[joshka]

How do you square away the idea that you do science for the increase in knowledge of human kind, but then say that a particular use of that knowledge is verboten?

I get the copyright aspect of this and I'm not arguing that here. I'm more asking about the moral / ethical idea of choosing who can benefit from your science.

Obviously there are the moral / ethical arguments about AI in general here to weigh against - those have been hashed out significantly elsewhere, and I'm not interested in debating them. What I'm asking about here is the impact on science by sharing it with tooling that distributes it in ways not generally considered when originally written.

A quick check of your post history suggests the frame that you work in strongly is privacy related research (observation - may be wrong). I'm curious how that impacts what you wrote here generally.

(Just to be perfectly clear, I'm not arguing your points here, trying to understand them better)

[Cynddl]

Good question. Unfortunately, academic knowledge is widely ‘verboten’ already. Everything under paywall, researchers having to pay up to $10,000 to publish in open access in some venues, rare books unavailable even to top universities. Access to knowledge and information is increasingly difficult for everyone.

That said, what matters here is the social contract, what do I bring to society and what do we get from tech companies. For most people around the world, access to the typical leading models is out of reach. Not many on this planet can pay the subscriptions (or even API keys) that offer access to the best models. So I'm not buying the argument that tech companies are broadening access. What we're creating is a increasingly discriminatory society where the few get access to information, and the many don't.

[joshka]

Thanks for the reply here.

I guess I have some perspectives on a bunch of this. I'm for open sharing of academic work for all (but I'm not an academic, so my perspective is a consumer), so inferring your perspective here I think we agree on that. I maintain many open source (MIT/Apache2 licensed) libraries, and I've also worked in big tech (Amazon, OpenAI). I believe both in the idea of collective commons but also in the ideas that there should be the ability of people to sell software. There's tension in that social contract similarly, and it gets more complex when you look at copyleft.

I guess I'd be disappointed if this was just allowing big labs access and not more broadly allowing access to the ACM library for smaller open source models. Very much in agreement with your last points there.

[throwaway27448]

Anything short of free access to the acm would ensure I'll fight ti burn down the acm instead. Not that they ever asked or cared what their members think. The organization can either choose to side with humanity or against it

[Aurornis]

> most people around the world, access to the typical leading models is out of reach. Not many on this planet can pay the subscriptions (or even API keys) that offer access to the best models. So I'm not buying the argument that tech companies are broadening access. What we're creating is a increasingly discriminatory society where the few get access to information, and the many don't

I’m sorry, but I can’t buy this argument. Making information more available does not make it more discriminatory. Nobody is saying it will only be available in the best models and withheld from other models or services like the ChatGPT free plan. Nobody is saying we’re going to make the original content inaccessible through the previous means after the LLMs are trained on it. Nothing about this shrinks access or makes it more discriminatory.

I understand that you’re upset about the use of the content, but I think you need to admit that your stance is the one trying to restrain use of the content. Training LLMs on it can only bring knowledge to a wider audience, not restrict it.

Whether or not that’s a good or fair idea is a separate discussion, but arguing that this makes access to the knowledge more discriminatory and locked away is 180 degrees backwards.

[throwaway27448]

> but then say that a particular use of that knowledge is verboten?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Without material values, you will be lost and confused.

Granted, the ACM is hardly a bastion of anything but self interest and greed.