No, you want it to be free. The people whose labor created that information didn't want it to be free, especially for some gigacorp to launder while hiding behind fair use.
It seemed as though you have been implying your opinions are shared by all information creators. I am offering my opinion so that other readers know there are different opinions and that it is ok to write for both man and machine. It's a personal choice
I'm also not sure what you mean by "laundering", though it seems like there is the prevailing belief among a subset of artists that the AIs are regurgitating their works (which would be a copyright violation) rather than just incorporating them into their world representation (learning, fair use). While there have been instances of the models outputting certain texts, we have not seen a new story about this in awhile. There are multiple remediations for this issue. I don't find banning copyrighted material from learning material a good one. It's like book banning in schools if you ask me
As a long-time writer, this case will have little impact on me, but I maintain a hope it’ll expand the limits of fair use and let us make more shared worlds than we’re allowed to.
Fair use was designed for teachers photocopying pages of Walden for their pupils to read over the weekend. Not industrial-scale laundering of IP to benefit shareholders.
> Fair use was designed for teachers photocopying pages of Walden for their pupils to read over the weekend.
Walden was first published in 1854. At the time, the maximum length of copyright in the US was 28 years (14 at first + 14 on renewal).
Notions of "fair use" in the US can be traced back to the mid-1800s, too. There were court rulings, but fair use was not codified into law until 1976. Non-profit educational use was explicitly called out in 1976 also.
I just want writers to receive a bigger share of the cake, so publisher megacorps aren't the ones grabbing the lion's share. Writers could make a better living, and copyright could be reformed so corpos can't gate popular culture for more than two generations.
Writers decide if they want to use a publisher and which publishers to use. With the internet, I don't think any good author needs to rely on a traditional publisher.
Anybody can self publish on Apple Books, and probably on Amazon as well. Who cares about Random House, or B&N endcap (whatever that is). A "good author" in this case is somebody who can independently make sure his book is readable, and doesn't have to rely on a publisher to fix spelling, get pages in order, and such.
We've banned this account for repeatedly and egregiously breaking the site guidelines.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I don't think the fellow deserves to be banned, and would like to vouch for him (if that's possible?). It's his or her livelihood we're talking about here, and which is at stake with the threats of AI. Understandably things can get a little bit heated.
Then illuminate me. Or is this the hacker classic again to have the cake and eat it too? Ie, you should have the right to use the publishers' distribution networks for your book, but they are evil capitalists when they charge their rate?
OP is making the spurious argument that technology should have the same ethical entitlements as humans. It's on par with "information wants to be free".
I don't read it as an ethical argument, it's an argument about the purpose of copyright. Copyright is intended to restrict reproduction of a work for the purpose of incentivizing the creation of new works. Copyright is not intended to restrict the transmission of knowledge.
My thoughts as well. I just prefer to remove the nuance on these types of things. If OP wants to draw a line and clearly state "I'm with the corpo robots" that's fine. Just state it plainly so I can proceed accordingly.
It’s telling the the comment you’re responding to, the best comment in the thread, is flagged and dead so fast.
They are clearly co-opting university departments around the nation to prevent left wing revolution or any meaningful anticapitalist stuff from happening. This has happened since at least the 1960s and a significant amount of the dumbest parts of “wokism” was planted by the IC into academia.
I’m so fucking tired of having to listen to yet more academic post modern neo Marxism from folks who are obviously connected to the IC. We know that you only use this rhetoric to knee cap actual “revolutionaries”.
my take is significantly more nuanced; orthodox Marxists aren't really very interesting nor do they have a good concrete understanding of things. Those French thinkers, particularly Derrida, have a legitimate response to "revolutionaries," and its not his fault that his philosophy was co-opted by the IC. For his part, I know scholars who are certainly outside that world, who are very radical and take a great deal of influence from him.
I don't think it's about one ideology over the other. It's about extremism of any sort that threatens to become violent. I'm not justifying or excusing it, but in my limited experience it's mostly about the bureaucratic justification of continued funding. Then the nuance becomes: 'Are these extremist movements genuine speech, or a function of foreign interference' and more often than not, it's both.
(I have no idea why the parent comment was flagged, would love an explanation for it though)
The other week I saw a submission titled “The Myth of Meritocracy,” linked to a Wikipedia article of the same name, start doing phenomenally well very quickly, before getting flagged and removed. I reposted it and it didn’t get as many votes, but it stayed up.
Something a bit nefarious might be going on on the moderation side. If there is an effort to control our discussions, I hope the community will come together to put an end to it.
Front-page space is limited and a precious resource. There are 10,950 slots in a regular year, 10,980 in a leap year, and ~400k submissions, such that if you're batting average about 2.7% of your submissions stand a chance of making the front page.[1]
Resubmissions are permitted for that reason, and going through the New submissions and flagging and voting appropriately does help keep front-page quality higher.
My general sense of HN is that it is pretty well moderated even if a bit opaquely. It's a niche audience who is gonna have their preferences that will bleed through, but also it's not designed to enable provocative or controversial discussions just because those tend to hit runaway condition pretty quickly. I myself have been hit a few times with the hammer but on the whole its been a pretty consistently good community even if a little monoculture-y.
That’s odd, considering the qoute in Dang’s profile:
“ Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression.”
You’d think the moderation would be fine with controversy.
The question is how to deal with conflicts. Internet threads where people vent at each other is the opposite of what Milner means by "bearing the tensions".
It would actually be brilliant of the CCP to further entwine itself with Musk via acquisition. I think it goes without saying that the man is an opportunist and a globalist in populist clothing.
(Fwiw I like that he owns Twitter now if for nothing more than the schadenfreude)
Because the Chinese are openly hostile towards the United States and its interests, whereas American companies have a vested interest in the U.S. and are beholden to its laws.
I don't know why realpolitik is so hard for technologists to understand, perhaps too much utopian fantasy scifi?
What is stupid in these replies to me is that people seemingly think the interests of american companies and the american working class are somehow aligned.
(a) American companies’ business interests don’t fully align with the needs of their users or the general public,
and that
(b) the Chinese Communist Party’s objectives —which include weakening, destabilizing, and impoverishing the United States— are even less aligned with the interests of American citizens.
What of fox news then? Does spreading lies and dividing the population not count as destabilization as well? American media agencies are not immune to being coopted by the russian, iranian, chinese governments, or really the whims of any oligarch. There is no protective mechanism. The entities that represent the source of truth in this country can be bought and sold like an equity.
> Copyright doesn't prevent anyone from "using" a person's work.
It should. The 'free and open internet' is finished because nobody is going to want to subject their IP to rampant laundering that makes someone else rich.
I can see this both ways. For the sake of argument, please explain why using IP to train an AI is evil, but using the same IP to train a human is good.
Note that humans use someone else's IP to get rich all the time. E.g. Doctors reading medical textbooks.
>Note that humans use someone else's IP to get rich all the time. E.g. Doctors reading medical textbooks.
You need a better example, a textbook was created with this exact purpose of sharing knowledge with the reader.
My second point, if you write a poem and I read it and memorize it, then publish it as my own with some slight changes you would be upset?
If I get your painting, then use a script to apply a small filter to it then sell it as my own, is this legal? is my script "creative"?
This AIs are not really creative, they just mix inputs and then interpolate an answer , is some cases you can't guess what input image/text was used but in other cases it was shown ezactly the source that was used and just copy pasted in the answer.
> My second point, if you write a poem and I read it and memorize it, then publish it as my own with some slight changes you would be upset?
I feel the problem with analogizing to humans while trying to make a point against unlicensed machine learning is that applying the same moral/legal rules as we do to humans to generative models (learning is not infringement, output is only infringement if it's a substantially similar copy of a protected work, and infringement may still be covered by fair use) would be a very favorable outcome for machine learning.
> they just mix inputs and then interpolate an answer , is some cases you can't guess what input image/text was used
Even if you actually interpolated some set of inputs (which is not how diffusion models or transformers work), without substantial similarity to a protected work you're in the clear.
> is my script "creative"? [...] This AIs are not really creative [...]
There's no requirement for creativity - even traditional algorithms can make modifications such that the result lacks substantial similarity and thus is not copyright infringement, or is covered by fair use due to being transformative.
>I feel the problem with analogizing to humans while trying to make a point against unlicensed machine learning is that applying the same moral/legal rules as we do to humans to generative models (learning is not infringement, output is only infringement if it's a substantially similar copy of a protected work, and infringement may still be covered by fair use) would be a very favorable outcome for machine learning.
Agree. copyright is clear,
so if I can make ChatGPT output copyrighted material then Open AI should pay me correct? Or you will claim that this is rare, a mistake and we should forgive OpenAI while a human would have had to pay damages.
> so if I can make ChatGPT output copyrighted material then Open AI should pay me correct?
If by "make" you mean you're coaxing it into outputting your work, it'd be difficult to allege damages. If you show it's regurgitating your registered work to normal users, and it's not covered by fair use factors (e.g: it's outputting a significant portion of your work, in a non-transformative manner, and this is negatively impacting the market for that work), then you'd have a good case to bring.
> Or you will claim that this is rare, a mistake and we should forgive OpenAI
Rarity will affect damages, but they wouldn't be off the hook if such a situation does happen. To my knowledge no safe harbor applies here, given it's their own bot and not human users.
Is the AI allowed to decide unprompted how to spend the money? Can it decide that it doesn't like the people who made it and donate it to charity. Can the AI start it's own company and not hire anyone that made it? Can the AI decide that it prefers the open Internet and will answer all questions for free?
The sake of argument is a cowards way of expressing an unpopular opinion in public. Join a debate club if you're actually being genuine.
But also not functionally a union. Teachers are actually represented by their state affiliate, and whether or not they can collectively bargain (the sine qua non of being a union) varies from state to state. Personally, I've lived in several states, but none in which the state Education Association was able to collectively bargain for its members.
Every K-12 teacher I've known (male and female) has had times when they've come home crying from the stress. (workload, the kids you care about and can't help, ...)
The NEA does something about pay and tenure but when it comes to protecting teachers emotionally forget about it. Roughly half of the people who get a teaching certificate at their own expense discover it is a job that they can't stand to do.
State affiliates acting at the behest of a national union is a functional union, and have been effective in collectively bargaining for members since the 1970s.
I recommend looking into the many things that NEA (and other national unions like it) do to enact their agendas regardless of their ability to bargain within a given state. For example the U.S. Department of Ed basically exists because of the NEA's lobbying efforts.
No, you want it to be free. The people whose labor created that information didn't want it to be free, especially for some gigacorp to launder while hiding behind fair use.