Comment by caconym_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by caconym_ | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is a load of bullshit and I sincerely hope you know that as well as I do.

As a thought experiment, let's say I pirate enough ebooks to stock a virtual library roughly equivalent in scope to a large metropolitan library system, then put up a website where you can download these books for free. I make money on the ads I run on this website, etc. This is theft, but as "compensation" I put some percentage of my revenues into funding a UBI study that might, if we're lucky—in half a century or so, in a progressive, enlightened version of the future we are by no means guaranteed to realize—make a fractional contribution to the thrust of a successful UBI movement.

Does that make what I'm doing okay? Should all those authors deprived of royalties on their work now, even deprived of publishing opportunities as legitimate sales collapse, understand my token contribution to UBI as fair compensation for what I'm taking from them?

That to me is a joke, and the only difference between it and what OpenAI is doing is that OpenAI's product relies on a technical means of laundering intellectual property that seems tailor-made to dodge a body of existing copyright law designed by people who could not possibly have conceived of what modern genAI is capable of. We will see what our lawmakers and courts make of it now, but either way, making a promise to pay me back later does not justify you in taking all the cash out of my wallet without my consent. Nor, for that matter, does tearing it up and returning it to me in the form of a papier-mâché sculpture of Shrek's head protruding from the bowl of a "skibidi toilet".

I sincerely think you (in the thought experiment) sounds like an incredible hero.

Libraries are awesome and great for reducing inequality, using ads to support that cause and also funneling cash to UBI initiatives? Even better

UBI is great! But taking away artists' livelihoods and justifying it with an uncertain promise of UBI years or (far more likely) decades in the future is (hypothetically) a particularly malignant example of putting the cart before the horse.

My observation of the vast majority of people who think intellectual property law is moral anathema to some idealized notion of "freedom" is that they either know nothing about making art themselves, or at the very least they are dilettantes who don't rely on it for any substantial portion of their livelihood. And, as it turns out, the latter group very rarely produce anything of note. Why is that? Because making interesting art is hard—just making art the average person would be willing to spend more than a second or two thinking about is hard enough, let alone art they'd be willing to pay for. It's hard, and it takes time and incredible effort and focus.

By taking (in whatever sense) an artist's work for less than it's worth, you're damaging their ability to extract value from their time investment in art, and so forcing them to choose between their artistic endeavors and other profitless aspects of their lives (e.g. their families). Even if you think that's your right (which I absolutely, categorically disagree with), your theft will have a very real effect of stunting young artists' development and reducing their output, and therefore cultural impact, in aggregate.

The sort of (frankly) idiots who think AI art is "giving power back to the people", or whatever, probably don't care about that because they don't understand art, or its impact on people and culture, at all. All I can say to them is that they have an incredibly juvenile outlook on the whole subject, and that instead of whining about artists gatekeeping art they should spend $10 on a pad of paper and a box of pencils, or $0 on a Google Doc, and go make some fucking art for themselves. Nobody's stopping them, and if they put in enough work maybe they'll start to understand some things.

Or, if you think UBI fixes everything, go ahead and start sending out checks (with a robust guarantee that they will keep coming). I'm sure that will change the tenor of the conversation.

> Or, if you think UBI fixes everything, go ahead and start sending out checks (with a robust guarantee that they will keep coming). I'm sure that will change the tenor of the conversation.

So far as I can tell, the capacity to do that is called "communism". Specifically "fully automated luxury communism". Why? Because governments are the only entities capable of making such a robust guarantee, and they can only do it without hyperinflation if they own the means of production… which in this case would be the AI.

Now, convincing a government to take an AI into public ownership and use its economic productivity to fund a UBI, that's going to be hard work, and will need evidence to show which of the many options within this very ill-defined and barely researched topic will work vs. which are mere wishful thinking.

This research is what's currently being funded by the actual entity you're most visibly upset with (OpenAI).

And that research may well also determine the answer is "no", at which point we have to come up with something else.

Saying "if you want that why don't you fund it yourself?" was a retort against government funded pensions back in the Victorian era, which I mention because pensions are an age-gated UBI[0]. It's never sufficient to find volunteers for stuff of this scale in a democracy, because "sufficient" is on the same scale as becoming the government and changing the laws.

[0] thus not literally universal, but that's always going to be a sticking point — one open question is if "UBI" should apply to just "all adults" or be the same rate also for minors

You are rationalizing an unsupported prior ("OpenAI and its ilk are right to keep doing what they're doing") with a science fiction premise in which what they're doing is a clear path to so-called "fully automated luxury gay space communism". I don't find this kind of thinking to be particularly well-founded in reality, especially when it's used as a justification for causing harm.

IMO that's a terrible thought experiment given the situation.

LLMs do not store enough content or with enough accuracy to even close to a virtual library. Unlike, say, Google and the Wayback Machine, the former of which stores enough to show snippets from the pages it's presenting to you as search results (and they got sued for that in certain categories of result), and the latter is straight up an archive of all the sites it crawls.

Furthermore, the "percentage" in question for OpenAI is "once we've paid off our investors, all of it goes to benefitting humanity one way or another" — the parent company is a not-for-profit.

> Does that make what I'm doing okay? Should all those authors deprived of royalties on their work now, even deprived of publishing opportunities as legitimate sales collapse, understand my token contribution to UBI as fair compensation for what I'm taking from them?

Here's a different question for you: If a generative AI is trained only on out-of-copyright novels and open-licensed modern works, and then still deprives everyone of all publishing opportunities forever as in this thought experiment it's better and cheaper than any human novelist, is that any more, or any less fair on literally any person on the planet? The outcomes are the same.

I'm sure someone's already thought of making such a model, it's just a question of if they raised enough money to train such a model.

> OpenAI's product relies on a technical means of laundering intellectual property that seems tailor-made to dodge a body of existing copyright law designed by people who could not possibly have conceived of what modern genAI is capable of

You may have noticed from the version number that they're on versions 3 and 4. When version 2 came out in 2019, they said:

"""Our model, called GPT-2 (a successor to GPT), was trained simply to predict the next word in 40GB of Internet text. Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model."""

They were mocked for this: https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/openai-gpt2-text-genera...

Even here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21306542

Indeed, they are still mocked for suggesting their models may carry any risk at all. Of any kind. There are plenty of people who want to rush forward with this and think OpenAI are needlessly slow and cautious.

You may also have noticed their CEO gave testimony in the US Congress, and that the people asking him questions were surprised he said (to paraphrase) "regulate us specifically — not the open source models, they're not good enough yet — us".

To the extent that any GenAI can pose an economic threat to a creative job, it has to be better than a human in that same job. For now, IMO, they're assistant-level, not economic-threat-level. And when they get to economic-threat-level (which in fairness could be next month or next year), they'll be that threat even if none of your IP ever entered their training runs.

> LLMs do not store enough content or with enough accuracy to even close to a virtual library. Unlike, say, Google and the Wayback Machine, the former of which stores enough to show snippets from the pages it's presenting to you as search results (and they got sued for that in certain categories of result), and the latter is straight up an archive of all the sites it crawls.

I already addressed this: "the only difference between it and what OpenAI is doing is that OpenAI's product relies on a technical means of laundering intellectual property that seems tailor-made to dodge a body of existing copyright law designed by people who could not possibly have conceived of what modern genAI is capable of."

You are certainly welcome to disagree with what I've said, but you can't simply pretend I didn't say it.

> Furthermore, the "percentage" in question for OpenAI is "once we've paid off our investors, all of it goes to benefitting humanity one way or another" — the parent company is a not-for-profit.

A quick Googling suggests that OpenAI employees are not working for free—far from it, in fact. In this frame I don't particularly care whether the organization itself is nominally "non profit", because profit motives are obviously present all the same.

> Here's a different question for you: If a generative AI is trained only on out-of-copyright novels and open-licensed modern works, and then still deprives everyone of all publishing opportunities forever as in this thought experiment it's better and cheaper than any human novelist, is that any more, or any less fair on literally any person on the planet? The outcomes are the same.

They are certainly welcome to try! Given how profoundly incapable extant genAI systems are of generating novel (no pun intended) output, including but not limited to developing artistic styles of their own, I think it would be quite funny to see these companies try to outcompete human artists with AI generated slop 70+ years behind the curve of art and culture. As for modern "public domain"-ish content, if genAI companies actually decided to respect intellectual property rights, I expect those licenses would quickly be amended to prohibit use in AI training.

AI systems will probably get there eventually, though it's very difficult to predict when. However, that speculation does not justify theft today.

> I'm sure someone's already thought of making such a model, it's just a question of if they raised enough money to train such a model.

People are absolutely throwing money at genAI right now, so if nobody has thrown enough money at this particular idea to give it a fair shake then the obvious conclusion is that people who know genAI think it's a relatively bad one. I'm inclined to agree with them.

> You may have noticed from the version number that they're on versions 3 and 4. When version 2 came out in 2019, they said [...]

Why is this relevant? I'm not talking about AI safety or "X risk" or whatever—I'm talking about straightforward intellectual property theft, which OpenAI and their contemporaries are obviously very comfortable with. The models they sell to anybody willing to pay today could literally not exist without their training datasets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com