[qup]

What are we actually worried about happening?

Are AI-written books getting published?

If they start out-competing humans, is that bad? According to most naysayers, they can't do anything original.

Are people asking the AI for books? And then hoping it will spit it out a human-written book word for word?

[jjmarr]

> Are AI-written books getting published?

Yes, online bookstores are full of them:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/travel/amazon-guidebooks-...

The issue is there's an asymmetry between buyer/seller for books, because a buyer doesn't know the contents until you buy the book. Reviews can help, but not if the reviews are fake/AI generated. In this case, these books are profitable if only a few people buy them as the marginal cost of creating such a book is close to zero.

[qup]

This really has fuck-all to do with copyright though, correct?

If you can't tell how the content is before you read it, it could be written by a monkey.

[brendoelfrendo]

This is starting to get pretty circular. The AI was trained on copyrighted data, so we can make a hypothesis that it would not exist - or would exist in a diminished state - without the copyright infringement. Now, the AI is being used to flood AI bookstores with cheaply produced books, many of which are bad, but are still competing against human authors.

[JohnHaugeland]

the problem with how circular the argument is is that the essence of there being an actual problem is being taken for granted

it's not clear that detriments actually exist, and the benefits are clear

[roguecoder]

The benefits are not clear: why should an "author" who doesn't want to bother writing a book of their own get to steal the words of people who aren't lazy slackers?

[satvikpendem]

It's as much stealing as piracy is stealing, ie none at all. If you disagree, you and I (along with probably many others in this thread) have a fundamental axiomatic incompatibility that no amount of discussion can resolve.

[greenie_beans]

shop at a real bookstore, they don't have this problem.

[volkk]

> Are AI-written books getting published?

actually i think they are. lots of e-book slop

> If they start out-competing humans, is that bad?

Not inherently, but it depends on what you mean by out-competing. Social media outcompeted books and now everyone's addicted and mental illness is more rampant than ever. IMO, a net negative for society. AI books may very well win out through sheer spam but is that good for us?

[qup]

Nobody has responded to me with anything about how authors are harmed, so I don't really get who we're protecting here.

It feels more like we just want to punish people, particularly rich people, particularly if they get away with stuff we're afraid to try.

[volkk]

> Nobody has responded to me with anything about how authors are harmed

i imagine if books can be published to some e-book provider through an API to extract a few dollars per book generated (mulitiplied by hundreds), then eventually it'll be borderline impossible to discover an actual author's book. breaking through for newbie writers will be even harder because of all of the noise. it'll be up to providers like Amazon to limit it, but then we're then reliant on the benevolence of a corporation and most act in self interest, and if that means AI slop pervading every corner of the e-book market, then that's what we'll have.

kind of reminds me of solana memecoins and how there are hundreds generated everyday because it's a simple script to launch one. memecoins/slop has certainly lowered the trust in crypto. can definitely draw some parallels here.

[consteval]

> Nobody has responded to me with anything about how authors are harmed

The same way good law-abiding folk are harmed when Heroin is introduced to the community. Then those people won't be able to lend you a cup of sugar, and may well start causing problems.

AI books take off and are easy to digest, and before long your user base is quite literally too stupid to buy and read your book even if they wanted.

And, for the record, it's trivial to "out compete" books or anything else. You just cheat. For AI, that means making 1000 books that lie for every one real book. Can you find a needle in a haystack? You can cheat by making things addictive, by overwhelming with supply, by straight up lying, by forcing people to use it... there's really a lot of ways to "outcompete".

> It feels more like we just want to punish people, particularly rich people, particularly if they get away with stuff we're afraid to try.

If by "afraid to try" you mean "know to be morally reprehensible" and if by "punish people" you mean "punish people (who do things that we know to be morally reprehensible)", then sure.

But... you might just be describing the backbone of human society since, I don't know, ever? Hm, maybe there's a reason we have that perspective. No, it must just be silly :P

[satvikpendem]

> know to be morally reprehensible

In your opinion, not to everyone. There has been no actual argument as to why it's supposedly "morally reprehensible."

[consteval]

I just explained how it's morally reprehensible. The argument is right there, above the quote you chose to quote. Neat trick, but I'm sorry, a retort that does not make.

[satvikpendem]

You didn't explain anything about why it is so, you just said it is, hence why I said it's your opinion. If you can't explain why, in more concrete terms, then there is no reason to believe your argument.

[sanderjd]

I think the concern goes to the point of copyright to begin with, which is to incentive people to create things. Will the inclusion of copyrighted works in llm training (further) erode that incentive? Maybe, and I think that's a shame if so. But I also don't really think it's the primary threat to the incentive structure in publishing.

[qup]

> the point of copyright to begin with, which is to incentive people to create things

Is it?

(I don't agree)

[sanderjd]

Yes, it is. It's not actually an opinion thing. It's a "what did the people who came up with the idea of copyright think it was for?" thing.

I haven't read the primary source material, so you could teach me something here, but my understanding is that the idea was to incentive creators.

[roguecoder]

That is not actually the goal of it.

Copyright was invented by publishers (the printing guild) to ensure that the capitalists who own the printing presses could profit from artificial monopolies. It decreases the works produced, on purpose, in order to subsidize publishing.

If society decides we no longer want to subsidize publishers with artificial monopolies, we should start with legalizing human creativity. Instead we're letting computers break the law with mediocre output while continuing to keep humans from doing the same thing.

LLMs are serving as intellectual property laundering machines, funneling all the value of human creativity to a couple of capitalists. This infringement of intellectual property is just the more pure manifestation of copyright, keeping any of us from benefitting from our labor.

[sanderjd]

Interesting! I'd love a citation on this...

[satvikpendem]

People have created for millennia before the modern institution of copyright, so I'm not sure how that's a cogent argument.

[sanderjd]

Yeah it's an interesting point, but it was also hard to physically copy things for all of those millennia.

[greenie_beans]

i wrote a book and copyright was not once on my mind. having created something is the incentive to create for most artists

[sanderjd]

I don't think we can infer the motives of most artists from your personal motives.

[greenie_beans]

fine, because that means your claim that artists create for the copyright incentive is also false

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

>What are we actually worried about happening?

Few company can amass such quantities of knowledge and leverage it all for their own, very-private profits. This is unprecedented centralization of power, for a very select few. Do we actually want that? If not, why not block this until we're sure this a net positive for most people?

[qup]

Meta open-sourced it my guy

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

Because they expect not to have to opens-source future models. Easy to open stuff as long as you strengthen your position and prevent the competition from emerging.

Ask Google about Android and what they now choose to release as part of AOSP vs Play Services.