If a child is instructed to read a copyrighted work at school, which later becomes a factor in his own derivative works, he won't be in breach of copyright.
Why should other intelligent entities be prevented from reading copyrighted works and gaining whatever there is to gain from those works the way any human might?
If the child / author then regurgitates entire paragraphs or sections verbatim in his own works and someone notices, you bet there will be a plagiarism lawsuit coming his way.
In that case, the person legally liable for publishing the material is sued for infringement of the work. You don't send someone to jail because they're simply capable of infringing; they have to actually do it, and you have to actually show the specific work whose copyright was infringed upon.
You can also get into the weeds of what's copyright-able (ask Donald Faison about his Poison dance). If you ask for C-3PO and you get C-3PO as he appears in Star Wars promotional material, that seems cut and dry. What if you ask for a "golden robot"? What if you get a robot that looks like C-3PO but with a triangular torso symbol instead of his circular one? What's parody, what's fair use?
Especially true if that child or its mother has a huge market capitalization, large profit margins, highly-paid employees and shareholders eager to reap some more $$.
If the public starts to see LLMs as highly sophisticated copyright laundromats it would most likely hamper further investment & development in that field.
> Especially true if that child or its mother has a huge market capitalization, large profit margins, highly-paid employees and shareholders eager to reap some more $$.
This is the bit I don’t get from the “feed everything to machine” LLM-maximalists. Do they think courts don’t take context into account, do they think all actions happen in a vacuum and that they can just skip along and ignore laws at their pleasure because “tee hee it’s totally definitely fair use bro, I’m totally an academic researcher-pinky promise”.
LLM bros ought to stop and have a think before they poison their own well, assuming they haven’t already done so.
>This is the bit I don’t get from the “feed everything to machine” LLM-maximalists. Do they think courts don’t take context into account, do they think all actions happen in a vacuum and that they can just skip along and ignore laws at their pleasure
An entire generation of unicorn startups believed that (Uber, AirBnB, etc.). We see in the news every day that once you have enough money laws don't apply to you (most things Elon Musk does, the fact that Trump can defy court orders repeatedly and not go to jail, etc.) so yes, this seems entirely plausible.
The 2 darling startups that are now facing increasingly less rosy futures?
Airbnb in particular is facing enough backlash that I’d be surprised if it lasts terribly much longer.
Sure, they get away with it for a while, but not forever.
> We see in the news every day that once you have enough money laws don't apply to you
I agree with you here, but I think this is a much broader conversation about capitalism in general which would be getting a bit off-topic for this particular thread, except to say, capitalist forces aren’t above cauterising a limb if it becomes too annoying or intrudes on the other limbs too much. I think the “AI” limb might be overstating its own importance, and I suspect that if it got too up in everyone’s interests re-profit, it would, as an industry, very quickly find itself being neutered. Capital interests would love to get rid of pesky human labour, but if the alternative is too annoying, they’ll have no objections to going back to grinding people through the system again.
AirBnB will get away with it forever. While short term rentals might get banned in a handful of cities, the service now operates worldwide. The stock might be overvalued but if you examine their financials it's simply not plausible to think that failure is imminent.
Sure. But if the child has that capability, it doesn't automatically make them a walking copyright violation. "Intelligence", even the current version of AI, entails knowing about stuff, including being able to recite. That doesn't mean intelligence's existence violates copyright. If a person used AI to make a copyright violating work, that's a different story, just like if they used their own innate intelligence to do so.
Taken to its conclusion, liability is then on everyone who decides to publish anything that ChatGPT “tells” them, because it might cross the threshold on plagiarism.
Are the OpenAIs of the world ready to shield their customers from that liability?
If it turns out that using ChatGPT to help you write your resumé opens you up to accusations of plagiarism, or DALL·E to create an image for your website opens you to copyright violation, will you use them?
> Taken to its conclusion, liability is then on everyone who decides to publish anything that ChatGPT “tells” them
Yes. Just like reading anything else on the internet. An LLM is no different from typing "popular cola logo" into Google search and claiming you invented it. If I type "cola logo" into DALL-E and get a replica of Coca-Cola... that doesn't mean I created that logo and can exploit it for commercial purposes.
> Are the OpenAIs of the world ready to shield their customers from that liability?
Why would they? We aren't suing pen manufacturers because someone wrote something libelous using their pen. We aren't busting down the doors of Crayola because little Johnny used the crayons to draw Mario.
OpenAI might not want to shield all their customers from liability, but that is exactly what GitHub have done with Copilot. It's not a hypothetical, it's being done today.
I mean get this great auto complete; if you use it, your code might be AGPLed for all you know, and you're in violation, because you didn't even add a notice.
In a heartbeat. It's time for the old paradigms to die and new ones to be formed.
If ASI can exist I don't believe our the old methods of intellectual fortifications will continue to work in the future. Much like castle walls aren't used to protect against guided missiles.
This is an extremely dangerous precedent that I think you are purposefully trying to put forward.
It's a horrendously bad idea especially for startups to make it apps' faults for how users use their platform. It's only in the benefit of entrenched tech companies to make this precedent.
This argument might hold more water when generative models are more than fancy compression algorithms/text completion engines.
A more practical way of looking at this is: who is making money off of these models? How did they get their training data?
I’m not a fan of copyright in general, but we have serious outstanding issues with companies and organizations stealing or plastering work without compensating the original creators of said works. Thusfar, LLMs are becoming another method to concentrate wealth to whoever has the resources to train and sell these models at scale.
> I’m not a fan of copyright in general, but we have serious outstanding issues with companies and organizations stealing or plastering work without compensating the original creators of said works.
Would you mind unpacking this one a bit? It sounds like you denigrate copyright (some "general" grievance) but then immediately execute an about-face and begin to extoll its virtues. Is copyright not the thing that allows us to share works without fear they'll be stolen?
I think they are expressing a view that we ought to offer less protection / more scrutiny to larger commercial entities, which concentrate disproportionate amounts of wealth and power, compared to smaller entities. I tend to agree.
This is more or less correct. We can have systems to compensate creators that aren't identical to the copyright system we have today. If I were to rephrase my previous statement, I'd clarify instead saying: "I do not like copyright as it exists today."
As a society we want to incentivize innovation and reward things that advance society. One of the ways we do that today is copyright. It doesn't need to be the only way, or be done in the ways we do it now.
> This argument might hold more water when generative models are more than fancy compression algorithms/text completion engines.
I doubt that part of the argument would change even if we perfected brain uploads.
Now, if you gave the current LLMs a robot body with a cute face, that'll probably change minds faster, regardless of the underlying architecture.
> who is making money off of these models?
When the models are open source, or at least may be downloaded and used locally for no cost, that would be the users of the models.
And back to the biological comparison: I learned to read (and also to code) in part from the Commodore 64 user manual, should I owe the shareholders anything for my lifetime earnings? As I got to the end of that sentence, a thought struck me: taxes do that. And in the UK the question of if university should be funded by taxes or by the students themselves followed the same lines.
> When the models are open source, or at least may be downloaded and used locally for no cost, that would be the users of the models.
I think there's a bit more nuance to this. The profits go to those with the ability to run these models and to those with the infrastructure (or capitol) to run said models. I'm hoping this will change and we'll see lower barriers to entry as LLMs are made more accessible over time.
> And back to the biological comparison: I learned to read (and also to code) in part from the Commodore 64 user manual, should I owe the shareholders anything for my lifetime earnings?
This is more a philosophical question than anything else. I don't think there's right or wrong answer, but in my opinion the answers we arrive at should provide as much benefit to as many people as possible.
> As I got to the end of that sentence, a thought struck me: taxes do that. And in the UK the question of if university should be funded by taxes or by the students themselves followed the same lines.
I agree with your assessment and this model lines up well with my own opinions on reasonable ways to ensure equitable benefit from AI (be it ML, LLMs, or some theoretical general AI in the future).
> I’m not a fan of copyright in general, but we have serious outstanding issues with companies and organizations stealing or plastering work without compensating the original creators of said works
Copyright is meant to give the original creator a monopoly over their creation (so that others don't profit off of their work). Are you not a fan of copyright in its current scope / implementation? Because it sounds like you do agree with its goal.
> Copyright is meant to give the original creator a monopoly over their creation (so that others don't profit off of their work).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the goal of copyright is to incentivize innovation (specifically of art and culture) and to provide innovators a way recoup (and profit) off of innovation they've made public. I view it as similar to how patents work in that it's an incentive for people to publicize and share their works more broadly.
> Are you not a fan of copyright in its current scope / implementation? Because it sounds like you do agree with its goal.
I have a differing understanding of the goal of copyright based off of what you've said, but I think our understandings are similar in that the copyright holder benefits from copyright/patents of their works.
I dislike the ways our current implementations of copyright are abused. I think the concept of fair use makes copyright as it is today workable. I also think our current copyright laws (at least in the US) have a lot of failure modes that subvert what I believe the purpose of copyright should be: to advance art and culture with legal and economic incentive.
If llms are intelligent entities legally equivalent to a human child, then they incur an even more serious legal problem, as we are all in violation of the 13th amendment.
150 years ago society exists by and for men specifically (as in: not women) in most nations; 220 years ago, US society was by and for rich white (specifically white) land owners.
I don't know when AI will count as people in law, or even if they ever will; we may well pass laws prohibiting the creation of any mind in danger of coming close to this threshold.
But be wary, for AI acting enough like people is different to being anything like a person on the inside, and that means being wrong in either direction can have horrifying consequences. To appear but not to be conscious, leads to a worthless future. To be but not to appear conscious, leads to a fate worse than the history of slavery, for the slaves were eventually freed.
A child isn't a computer program, and no amount of anthropomorphizing will ever make them so.
Especially ChatGPT and other LLMs, they're not even close to being AGI or an "intelligent entity" as you put it, despite what all the AI-bro hype and marketing would like everyone else to believe.
Only because all three letters of the initialism mean different things to different people.
Existing LLMs won't do everything, but bluntly: good, we're not ready for a world where there is an AI that can do everything for $1-60/million words[0], and we need to get ready for that world before we find ourselves living in it.
ChatGPT-3.5 has a lot of weaknesses, but it can still do a better job of coding than a few of my coworkers demonstrated over the last 20 years. I'm listening to a German language learning podcast, and the hosts mentioned using it to help summarise a long email from one of their listeners. My sister has work anecdotes about it helping, and she's not in tech. Influencers, teachers, lawyers, Hollywood writers… well, "moral panic" doesn't tell you much… the game Doom was 30 years ago, and that had a moral panic that looks quaint given how much FPS games' graphics improved with each subsequent release, and I suspect ChatGPT-3.5 was to conversational AI what Doom was to 3D realtime gaming: the point at which people take note, followed by a decade of every new release being (wrongly) called "photorealistic".
[0] current pricing for gpt-3.5-turbo-1106 ($0.0010 / 1K tokens) and gpt-4-32k ($0.06 / 1K tokens) pricing: https://openai.com/pricing
> ChatGPT-3.5 has a lot of weaknesses, but it can still do a better job of coding than a few of my coworkers demonstrated over the last 20 years.
Whenever people say stuff like this I can't help but wonder what on earth kind of projects they work on. Even GPT4, while useful for things like reformatting or generating boilerplate code and stuff like that, it's still a far cry from any decent dev I've ever worked with, especially if you're not using a popular language like JS or Python.
My usual PRs at work are pretty big, complex pieces of code that all have to actually work when integrated with the larger system around it, no AI tool I've tried so far has come even close to acceptable here, other than for generating some boilerplate code that I would've written myself anyway. But even with the innocent-looking boilerplate there's always a weird gotcha that isn't obvious until you really analyze the code closely. It ends up saving nothing more than a few keystrokes, if that, yet people say all the time that they're generating entire pieces of software by gluing together code it spits out, which I find absolutely insane given my anecdotal attempts at it.
This can circumvented by going with more elaborate in-depth prompts, but at that point are you really saving on effort compared to the alternative? Is it really more efficient? By the time I have a prompt complex enough for it to spit out something good at me, I could've already bashed out the code myself anyways.
That's not even mentioning all the legacy shit you have to keep in mind for any one line of code, plus whatever conventions and standards your team uses and has etc.
I mean it works great for a function or whatever, but is that seriously what most people are working on? Simple, one-off independent function calls that don't interact in any way with anything within a larger system? Even simple CRUD apps aren't so well isolated.
Don't even get me started on the actual difficult part which is the whole preamble to creating the ticket in JIRA or whatever task management software you use where you're talking with stakeholders and planning out the work ahead, you're telling me you're paying 'Open'AI to do that whole rigamarole for you, and you're doing it successfully?
> Whenever people say stuff like this I can't help but wonder what on earth kind of projects they work on.
Terrifyingly, one of the bad human examples was doing C++. That person didn't know, or care to learn about, the standard template library; and they also duplicated entire files rather than changing access specifiers from private to public so they could subclass; and one feature they worked on was to support a change from storing data as a custom file format to a database, and the transition could take 20 minutes on some inputs even though neither loading before nor after this transition took more than milliseconds, and they insisted during one of the standups the code couldn't possibly be improved… the next day I looked at it for a bit, removed an unnecessary O(n^2) operation, and the transition code went back down to milliseconds. Oh, and a thousand(!) line long block for an if statement that always evaluated true.
The whole codebase was several times too big to fit into the context window for any version of any GPT model thanks to both this duplication and to keeping old versions of functions around "for reference" (their words), but if it had been rewritten to be more sensible it might just about fit into the biggest.
(My other examples were either still at, or fresh out of, university; but this person should have known better).
> Don't even get me started on the actual difficult part which is the whole preamble to creating the ticket in JIRA or whatever task management software you use where you're talking with stakeholders and planning out the work ahead, you're telling me you're paying 'Open'AI to do that whole rigamarole for you, and you're doing it successfully?
If it was all-round good, none of us would have jobs any more.
> Whenever people say stuff like this I can't help but wonder what on earth kind of projects they work on. Even GPT4, while useful for things like reformatting or generating boilerplate code and stuff like that, it's still a far cry from any decent dev I've ever worked with, especially if you're not using a popular language like JS or Python.
I mean this not overly sarcastically, but ... have you seen https://thedailywtf.com ? Between my own experiences, and that of some colleagues, I could probably put together at least a half-a-dozen WTF stories that would rival some of the best that site has to offer. There's enough really incompetent people in positions they shouldn't be in to the point that chatgpt - at this point - could realistically provide better output than more than a few of them.
ChatGPT is not an intelligent entity? What’s been comprehending and rewriting all my crappy code for several months? An auto-complete? There’s obviously emergent behavior there that is actually defined by the maker and most users as “intelligence.”
I would paraphrase one of Clarke's laws and say that "Any sufficiently advanced text generator is indistinguishable from an intelligent entity."
Just because a computer program's output is remarkably good does not mean there is any emergent intelligence, any more than a technology we don't understand means there is magic.
The reverse can also be true, with John Keats' agreeing with Charles Lamb that Newton "had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia_(poem)
If we should ever fully understand how our own minds work, will we hold machines in higher esteem, or ourselves in lower?
Any biology or physics that suggests humans are just a pattern recognizer will be discarded as us being a conscious being is the only thing every human knows to be 100% true.
So, all of biology and physics then. If souls exist, they have no mass, and have a weird way of being repeatably disrupted in consistent ways by damage to certain parts of the brain or specific chemicals.
Just because consciousness is a mystery today, doesn't mean we get to stop and say it will be so forever more.
Heck, the problem still fundamentally exists regardless of if you're atheist, monotheist, polytheist, or pantheist.
--
“We’re not listening to you! You’re not even really alive!” said a priest.
Dorfl nodded. “This Is Fundamentally True,” he said.
“See? He admits it!”
“I Suggest You Take Me And Smash Me And Grind The Bits Into Fragments And Pound The Fragments Into Powder And Mill Them Again To The Finest Dust There Can Be, And I Believe You Will Not Find A Single Atom Of Life–”
“True! Let’s do it!”
“However, In Order To Test This Fully, One Of You Must Volunteer To Undergo The Same Process.”
There was silence.
“That’s not fair,” said a priest, after a while. “All anyone has to do is bake up your dust again and you’ll be alive…”
You missed the entire point. Physics and biology exist to help humans understand the material universe. Anything supposing that humans aren’t actually intelligent or conscious or whatever, or lack agency, is wrong since all of physics and biology are an offshoot of that agency meant to enrich it.
I'm not missing the point, I'm saying you're wrong. There's a difference.
Also:
> Anything supposing that humans aren’t actually intelligent or conscious or whatever
Doesn't really match what I was writing about: if it turns out that a thing which is "just a pattern recognizer" can in fact be "intelligent or conscious or whatever", it's up to us if we see intelligence or consciousness or whatever in the pattern recognisers that we build, or if we ourselves descend into solipsism and/or nihilism.
Or if we take the traditional path of sticking our fingers in our ears and go "la la la I'm not listening" by way of managing cognitive dissonance. This is a very popular response which should not be underestimated.
But the laws of physics are quite clear, that a whole bunch of linear equations (quantum field theory) gets us chemistry, which gets us biology, etc., and the only place in all this for the feeling of existence that we have is emergent properties. Those emergent properties may, or may not, be present in other systems, but we don't know because we're really bad at characterising how emergent properties… emerge.
It’s not a human and so the entire argument comparing it to one is moot. It’s a program on a machine and doesn’t have rights, this anti-human way of thinking is seriously fucking scary.
The post you're responding to didn't call them human. Nor alive. Just "intelligent", and just as intelligence isn't required of life so I have no reason to think intelligence itself requires life.
These things are indeed "a program on a machine and doesn’t have rights", but what I find scary is that rights aren't part of the rules of the universe, they're merely laws, created and enforced (to the extent that they are at all) by humans.
As Max Tegmark said in his recent interview with Lex Fridman, a lot of the technology being developed now, and how it's being talked about and how it's used, is anti-life.
This line of logic is more frightening to me than actual AI. LLMs are really useful in a lot of scenarios but it takes 5 minutes playing with one to see that it isn't intelligent.
But since you are the type of person who is seemingly using LLM "written" code in production, your ability to accurate assess anything is suspect at best.
"Any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic".
No, an LLM is not intelligent. I do not understand why people will go through mental gymnastics to conclude they are.
queue all the typical arguments supporting them being intelligent and demanding I give reasons for them not being
This is kind of a weird take... if you said your dog isn't intelligent because it can't do calculus and most people would look at you funny. You don't have to see your pet as intelligent, but don't expect everyone else to blindly follow your thinking.
The only thing that I would say is "clear" is that LLMs are big collections of statistical data on how we use language. That does not cross my threshold for "intelligence".
> That does not cross my threshold for "intelligence".
You have your own individual threshold for what "is" intelligence? Holy cow, imagine if each other agent had their own also, but spoke as if they had a common one...that sure wouldn't be a very intelligent way to run a simulation, imagine the unrealized confusion and delusion that could result if that became a cultural convention!
Why should other intelligent entities be prevented from reading copyrighted works and gaining whatever there is to gain from those works the way any human might?