All things are built on knowledge that came before it. In what way is AI built on stolen labor?
I'm certainly still waiting for my check.
You might say that the fact LLMs are being provided as services by big techs invalidate that. But some people taking the provided knowledge for themselves has also always happened. More importantly, though, is that big tech provided LLMs aren't the only way to access the technology. Open weights and local models exist.
They are not databases of facts. Even if they were, that would still constitute a very serious violation. They aren’t, and they’re not particularly good at serving that function either.
No, LLMs are capable of reproducing things (text, art, other media) based on their training data. Consider being an artist who produced something original that somehow made it into that training set - your chances of actually making a living are now vastly smaller.
The result is the same as if there was no copyright at all: Big companies will just exploit whoever, no art would be produced.
This is a huge issue, and there needs to be a reckoning.
You're probably also capable of reproducting some art off the top of your head, your existence doesn't somehow violate copyright.
Besides, anything they're reproducing is the work of very successful artists whose work is widespread. Anyone who had their worked looked at once during training isn't being affected anymore than some artist who never had anything of theirs looked at.
Also, copyright benefits big companies much more than it benefits artists, by the way. Not being able to take any art for free and requiring to pay is a great trade-off for getting a monopoly over anything they pay for. Art would still be made regardless, just like it was before and just like it is right now even when, outside of these big corporations who mostly respect it, copyright is constantly infringed upon.
Exploitation of those rights is down to individuals, only since Google came on the scene has any company been able to get away with broad ranging infringement of these rights without censure.
As for your cheque, you have the right to sell your work. No-one is obliged to buy it, of course. You also, under copyright, have the right to make a license to exchange use of your works for binding the users to conditions of release of their derivative/associated works ([F]OSS licensing).
You still have the right to sell it, and if ML models have been trained on those works you have the right to seek compensation.
Yes: https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-settlement-lawsuit-cop...
And, how do you envision the white collar economy, which is entirely built off of selling knowledge, will operate if you get your way?
It will crash and burn anyway. That kind of economy made sense before the Internet, before mobile phones made it possible to carry the entire world's knowledge in your pocket, only impeded by your ability to efficiently query the database and apply the concepts.
Now with AI? It's even worse. AI not just can efficiently query its own knowledge dataset it was trained upon, but it can also search other databases, apply the knowledge to the input and to put the cherry on the icing, it can do so when operated in natural language. And we're not going to be able to put the genie back into the bottle, not with people being used (and able) to run open weight models on local hardware. OpenAI et al don't have any actual moat behind them, they are just making stuff a bit more convenient and are for now the cheaper way to access compute resources.
For Western countries, the white collar economy is going down the drain, black collar (mining and other forms of dirty resource extraction) is already gone off to places that "compete" by using slave labor, and what remains of blue collar now that industry went the same way as black collar is heavily under threat because so many white collar people are fleeing towards the trades.
It's unclear from your comment whether you think this is good or bad. You certainly seem to think it is inevitable.
I just want to remind you that nothing here is inevitable - someone is making it happen, and it's only possible because we're not enforcing any of the laws we have about it for some reason, such as copyright. Well, the US isn't enforcing it. The EU is scrambling to come up with reasonable regulations. God knows what China is doing.
I agree that AI, like many other things, would have been an unambiguously great invention in a post-capitalist society, but that's not where we are. They are unbelievably powerful, impossible to control, and fully owned by powerful corporations, so the future looks pretty dystopic for humans who love freedom, art, and science.
But I hope you realize that we have the chance to fight back and get this right. But it does require that you do something.
I think it is bad, but the consequences are manageable.
> someone is making it happen
We're past that point. Open weights plus local inference is already good enough for an awful lot of use cases. Even if we'd say we ban all AI training, we yeet China and the US from the Internet... it's too late.
> But I hope you realize that we have the chance to fight back and get this right.
The best chance we have is mitigate the consequences. That means first and foremost UBI, backed by actually useful corporate taxation. We need to prepare our economies for the shift towards an economy that requires fewer and fewer people to actually do work. For the moment, the only thing that is relatively safe from both automation and scale efficiencies is some trades (plumbers and electricians), some sections of healthcare and some sections of black collar work. Everything else is under massive threat from AI, automation (have you looked at precision farming?!) or both, and politicians seem like a deer frozen in the headlights.
Don’t play half-court tennis. Other people can read and write too, and social shifts are simultaneous slow, but then sudden.
For example, I’m not seeing a lot of trust in AI as a technology for things that are actually important. It takes one wrong diagnosis from an expensive AI doctor to erode all trust and make everyone prefer a human expert.
If you want anybody to keep making anything, including programmers, artists, and writers, you're going to have to pay them somehow.
Anthropic and OpenAI would not have a product at all without the contributions of thousands of non-consenting humans. Yet they somehow have the gall to charge customers a premium.
For projects like WINE or ReactOS that absolutely have to enforce hard firewalls between people with "insider knowledge" to avoid contamination and resulting legal issues, this alone makes the use of AI for coding highly problematic.