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by justsomeshmuck 651 days ago
I think it is important for America and Europe to take the side of using copyrighted works for LLM is fair use/not illegal. Advancement in this space in the west will be hindered otherwise, and nations that don’t respect IP law will have enormous advantage.
7 comments

Yes we should bury all human work under fair use for AI training data, otherwise we will lose the AI race…

How funny it will be if/when we realise that LLMs aren’t even the way to get to real AGI, and we destroyed the value of all human labour for nothing.

Can you expand upon the destruction of the value of all human labor by OpenAI and friends? I just don't see the logical steps from LLM trains on copyrighted data to human labor has no value.

Certainly you can make the claim that some forms of labor could have less value, like maybe in the future AI/LLMs become good enough at image generation that concept artists are replaced with a different job role that uses them to produce concept art.

But all forms of labor? Building a house?

It's a stretch yes, but you could start filming builders at their work, have them all wear cameras and LIDAR as a job requirement, get all the data into robots and then fire them all without compensation.
>and we destroyed the value of all human labour for nothing.

How exactly does AI training "destroyed the value of all human labour" when "LLMs aren’t even the way to get to real AGI"? You could plausibly make the argument that AGI might make all human labor obsolete, but the current LLMs are nowhere close to replacing human labor. Sure, some value might be lost, but nowhere near "destroyed the value of all human labour ".

We are already experiencing how destructive LLMs have been to information, news, art, articles, blogs, novels etc... not even from the framework of money or copyright, but from the lens of culture and our daily experience. This very well means that any corporation can just suck up anything you create and crap out ten thousand times more "content" that is sanitized of all human context and meaning that buries the people who they stole from and everyone else in cheap meaningless trash. How is the inconsequential? That's massively destructive, even more so than tech already is over the past 2 decades. Of course people have a problem with that. It's not just about money or barely surviving.
>How is the inconsequential?

This is moving the goalposts. The original claim was "we destroyed the value of all human labour for nothing", now it's being moved to "it's not inconsequential "

The value of all human labor does not come from copyright.
I think few people say Llama should be destroyed (some very possibly do). I for one just think copyrighted training content should be bought or at least acquired with explicit consent. And if you can't afford to pay for it then rethink your business.
> we destroyed the value of all human labour for nothing.

FTFY: "we found a way to remove the archaic copyright system"

Why do you think the copyright system is archaic? It's the only thing protecting the livelihood of millions of people around the globe.
Not the OP, but if general copyright lasted for 20 years and you had to pay (even a small) fee for prolonging it after that period, the public domain would expand massively and abandonware + orphaned works would stop being a thing.

And the very few lucrative works would still be protected, because their copyright holders would pay the fee.

The tragedy of current copyright is that there is an enormous mass of copyrighted works that is a) commercially useless or nearly useless, but b) still copyrighted, so other people cannot build on them.

40 years copyright sounds about right to me, half the average human lifetime and certainly most of one’s highly productive lifetime.
Only for AIs, not for humans.

If humans did what some of the AI video gen tools are doing, they’d get sued.

> I think it is important for America and Europe to take the side of using copyrighted works for LLM is fair use/not illegal. Advancement in this space in the west will be hindered otherwise, and nations that don’t respect IP law will have enormous advantage.

You're assuming LLMs are an enormous advantage. But they could very well end up being an over-hyped dead end, like blockchain, and avoiding them ends up being neutral or advantageous to the nations that do so.

I read this weekend that OpenAI may go to market with a $100 billion valuation. Why not share some of that with creators?

It's hard to come up with percentages though. I'd probably borrow from the app store model and assign 70% of whatever they raise to creators and they keep 30%.

What other laws do you think we should ignore so that we can ensure we continue to be dominant in this or other fields?
Pretty much everything. From Stockton Rush who would disregard safety, to British Petroleum who thinks the EPA is the ultimate evil. You may die from lead poisoning in your store bought food, but that is a sacrifice they are willing to make.
Training on all my work so you can generate my work and thus replace me is not fair use. If you think this argument is one salty software engineer yelling at CloudGPT, I'm sure Disney and every other media company feels the same way.
Nope. Pay or fuck off.
It should be important for all countries to punish stealing of copyrighted materials by megacorporations, to prevent their arrogance and abuse in future.