1. I don't believe that training LLMs on publicly-available content is morally bad. Nor do I believe that it should be prosecutable as copyright infringement, any more than I believe that we should prosecute humans for studying books/art/essays/movies/etc and "downloading" that information into their brains. I'm not a big fan of IP law in general (I think it's largely a crime against the people's freedom to share and riff on ideas and expression), but to the extent that we need to bring IP law into this, I only think it should be prosecutable to publish a near-exact copy of an existing work. Creating a tool/AI capable of reproducing a Lady Gaga song is not the same thing as actually reproducing and selling a Lady Gaga song.
2. Capitalist markets depend on constant competition and innovation. This is a good thing for consumers, as things generally tend to get better and better over time (look at cars, clothing, medicine, food choices, etc). The cost comes to business owners, who are endlessly forced to compete on cost/speed/availability/value at the risk of being disrupted. As a business owner myself, I am okay with this cost and do not find it morally wrong, unfair, or reprehensible. It's for the greater good, and business owners imo are the societal group least in need of charity or prioritization. And, again, the rules help consumers. When a business is being outcompeted, that's because consumers are voting with their feet for what they think is the better option.
3. Pure artists are unaffected. If you're a craftsperson, artist, writer, chef, programmer, etc who is creating for the love of creating, that's amazing. You are unaffected. Nothing under the sun can stop you from doing what you love. If you make a great burger for yourself or your friends and family, it does not matter that McDonald's has sold a billion burgers. However, once you start trying to sell your creations to others, you are no longer purely an artist, you are a business, and you will be subject to the aforementioned rules of the market. Which, once again, I think are fair.
4. Trying to skirt the rules of the market to avoid competition or disruption, imo, is not cool. It generally amounts to rent-seeking "I got here first" behavior, which benefits no one in society except for business owners who don't want to innovate. "My profession/industry was here first, and this is how it's always been since I got into it, and I like making money this way, and it's unfair for anything to happen in the market that disrupts my flow of money or causes me to change, and I'm going to use my incumbency/popularity/authority to try to change the law to stop newcomers from out-competing me or to force them to give me a cut, consumers be damned."
It is not a tragedy for a business model that used to thrive to decline. It's a natural process that has happened many tens of thousands of times, and it's the flip side of the coin called progress.
Apples to oranges. No amount of studying Rembrandt paintings would permit a human to paint 9 of them every minute.
Learning in humans and learning in LLMs are fundamentally so different, this analogy doesn't hold up to basic scrutiny.
> I only think it should be prosecutable to publish a near-exact copy of an existing work. Creating a tool/AI capable of reproducing a Lady Gaga song is not the same thing as actually reproducing and selling a Lady Gaga song.
Our legal system will decide that.
> Capitalist markets depend on constant competition and innovation.
Fuck capitalism and fuck the corporations playing it's game. I don't give a fuck if OpenAI makes a billion trillion dollars or not. I give a fuck whether or not people can continue earning money so they can not freeze to death.
If we want to embrace fully automated luxury communism, fine. If you want to automate millions of workers out of a job simply because you can, and pocket a fraction of their salaries each and be rich beyond belief while millions are consigned to starvation, you are everything wrong with our modern world and I hope those workers take vengeance on you.
> Pure artists are unaffected.
[ citation needed ]
> If you're a craftsperson, artist, writer, chef, programmer, etc who is creating for the love of creating, that's amazing. You are unaffected. Nothing under the sun can stop you from doing what you love.
You know what can? Losing your home.
> However, once you start trying to sell your creations to others, you are no longer purely an artist, you are a business, and you will be subject to the aforementioned rules of the market. Which, once again, I think are fair.
Justify to me how it's fair for a comic illustrator to lose market share to some asshole with a subscription to Midjourney. Justify to me why it's fair for copy writers to lose their jobs to ChatGPT because the results are fine. Is the broad-scale punishment for not learning to code that as software eats the world you just get to go die about it? Is that what our industry is? I thought we were in this to build a better, more efficient world, not to just privatize everyone's way to earn a living so our oligarchs could buy a 14th yacht.
This sucks.
All of #4 is trying to recast people trying desperately to cling to their mode of survival as rent seeking which is not only ethically disgusting, it's also dumb as hell.
You can recast this argument that it's only businesses losing out to AI, but it fucking isn't and you know that. It's workers who trained up for jobs and did exactly what they were told, and now their path to whatever meager way to scrape by is being automated so a handful of people who are already rich beyond fucking belief can be slightly richer.
Fuck this whole thing.
Literally the only people benefitting from AI are the rich assholes who are investing in it, who then get to scrape a tiny amount of money off of everything it writes, draws, and otherwise farts out for people who also transparently do not want to become skilled themselves. It robs workers of their ability to earn a living, it's widely regarded as shit to consume which makes the consumers experience worse and platforms already struggling to filter all the stupid garbage out have to now solve that too. Literally just a tax on everyone and everything on the internet, paid to people already unfathomably rich, because fuck you.
That's an arbitrary and irrelevant difference. Proof: if a future society upgraded human brains to have the same power as AI, would you then consider it to be immoral and illegal for humans to witness the works and creations of others? No, you would certainly not, as that would be ridiculous. Or take the inverse: it's illegal to use a copy machine to mass copy and distribute somebody else's work, but should it be legal for a human to do this by hand, since humans are massively slower than a copy machine? No, it shouldn't, both should be illegal.
These examples prove the point that ability/capability/skill are non-factors in assessing the morality and legality of copyright infringement.
> Fuck capitalism and fuck the corporations playing it's game. I don't give a fuck if OpenAI makes a billion trillion dollars or not. I give a fuck whether or not people can continue earning money so they can not freeze to death.
Capitalism and the competitive market have created more prosperity and taken more people out of the cold than any other economic system in history. So either you don't actually care about people's well-being, or you're simply ignorant of the effects of capitalism on human prosperity. I suspect it's the latter since you're 100% focused on only a small slice of what's occurring when competition/disruption occur (incumbents lose profits) and 0% focused on everything else (consumers win en masse as things get cheaper and more abundant, new business opportunities are created, new players increase their profits).
Essentially you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. By trying to do do the shorted-sighted "humanitarian" thing to protect the profits/livelihoods of a small number of incumbents, you're sacrificing the massive benefits for everyone else.
I would hope if we all had brains powered by AI we would recognize how stupid the game we're playing is and end it already, do away with the notion of money as a whole, and just set about living good lives, since that's what AI itself largely suggests we do. However, if this extremely tenuous metaphor is be executed as is presented, if indeed a human could look at a Rembrandt, and subseqently produce 9 copies of it per minute, no, viewing it shouldn't be illegal, but selling the copies absolutely should and would be.
Like if you just want to obsessively generate AI art and... idk, staple it to your wall? That's not illegal, nor even unethical. You don't need to generate it either, you can just print things, and have them.
> Or take the inverse: it's illegal to use a copy machine to mass copy and distribute somebody else's work, but should it be legal for a human to do this by hand, since humans are massively slower than a copy machine? No, it shouldn't, both should be illegal.
No shit.
> Capitalism and the competitive market have created more prosperity and taken more people out of the cold than any other economic system in history.
It also starves 25,000 people to death per day.
there is no guarantee this will continue to be true forever
I don't see how capitalism survives in a future where nearly all humans are redundant
it will be feudalism, not capitalism