It’s not “theft of labor”; the work was already done. If anything it is theft of “intellectual property” (aka “copyright infringement”), if you believe that is a thing, but not of the “labor” that went into it.
My personal take: anyone producing content, everyone’s creativity, is fed by something that others did before. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants composed of previous generations and their “content’s” distribution and dissemination. I have an immense gratitude for all the labor before me that I was and am allowed to partake; without that, I would be nothing. Sharing information is an act of love; gatekeeping it is short-sighted greed. New technologies have always “killed” previous “labor”, out of which new opportunity grows. I just wished the collected data was public. I hope we all get a mega-leak at some point.
That's the entire contention here. It's a double standard. Companies will sue the living hell out of anyone taking their IP, whether it's code or art, yet they have no qualms taking all the data they need from anyone and everyone. It was already a problem before, i.e. artists getting paid very little for work that companies profit a lot from like musicians or digital artists, but now with AI it's on steroids.
I agree. The double standard is the problem. People have been imprisoned for IP theft, but when these companies commit IP theft on the grandest scale ever imaginable, they're rewarded with trillion dollar IPOs. Either IP isn't protected, or it is. Legislators need to pick a lane. Right now it appears that poor people go to prison, and rich people get rewarded.
IP does not protect the little guy. This is nothing new. Draw a picture and then people start putting it on t-shirts and posters without paying you? Great, you can't do anything about it unless you have enough time and money to hire a lawyer to go after them. Self publish a book and then people start uploading PDFs of it? Better hope your real passion is filing takedown requests instead of writing.
AI training is the clearest example yet that companies are allowed to get away with what is treated as a serious crime only when an individual does it. There are many more examples of this, of course, but this one seems to be the most stark and obvious.
Other companies have no qualms about distilling the first. Let's hop on gear and get the market to deliver a distilled Fable that runs on a smartwatch. Sooner is better.
I think the difference is that the companies are dumping billions of dollars into transforming that data into something useful, so they would like a return on their profits. Opening up the models for free is not a good business model if you want to make money.
I think the difference is that people are investing significant amounts of time, effort, and money into transforming their work into something useful, so naturally they would like some return on that investment. Giving away that work for free is not a particularly good business model if those people expect to be compensated for the value they create.
I sort of agree, and i think strengtening IP Law is probably not great. But I do think it's very fucked that building generative ai is only possible by taking the works of countless artists and craftspeople and then the model produced from that data immediately gets deployed to destroy the careers of the people whose, work was vital to it being created, without compensation for them, while making a few evil nerds richer than god. I think if you work at one of these labs you owe an enormous debt to society and your earnings should be redistributed among it.
> I think if you work at one of these labs you owe an enormous debt to society and your earnings should be redistributed among it.
Now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s start with redistributing the profits from AI companies and then move on to all profits from all companies because the logic is the same.
Nope. You are making one or both of these mistakes. (1) Overlooking that the same logic can lead to different outcomes depending on the premises to which the logic is applied. (2) Overlooking that real life is analog, not digital, and so thinking the premises are the same when they are not.
The targeted outcome is the redistribution of wealth away from the capital class to the working class. Capitalist exploitation of labor was analog to begin with, and the same premise does apply: the capital class absorbs the fruits of labor, training, and education that is performed by the masses in order to enrich themselves. The capital class owes a tremendous debt to society and if they don't plan on paying we should plan to seize it.
The exploitation of labor has has a tremendous negative impact on the environment and the health of humans. Recall that it took dragging the factory bosses from their and beating them to death to get an 8 hour work day, a weekend, and restrictions on child labor.
We can do it the easy way —- government redistribution of excess profits — or we can do it the hard way. I suspect the people in charge won’t realize they could have taken the easy way until it’s too late.
Pretty sure we had to sanction/assassinate/goad into self-destructive military campaigns the Red Terror to beat it. And even then, the major survivor still beat us to cyberpunk dystopia (the cool one with hologram skyscrapers, not the uncool one with decaying suburbs).
There’s a difference between an individual creating something and the industrialization of creation. You can’t scale the creation of a single person 1000000x by the snap of a finger but you can with machines. This has severe implications.
The key problem is that IP is either proprietary to the creator or it is a commons type of situation.
Even if you agree with the former exploiting the commons for personal profit is... not good.
One could make the argument that if these LLMs were all open weight it would be okay, but to keep the result of the training private and proprietary is not fair.
Unfortunately in the real world there’s this thing called money, and we exchange it for goods and services. The reason information isn’t free is because it costs time to produce it and people need to be fed.
If you believe that a creator doesn’t need to consent and doesn’t deserve credit or compensation for their work, then you’re likely not someone who has many fundamental needs unmet
These AI companies actively chose not to get consent from creators and earn billions from their content with no compensation.
IIUC, the question at hand is: does training require a special, separate, license or can you legally acquire a work and then use it for training?
I.E. Anthropic can not pirate a bunch of books and then use those for training, but it can legally purchase the same books and then use those purchased books for training.
> In the past, but today fewer people are getting paid less this way.
There has never been more content creators making a living off their content than there is today. Look no further than these enormous platforms with ad rev sharing options for contributors producing UGC.
> Would you rather resurrect IP law, or find some new way to pay creators, then finish killing it?
Uploading content online and getting a cut of ad revenue fits this criteria, no?
The idea that we would scrap IP law and rewrite it from scratch is the very definition of tossing the baby out with the bathwater, IMO.
> There has never been more content creators making a living off their content than there is today. Look no further than these enormous platforms with ad rev sharing options for contributors producing UGC.
And you think anyone is actually making a living this way? It's one of the most extreme winner-take-all markets, even worse than sports and music. Top .1% maybe can live off it, everyone else also has an actual job that pays the bills.
> It’s not “theft of labor”; the work was already done. If anything it is theft of “intellectual property” (aka “copyright infringement”), if you believe that is a thing, but not of the “labor” that went into it.
If you cross out "intellectual" from these sentences, isn't this just the dichotomy of actual workers as living labor vs capital as dead labor?
Taking the original of a painting from your house is stealing. Copying is only potentially violating the government-granted limited-time exclusivity that allows you to decide who can copy your work.
BTW I hereby allow you or your browser to copy this comment into your computer’s RAM.
It's telling that you need to fall back to non-creative information in your argument.
Clearly we're talking about the labor of creating a written or visual work, not the contents of your ram. I did not use the word copy either. My interpretation of the parent comment is that it was rationalizing by claiming all creativity is not fully original and therefore must have no rights.
Extrapolated further, this is a collapse of creative works as a profession.
"There are naïve questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question". (Carl Sagan)
Just because you don’t seem to be interested in the answer - then don’t read it? - doesn’t make the question wrong.
What do you find strange about trying to protect against tampering and theft?
I find it strange how little people seem to care these days and just widely share their users and company data across clouds. Plenty of supply chain attacks to learn from.
the content is written by a group of autistics and displays characteristic lack of social situational awareness, i.e. it's tone-deaf as to how it will be recieved. It comes off as extremely pretentious, bordering even on megalomaniacal (it's a "manifesto" after all - something typically left to serial killers, unabomber types, and bond villains...)
They are now flagged as a terrorist group by the federal gov. So, I wasn't speaking hyperbole.
I’m trying to follow your position, but I need more context to understand which elements of the text made you form that opinion. All I read is a list of personal judgments; nothing that helps me or anyone to argue over them.
“Antifa has…” is like saying “Nerds have” or “Hackers have”. It is really only a broad label, either assigned by one self or by others. I know people who are strictly against any violence and still proud to use Antifa “branding”. Others wouldn’t want to be called Antifa but are called that by others.
You are a HN user. Saying “HN users have enacted physical violence” and implying it is all of them is just utter bs.
Fascists are just against the rule of law. They designed a multi tiered system where they have more rights than the one they judge inferior. An antifascist is someone who fights against fascists, either violently or, more often, through documenting of fascist groups, taking pictures and counter protesting.
I am not a Bluesky user, but it looks like it actually serves a privacy-preserving purpose here - whether the person is following the account or not. Were it not for the name of the module, I wouldn’t see any nefarious action here.
That said, operating systems should turn this into a user choice, and present a dialog to select the “protected” version or not.
It’s not “theft of labor”; the work was already done. If anything it is theft of “intellectual property” (aka “copyright infringement”), if you believe that is a thing, but not of the “labor” that went into it.
My personal take: anyone producing content, everyone’s creativity, is fed by something that others did before. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants composed of previous generations and their “content’s” distribution and dissemination. I have an immense gratitude for all the labor before me that I was and am allowed to partake; without that, I would be nothing. Sharing information is an act of love; gatekeeping it is short-sighted greed. New technologies have always “killed” previous “labor”, out of which new opportunity grows. I just wished the collected data was public. I hope we all get a mega-leak at some point.
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