[Levitz]

>You don’t get to make information publicly available. But not publicly available.

But we do? Open sourcing something with caveats is common. This code is public BUT not for commercial use. This code is public BUT you must display attribution etc.

Sure, blogposts are unlicensed (that I know) but the idea of something publicly available being held to restrictions is nothing new.

[H8crilA]

Do you allow commercial employees to read the code and incorporate knowledge obtained from the code into their brains?

[DirkH]

This is a fantastic point. I can legally go pick up any strictly copyrighted book at a store and read parts of it for free which I will then have learnt and have in my brain to share with to anyone else. If I happen to have a superintelligent brain I can potentially gain a lot more and make a lot more inferences from this one outing and consequently add a lot of value to others I share my info to.

But telling me it is illegal to share what I learnt because the original source is copyrighted... doesn't sit right with me.

[H8crilA]

Copyright just doesn't protect such cases. There's a funny exaggeration that is very illustrative: copyright protects the bugs in the code. I.e. the specific way in which code was written. Reading it and getting inspired was never meant to break copyright.

What protects particular solutions is patents. For example if someone were to obtain a patent for computing GCD of large integers the usual fast way, well then everyone else would have to use a different solution.

This analogy to someone reading a book, perhaps peppered with lots of legalese to the point of being hardly recognizable, will definitely be used in courts at some point. And I can't see how it wouldn't stand as a valid argument.

[chasing]

If you go read a book, memorize it, write it down later in a substantively similar form, and share it freely or sell it — yes, you might get into copyright trouble. It has happened before and it is at best a tricky gray area.

If you pick up a book and learn a fact, then yeah, you’re allowed to share that fact.

It’s weird that this topic keeps devolving into a form of “so what, it’s illegal for me to learn things?” Because: no, it’s not. And: You and a piece of software are treated differently under the law. You have a different set of rights than ChatGPT.

[DirkH]

Everything ChatGPT seems gray area and might which is probably why we are where we are.

[H8crilA]

> You have a different set of rights than ChatGPT.

Gods, no. Where did you get that from?

[Levitz]

Are you a human being? A citizen of some country? If so you definitely have a different set of rights than ChatGPT.

Those might not be a problem regarding this specific case, but the case can easily be made that it ought to be.

[DirkH]

I don't think ChatGPT has any rights yet... And a person using it has the exact same rights as someone not using it.

[H8crilA]

?

I don't understand your point. Do you think it makes any difference whether I use my laptop, or a pen, or ChatGPT to violate copyright?

[cool_dude85]

Show me where ChatGPT's brain is and your comparison will become relevant.

[H8crilA]

I mean in the floating point / quantized numbers and the connections that make the model? I'm not sure I follow, the analogy to the human brain has always been obvious, it's even in the name (artificial neural network) ...

[mrtranscendence]

The analogy is just that: an analogy, and a very imperfect, misleading one. The working of the brain may have motivated early research, but GPT (as instantiated in hardware) does not operate or learn in a way similar to a human brain.

[Levitz]

Yes, it's completely unfeasible to make a license to control that.

On the other hand, it's completely feasible to make a license that stops someone from training their model with some piece of info, is it not?

[jacquesm]

Why is it that people keep on flogging dead horses?