Technology

You might want to read this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF, and this one by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries. YouTube's one-sided strike-happy system isn't the real world.

Headlines like these let people assume that it’s illegal, rather than educate them on their rights.

I love seeing Lemmy users trip over themselves to declare that copyrights don't or shouldn't exist when it comes to pirating, right up until it comes to AI. Then Copyrights are enshrined by The Constitution and all the corporations NEED to pay for them, even when they're not actually copying anything.

Just like I do with literally all content I’ve ever consumed. Everything I’ve seen has been remashed in my brain into the competencies I charge money for.

It’s not until I profit off of someone else’s work — ie when the source of the profit is their work — that I’m breaking any rules.

This is a non-issue. We’ve let our (legitimate) fear of AI twist us into distorting truth and motivated reasoning. Instead of trying to paint AI as morally wrong, we should admit that we are afraid of it.

We’re trying to replace our fear with disgust and anger. It’s not healthy for us. AI is ultra fucking scary. And not because it’s going to take inspiration from a copyrighted song when it writes a different song. AI is ultra fucking scary because it will soon surpass any possibility of our understanding, and we will be at the whim of an alien intelligence.

But that’s too sci fi sounding, to be something people have to look at. Because it sounds so out there, it’s easy to scoff at and dismiss. So instead of acknowledging our terror at the fact this thing will likely end humanity as we know it, we’re sublimating that energy through righteous indignation. See, indignation is unpleasant, but it’s less threatening to the self than terror.

It’s understandable, like doing another line of coke is understandable. But it is not healthy, not productive, and will not play out the way we think. We need to stop letting our fear turn our minds to mush.

Reading someone else’s material before you write new material is not the same as copying someone else’s material and selling it as your own. The information on the internet has always been considered free for legal use. And the limit of legal use is based on the selling of others’ verbatim material.

This is a simple fact, easy to see. Except recognizing it nullifies the righteous indignation, opening the way for the terror and confusion to come in again.

Why are people publishing so much content online if they aren’t cool with people downloading it? Like, the web is an open platform. The content is there for the taking.

Until one of these AIs just starts selling other people’s work as its own, and no I don’t mean derivative work I mean the copyrighted material, nobody is breaking the rules here.

I read content online without paying for a license. I should only have to obtain a license for material I’m publishing, not material I read.

I don't know if you noticed this but some really big companies with high stock valuations are only existing because investors poured tons of capital into them to subsidize the service.

Uber could not do taxis cheaper than existing if they didn't have years of free cash to artificially lower prices.

We are in the beginning of late state capitalism, profitable companies go under due to private capital firms and absolute ponzi frauds get their faces on time magazine.

Enjoy the collapse.

So youre fine with the free models Facebook and many others provide?

Because many of these LLMs can be run on your own device without paying.

I guess people are finally catching up to the big con with LLMs should not be copyrighted ampliganda. It is astroturfing at its best.

The end goal is controlling rights to what corporations produce with LLMs without spending a dime. All the while cutting jobs.

Writing was in CAPITAL LETTERS on the walls for the past two years. Why did twitter restrict API access? Why did Reddit restrict API access? Why did Github/Bitbucket/Gitlab restricted web ui functions for unlogged?

They knew and wallgardened the user generated data.

Cmon people.

And the hypocrisy of this all. If it is bad, it is user data, if we can mine nuh ah bitch, ours.

Also, for people arguing for free use of anything to build LLMs. Regulations will come. Once big players control enough of the LLM market.

Serious Question: When an artist learns to draw by looking at the drawings of the masters, and practicing the techniques they pioneered, are the art students respecting the intellectual property rights of those masters?

Are not all of that student's work derivative of an education based on other people's work who will never see compensation for that student's use?

They also don't care if the open, free internet devolves into an illiterate AI generated mess, because they need an illiterate populace that isn't educated enough to question it anyway. They'll still have access to quality sources of information, while ensuring the lowest common denominator will literally have garbage information being fed to them. I mean, that was already true in the sense that the clickbait news outsold serious investigative news, and so the garbage clickbait became the norm and serious journalism is hard come by and costly.

They love increasing barriers between them and the rest of the populace, physically and mentally.

Silicon valley’s core business model has for years been to break the law so blatantly and openly while throwing money at the problem to scale that by the time law enforcement caches up to you your an “indispensable” part of the modern world. See Uber, whose own publicly published business model was for years to burn money scaling and ignoring employment law until it could drive all competitors out of business and become an illegal monopoly, thus allowing it to raise prices to the point it’s profitable.

We are allowed to have nuance, nothing is inherently good or bad. A knife can wound or make dinner.

Trying to reduce nuance lessens the public discourse, do not be tempted by lowest common denominator memery.

Whether anyone likes it or not LLMs are here and even if we strictly regulate them there will be organizations and governments that do not.

WHAT WE SHOULD be focusing on is how to prevent low effort AI content from just basically overtaking the web.

We are already mostly there.