US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

That is not to say that we shouldn't do the right thing regardless, but I do think there is a feeling of "who is going to rule the world in the future?" tha underlies governmental decision-making on how much to regulate AI.

I'm not sure at all what China will do. I find it likely that they'll forbid AI at least for minors so that they do not become less intelligent.

Military applications are another matter that are not really related to these copyright issues.

Even (especially?) the military is a dumpster fire but it's at least very good at doing what it exists to do.

Yeah..

you tax it if the "chatgpt" is foreign.

I mean, name 2 things anyone owns that aren't dumpster fires?

Long time ago industrial engineers used to say, "Even Toyota has recalls."

Something being a dumpster fire is so common nowadays that you really need a better reason to argue in support of a given entity's ownership. (Or even non-ownership for that matter.)

That said, there are plenty of successful government actions across the world, where Europe or Japan probably have a good advantage with solid public services. Think streets, healthcare, energy infrastructure, water infrastructure, rail, ...

1. The National Weather Service. Crown jewel and very effective at predicting the weather and forecasting life threatening events.

2. IRS, generally very good at collecting revenue. 3. National Interagency Fire Service / US Forest service tactical fire suppression

4. NTSB/US Chemicals Safety Board - Both highly regarded.

5. Medicare - Basically clung to with talons by seniors, revealed preference is that they love it.

6. DOE National Labs

7. NIH (spicy pick)

8. Highway System

There are valid critiques of all of these but I don’t think any of them could be universally categorized as a complete dumpster fire.

2) state parks are pretty rad.

Even saying the military is a dumpster fire isn't accurate. The military has led trillions of dollars worth of extraction for the wealthy and elite across the globe.

In no sane world can you say that the ability to protect GLOBAL shipping lanes as a failure. That one service alone has probably paid for itself thousands of times.

We aren't even talking about things like public education (high school education use to be privatized and something only the elites enjoyed 100 years ago; yes public high school education isn't even 100 years old) or libraries or public parks.

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I really don't understand this "gobermint iz bad" meme you see in tech circles.

I get more out of my taxes compared to equivalent corporate bills that it's laughable.

Government is comprised of people and the last 50 years has been the government mostly giving money and establishing programs to the small cohorts that have been hoarding all the wealth. Somehow this is never an issue with the government however.

Also never understand the arguments from these types either because if you think the government is bad then you should want it to be better. Better mostly meaning having more money to redistribute and more personal to run programs, but it's never about these things. It's always attacking the government to make it worse at the expense of the people.

For national security reasons I'm perfectly fine with giving LLMs unfettered access to various academic publications, scientific and technical information, that sort of thing. I'm a little more on the fence about proprietary code, but I have a hard time believing there isn't enough code out there already for LLMs to ingest.

Otherwise though, what is an LLM with unfettered access to copyrighted material better at vs one that merely has unfettered access to scientific / technical information + licensed copyrighted material? I would suppose that besides maybe being a more creative writer, the other LLM is far more capable of reproducing copyrighted works.

In effect, the other LLM is a more capable plagiarism machine compared to the other, and not necessarily more intelligent, and otherwise doesn't really add any more value. What do we have to gain from condoning it?

I think the argument I'm making is a little easier to see in the case of image and video models. The model that has unfettered access to copyrighted material is more capable, sure, but more capable of what? Capable of making images? Capable of reproducing Mario and Luigi in an infinite number of funny scenarios? What do we have to gain from that? What reason do we have for not banning such models outright? Not like we're really missing out on any critical security or economic advantages here.

Or C) large corporations (and the wealthy) do whatever they want while you still get extortion letters because your kid torrented a movie.

They really do get to have their cake and eat it too, and I don't see any end to it.

"have their cake and eat it too" allegations only work if you're talking about the same entity. The copyright maximalist corporations (ie. publishers) aren't the same as the permissive ones (ie. AI companies). Making such characterizations make as much sense as saying "citizens don't get to eat their cake and eat it too", when referring to the fact that citizens are anti-AI, but freely pirate movies.

Nothing. You don't even need the LLC. I don't think anyone got prosecuted for only downloading. All prosecutions were for distribution. Note that if you're torrenting, even if you stop the moment it's finished (and thus never goes to "seeding"), you're still uploading, and would count as distribution for the purposes of copyright law.

what if they route through third countries?

If I'm learning about kinematics maybe it would be more effective to have comparisons to Superman flying faster than a speeding bullet and no amount of dry textbooks and academic papers will make up for the lack of such a comparison.

This is especially relevant when we're talking about science-fiction which has served as the inspiration for many of the leading edge technologies that we use including stuff like LLMs and AI.

Library of Congress

National Park Service

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)

NASA

Smithsonian Institution

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Social Security Administration (SSA)

Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air traffic control

U.S. Postal Service (USPS)

Musicians remain subject to abuse by the recording industry; they're making pennies on each dollar you spend on buying CDs^W^W streaming services. I used to say, don't buy that; go to a concert, buy beer, buy merch, support directly. Nowadays live shows are being swallowed whole through exclusivity deals (both for artists and venues). I used to say, support your favourite artist on Bandcamp, Patreon, etc. But most of these new middlemen are ready for their turn to squeeze.

And now on top of all that, these artists' work is being swallowed whole by yet another machine, disregarding what was left of their rights.

What else do you do? Go busking?

Can you link to the exact comments he made? My impression was that he was upset at the fact that they broke T&C of openai, and deepseek's claim of being much cheaper to train than openai didn't factor in the fact that it requried openai's model to bootstrap the training process. Neither of them directly contradict the claim that training is copyright infringement.

Oh really ? They didn't had any problem when people installed copyrighted Windows to come after them. BSA. But now Microsoft turns a blind eye because it suits them.

A reasonable compromise then is that you can train an AI on Wikipedia, more-or-less. An AI trained this way will have a robust understanding of Superman, enough that it can communicate through metaphor, but it won't have the training data necessary to create a ton of infringing content about Superman (well, it won't be able to create good infringing content anyway. It'll probably have access to a lot of plot summaries but nothing that would help it make a particularly interesting Superman comic or video).

To me it seems like encyclopedias use copyrighted pop culture in a way that constitutes fair use, and so training on them seems fine as long as they consent to it.

The difference here is that we have people like yourself: those who have zero faith in our government and as such act as double agents or saboteurs. When people such as yourself gain power in the legislator they "starve the beast". Meaning, purposefully deconstruct sections of our government such that they have justification for their ideological belief that our government doesn't work.

You guys work backwards. The foregone conclusion is that government programs never work, and then you develop convoluted strategies to prove that.

>Meta allegedly tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to "avoid" the "risk" of anyone "tracing back the seeder/downloader" from Facebook servers

Sounds like they used a VPN, set the upload speed to 1kb/s and stopped after the download is done. If the average Joe copied that setup there's 0% chance he'd get sued, so I don't really see a double standard here. If anything, Meta might get additional scrutiny because they're big enough of a target that rights holders will go through the effort of suing them.

In the end this all comes down to needing the people to care enough.

This isn't some new phenomenon. We do indeed seize assets from buyers if the seller stole them.

Citation needed. RIAA used to just watch torrents and sent cease and desists to everyone who connected, whether for a minute or for months. It was very much a dragnet, and I highly doubt there was any nuance of "but Your Honor, I only seeded 1MB back so it's all good".

It's annoying to see the current pushback against China focusing so much on inconsequential matters with so much nonsense mixed in, because I do think we do need to push back against China on some things.

As did Disney, apparently.

>what use is regulation if you can just buy it?

I don't like it either, but it still comes down to the same issues. We vote in people who can be bought and don't make a scandal out of it when it happens. The first step to fixing that corruption is to make congress afraid of being ousted if discovered. With today's communication structure, that's easier than ever.

But if the people don't care, we see the obvious Victor.