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Comment by throwaway4837 | Hacker News Reader

You can have a kid, that kid can grow up to be a musician inspired by Taylor Swift, likely with some of their musical output having depended on Taylor's input. That's perfectly legal. But in a possible future, you could produce an AGI that isn't allowed to listen to Taylor Swift, never allowed to be inspired by anything from Taylor's songs?

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AGI, I would hope, would be governed by different laws - including worker’s rights - so that the economic relationships between all parties is more similar to human relationships than LLMs.

In other words: turning Taylor Swift into a software product should be a different legal situation than raising a digital consciousness.

I think it is more nuanced than that.

Imagine you write a book and release it with a non-commercial use license, but a company copies it and uses it for employee training.

Imagine you wrote software and released it with a non-commercial use license, but the company includes it in their for-profit workflow.

Imagine you wrote a book, released it using a publisher who put it on dead trees, and sold it in e-book format. And imagine that a whole industry does this, and doesn't release the books for free to copy use in any format. Which is not hard to do, because that's basically the current situation for the publishing industry.

Now imagine that all of that was used to train an LLM without compensation to the authors and publishers who paid the authors. This is apparently current situation with some of the training dataset.

While at the same time, libraries have to pay per e-loan. Archive.org can't do a 1:1 dead tree format shift loan to ebook.

I get that the tech industry wants everyone else's information to be free to use and their products to generate money enough for big exits and big salaries, but at some point the optics look pretty bad.

It's easy enough to imagine, since the Google Book Search project to scan all of the books dates back to 2004.

Sounds like information would finally be free, just like it always wanted

sounds like you are projecting your desires on an abstract concept.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

Exactly, a projection.

Finish the sentence

that was a complete sentiment.

Do you produce information as part of your work? Do you expect to get paid for this work?

People will still pay you to create things. Posting things in public and hoping to stake a claim on that information is… stupid.

We don’t want society to evolve on shitty workarounds like hiring someone to summarize a work so it can be ingested or hiring a cheap artist to copy a style So it can be ingested

The existence of sentient AGIs would certainly have wide-ranging impacts on the law!

This case is not about sentient AGIs.

We're not at the AGI stage yet. Whether the AI is "inspired" is a poor direction to argue in.

A better question is whether a person who can legally do X without using a tool is legally allowed to do X using a tool. Can a musician who learns Taylor Swift songs make music similar to Taylor Swift songs? If so, then a non-musician should be able to use a tool trained on a body of songs including but not limited to Taylor Swift songs to generate "music" similar to Taylor Swift songs.

The notion that a large scale generative AI system should be viewed and treated the same as a human child legitimately makes no sense to me.

As always, it’s not what the thing is but what you do with it. If you click a spotify link and dance around your kitchen that’s okay. If you click a spotify link and put it into a commercial it’s not okay. Same thing for your scenarios. The legality question is about what your kid does with the music they heard.

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