor without permission is theft that is much more consequential and much less morally defensible than what you describe.

I'll bet if someone outside of our IP jurisdiction figured out a way to reliably and thoroughly reverse engineer the most complex commercial software from binaries so people could spit out a working, fully-customized copy of a commercial application from a prompt, and the entirety of the software development market would soon collapse, the tenor of this conversation would be very different.

Maybe the people with the very ethically defensible stance that private property is theft would be totally fine with OpenAI knocking down your home to build their new headquarters without compensating you? Imagine the progress! (hint: they probably wouldn't be ok with it)

None of this stuff exists in a vacuum. None of it.

You are right, the (potential) negative impact AI training has on what people do will only manifest in the future.

But no matter how I or anyone else feel about the car or how bad it is for the environment, or how much we dislike the noise they impose on us, it's simply not going to bring back the horse.

There just is no conceivable future. It's dead.

Another cop-out. No, the horse isn't dead. This technology is at its precipice and society outside of the tech world hasn't even started to react yet let alone develop entrenched immutable norms surrounding it. A good portion of what these algorithms put out isn't even particularly commercially useful... yet. There's a lot of time to change policy, to change corporate norms, to change compensation structures, and to change perspectives. Just because you find that prospect inconvenient compared to just throwing up your hands and saying fuck it, likely because you benefit from doing so, doesn't mean that you don't have a moral obligation to reduce the harm these behaviors will result in.

Beyond that, the technology is just the catalyst. It's a tool. The problem is what people are doing with it. That's an ongoing behavior that can be changed-- not a bell you can't un-ring.

I won't claim to know what's in your head, but most people I've encountered who rebuff complex topics with idealistic platitudes don't really think the topics are that simple. They're avoiding confronting the negative consequences of a behavior they have no intention of changing to avoid damaging their moral self-image.

Sigh, alright. Copping out of this one I guess.

That's all great until people stop providing intellectual property for free because of the chilling effects.

Artists are already starting to completely paywall their content.

How far do we let AI scraping and incorporation go? Just say "fuck it" until there's nothing left to scrape other than content also made by AI?

"chilling effects" usually refers to when people decide not to share things because of potential legal consequences. For example, if people stop creating or distributing AI art because they don't want to be sued by artists for using their style, that's a chilling effect. Basically the opposite of what you are describing

>Just say 'fuck it' until there's nothing left to scrape other than content also made by AI?

Sounds good to me! There will always be people making free art, and AI will make this much easier.

The thing that I think people are missing is that AI-generated content CAN be used to improve AI models. There is no requirement that the input data is created without AI.

Furthermore, AI-generated content on the internet is not random; it is curated content. Generally speaking people don't post every image they generate with Stable Diffusion, they only post the best images. If you consider engagement metrics and user feedback (upvotes etc), they can be a valuable and useful part of a training set.

The fact that you think that sounds good and is not a bleak and dystopian hellscape tells me that your ideal future is likely my nightmare scenario.

I fear our views on this issue are wholly incompatible.

Two months? The (ai-luddite) preachers have been reciting this litany since the first decent diffusion models released over a year ago. They haven't slowed down any.

I wonder how large the Venn overlap is for people who think IP is good and people who don't think hip hop is "real music"?

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