I.e., when challenged, defenders of concept assert the safer, easy to defend definition
In reality the actual meaning of the concept is practiced
A lot of the time though, people are pretty innocent and just don't know that there is literature behind these things. They just think equity always means some ideal they hold in their heads. And they'll see egregious examples of it being exercised and think "that's not real equity!" when in reality, it is, and "real equity" is not defined by their understanding of it, but by some academic literature that ultimately guides the implementation/practice at the high levels.
Using this logic, every writer who has learned to read and write by reading books, or every artist who improved their craft by studying works, or every musician who learned the piano by practicing pieces, is also "stealing" in whatever they "originally" create due to learning via pattern recognition "tiny pieces of every work" in their data set. It's ridiculous to compare agents that generalize well to "stealing" pieces of the works they used to learn the generalizations. Obviously if an artist memorizes a painting in their data set and reproduces it, or an AI spits out the exact image instead of original works based on what it has learned, then that is theft. But generalization is not theft. At least in my view. To assume otherwise leads to some very dysfunctional logical conclusions
I think this is a fallacy that I see a lot in recent AI discussions. An LLM is not the same as a human brain. You might see some superficial similarities in both being able to produce a block of text, but the method by which the text is produced is entirely different. For example, we can't download entire libraries of books instantly to our brains and then reproduce those books word for word in memory. Things that operate at different scales and by different methods should have different regulations, in the same way a bike or a car is regulated differently from a truck or another piece of heavy machinery.
Also, humans can be, and often are, found liable for copyright infringement or for piracy depending on how they conduct themselves. If a human was to reproduce a copyrighted book word for word, that would consist of copyright infringement regardless of whether it was done by rote memory, by copy and paste, or assisted by a black box LLM. Even if a human paraphrases another work they can still be found guilty of plagiarism if the paraphrase is still overly similar to the original source material. A human can also be guilty of copyright infringement if they use a copyright work as source material in certain ways. If I steal a stock image without paying for a license and add it in my Photoshop collage, I might be found to have pirated or infringed on the original image creator's property.
LLMs are trained on copyright data and can often reproduce that copyright data. It's an open question how we regulate this.
I personally think it would be fair for an artist or author to say their work was not licensed to be used in training a neural net or otherwise request to opt out.
> For example, we can't download entire libraries of books instantly to our brains and then reproduce those books word for word in memory.
Yeah. Nobody's talking about word-for-word duplication here.
> If a human was to reproduce a copyrighted book word for word...
Again?
> Even if a human paraphrases another work they can still be found guilty of plagiarism if the paraphrase is still overly similar to the original source material.
Go look up the dictionary definition of plagiarism. Notice the most crucial element, which you seem to have omitted here, and also notice that it's irrelevant to AI systems, which overtly acknowledge that they exist to generate derivative works.
> If I steal a stock image without paying for a license
Here's another version of your "word-for-word" analogy, which nobody else is talking about.
> I personally think it would be fair for an artist or author to say their work was not licensed to be used in training a neural net or otherwise request to opt out.
I am genuinely curious: how do you propose to enforce this?
Another humans are special and different argument.
Consider an inevitable AGI with autonomy and no ties to a corporate. Can it not learn and write text whether in conversation, creatively or academically? If it's held to the same copyright laws that humans are then of course it's fine, in my mind. Hell, AI will be _better_ at avoiding infringing on others as they can store so much knowledge and process new knowledge (searching the internet for similar works) than humans are at infringing.
If this is still a problem then doesn't this just boil down to racism against the machine?
> LLMs ... can often reproduce that copyright data. It's an open question how we regulate this.
why isn't existing copyright protection sufficient to regulate this? Photoshop can be used today to reproduce copyrighted data just as well.
This has nothing to do with "license to train". I do not believe existing copyright holders have this right granted to them by law - it is a right that is given to society for all works.
An artist learning a style, and producing another piece in the same style, is allowed today. This should be allowed, regardless of whether it is done via using an AI, or via years of training.
Using your logic, I could learn to read a book by saving each sentence to my database. Then, when requested by someone else, I could regurgitate the book sentence by sentence from my db. And also charge the person for it.
Before we can agree on anything, we have to define what qualifies a human as any of those things. We will be here all night debating that.
- "They call themselves an artist but they are not that good."
- "Copying and pasting shell scripts in a terminal does not a software developer make."
- "The story that writer created is yet another permutation of <insert tale as old as time>"
You see what I mean? There is a good probability that today alone a significant percentage of content you saw online was AI generated and you were non-the-wiser and thought nothing of it.
I see what you mean but i think we are digressing. A human has certain rights while a machine doesnt. If we give ai learning rights then who’s to say a database is not like a human memorising things at a highly accurate level and as such we should make databases not liable for the storage of any copyrighted material. I dont mind ai generating code or art as long as that code and art it was trained on is not our publicly available but licensed work. Eager to try an ai trained against microsoft’s source code. After all, it would be like a human that worked at microsoft and hopped to a better job.
> I dont mind ai generating code or art as long as that code and art it was trained on is not our publicly available but licensed work.
It sounds good but mandating this will be death of AI in the west. This is relatively unprecedented situation where the use of copyrighted works actually helps you build tools useful for doing work. Training on DeviantArt makes the AI better at Photoshop-esque tasks.
Any country that doesn't implement this restriction will immediately be able to produce smarter more useful AIs.
> we should make databases not liable for the storage of any copyrighted material
I think this would actually be allowed right now legally speaking. That's basically a library or Google Cache. The hypothetical database wouldn't expected to be super useful because you can't "perform" any of the works outside of fair-use cases but it's up
in the air of running inferences on that data (Google snippets) or training AI is a performance.
It isn't now, but as we approach an inevitable singularity, whether it's in 100 years or 1000 years, what then?
Are we gonna fall prey to the scifi trope of "let's all be racist to machines", if so then I wouldn't hold it against AGIs to fall prey to the scifi trope of "I am gonna b evil now, bye bye humans".
If the output is indistinguishable, how can this matter? If I publish a work, how can it be copyright infringement when generated by AI, but not if I came up with the exact same output myself?
Makes sense. If you're a genius in a country of people who make worse decisions (IQ/culture/other), you may ne worse off than an average person in a country with an average average decision making level
If folks where actually skeptical of the paper, you would think they would provide some evidence to back up their thought process, based on experiences from academia, or a study of crowd movement in relation to race that shows contrary evidence to the paper itself, instead of saying they can imagine the possibility of bias.
I mean I can picture an evil cabal of racists who purposefully show up in discussions like this to purposefully sow fear, uncertainty and doubt. Is that the level of HN discourse?
The ability to imagine something isn't evidence of it's existence, nor is it healthy skepticism.
So essentially, his assertion that academia is systemically bias, can only be proven through:
>Experience in academia
>Papers, which you can only get money to work on full time through academia
Seems convenient.
Looking at the paper itself it found evidence of both a gender bias (either ingroup/outgroup or against men) and a racial bias (either ingroup/outgroup or against blacks). It notably, did not censor any facts about this gender bias, and instead published them in full. In the discussion however, it discussed these two facts with overwhelming bias, treating the observed racial bias with the utmost seriousness while not discussing the observed gender bias at all.
I think there's grounds to be sceptical of anything academia says on politically charged topics.
The point of the parent's example was to criticize the picturing of random technically possible but bad things about people you disagree with. They are specifically saying that it would be silly to make the exact claim that you are accusing them of making.
I am worried we are currently headed down a similar terrible path.
In another thread about Ireland's new law to jail people for "hateful content" on their personal devices, when I said that I believed future measures could go further, sliding towards mass murder, due to the ideologues believing hate speech is literally violence and genocide (because the logical conclusion is to then allow violence to be used to stop the ill defined "hate speech"), I got 1 comment supporting consequences for free speech, citing the common anti-free-speech strawman "you are wrong in that free speech doesn't have consequences" and another comment supporting "the removal of bigots from society, violently if necessary" [1]
Read it for yourself, maybe I am misinterpreting it? I don't want to feed into some culture war flame war thing, but this is extremely disturbing to me. It's not about the comments, it is about the underlying beliefs of these ideologues in power, and the logical conclusion of their beliefs. Historically, it seems to me that peoples' behavior can be predicted by taking their beliefs to their logical conclusions.
I believe you are correct, but I would encourage you to not worry. Instead put it in God's hands to be your protector.
There is only one solution to "hate speech" and that is not making it taboo and subjecting it to censure. The solution is more better speech. That being said one must define "hate" and it's opposite corollary, love. The modern misconception is love is nice. That has and always will be incorrect. Love is not nice, but love is kind. Kindness will always warn a person away from destruction, even if they don't like or welcome it. Hate is "nice" to the person that hates and only tolerates a person. It does not hold inherent value in the person but only in their status and ability to serve the desires of the hater.
Warning others in kindness and love can only be achieved when our speech is free.
Well stated. I will try not to worry about this and to trust God. It makes sense that that would be the antidote to that which is caused by a lack of God. Thank you.
Rwanda's dictatorship relies on accusing everyone who disagrees with Kagame of being genocide deniers or planning genocide. In the end, hate speech/bullying laws becomes lèse majesté; it's the introduction of thoughtcrime. It ain't for the sake of minorities.
The Overton window will go further than that due to the beliefs of the ideologues pushing to remove "hate speech". They believe that hate speech is literal violence and genocide, as bad as murder or mass murder. I posted a comment warning that this anti-hate-speech legislation may go further as time goes by, towards killing of people, and even further from there, and got 1 comment supportint the "violent removal of bigots from society". These people believe you are committing genocide with your words, why wouldn't we expect them to act as if they actually are preventing genocide?
Here is the comment, before they change or delete it:
Tanjreeve 8 hours ago | parent | next [–]
Society might be a fair amount improved if we had a strategy where we aimed to remove bigots, violently if necessary. What value do they actually bring?
(At the time of me posting this comment, the only replies were the one above and another supporting hate speech laws and citing a common anti free speech strawman along the lines of "you are wrong that your free speech does not mean freedom from consequences")
