From what I remember, they only mentioned that was technically possible and never actually tested or proved it.
1,553 karma · joined May 8, 2012
Maybe replacing the relationship between a parent and child has more emotional significance, but all your human relationships are valuable. Even AI for coding wants you to spend more money on tokens and less on hiring and training junior developers in your local area. You can say goodbye to your local tech scene, and eventually your local university's engineering department, and all the social benefits they brought to your local area. Even walking over to your colleague's desk to ask them how their code works is something that is gone now.
So you could definitely be the first to explain to me why AI is the only "tool" that gets forced on developers from the top down with threats like this.
In my experience, developers have to beg management to get productivity enhancing tools like linters, version control systems, editors and IDEs approved for use. AI is the rare reversal where the decision to use it is often made by non-technical C-suite members and pushed downwards, often with the implicit or explicit threat of job loss, like you are making now. But if the productivity gains are so obvious it turns 10x engineers into 50x, why is that necessary, and why do you need to look at anything other than the quantity of a developer's output to know if they're using it?
But Linus stands to financially benefit from his stance on AI. The current AI boom runs on Linux servers. The Linux Foundation is in deep with AI projects and its current platinum members are some of the biggest AI promoters. It would be very surprising and insanely self-destructive for him to take a principled negative stance on AI like we see from some other free software projects, but that also means you can't read a lot into his position. If you think money and power can influence beliefs at all, there's so much of it at stake right now (or at least there's the perception that there is) that you can't really trust people like "the guy who wrote the operating system that everyone uses for inference."
Some of the Linux-adjacent projects I've really come to respect in the years before this all became so serious are the ones bringing Linux to new unusual platforms, like Asahi and Nura (nee postmarketOS,) both of which have strong public anti-AI stances. My IdeaPad Duet Chromebooks running Nura are some of the most enjoyable Linux devices I've used, so as much as I let any talented developers influence my position on AI, I'd listen to them before I listen to Linus.
Yeah, it seems absurd to be afraid of computer-assisted writing in the WordStar era, but the Turing test was proposed in the 50s. Everyone knew that human fields of endeavor would only become "more computer" as time went on. Only, if a time traveller could tell a 70s-era sci-fi writer that artists and designers were some of the first to have their livelihoods threatened by 20s-era AI, they'd probably think it was too on the nose to incorporate into their fiction.
As others have pointed out, there's some surprisingly evocative language in Anthropic's original press release about this, comparing a self-replicating open weights model to "a slime mold or a swarm of fruit flies." Their communication with the public about issues that affect their valuation is probably not pure scientific objectivity.
> What I’m arguing is that existing legal doctrine on copyright law very clearly does not protect mere ideas or styles.
Like it or not, it is anthropomorphizing to claim that an algorithm can have ideas or use styles, rather than just saying that the apparent "ideas" and "styles" in its output are a mathematical derivation of the human ideas and styles in the copyrighted material in its training set.
If you think people are wasting their time scrolling reels now, the one social benefit is that you might have seen one of the same ones as your (human) friends. Imagine if that was gone. Truly horrifying.
This is exactly the sort of anthropomorphism I'm talking about.
Yes, human artists reproduce styles all the time, but implying this equivalence between what a human does when they recreate a style, and what an AI model has done when its output is suspiciously similar to a single artist's "contributions" to the training set is reductive since the mechanism is obviously completely different. It doesn't say anything about whether one ought to be allowed, just because the other is, but the assumption that it should is doing the legwork for those who benefit from AI as a copyright washing machine.
1. The sheer amount of material on the internet that is "free to view but not free to use for any purpose" is the greatest resource of our time, and despite it being easy for individuals to take advantage of it (no one will take you to court for printing a newspaper comic and pinning it to your corkboard,) it's historically been difficult for corporations to exploit it (their best idea pre-AI is to encourage people to post it on social media walled-gardens where they can surround it with ads.)
2. The reason behind the impressive results of generative AI is because it exploits the above "free" resource, which is the greatest resource of our time. The reason behind the industry-wide push for AI and the insane amount of investment in it, is that they know it's their first real chance to exploit the greatest resource of our time. This is the gold rush.
3. Anthropomorphism is the wool that AI labs are pulling over legislators eyes so they can pull off this heist. If you see training and inference as a black box, a process that consumes a copyrighted work (among others) and produces something very similar to the original work that also competes directly with it, is clearly something that's against the spirit of copyright. But if you (afraid of being judged a luddite) see AI as a little man inside the computer who is "learning" and "creating," how could you deny him? Especially if it would deny your jurisdiction access to the above gold rush. A lot of scientific-sounding AI communication is propaganda for this way of thinking, like the Anthropic J-space stuff, which stops just short of claiming AI is conscious, despite leading the reader to that conclusion.
Selfishly, I think my biggest fear of the AI future is everything will be like this. Previously, the existence of a game like this was proof that a human being was passionate enough to drag it into life. Now, there's this empty and slightly embarrassing feeling where if you think too much about someone else's creation, you might have put more thought into it than they did.
I don't think they'll be forked to irrelevance. Even if I put aside my skepticism of the quality or longevity of AI-assisted projects, I don't think there's a bigger audience for a Nura that's less principled on the issues they mentioned.
That's not the impression I have. HN has almost daily articles bemoaning the use of AI to enhance or pad-out human-to-human communication and the comments almost universally agree that the output is bad, using AI to communicate is rude, and they'd rather read the human-written prompt than the AI-"enhanced" version.
I'm not aware of any model that has solved the AI writing problem. Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 improve on Fable 5 and Opus 5, but neither are good. They all seem to overuse jargon, misuse literary devices and write ill-fitting metaphor. They all produce prose that is dense and hard to read, but sparse on actual information. Even non-techy people can identify AI writing.
Instead we have a TV series that's more or less exactly the same as the old movies.
I chose one over the Apple TV because I knew I wouldn't able to stand any limitations on sideloading. For a while I was running a custom build of Wholphin with patched libmpv/libplacebo to work around a bug before the fix was upstreamed. A device without the freedom to do that sort of thing would drive me nuts.