It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.

It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.

At least the Chinese AI companies are doing good service open-sourcing their models back to the public.

There are no open-source LLMs. There are only downloadable LLMs, with no source for the model being provided. The source for the training and inference programs is not the source for the model itself, which would be the training set, training program, and random seeds.

Has it affected DD as deeply as it as affected software engineering? Guessing clients feel a lot more "empowered" or "independent" and knowledgeable these days? I liked doing DD, just as much as I enjoyed developing, but it must be dying a slow death too. What's changed in how DD reports are produced?

What is DD supposed to mean?

Nit: Please don’t use obscure acronyms when writing things to an international audience without defining them first… DD can mean so many different things

Due diligence — pretty standard acronym in this community.

It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up

Would regulation help with that? Right now you can download free models that have been trained on that "stolen" data.

With regulation and compensation, only rich companies would be able to do that, and they would definitely not give it back for free. I put "stolen" in quotation marks because it's still unclear if we can call that stealing. Nobody would say a human reading a book and learning from it is stealing. I'm not saying that a machine doing the same is equivalent, but the only thing I am sure of is that I am not sure we can call it "stealing".

With regulation and compensation, only rich companies would be able to do that

Well, with some imagination, you can have regulation that forces companies to open up, not just close down.

Imagine a law that stipulates that if you want to offer "LLM-inference-as-a-service", you need to also publish exact details about how it was trained, what datasets were used and also offer those exact weights for download.

Sure, this would never happen, but just offering another perspective on how laws and regulation can be used if it was wanted, locking stuff down and pulling up the ladder behind you isn't the only way to use laws, although that is a very popular reason and approach.

I am unclear how this would help anyone?

Any argument that writers and artists lose from these existing, would remain unchanged.

We don’t have to treat people reading books and companies stealing all human knowledge the same.

Also, companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves. I don’t believe any of these companies have paid for all the books they have trained on.

companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves

really not the same entities here

No, but why should we accept they get away with it? Also Microsoft has definitely sued people for pirating windows and now collaborates with OpenAI and uses their ai trained on stolen materials.

Morally speaking, one of the issues of modern society is the idea that knowledge should be free which was partially started by the file sharing movement, which didn't really move society in the right direction imo.

Free means the same as worthless, which inherently isn't true - since information takes time to consume in some form, and your time isn't worthless. Therefore even if you could listen to all songs theoretically for free, you would need to spend an inordinate time doing that.

When I was a kid, getting a CD from your favourite band was a major expense, getting a video game even more so. But it formed a sort of emotional attachment (and not even just for me), my friends talked about how 'band X''s new album was amazing or a stinker. Since there were multiple bands making similar kinds of music, choosing to be a fan of one but not the other carried real monetary weight.

Nowadays you just fish out a song you think you would like out of the endless sea of Spotify, no different from prompting an LLM. No, Spotify didn't make me enjoy music more.

Same applies for Steam & videogames.

Therefore I think the ritualistic act of paying money to get access to something does have a purpose. It inherently establishes the value of information to you, makes it an investment that you need to recoup by using it. I'm sure most musicians would trade a million fans who might check them out if they're in town, to ones who think their music changed their perspective in life.

Also the process of creating a song that vaguely appeals to millions is different from making one that speaks to a thousand.

This is a fundamental issue of modern capitalistic society, similar to the Marxist idea of 'alienation' - once something is cheap to get, you don't appreciate the effort that went into making it. And if your customers don't care about the thing they get, producers won't make an effor to make it good either.

And once nobody cares, people even forget what a quality product is like.

We don’t have to treat people reading books and companies stealing all human knowledge the same.

We don't. People engaging in piracy have their lives ruined, companies engaging in piracy pay a tiny fraction of their revenues out to authors who can't legally outgun them.

(Sorry, I just wanted to air the juxtaposition as clearly as possible, I sense we are actually in agreement)

companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever

One's world cannot be so drawn in crayon that "companies" is a useful level of detail with something like that. There's no irony in two totally different companies (one of which was actually an industry body, the RIAA) doing two totally different things.

Does ones world view get upgraded to oil paint if one acknowledges that it's the same class of people - and in many cases literally the same people, PE firms and family offices - profiting from 2000s era record industry profits and on the hook for / in line to profit from Open AI, Anthropic and the rest if they IPO?

No, for obvious reasons. "acknowledging" implies it's a self-evident truth that people are just refusing to see as such, when it just isn't. Completely different companies - in fact one is the Recording Industry Association of America, an industry body that exists to protect the IP of artists for the mutual benefit of artists and publishers.

While it's seductive to carve the world up into goodies and baddies, it doesn't make it true.

Also, companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves.

So whose viewpoint is right here? Is downloading theft or not? These arguments always boil down to "it's fine when I do it, but wrong when a company does."

I don’t believe any of these companies have paid for all the books they have trained on.

Did you miss the "book burning" hysteria from a couple weeks ago? These companies have been trying to digitize copyrighted materials legally, in which copyright law demands destruction of the original, and people shit on them even harder.

It's clearly not a problem for these companies to buy the books they need for training, and they have been doing that in crazy high volumes. Lots of good training materials simply cannot be legally purchased though, and should those parts of human knowledge just be ignored?

Culture robbery is not limited to AI. Any big concert for example is capitalismed to hell. So are neighborhoods. Where you used to have people just living, now you have an intentionally designed facade for people to live within. There was a comment on the 40C3 thread saying it's got too capitalist because of the ticket cost, and idk about that because it's always been hosted in commercial venues to my knowledge, but the vibe of the conference and the club itself are much less rebel than they used to be. Stuff like Burning Man now exists for people like Elon to go there and say "I was at Burning Man" and for people to get T-shirts saying "I was at Burning Man" and photos of themselves being at Burning Man more than for whatever the first few ones were about.

The what thread, now? Got a link instead?

Well theres at least two different buckets of this.

First is the scraping of the open internet.

The second is the paywall bypassing, YouTube audio recording, and pirated content training that the labs have basically admitted to in one form or another.

Content from both gets served back to us, in exchange for watching ads/paying a subscription/paying tokens.

The second is more immediately hypocritical because they are license/copyright/DMCA violations that the little guy could get sued for while the labs get $2T valuations for. The automation of crime at scale, which is a common VC pattern.

Nobody would say a human reading a book and learning from it is stealing. I'm not saying that a machine doing the same is equivalent, but the only think I am sure of is that I am not sure we can call it "stealing".

It is stealing. A human paid for the book, compensated the author and learnt from it. The machine DID NOT pay for the book, DID NOT compensate the author and still learnt from it anyways.

We need to define machine in terms of "human-power"... much the same as how we already define automobiles via "horse-power". A single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 chip, for example, delivers roughly 35.58 teraflops of standard computing power (via 10,496 CUDA cores). That means 35.58 trillion calculations every second. In comparison, a mathematically trained human being, taking their time to solve a complex, multi-digit decimal division problem by hand takes roughly 100 to 120 seconds. That gives the human 0.01 flops. To match RTX 3090, you would need 3.56 quadrillion people working/learning in perfect sync. We can use a calculation similar to this to derive metrics on how much is being stolen for "learning/training" these models. The loot can be quantified.

EDIT: The reason I am comparing chip computation to human-power is because the authors of those digital works intended their works to only be read by humans. Not by some alien species (even if it be made of silicon) that incorporated their work into producing models.

So naturally the price should be determined based on this new species capabilities. I would not sell my software license for the same price to an Enterprise the size of Google that I would sell to a fellow developer. I price my product appropriately. With this entry of a new alien specie authors would need to have different tiers for them. Since these chips can train on petabytes of data and create models in a matter of days/weeks/months, it is obviously not comparable to a human being who has the capacity to ingest maybe 1-5 books a month at most. So the payout has to be different too.

The multiplication comparison makes no sense because humans don’t learn by multiplying numbers to change weights. It’s like comparing the lubrication oil consumption of a car to the cooking oil consumption of a human to compare the carrying capacity. That’s an implementation detail inside the GPU and doesn’t let you compare how much they learn. Otherwise, a human would learn much less in their whole life than a GPU does in one second.

That’s an implementation detail inside the GPU and doesn’t let you compare how much they learn.

The same applies to "horse-power". Yet we have no issue making the comparison anyways and HP has become an industry standard. I don't understand why we have to bend-over backwards when it comes to humans being exploited by AI companies.

The same applies to "horse-power". Yet we have no issue making the comparison anyways and HP has become an industry standard.

Yeah, which is why it's only used to compare cars etc. among each other. Nobody would calculate the equivalence of a car to a horse using their HP rating because a horse doesn't even have 1 HP. They have more or less depending on the task you're doing. It was a marketing thing at the time to make steam engines look good.

In france, cars are taxed by their engine power. Do you think pedestrians walking on the sidewalk should be taxed according to their power on an ergometer too?

Do you not see that different things need to be handled differently before the law and just taking an arbitrary measure that you can technically apply to both doesn't capture the situation?

It was a marketing thing at the time to make steam engines look good.

Except it is actually taxed based on HP in various countries. Austria, Belgium, Spain, Italy use engine horsepower to levy annual car taxes.

In france, cars are taxed by their engine power. Do you think pedestrians walking on the sidewalk should be taxed according to their power on an ergometer too?

Citizens are paying taxes for betterment of roads irrespective of whether they own vehicles or not. In India, betterment charges are collected for construction/maintenance of roads if you own land. Property tax collected every year has a certain allocation for maintenance/upkeep of roads. Apart from that, money from direct and indirect tax collections are allocated for roads upkeep as well. It just is done indirectly rather than a direct road tax if you have vehicles (road tax is actually an extra tax you pay APART from taxes you already pay for upkeep/maintenance of roads).

Do you not see that different things need to be handled differently before the law and just taking an arbitrary measure that you can technically apply to both doesn't capture the situation?

Except in your own examples it can easily be shown that it is not handled differently. Some countries use HP while others use CC. But end of the day, they use some measurement to determine taxes to be paid. It is not free.

EDIT: Do you not see that different things need to be handled differently before the law and just taking an arbitrary measure that you can technically apply to both doesn't capture the situation?

To answer this in more detail: HP/CC and all other measurements were created to equalize with human specific metrics. Bridges, for example, have safety measured based on how much weight it can sustain at any given time (called load limit). Weight, in this specific case, is an equalizing measurement (it can be in tonnes, kN, PSF, Pa etc). A bridge can hold ten thousand humans or thousand trucks. You can argue that a "human" may not weigh 100 kgs or a truck may not weigh exactly 1 ton. That's fine. It is a rough approximate to equalize unequal entities.

"It is stealing. A human paid for the book, compensated the author and learnt from it."

I went to the library. Didn't pay a cent.

Now what?

Library paid the authors.

Didn't pay a cent.

Taxpayers did pay on your behalf by funding the Library via the Government (if Library is public).

Nothing is free. Except ofcourse stealing, which is free.

Do you not think that stealing requires the original owner to lose access?

If I sneak into your home, take apart the coffee machine, measure everything, put it back together and go home and build a copy to have my own, did I steal your coffee machine?

Can we not just stick to calling it copyright infringement?

Sunshine, air, wind, gravity, radioactivity, public domain, knowledge passed on

I would not classify sunshine and air as "free". Sunshine requires the Sun to undergo continuous fusion. It is invaluable as opposed to "free". Air is invaluable asset too. Without both we would be dead. The price of both is literally price of my being alive every second of my existence.

Public domain on the other hand is legally only possible if/when copyright has expired. That means the owner has enjoyed proceeds from copyright protection for more than his own lifetime. That is fair. It is still not comparable.

EDIT: since you tacked on more like "wind, gravity, radioactivity" etc, I would still not classify them as "free". They are invaluable to very existence of life.

"Knowledge passed on" is also after someone (in ancestry) has paid for it through blood, sweat and tears. It isn't "free". "Public domain" is legally recognized form of "knowledge passed on".

EDIT: The reason I am comparing chip computation to human-power is because the authors of those digital works intended their works to only be read by humans. Not by some alien species (even if it be made of silicon) that incorporated their work into producing models.

News to me. That would be incredibly xenophobic of them if they did, and deserves to be called out.

News to me. That would be incredibly xenophobic of them if they did, and deserves to be called out.

What do you mean? Xenophobia does not mean what you think it means, especially so in this context. Also, every creator/producer of content has rights on who/what has access to his/her produced work. It is not xenophobia. And it is definitely not xenophobic to call out stealing of copyrighted works.

EDIT: Let me clarify this further. A recent court ruling (in US) established that ONLY humans can be authors of copyrightable works. As a consequence of that assertion, it can be safely concluded that consumers of the copyrightable work MUST ONLY be humans as well. Else it would be, using your own words, "xenophobic" against humans to have their copyrightable works be consumed by any species (other than humans) while the reverse is not recognized by Law.

https://www.reinhartlaw.com/news-insights/only-humans-can-be...

A recent court ruling (in US) established that ONLY humans can be authors of copyrightable works. As a consequence of that assertion, it can be safely concluded that consumers of the copyrightable work MUST ONLY be humans as well.

That does not follow in any reasonable way.

Break up the multi trillion, multifaceted companies into the their separate facets. These companies all thrived on far significant smaller portfolios in the past. Cap the size a company can grow. Regulate the amount of compute they are allowed to use.

sell it back to us at a mark-up.

What if it was for free, like Wikipedia?

Crimes this large are crimes against humanity.

jfc no, sit down.

Try doing something about the actual evil shit like arms manufacturers and the politicians ordering the deaths and misery of millions from the comfort of their couch.

At this point in our civilization, all human knowledge NEEDS to be collated in one place and easily queryable. Otherwise it's just too damn difficult to make any further progress at the edge of our understanding; there's just too much shit for one person to learn "manually" (wait I'm not advocating for low-effort slop, chill)

It's helping common folk who wanted to do something but didn't know where to start, while legacy search engines increasingly lead to spam, shallow knowledge or outright predatory shit (ofc AI could go this way too)

  Example:

Not long ago I had the misfortune of becoming interested in some WarHammer 40K lore. Most of the links led to Fandom (the enshittification of Wikia) and that place is a cesspool of obnoxious ads.

That content was written by unpaid volunteers. Should Fandom keep profiting from their work for perpetuity? Should I not be able to get the gist of what the heck a Qoiazrjirnowerx@# is without wasting my mortal lifespan on a horrible website?

Or, if I need to ask something peculiar, should I post on Reddit or StackOverflow or HN and wait for someone to see it and deem to give a sufficient answer, only to have a pricky mod decide that the question doesn't "fit" the community?

God hell no, if you don't know how much bullshit AI could eliminate for the silent majority then you were probably part of that bullshit.

(that's a general "you" for whomever was fine with the status quo and not a personal insult @ anybody)

If you see something you dislike increasing in popularity but can't figure out why, it's probably because a lot of people were sick of the way things used to work but their complaints were ignored by the people who now find themselves disrupted.

Defending the same entities getting large DoD contracts to use AI for killing?

Copying data isn't a crime.

Agreed, but now they're trying to stop other people from copying data so that they can be the sole gatekeepers of humanities collective knowledge.

Owning ideas with copyright and patents is what separates the United States from communism.

The first time a saw a documentary about Tetris it really hit me what communism is -- nobody owned anything they invented or created. [0] It was a long time ago and I remember feeling sad watching the story. In the Soviet Union, a group of ~15 people, Politburo, controlled everything including any thought written to paper.

It is this one line, Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8, that separates the United States from the disaster that was the Soviet Union:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

I don't think it is far fetched to call ignoring and disregarding the Copyright Clause a communist revolution, violent or not. That is the one thing the communists -- there have been many over the years inside the United States -- would change to make the United States a communist country.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris#Spread_beyond_the_Sovie...

In a communist society there is no profit (or incentive for), thus no need for copyright laws.

It's not abolishing copyrights that would turn the US into a commie country, communism is about abolishing private ownership to the means of production.

Well it's worth reading the linked wiki article section, which includes a link to another article "Copyright law of the Soviet Union", flatly contradicting you unless you maintain that the USSR wasn't truly communist.

The USSR was a socialist state, which is different.

In the United State, the individual or corporation owns the invention. In the Soviet Union the state automatically owned the invention. That clause is what ensures private ownership.

The clause is what ensures profits from market sales or licensing of ideas go to the creator.

Removing (or ignoring in the case of AI companies) that clause in the US Constitution is what abolishes private ownership.

It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.

This is such a brain-dead take. By that logic there could never be any kind of AI, because unlike a human it'd be completely forbidden from learning from the sources of knowledge from which humans learn. It's stupid to suggest silicon brains should not legally be able to read copyrighted material just because you hate bigcos and capitalism.

Learning isn't stealing, regardless of whether it's done by a human or a machine. By your logic someone reading and memorizing all somebody's life work is appropriation; completely inane.

You're ignoring that there are options other than theft. Heard of buying things?

Learning isn’t stealing, but if you’d set up a forum or hotline where paid staff would answer questions and write essay directly based on NYT content without a license for that content, that would probably be deemed illegal.

It is the largest democratization of knowledge that ever happened.

The 'sell it back to us' argument falls short in my view.

Free versions are abundant, and in some time useful models will ship preinstalled on all mobile phones.

The comment here seems incredibly pessimistic and quite dramatical.

Free versions are abundant,

Awesome, can I make my own competitive LLM, just like I can make my own open source software?

and in some time useful models will ship preinstalled on all mobile phones.

Considering hardware prices, that "some time" is doing super heavy lifting. It could be 10-15+ years before that happens and the local LLM is actually useful. Most people don't see hardware prices declining from current prices until at least 2030, likely much longer.

No. I also cannot make a competitive computer, yet can use one for my work to remain competitive.

Yes, it could take some time to arrive on phones. It is questionable if it will ever make sense compared to using a paid hosted provider.

But what are 10 years in the grand scheme of things?

Should we have scrapped it all, called it a crime against humanity, and never developed AI, because it will take a decade to disseminate the benefits to everyone?

and never developed AI, because it will take a decade to disseminate the benefits to everyone?

Yes, probably. The benefits of dissemination already existed. The internet was free. Libraries are free. You deny people basic reading and comprehension growth by giving a distilled, without thought, answer.

You say "some time in the future this might be available on our phones for free" and "what's 10 years in the grand scheme of things?"

We'll, I'll argue that in 10 years from now we may see the full damage of what doing this has done to us and I'd rather not wait for "the what's 10 years in the grand scheme of things" to playout and irreversibly damage an entire generation the way we let the unmitigated and unregulated rollout of social media do the same to the most recent generation.

The risk/reward of this technology is unproven regarding the long-term effects on developing minds. We are beta testing the bullshit dreams of a couple billionaire techbros on an entire cohort of kids and young adults.

I couldn't disagree more.

What I expect to see in 10 years is breakthroughs in science and medicine, with major diseases becoming treatable.

You can disagree, but on what basis do you think your predictions are more likely to be correct?

Humanity has turned out fine despite the invention of the book, the TV, and then social media. I reckon kids will develop just fine with AI too.

It's absurd to equate books and social media to being akin. And you're being facetious in your comments.

What if you are wrong? What are the risks vs rewards?

The main risk you have presented is a supposed negative effect on children's development. I am not convinced that there will be a negative effect at all.

On the reward side we have potentially curing most major disease, automating labor and freeing humanity from having to work for a living, as well as perhaps generally advancing science at an unprecedented pace. And of course improving education.

Wiki already democratized it just fine and was legitimately free for people who know how to read.

It's asinine that you think the sell it back to us argument falls short.

Not only does it distill our history to try to sound like some average version of us, it sounds like the blandest versions of us... And then sells this back to us.

From a coding standpoint, the tech is good and gets the job done. The pillaging of all other aspects of human history is just sad. With the only solace I'm seeing is that future training has to train on the dogshit versions of the internet that are now infected with LLM content.

Wikis made knowledge available.

Making it accessible, understandable, and usable is another matter.

How LLMs sound is not a fundamental limitation of the technology.

The current model's poor writing style and tone are currently a main focus of research and I would expect improvements there soon.

You do not have to train on anything you do not deem up to standard. This supposed poisoning of training data remains a common fantasy.

Making it accessible, understandable, and usable is another matter.

I see no evidence that this is what the use of LLMs is accomplishing for most users. Rather, they see to get distilled answers without the depth required to fully understand the response. Partially because that's what they like, and that's what the LLMs serve. Deeper understanding is not being given by LLMs. Instead, it's the SEMBLANCE of depth and laypeople don't know the difference. It's effectively eroding comprehension for some cool knowledge dopamine hit.

Cool. Then don't use LLMs and keep waiting for that prophesied "model collapse" to happen. See how that works out for you.

I'm more worried about the collapse of humanity a la idocracy. The model collapse might just be secondary. Even just conversing on HN, that's the vibe I feel we're headed towards. Or, perhaps, I'm just running into more and more posters that have financial ties to the success of LLMs.

Model collapse is an induced phenomenon, not something you'll ever see in practice. Of course naive predictions of an impending 'collapse' go back to at least GPT-3 (that's over 6 years ago), yet models continue to get smarter. And speaking of predictions, I assume you've been saying that AI is "fake" for just as long?

There are no viable free versions with sufficient computing power. The do-it-yourself AI is dangled as a carrot in front of users to camouflage the lock-in and rent seeking by Big AI. Go prove something new like Navier Stokes (replicating N-S itself no longer counts due to scraping and plagiarism) on your Mac Pro!

Paid influencers who perpetuate the open narrative are a whole new industry.

Even if there were open models, it is still IP theft and would not be "democratization" but "forced unpaid nationalization".

Works produced by AI are not copyrightable. Are they in the public domain? Can an entity sell unique works which are in the public domain?

Our "culture" has long been the province of corporations. In prior epochs it was still the product of patronage and power.

At least with LLMs we can glimpse an escape route to that which generations of humans have strived for - a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero.

Instead of fixating on a remedy that seeks to criminalize AI, maybe focus on the relatively rather achievable goal of redistributing LLM gains. Would that not be the most desirable justice? What is your alternative, and would you foreclose the future in the name of a past that never really existed in the first place?

Flourishing life? Where is your data leading to the conclusion that AI models are leading to the world populace leading a ‘flourishing life’? Are taxes on revenue of companies like OpenAI somehow being collected and turned into a UBI and I just didn’t hear about it?

I said a glimpse. I didn't say it's here now or it would be easy.

It is however, achievable. Certainly more so than engaging in the fantasy that we can criminalize LLMs out of existence. And it is likely more desirable than such an effort anyway.

Or, perhaps, the companies forming the for profit LLMs could be made to pay a license fee for the copyrighted data they lifted from behind the paywall and then used to form a for profit entity with.

Nothing about banning technology. How about enforcing DMCA and then applying a penalty for the knowing theft rather than negotiating a license?

This is solid but how many people you reckon would benefit if they paid every single penny for any copyrighted data? I am in my 50's with 30 years in the industry and I know maybe 2 people that might benefit from this... certainly not something general public would benefit from

We’re likely looking at a new world where physical and mental work from humans holds much less value.

So if the world still generates value ( think AI inventing new drugs, robots planting and harvesting fields of corn ), who is able to make income? The people who have the capital to purchase and run the systems.

So our future world probably looks like a system where effort/knowledge/skill has little to no reward and capital (e.g. inheritance, passive income) has all the reward.

So, we can have a world where you are born rich or you live in abject poverty, or we can figure out something else.

We’re likely looking at a new world where physical and mental work from humans holds much less value.

Or, perhaps, we're regressing to the mean after a century where this work was over-valued, because companies like Disney succeeded in regulatory capture and created artificial protections to maximize their own revenue.

How much money did Bach earn from royalties (ok, there's a pun there, but I mean payment for reproduction of his work)? How much power did Melville have over who published Moby Dick, and where, and how it was used (hint: very little in the US, none at all overseas).

We are seeing a weakening of control and revenue extraction from copyrighted works. But on the chart of history, the 1900's were a very anamolous spike in that area. And it saddens me that so much of HN is unhappy about more of a return to the commons.

So if the world still generates value ( think AI inventing new drugs, robots planting and harvesting fields of corn ), who is able to make income? The people who have the capital to purchase and run the systems.

On the bright side, I think you're wrong here. Or (as Claude likes to tell me), you're half-wrong. If this were true, it would already be the norm and only big companies could bring new products to market. Yet startups are a thing, and many succeed (more fail, but still.

The trick in entrepreneurship and creative work has always been knowing what to ask the system to do. You might as well say that music is dead because the synthesizer and music software companies can produce as much as they want at zero cost. It turns out that owning the means of production only loosely correlates to producing things people want.

So, we can have a world where you are born rich or you live in abject poverty, or we can figure out something else.

Already done. There are kids in Africa studying with AI tutors today, getting insight that they would likely never have had access to before. One-person shops are releasing board games and business services that they would never have had the capital to do before.

Where you see centralization of capital and control, and the masses reduced to abject poverty... I see the complete collapse of barriers to entry and switching costs in many fields.

But who am I? Some random guy. But I've heard very senior execs, at Microsoft and other companies, in absolute panic that the IP and systems they've spent billions of dollars to build over decades of work are suddenly subject to disruption by teenagers who are great at using AI. Seriously, panic.

It's a complex subject, and sorry for writing a book, but your prompt apparently got me. None of us know for sure what will happen but I think yours is a needlessly pessimistic view, ironically informed by the exact abuses of th past century that you're worried might not continue.

I mean I'm producing more and better art and software each month than I used to do in a year. I feel like I'm flourishing because of AI. Tell me I'm wrong?

You’re not wrong. Me too. I spend most of my waking hours using AI for new product development.

But can you bring it to market and turn it into a reliable revenue stream? And will this still be true in a few years when the duo or trio -opolies corner the AI market enough that the $200 subscriptions go away to be replaced by API pricing only?

I’m already seeing my subscription use slow to a crawl during peak hours so I now code before 8 am or after 6 pm. And turning on ‘Opus Fast’ with API pricing is already financially impossible for me as a small business.

Ironically, China may be the savior here, with open source models that may be good enough to ‘put the means of production in the hands of the working class’.

I mean, is QWEN a 4d chess game to replace capitalism with communism? Who knew (outside of the CCP central committee)?

is QWEN a 4d chess game to replace capitalism with communism?

No. The Chinese labs pay much less to train their models because they distill Western models. Western labs can't do it that way because they'd immediately be sued.

To distill a model requires high-quality prompts (and responses). Here's how the Chinese labs get these prompts: when a user sends a prompt to www.kimi.ai, Kimi immediately forwards it to Claude or another leading US model (using a vast network of laundered subscriptions), waits for the response from Claude, then forwards that response to the user via www.kimi.ai. All the Chinese labs do this. Of course, they never inform the user that their conversation is being routed to a US model.

Beijing is angry at them because they did this indiscriminately without filtering out the conversations of high Chinese government officials and military officers, so now the US labs have those conversations, which contain information useful to US intelligence because the officials and officers assumed the conversations would remain inside China's borders and that the Chinese labs would care about confidentiality.

The Chinese labs release model weights under permissive licenses to get any attention and usage share at all for the model.

The Chinese labs pay much less to train their models because they distill Western models.

That's nonsense.

But does it suck?

Considering that we don't seem able to appropriately tax the biggest corporations, why do you think we'll suddenly be able to redistribute LLM gains?

Far more likely is that wealth and power will become even more concentrated into the hands of the few and the rest of humanity will become effective slaves.

These doomsday theories sound solid in practice but in order for someone to accumulate a lot of wealth there have to be consumers to chip into this. If we are all slaves, where is that wealth going to come from?!

At least with LLMs we can glimpse an escape route to that which generations of humans have strived for - a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero.

Let me fix that for you: A world in the the value of the labor of each human approaches zero.

Right, and the consequence is going to be, what?

Humans with zero economic value can still vote. They can still mass. They will still have needs. Really the script here writes itself. The historical precedents bound the problem rather well. As always, radical social change will not occur until a wide swath of the population is aligned. In this case, due to their broad economic devaluation.

It would be easier if today's knowledge workers stopped deluding themselves into thinking that their standards of living will maintain. Your acknowledgement of the necessary predicate to change is, in that respect, progress in itself. There is little reason why we cannot accelerate the timing of broad consensus if more people so readily came to that conclusion - and resisted the temptation to then find the answer instead in nostalgia about the past.

We are not deluding ourselves that we will maintain our standard of living. If the boss’ dream of replacing all workers by AI that does their job poorly but cheaply will be realized. We will go to the gutter with the rest of the economically worthless people.

There are many of them today, their needs are not met (but could be, the production output is largely there, but captured) and their political views don’t matter because the votes are captured by populists. I’m sure the powers that are will find a way to go around educated people voting.

I still see a lot of denialism.

It is easy to ignore the misallocation of output and the private greed when generally people are still doing fairly well.

As the denials give way, the politics will change. You may be right such moments will be hijacked and hope extinguished. That's why we should all aim to think about these problems in the most robust way, so we can all contribute to the coming efforts.

Cynicism about the future is easy, but should be resisted. Perhaps ironically, I find hope in your acknowledgement of your own imminent devaluation.

“I find hope in your acknowledgment of your own imminent devaluation.”

Gave me a chuckle. I think this is my personal ‘best sentence of the year’.

Great way to summarize how we will likely look back on 2026.

The value will tend towards infinity [1] because we can keep building more data centers. This will allow us to apply tokens to solving every problem we can conceive.

The cost will tend towards zero because competition is intense and there appear to be zero moats and ample improvements from every direction.

If these systems have low costs, that means they will be usable by the broad population and that their utility will be widely accessible.

Industrialization led to iPhone, PlayStation, Spotify, and Waymo.

AI will lead to personal chefs, contractors, assistants, drivers, tutors, climbing partners, ...

AI will lead to people making their own PlayStation games, their own music and streaming services (I already have), their own custom smartphones (a future personal project - vibe hardware). And your robot will drive you cross country on vacation while you sleep in the car.

[1] Not actually infinity because earth [2] has finite resources, but the S-curve will look like it for awhile.

[2] Until the robots leave earth, anyway

AI will lead to personal chefs, contractors, assistants, drivers, tutors, climbing partners, ...

You need to show how having X more data centers is somehow going to translate into affordable, highly advanced robots in the immediate future.

There are hard problems about robotics we don't yet know how to solve. Not to mention, who the fuck is going to buy them if AI takes their jobs?

You think people are going to stop watching celebrities and influencers just because there are AIs and robots?

Do you think people will stop dating, trying to impress mates, buying luxury, etc.? Neither candlelight dinner to a robot no a Dior manufactured by robots have the same allure. There's a huge industry around this.

Sports aren't going to go away. Huge industry.

People aren't going to stop making art. I know a ton of artists who have embraced AI that are doing even bolder work using the tools. (I was a filmmaker pre-AI, and I know a lot of people in this field.)

People aren't going to stop traveling. And consuming. And eating human food and consuming human experiences.

There are going to be all new kinds of businesses and opportunities that spring up. OpenAI and Anthropic are not going to be the only two employees. They won't be staffed by only agents.

In the 50's there were predictions that in 10 years no-one will have to work again because of the advances made in automation, like the washing machine for example. Any predictions of less work this time around are a complete joke.

When was the last time you saw a Chinese laundry?

a world in which the labor required of each human to lead a flourishing life approaches zero.

The AI bubble is pricing AI stocks so high that the only possible way for them to meet investors expectations is for AI to charge so much that every human & corporation has no money left.

So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.

Let's say hypothetically a solution was legislated globally, wherein each living individual whose work was scraped for LLM training is compensated with royalties relative to the work's value.

Would that resolve the injury caused by the intellectual osmosis? Of course many of the original thinkers are now dead, and this system would mostly benefit those writing before the LLM age rather than help people going forward.

The more fundamental objection seems to just be to the concept of a machine that "learns" by ingesting public information, which is maybe ultimately a feeling that reality itself constitutes a crime against humanity.

Musicians and writers build new works on top off millennia of literary and musical history, then copyright their works and sell it back to us. Is this so bad? If Taylor Swift, consciously or subconsciously, gets an harmonic idea from a 1970's song and a fragment of a melody from some 1990's song... is that theft?

I'm ambivalent about AI and, like all gold rushes, many of the players are terrible, dishonest, egomaniacal jerks.

But I am deeply skeptical of the idea that aggregation of knowledge and culture is itself wrong. That's literally how culture has worked since the dawn of time, and our modern era obsession with credit and perpetual copyright is unhealthy. \

It's only in the past 100 years or so that this idea of "if you create it, it's yours alone and nobody can build on it without paying you" became current, and it was largely driven by the megacorps that AI haters used to hate (remember the despite for RIAA? I do). It's bizarre to think that someone's life work is entirely their property, as if they grew up in a box and did not build on hundreds of generations of other peoples' lives work.

I don't object to disliking these companies; I object to the idea that you, me, anyone remixing culture is committing a crime. What the hell happened to the hacker ethos?

The problem is not Taylor Swift is being "inspired" from other artists. We have tons of examples this throughout history.

The problem is, replacing Taylor Swift with its AI counterpart, and to use Taylor's own material to do that without getting her permission or compensating her.

This is not about Taylor even. It's about everyone, you and me, and Taylor and Haggard and Blind Guardian and Sia, etc...

We hated RIAA because they prevented us from listening to the music while trying to get it was hard and expensive. In short, we were not angry because they wanted compensation, but because they have cut the supply without giving us a solution. Now we have iTunes Store and Bandcamp for DRM free music, and nobody is against musicians getting their fair share. As a side note, I used to make music, I know what it entails.

Hacker ethos has ethics. It has do experiment but don't cause harm embedded all over it. It's about experiment and discovery. Not about ripping people off for their own profit (unless you're a black hat of course), and getting things were free was part of sending a message, not monetary gain.

Ok, thought experiment: at what point in the past 1000 years do you think the balance of collective versus individual benefit from creative works was at its most fair?

getting things were free was part of sending a message, not monetary gain.

As an old who lived through phone phreaking (calling cards, not 2660hz, I'm not THAT old), cracking software, Naptser, torrents, etc... I can assure you that the message was more often than not a justification that transformed "getting it for free" from theft to a righteous moral stand.

We’re about the same age, probably. On this side of the pond, all of this stuff was rooted in inability to get something legally first, and if it was possible to get, it was prohibitively expensive to buy for us. So we got it for “free”. The thing is we were not using the software to earn money, so companies don’t care (this what I heard from a couple of companies directly). Music was in a similar position.

It was a righteous moral stand because we wanted to get things relatively affordable for us.

I for one prefer to buy my software and music nowadays, because it’s affordable and I can get it at the quality I want.

For your other question, the answer is probably 1800s, because the current model was not entrenched everywhere and creators had sane rights for what they created. So creators had to get what they made out to masses to show it, but lost their rights in relatively shorter times, so things were free to use for everyone. So you can’t excessively milk something till proverbial eternity.

when you do your job you take ideas from others before from university from calculus etc

therefore you have to work for me for free

Oh I'm sorry, who's forcing you to work without pay?

I agree with you, but there is one aspect that is different here - the scale that is way beyond what any human can do.

I don't know what to think about that though.

Fair point. Think of it this way: the scale is more than any human, but it is probably akin to what humanity in general can do.

You might argue that since those LLMs build on all of humanity's knowledge, they should belong to everyone. But where do you draw the lines? Or make a practical case.

They kind of do belong to everyone. The technology and majority of training corpus is available to essentially everyone.

The training and inference infra are owned and operated, but I can't see an argument that any machine that processes public domain (or stolen, if you prefer) info should be available to everyone for free.

But those training and inference costs will go to zero. Think about your cell phone today versus $1m+ supercomputers in the 1980's.

We're living in a transitory blip where capitalists and gold rushers are getting rich arbitraging the cost of processing against the non-cost of corpus. We can argue about morals (it doesn't bother me much) but it is a narrow window and it will be remembered the way Compuserve is: a precursor to the actual revolution, worth a footnote.

Robbery implies taking it away from you so you can't have it anymore. How is that the case?

It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up

Learning isn’t stealing. They didn’t take our culture away from us and nobody is “buying our culture back” from them. We never lost it; it never went anywhere.

Imagine someone asks you how to do something at work, you tell them. Then they create a huge packet filled with bullshit about how it got done and now they are your boss.

It's a shitty move, but ultimately, in between the bullshit narrative, they also did the thing - not you - so the promotion rightfully belongs to them.

Execution trumps ideas, impact trumps raw effort, and such. Isn't this the entrepreneurial narrative?

Sure thats obviously how it works today.

Now what do I do next time someone comes and asks how to do something?

Of course you tell them, because you're nice person, and not jealous of someone else succeeding in a thing you aren't even pursuing? You wouldn't want to act like "the dog in the manger" from childhood stories.

LOL I have no idea about the dog in the manger. You have my full attention, please tell me the story.

Isn't that the same point piracy advocates have been making for a while? If I watch a pirated film, I didn't really consume a physical resource. Nothing physical is lost. Therefore it's not theft?

Learning isn’t stealing.

This is cheesy. There is an exposure to (and a gain from) a resource that is traditionally associated with a cost. That cost wasn't paid. It's a public good to have information available, but it's not really acceptable to circumvent established ways of compensating the creator of the work you're benefiting from.

Partially true.

If StackOverflow dies because nobody uses it anymore, the entirety of its knowledge is now only available through LLMs that trained on it.

If a blog dies out because the author gave up writing, the entirety of its knowledge is now only available through LLMs that trained on it.

If people stop writing books because they cant outcompete generated content, that knowledge is also lost to LLMs.

If people stop making art because they can't outcompete generated art, that is also lost to LLMs.

So yeah, they haven't directly taken anything away, but the consequences of what they are doing may still have that outcomes - and it does look like that's the version of reality we're about to get.

It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up.

Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. This rhetoric sounds impressive, but really looks more like "piracy is theft" line from early 2000s, similarly flawed in basic premise.

Whether the end result threatens the form in which culture is created, at least beyond just threatening the business models of the gatekeepers, is a separate discussion, but you can't draw the heart-string-pulling "life's work got appropriated" arguments there so easily.

And let's not forget what we got back for this: reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West, inference is so dirt cheap that whole world uses it. It exploded in popularity organically, because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses.

There's plenty to hate about how AI is transforming the world, but one thing it's not, is "robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up".

What do you mean, it's already robbing me of the ability to discuss techniques with a number of my peers since they decided the mediocre output of LLMs is good enough instead of understanding what they are doing.

In addition, a great number of people have decided to stop publishing their code publicly, and discuss techniques except in spaces they can be sure it's a one-on-one with a human being.

Some things already got lost.

You're discussing your peers' behaviors, not AI.

It's the same as saying "People don't kill people; guns do." Maybe guns(AI) should be regulated, but the primary problem is murderers(lazy peers), not weapons(AI).

Just like with guns, AI is a crime of scope.

I can be a murderer with a knife, sure, but how many people can I kill? How many people can I kill if I have a class three license an a full auto gun?

I can pirate a news article here or there, sure, but how many news articles can I pirate? How many news articles can I pirate with AI?

That's people problems though, namely:

1) Lazy peers, and

2) Spiteful peers with "dog in the manger" mentality.

The latter case personally irks me, mostly because this often involves personal benefit (economical or moral) due to them claiming to give away knowledge for altruistic reasons, which later behavior reveals was a lie, mislabeling proprietary as open and free, to reap unfair gains.

But that's all off-topic for this thread anyway.

People creating free software for everyone to use, only to pull it away when suddenly there's a technology that can instantly let everyone use it at the drop of a hat, is not something I quite understand. If you're doing it so you show people, hey I made this, then you can still do that. If you're doing it to help the world, then that's very much happening. Of if you're doing it just for fun, that's possible too, though I totally understand how much less fun it is when AI can rip it out in a few minutes.

> In addition, a great number of people have decided to stop publishing their code publicly,

A lot of my peers who have been in tech for more than a decade are all doing this. They're effectively backing out of the industry. Their attitude now is they're ready for retirement in their 40's. They're only building and working on side projects and only sharing with people they know, nobody else.

One thing I'm seeing right now is the amount of institutional and domain knowledge being lost is a on a massive scale. The more startling fact is nobody seems to care - as if vibe coding and LLM's are going to fill this gap.

It's interesting to me that the actual motivations for releasing code open-source were very different than I had assumed for the past ~30 years. I always liked to give stuff away so folks could play with and try stuff. As far as I can tell, the only reason not to still give away code is the desire for credit, which was never all that interesting to me.

But then again, I haven't devoted my life to developing and releasing a huge open source project used by millions, so perhaps my opinion should be discounted accordingly.

it's still there

There are many refutations to this fallacy from the Slashdot era, but with AI it is even simpler than with music:

Clankers are only useful for current events (which most people use them for) by scraping the web and rewording it. This results in direct financial and notoriety losses for the original authors of the websites.

To use another Slashdot cliche: "But you knew that already."

If we ignore the massive amount of books being destroyed, the outages and increased usage bills for once free websites (some resulting in closure), the increased difficulty to access public information such as Reddit and Twitter, and lastly ignore the amount of conversations being taken away from the public in favor of LLMs, I would agree.

Except books are already destroyed in physical form every single day. My local library has a section near the front for free and/or extremely cheap books ($1) they are desperately trying to get rid of. My impression is that if they are untaken/unsold they will end up in a dumpster.

[Edit] Here's an article from 2003 talking about how Random House destroyed up to 25,000 books a day: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/19/fiction.stephe...

The scale is completely different. It is like comparing a tiny ant to a Star Devouring Shoggoth. Anthropic destroyed millions of books in hardly any time. They are destroying the foundations of civilization

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...

They are destroying the foundations of civilization

No, they are not. For all the hype around that 404 media article, no one came forward with titles or authors. Turns out the booksellers that sold them those books said they were "dead inventory".

If you're going to assert that companies are destroying the foundations of civilization, you're going to have to produce quite a bit more evidence than the (poorly cited) 404 Media article.

Evidence ? Good lord, how about the US district court of justice ? Anthropic physically destroyed millions of books after scanning them - are you really, truly questioning that ?

Here is what was signed by Judge Alsup at https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo...

Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase MILLIONS of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals.

Dismissing the above as "dead inventory" is atrocious reasoning. The more obscure/low-circulation books are arguably MORE valuable as training material because they contain information that is less likely to be duplicated across the ordinary web.

And 404 Media's reporting wasn't merely based on a bookseller's terminology of your "dead inventory". There are now unsealed Anthropic internal documents describing Project Panama as an effort to "destructively scan all the books in the world"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/the-que...

They are destroying books that they bought. It should not be controversial that part of ownership is decided how to dispose of the owned object.

But nothing you're citing adds up to "destroying the foundations of civilization". What we have instead is companies that are now paying to get copies of creative works (isn't this what everyone is complaining about with all the "theft" rhetoric?) so they can use them for training.

When they discuss scanning all the books in the world, they are not talking about every copy, since that makes no sense. They want one of each.

So, in the end, this all sounds like some breathless emotional take because large companies are buying copies of books and using them to train AI and throwing them away. They are probably destroying fewer books than the publishing houses do over the same time period.

This is like the water discussion: people with no understanding of agriculture (or publishing) hear a sound-bite about what AI is doing, and, with little-to-no context, devolve into a panic about it.

Again: cite real harm. What books aren't available? What knowledge was destroyed? There are real concerns about AI, but this whole discussion is a distraction.

the massive amount of books being destroyed

Surely that's not about AI? Or you mean the small fraction of that that's result of "destructive format shift" process[0], which itself is a consequence of copyright regulation that would otherwise prevent anyone from accessing these works?

the outages and increased usage bills for once free websites (some resulting in closure)

That's assumed to be AI companies for some reason, even if they have no real incentive to do that, while the usual business underbelly of people scraping web for whatever reasons (which now may include some AI upstart wannabies too, to be fair) is forgotten about. Not helping is people confusing AI agents acting as user-agents and doing one-off fetches with "AI scrappers".

the increased difficulty to access public information such as Reddit and Twitter

It was never public, and they started locking down before AI, when both platforms (as well as all other social media platforms) run out of VC subsidsies and realized they need to start monetizing; first step they did was to wage a war on third-party clients and API users. AI came later.

ignore the amount of conversations being taken away from the public in favor of LLMs

You mean human agency? Like, humans deciding it's better for them to ask a machine instead of posting questions online? I can understand that, it's usually much better experience (particularly on sites like StackOverflow - they dug their own grave here, and they know it; there have been memes about this way before LLMs were a thing).

You're also not considering the amount of questions answered that would not have been asked otherwise. I for one don't ask many questions on-line, so anything I ask LLMs that they solve for me, is a question that would've remained unanswered for me otherwise. Not everyone is gregarious online, many people are more self-reliant and only answer questions, but solve their own problems without asking for help (it's probably not optimal thing to do, but that's another topic).

--

[0] - Digitizing and retaining physical copy is clear infringement, digitizing but destroying the physical original can be argued to be fair use.

Your talking about a bunch of books that are out of print and sat unsold for years in a warehouse somewhere. The rights holders could print another run tomorrow if they wanted, or better yet digitize them but they don’t. Where’s your ire for the rights holders who sit on these books and don’t do anything with the ?

It's the collective action of losing access to information that's the issue, not the potential of the book itself.

Regardless, these books were available. Researchers, hobbyists - many people have and will find value.

Justifying the destruction of information for a for-profit company is bizarre.

Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. This rhetoric sounds impressive, but really looks more like "piracy is theft" line from early 2000s, similarly flawed in basic premise.

This logic only works if you believe that IP has no value. Which is, of course, utter nonsense.

Microsoft doesn't believe this. Nor do any of the AI labs. Otherwise, they wouldn't have needed to scrape the data in the first place as it had no value. All of their software (and other products) would be developed in the open as there's no point in protecting the IP.

They work very hard to protect their own IP so they obviously believe that IP is worth protecting.

Yep: the problem with IP is exactly the "Property". The texts are economically (even if only for leisure) valuable, so the producer deserves a fair comoensation unless he has explicitly dismissed it.

So paying a price for an intelectual product is reasonable. Nothing to do (per se) with property.

Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. This rhetoric sounds impressive, but really looks more like "piracy is theft" line from early 2000s, similarly flawed in basic premise.

It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been.

I spent 20 years working as a freelancer and 10 years selling tech video courses. I made enough to have a happy life (not a lot but enough to survive), as long as the income kept flowing every month.

Nowadays I make nothing from a business I've built up for 2 decades because AI took away most traffic to my site which was the entry point to my business. I actually lose money because course sales have been impacted so heavily that I pay more for hosting than I get in sales.

AI is consuming an unimaginable amount of searches which is the gateway for so many businesses. It's preventing people from being discovered on the internet. Not only that but it's taking everyone's content and selling it back to users while keeping all of the profits.

I only see 2 consistent world views: either intellectual property is real, or it is a false concept and all information should be free.

If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft.

If IP is not real, then the algorithms and weights the AI companies have developed should also be free as they are just more information.

The status quo of "your knowledge has no protection, but our knowledge is sacred" is the worst of all possible worlds.

I only see 2 consistent world views

Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior.

Instead we should try to find the most practical solution that has the most benefit - which will probably be more complex than yes/no.

Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior.

Intellectual property is as real as private property (which is a lot more elaborate and weird than possession and territoriality, which is the most that has any natural basis). It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished and the other this fundamental sacred thing that should be respected absolutely (as many do).

Yes, that's why I said property (not just IP) is a social construct.

Yes, I'm agreeing with you.

We made it up. We made all this up. We do it for an outcome.

Intellectual property exists as a concept to foster the creation of more intellectual property. That is not the case for all private property, because I cannot copy your land or your car infinitely. That’s why IP rights expire at some point, or have fair use that doesn’t harm the IP rights holder, something other forms of property don’t have. Saying that they are equivalent is not foolish—I think that’s a bit extreme—but it doesn’t recognize that they have fundamental differences, and the laws around them have different intended outcomes.

I think AI training falls most likely in the fair use category of intellectual property: there is some societal benefit* that requires no actual harm** to the IP holder, therefore it’s a good trade-off for society if we poke a hole in the social construct of property to get that benefit.

*Let’s put aside the question of whether AI is good for society or private ownership of AI models is good for society. Important questions but separate from the theory. IF IT IS GOOD, it follows the above. If it is not good, then of course it does not.

**Also not a fully settled question. Again, an important debate to have and the tradeoffs here matter. If the harms are small enough, the societal benefit could be worth it. Both notes have to be true for this to be worthy of “fair use”.

This is going to blow your mind, but people created music, literature, art long before intellectual property laws existed. IP laws are nothing but rent seeking.

This is going to blow your mind

No. it won't blow anyone's mind. Not a single person.

but people created music, literature, art long before intellectual property laws existed.

^^^ cherry-picked, incomplete reading of history.

Intellectual property exists as a concept to foster the creation of more intellectual property.

The idea of IP as an economic tool to foster creation comes out of the UK and subsequently the US. In mainland Europe, IP comes out of the French Revolution and the idea that copyright is like a "moral right" that you intrinsically deserve for putting in the effort to create something. This viewpoint has de facto won out because as global commerce and global culture has become more and more widespread, everybody has standardized on the longest durations (the standard has long been "life + 50 years" in Europe) so one country doesn't have to worry about freeing up its works for "exploitation" by another country.

the idea that copyright is like a "moral right" that you intrinsically deserve for putting in the effort to create something

Nope. "[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

The ends is promoting progress. The means for that is prescribed by a limited monopoly as an incentive to those ends.

At least in the US.

It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished

Hear me out. Property rights exist to assign stewardship and use rights over rivalrous goods. goods where the use of the good precludes the use of that good for its purpose by another party. If you take my bike, I cannot ride it to work. This concept exists to prevent violent conflict over non-shareables and to prevent the tragedy of the commons (see the highly successful fisheries rights, NOx and SOx emissions markets as propertization schemes)

"Intellectual property" (except for trademark if you want to get pedantic), is not rivalrous, and its primary purpose is to be shared, not hoarded. Therefore intellectual property isn't a thing, creating it as a legal construct was a mistake that has hamstrung society for a long time.

Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior.

That very much falls within the "IP is not real" category. Taking a utilitarian approach here is exactly what the sam altman / effective altruist crowd is doing (or claiming, at least).

Believe it or not, but there are different philosophies. The US Constitution, for example, is written under the framework that all rights are innate, and the government merely endorses, not grants, those which are described. This framework creates a moral basis to rights, such that things like property are not merely social constructs but moral goods. To violate them is itself an immoral act.

That very much falls within the "IP is not real" category.

AH. Given that framing, then I suppose anything that varies from "these axioms are perfect there can be no others" must fall into the "not real" category.

But isn't there some debate about the moral axioms themselves? A space that is much more complex than "yes/no"?

EDIT: I always wonder, when I get two downvotes in the same moment, if someone is cheating. It happens so often.

EDIT2: And now! 3 upvotes in the same moment. I daresay someone is confessing.

Social constructs are bought and paid for by the wealthy.

Most people want a clean environment while the current US administration is pulling back environmental regulations to allow for more pollutants. The current US Supreme Court has taken gifts from those that have invested interest in the outcome of their judgements.

Social axioms are mutable while mathematical axioms are immutable.

Human trafficking is bad. How many of the wealthy that partook of Epstein's trafficking have been prosecuted? This shows that human trafficking being bad is mutable based on wealth and power.

Social constructs are bought and paid for by the wealthy.

Well... no. I'd say that most of the social constructs I'm thinking of predate wealth. Most likely shaped by evolutionary pressures.

mathematical axioms are immutable

I invite you to Google "the axiom of choice" to see a lively debate.

Social constructs are bought and paid for by the wealthy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg

no, I think people are just annoyed that you're trying to have an irrelevant and kinda cheesy 'is epistemology really real - think about it bro' conversation

I'm also a fan of nuance and non-black&white thinking but that is quite literally not how the rule of law generally works

No - I'm specifically calling out that the total changes abruptly. As if someone were using multiple accounts.

Your wording is pretty revealing:

This framework creates a moral basis to rights

The Constitution (and the thinkers that it was based off of) creates a moral basis to rights. At the time the Constitution was written, this was a pretty radical idea. The most prevalent moral framework at the time was the divine right of kings, the idea that the king was ordained by God to rule and anyone who questioned that right was speaking heresy.

My wording was actually wrong, as the constitution recognizes a divine source for the rights, it doesn't create the moral basis. Perhaps 'establishes as the formal basis' would have been more appropriate.

You're right that it was a relatively radical idea at the time, but not without precedent. The Dutch, Venice and Genoa were republics, the Swiss Confederation was a union of cantons and territories, for example, not to mention the influence of the Iroquois Confederacy, John Locke, Montesquieu, and the assorted Greek and early Roman city states.

although the US Constitution does make reference to deities, the copyright section does not. its formalization is entirely pragmatic, utilitarian.

Funny how, when Aaron Swartz did the exact same thing (in a much narrower and more focused way), he was driven to suicide by the US government, but when Sam and Dario do it, people argue about whether (or not) "IP is real".

Note that society is more about justice than it is about philosophy or logic. Whether you believe that IP makes logical sense or not, is not terribly relevant through the lens of justice. To allow the Altmans and Amodeis of the world to escape the kinds of consequences that Swartz could not (despite having purer intentions than either -- despite being a genuine utilitarian, instead of an aspiring oligarch _pretending_ to be one), would be the height of injustice.

It would be a grotesque and cruel insult to all the people who remember Swartz, and share his values and optimism about the internet and computers.

The funny thing about having a divine source for rights is also recognizing that humans are fallible and thus inevitably going to be unable to live up to that standard. This argument is the basis for people who want government to have limited powers- the less power it has, the less it can abuse it.

There's a flip side to this as well- President Lincoln famously suspended habeus corpus unilaterally in violation of the Constitution, outright ignoring a Supreme Court ruling in the process. It became moot when Congress retroactively approved the suspension and allowed it to continue for the remainder of the civil war. Lincoln remains celebrated, despite what could rightfully be argued as blatantly unconstitutional power grabs.

reality > rights

The use of the term divine at the time was more of an aftereffect of most people having some kind of belief in god and using that as a casus belli to redistribute power. The actual causal reasons seem more technological and more of England spreading themselves too thin. Lincoln went on to further prove there is no divine power enforcing these rights, it's the distribution of power and information that defines the rights you have. The Constitution is simply a piece of paper, not an agent.

We see this happening again in our modern world. Technology has allowed us to concentrate information like never before. If you believe knowledge (hence processing of information) is power then we've created new power structures that must change society.

Now, we can say things like "well, you can't concentrate information" but the other party can simply disagree and say it's my divine right to. You're at an impasse unless you plan on taking up a path to violence (any and every legal action is implied violence).

What happened to Swartz was injustice.

Why would I want it to happen to more people? This is, at least to me, an insane point of view.

"Oh my god, the police just shot a black man for no reason. To make this fair they should also shoot more white people for no reason". Do you see how absolutely unhinged that sounds?

The parent comment highlights the double standards, they are not campaigning for pushing people to suicide. This is a strawman.

Yeah, this double standards thing is profoundly unjust.

You are assuming that social constructs are not real.

"A social construct" and "not real" are not the same thing. Money, laws, countries, gender, even civilization itself are all social constructs. More importantly, all forms of ownership are social constructs, and that doesn't provide any information as to whether we should respect them or not.

Property is a social construct in the sense that anything is a social construct. Like, sure, the fact that I "own" this spoon is societally constructed, but it's so foundational that almost every other aspect of human society is more abstract. Even animals have some sense of "property" - whether that's territory they defend or their stash of food. The social construct part is that we respect each other's property rights (mostly) without resorting violence, where animals resort to individual violence or threat displays.

Let me introduce you instead to the one golden rule. He who has the gold, makes the rules.

IP is obviously not "real" like physical property is real. Moreso, IP is a restriction on free speech as it walls off some expression as "Copyrighted" so you can't legally express it yourself without paying someone for the privilege.

That's not to say that IP is useless, but treating IP infringement as "stealing" was always a problematic shorthand. Previously, calling IP infingement "stealing" was the domain of corporate interest groups like the RIAA or MPAA, but with AI the winds have turned and supposed anti-corporate lefties are keen to treat IP infringement as theft to attack AI companies. There's very little intellectual consistency on either side of aisle here.

I think the blend of the two is that value added to any information, such as the first time its distilled or positioned in a certain way, that's IP and should be real.

When an AI company takes that type of value, and doesnt provide value back to the person who made it, thats theft.

Information / facts are real and free. But those who helped us get here should choose how to license their work, and an AI company picking it up and re-selling it is clearly unethical.

It’s real but whether you can make a profit or not is dependent on whether you can protect the information. It has been this way since civilization as we know it started, I believe.

If you are freely posting sentences like this was on the internet you are giving away your IP for free. Anyone can read the sentence. If someone can make money off of it then that’s just markets at work. I can’t make money off of what I write here, for example.

But I also don’t think pirating a movie is theft either. You haven’t proven to me you’ve lost money. Maybe wouldn’t have watched it anyway.

Fun topic

It’s real but whether you can make a profit or not is dependent on whether you can protect the information.

That's what contracts and licenses [0] are for. Or perhaps you're arguing for a world where the only possible protection is that of trade secrets... that once protected information is made public by any means anyone can do anything they wish with it? If you are, then this quote [1] seems relevant:

  If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft.
  
  If IP is not real, then the algorithms and weights the AI companies have developed should also be free as they are just more information.

[0] ...which are contracts in disguise...

[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49754448>

If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft.

It’s called Derivative Work and it’s a good feature for IP law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work

You wouldn’t like a world where companies could copyright knowledge and then prevent anyone else from making a derivative of that knowledge.

Imagine Wikipedia being taken down for sharing knowledge that another company wrote about first. It’s a bad idea.

It’s called Derivative Work

That would be on what the AI model generates, not what it is trained on.

The latter is where the contention is, and it's a valid argument. So much so that some companies are not using stolen information to build their models.

IBM for example indemnifies its models for its customers and has detailed information on where the sources came from to train them.

The latter is where the contention is, and it's a valid argument

It has been tried in court several ways already. Remember the lawsuit that forced Anthropic to use physical books? They tried to argue that the books couldn’t be trained on at all. It failed.