[biggestdummy]

I am an author. While 99% of "ordinary people" are not authors, 99% of authors are "ordinary people".

Under your moral logic, everyone should just be free to pirate/steal any creative work, as why shouldn't the un-talented (or un-trained, or un-dedicated) have equal rights to the works.

All this leads to a case where there is no longer an incentive to create and popularize creative work, and suddenly all that is available are AI rehashes of AI summaries. I, for one, don't look forward to such a marketplace of non-ideas.

[visarga]

LLMs don't steal/pirate works, "copying" is the word you're looking for. So much faster, cheaper and precise to copy than to use LLMs. What LLMs do is to combine user information with patterns learned from data. Almost never a full work, they rarely generate more than 1000 words at once. Books are 100x larger

[Earw0rm]

Actually, "launder" is the word I'd use for LLMs.

Clean things up just enough that it's difficult to prove where their semantic content came from.

How useful this is or isn't, and how much of a threat to rightful IP owners, depends very much on the type of IP.

[visarga]

If "laundering" IP is made illegal, then we're all in for a huge surprise. Almost everything we say and do has been said and done before. And we're rarely the originators of our main ideas, we "launder" 99.99% of what we know, even subconsciously. Any one human could be suspected of secretly using AI today.

[Earw0rm]

Totally agree, the difference is speed and scale.

Copyright laws didn't need to be invented until the printing press came along, because the act of copying was slow and difficult.

Not a fan of the patent model for software, for example, but perhaps this is an argument for it. Or, we just get used to the fact that idea-reuse is cost-free, accept a couple of decades of uncomfortable economic dislocation, and get on with it.

[Kim_Bruning]

I don't think "copying" applies to what an LLM does either!

[lupire]

"Good artists copy. Great artists steal." - Picasso

[ycombinatrix]

I don't think I should be able to steal or pirate your work.

I do think I should be allowed to read your book & do math with it.

[freejazz]

>I do think I should be allowed to read your book & do math with it.

This is such a painfully obtuse construction of what is occurring that it escapes any reasonable discussion.

[ycombinatrix]

Up to you. You can stop people from reading your book but you can't stop people from doing math.

[freejazz]

You are being obtuse, copying is "just math" and is already illegal. "Just math" is not a legal argument, this is childish.

[thecrash]

> there is no longer an incentive to create and popularize creative work

It's reasonable to be worried about this scenario. If there was no incentive to produce creative work, our society would be much worse.

But the notion that there's only one way to prevent this scenario, and it requires a drastic expansion of the already sweeping "intellectual property" regime...well it just lacks creativity.

It's not that we want to eliminate the incentive to be creative, it's that we believe there are better ways to prevent that scenario than to further entrench a broken system.

[meiraleal]

You give me your creative work for free. What I do with texts in my computer is my business, not yours. Don't like it? Stop publishing your creative work online. There is nothing being stolen.

[bumby]

This is strange logic that ignores the idea of copyright. Just because I allow you to view my work for free does not mean I relinquish copyright protection. If I write a song that I perform for free, it doesn’t give you license to record and sell that song, for example.

[meiraleal]

> This is strange logic that ignores the idea of copyright

What is strange in ignoring the idea of copyright? If you write a song and I can play it in my computer, I use it the way I want in my computer. If you don't want that, don't make your work public. Copyright is a men's creation, nobody is forced to respect it.

The code I develop can be accessed for free in github and even in the browser "view source", I won't be fighting for other people to have the right to force others to pay for using their creation while they don't pay for mine and all other open source and open science creations.

[bumby]

>nobody is forced to respect it

I was afraid the discussion would go this route.

Yes, copyright is a convention. It’s subject to change. However, IP protections are written into the US Constitution and the bar to change it is relatively high.

Murder is also a crime by convention, there’s no natural law against it. But we generally recognize that to live in a stable society, we must live by certain conventions.

You can play a song on your computer because that is considered appropriate use. You selling tickets to play it, or to copy it and sell it is not because they conceivably limit the authors ability to make money from their creation.

You may not realize it but software is also covered by copyright. For most intents and purposes, it’s considered the worlds worst book; you cannot legally copy and sell it if the license doesn’t allow it.

Edit: added the word "legally" to be more precise

[meiraleal]

> you cannot copy and sell it if the license doesn’t allow it.

Well, good luck trying to force me to not sell your work in my country.

[Earw0rm]

AI changes the rules here, because AI is able to automate extracting structure/meaning, and launder it of its origins.

In classical copyright, fair use allows certain.. fair uses. Going beyond that is considered stealing. You can chop things up into small parts, and there are rules governing how you can put the pieces back together and claim them wholly or partly as your own work.

LLMs behave more like a solvent. Everything goes in the pot, gets melted down, and by the time it's recast you can't say for sure where anything came from or who it once belonged to. Even if sometimes you might get a strong whiff.

[freejazz]

Not according to the NYTimes' attorneys.