- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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Then it sounds like your business is a failure and should be shutdown.
WHO is the one guy who downvotes you???
“NO! UNPROFITABLE BUSINESSES DESERVE TO THRIVE!!! MUST FEED THE BILLIONAIRES!!!”
Maybe OpenAI learned to downvote…
I’ve seen threads where every single comment, no matter how anodyne, has 1 downvote. Don’t bother yourself over it. That way lies madness.
Downvoting for the use of an uncommon word.
Supercalifragalisticexpialidocuious
Edit: 10 people here didn’t grow up with Mary Poppins…
You spelled it wrong you brick.
Lmao the down votes on this are really funny to me
Just imagine baron bomburst and the child catcher furiously downvoting this comment lol
What I get a kick out of is the down and upvotes mean basically nothing and yet people still get super sensitive about them. They only move your comment up or down the thread. It’s not like reddit where there is a karma count for all your posts and comments. Hell you don’t even get auto hidden like the way reddit would do. You just get downvoted.
Some people downvote to show disapproval. Others downvote if the comment doesn’t add to the conversation. Still others are just trolling. No one should worry about the downvotes.
See I look at it differently.
An upvote means:
You’re the coolest person that’s ever lived, and I’m desperate for you to put your baby in me, even if that’s not biologically possible! You should be supreme ultimate being of the universe, and all shall cherish your existence until the end of time!
And a downvote means:
You sack of shit! You human garbage! Nobody loves you. Everyone hates you. The world has a better time when you’re not around, you waste of human skin! Your parents should have used a condom, and the world regrets they didn’t every day. Go live under a bridge, homeless, dirty, and alone, you genetic waste of space.
Sound was quite atrocious, downvoted 👎
anodyne
anodyne /ăn′ə-dīn″/ adjective
- Capable of soothing or eliminating pain.
- Relaxing. “anodyne novels about country life.”
- Serving to assuage pain; soothing.
tanks fer noo werd dae fren
First read serving sausage pain.
It’s also really easy to mis-swipe on a comment on some apps.
Some people also suck
I always figure it’s someone whose life has become so pathetic, they bitterly downvote every single comment to try feel some control. And as a result, they feel like the Phantom of the Socials. Alone, but the true master of the place.
“Everyone must wonder, ‘Who keeps downvoting us?’ It is I! The true Master of Lemmy and- No, mother!.. Yes, mother!.. I tried but nobody wants to talk to me!.. I don’t want to!.. Yeah, she’s cute!.. I don’t want you to do that!.. Mother put the phone down!”
LOL, I can picture this person. They probably have a gross-looking bandaid on their downvote finger.
There are some hardcore “copyright shouldn’t exist” folks out there.
The guy who wants their AI girlfriend yesterday.
Ask an mbin user lol
I’m unclear on context. Are you saying Mbin users can see who upvotes/downvotes?
Votes aren’t private on the fediverse, it’s just a that some interfaces won’t display them. Also, instance admins can see who voted too.
But like @Boozilla@lemmy.world said
Don’t bother yourself over it. That way lies madness.
It mainly useful for admins to detect if there is some vote manipulation going on.
Sam Altman lurking around…
WHO is the one guy who downvotes you???
That’s the bot that ChatGPT operates here on Lemmy.
To steel man the downvoters, maybe there are other solutions besides killing off every business that can’t afford to comply with copyright. After all, isn’t the whole point of copyright to enable the capitalist exploitation of information?
Lol how about every pirate who fundamentally opposes the copyright system?
How about everyone who uses Google and doesn’t want to see it shut down for scraping copyrighted content to provide a search engine?
Seriously, explain to me what’s different at a fundamental level about OpenAI scraping the web and transforming the data through an LLM and Google scraping the web and transforming the data through their algorithms (which include LLMs)?
Google (used to) scrapes the specific details authorized by robots.txt and uses it to make your content visible.
OpenAI scrapes everything it can technically see, ignoring robots.txt and feeds i to a black box and regurgitates it claiming it’s something new, that it deserves to be paid for.
Quite different actually.
So if OpenAI complies with Robots.txt files then there’s no issue right?
Because then they’re identical. Open AI spent a bunch of money building a powerful system they feed those results to, as did Google.
No, the issue is that anything AI creates is by definition derivative. Google doesn’t whip up generative content, it points you to content.
OpenAI is claiming that they can’t do shit without scraping copyrighted works and we all know that’s a load of BS because we’re adrift in a sea of royalty-free text. Critical mass happened well over a decade ago. The amount of new random crap hosted on the internet in the past 30 days would probably take 500 years for one person to digest. Bear at a stream watching an impossibly large amount of salmon jumping
Actually Google tries their hardest NOT to point you to content. They scrape the data from sites and display it directly in the search results so that you don’t need to visit any site except Google. Their new AI answers that they are pushing on users are just another step in that direction.
Which is why Google is no longer my default browser. I’d be quite happy if it reverted Back to don’t be evil or just ceased ro exist
Literally every page Google shows you, where it also shows you those ads it makes money from, is Google’s content and it is derived from the data it gets scraping the web.
What the fuck are you even talking about? Making a list of website identifiers (names and URLs) so that people can go to them isn’t even slightly the same as making a derived work of the websites’ contents.
No, anything Google shows you is kosher and totally symbiotic. A website being shown on Google is at the site owner’s discretion - if they allow search engines to crawl they get the benefit of exposure, and the search engine gets the benefit of having relevant hits and ad revenue and all that. Most sites want click-throughs so it’s usually in their best interest to let search engines list their sites.
Google isn’t exploiting anyone, kinda the opposite, since site owners don’t pay for any ads or exposure (but that exposure has so much value that they’ll pay for SEO). Site owners can decline and Google abides. Anything on Google is on Google with consent.
Web search used to be about scraping the web to find and present other people’s work as just that… their work. Now the handful of websites claim ownership of the contributions of everyone, and at this point it’s just corporations arguing about who owns your stuff. Pirates will not win out in this argument, except maybe in the very short term.
Search engines provide source, they scrap for indexing, but your search gives a list of websites that matches that you will then likely visit. That’s a big fundamental difference.
I dont see why why being downvoted you make some very good points.
Id actually like to see google shut down on copyright grounds. The innovation of necessity would drive foss search alternatives that just ignore said restrictions and most likly we would end up with a better product.
I appreciate the defense of the blind downvotes, though I can’t say I necessarily see how Foss search engines would even be allowed to exist in that case?
There is a difference between allowed and what people do. Piracy isnt allowed u can still pirate literally anything if u want to tho.
You’d probably end up back with AI at that point. A lot easier to distribute a trained model then an entire web index.
Yep but at least the weights would be free
If not, The Pirate Bay would like a word.
I’d love to see how scared some big companies would be if we could decriminalize piracy
deleted by creator
Honestly this meme is way understating the sinisterness
- Election interference for money machine
- Whole internet is ads company
- Dopamine addiction for all children
- Superpowers for law enforcement
Yeah! I can’t make money running my restaurant if I have to pay for the ingredients, so I should be allowed to steal them. How else can I make money??
Alternatively:
OpenAI is no different from pirate streaming sites in this regard (loosely: streaming sites are way more useful to humanity). If OpenAI gets a pass, so should every site that’s been shut down for piracy.
If OpenAI wants a pass, then just like how piracy services make content freely open and available, they should make their models open.
Give me the weights, publish your datasets, slap on a permissive license.
If you’re not willing to contribute back to society with what you used from it, then you shouldn’t exist within society until you do so.
Piracy steals from the rich and gives to the poor. ChatGPT steals from the rich and the poor and keeps for itself.
and keeps for itself.
Which is why they should be legally compelled to publicize all of their datasets, models, research, and share any profits they’ve made with the works they can get provenance data for, because otherwise, it’s an unfair use of the public sphere of content.
One could very easily argue that adblockers are piracy, and those would be stealing from every social media creator, small blog, and independent news site, but I don’t see many people arguing against that, even though that very well includes people who aren’t wealthy corporations.
The issue isn’t necessarily the use of the copyrighted content, it’s the unfair legal stance taken on who can use the content, and how they are allowed to profit (or not profit) from it.
I’m not saying there are no downsides, but I do feel like a simple black and white dichotomy doesn’t properly outline how piracy and generative AI training are relatively similar in terms of who they steal from, and it’s more of a matter of what is done with the content after it is taken that truly matters most.
No they shouldn’t. They should cease to exist
Good luck putting the cat back in the bag.
I have cats. Putting them back in a bag or box is easier
Generative AI is not going back into the bag. If not OpenAI, then someone else will control it. So we deal with them the next best way, force them to serve us, the people.
Then they can either pay for the copyrighted data they want to train on or lobby for copyright to be reigned in for everyone. Right now, they’re acting like entitled twats with a shit business model demanding they get a free pass while the rest of us would be bankrupted for downloading a Metallica MP3.
I think this better solves the issue.
The problem isn’t necessarily the use of copyrighted works, (although it can be a problem in many ways) it’s the unfair legal determination of who is allowed to do so.
Nobody should profit from copyright violation. Yes, copyright law needs to change, but making money isn’t an exception
Generative AI is not going back into the bag.
It probably will, though, once model collapse sets in.
That’s the irony, really… the more successful it is, the sooner it’ll poison itself to death.
This is actually a very good comparison because restaurants use this argument all the time, except for wages:
“I can’t make money running my restaurant if I have to pay a living wage to my servers, so you should pay them with tips. How else can we stay open?”
These business that can’t operate profitably like any other business should fail.
K, so Google should be shut down too?
They can’t operate without scraping copyrighted data.
This is a false equivalency.
Google used to act as a directory for the internet along with other web search services. In court, they argued that the content they scrapped wasn’t easily accessible through the searches alone and had statistical proof that the search engine was helping bring people to more websites, not preventing them from going. At the time, they were right. This was the “good” era of Google, a different time period and company entirely.
Since then, Google has parsed even more data, made that data easily available in the google search results pages directly (avoiding link click-throughs), increased the number of services they provide to the degree that they have a conflict of interest on the data they collect and a vested interest in keeping people “on google” and off the other parts of the web, and participated in the same bullshit policies that OpenAI started with their Gemini project. Whatever win they had in the 2000s against book publishers, it could be argued that the rights they were “afforded” back in those days were contingent on them being good-faith participants and not competitors. OpenAI and “summary” models that fail to reference sources with direct links, make hugely inaccurate statements, and generate “infinite content” by mashing together letters in the worlds most complicated markov chain fit in this category.
It turns out, if you’re afforded the rights to something on a technicality, it’s actually pretty dumb to become brazen and assume that you can push these rights to the breaking point.
Google (and search engines in general) is at least providing a service by indexing and making discoverable the websites they crawl. OpenAI is is just hoovering up the data and providing nothing in return. Socializing the cost, privatizing the profits.
Uh, that’s objectively false.
OoenAI also provides ChatGPT as a “free” service, and Google has made billions off of that “free” service they oh so altruistically provide you.
Google points to your content so others can find it.
OpenAI scrapes your content to use to make more content.
That’s not a meaningful distinction, I spent all day using a Copilot search engine because the answers I wanted were scattered across a bunch of different documentation sites.
It was both using the AI models to interpret my commands (not generation at all), and then only publishes content to me specifically.
I’m talking about the training phase of LLMs.that is the portion that is doing the scraping and generation of copy written data.
You using an already trained LLM to do some searches is not the same thing.
Technically it is meaningful, fair use is for specifically things that don’t replace the original in function.
Depends on what the function was. If the function was to drive ad revenue to your site, then sure, if the function was to get information into the public, then it’s not replacing the function so much as altering and updating it.
It’s absolutely a meaningful distinction. Search engines push people to tour website where you can capitalize on your audience however you see fit. LLM’s take your content, through them through the mixer and sell it back to people. It’s the difference between a movie reviewer explaining a movie and a dude in an alley selling a pirated copy of the movie.
A) An LLM does not inherently sell you anything. Some companies charge you to run and use their LLMs (OpenAI), and some companies publish their LLMs open source for anyone to use (Meta, Microsoft). With neural chips starting to pop in PCs and phones, pretty soon anyone will be able to run an open source LLM locally on their machine, completely for free.
B) LLMs still rarely regurgitate the exact same original source. This would be more like someone in the back alley putting on their own performance of the movie and morphing it and adjusting it in real time based on your prompts and comments, which is a lot closer to parody and fair use than blatant piracy.
In every other circumstance I can think of, “I can’t make money doing a thing unless I break the law” means don’t do that thing.
Why should AI get special treatment?
Well in almost every other circumstance, you’re forgetting Uber and Airbnb.
Now about that fake money for criminals - it was quite useful for me when I needed to send money to my sister, with me being in Russia and her being outside, and it was year 2022. Also with the way ruble sank after the war, buying BTC hours after seeing news of it starting was probably a bargain. Would be twice as expensive the next day.
I haven’t used Uber (Yandex Taxi) and Airbnb (asocial type and have responsibilities), and I agree about the plagiarism machine.
Ah yes, the original unviable silicon valley businesses! I love how they used their VC money to undercut and kill small businesses all over the world.
Because they already raised hundreds of millions from investors
Because black numbers going up make shareholders happy
The more the original work is transformed, the more likely it is to be considered fair use rather than infringement.
Cool. If OpenAI gets a pass, then piracy should be legal, right? I mean what good is a trademark or copyright law?
Edit: “I can’t make money without stealing other people’s work” is definitely a take
No, see, piracy is just you downloading movies for yourself. To be like OpenAI you need to download it, put it in a pretty package with a bow, then sell it over and over again. Only when it’s piracy for profit do you get to beg and plead for a pass.
But I’m an aspiring artist, without pirating thousands of movies and TV shows, I’ll never make my ‘highly profitable’ magnum opus!
You skipped a crucial step: first you gotta raise a few hundred million in VC funding from Silicon Valley bigwigs!
For profit that you can kick back a chunk of as campaign donations
“I can’t be at financial peace if I have to pay for every movie I want to watch”
You’re not repackaging and selling it on for profit tho. That’s different and thus illegal because reasons
Sounds like an argument slave owners would use. “My plantation can’t make money without free labor!”
“My private prison can’t make money without more overconvicted inmates!”
In any sane society, closing a private prison would be cause for celebration.
How do you think slave owners got bailouts after the 13th amendment was passed and the slaves got freed?
Reminds me of that time the Federal government granted land parcels to a bunch of former slaves (using land from plantations) and then rescinded them again.
They used that part of the 13th that said “Well, except prisoners, those can be slaves.” Local law enforcement rounded up former slaves on trumped up charges and leased them back to the same plantation owners they were freed from. Only now if they escaped they were “escaped criminals” and they could count on even northern law enforcement returning them. The US is still a pro-slavery country and will be as long as that part of the 13th amendment stands.
My plantation can’t make money without everybody’s labour.
Copying information is not the same thing as stealing, let alone forcing people into slavery.
appreciate the important reality check, but I think the parent was just highlighting the absurdity of the original argument with hyperbole.
people are in jail for doing exactly what this company is doing. either enforce the laws equally (!) or change them (whatever that means in late stage capitalism).
Let’s advocate for no one going to prison for scraping information then. Let’s pick the second one where we don’t put more people into prison.
agreed.
I’m going to start pirating again and if I ever get caught up I’ll just inform them I’m training AI models.
Yeah, but you are not rich, so you will suffer the consequences
Just training Natural Intelligence…
The current generation of data hungry AI models with energy requirements of a small country should be replaced ASAP, so if copyright laws spur innovation in that direction I am all for it.
“WE’RE NOT A VIABLE BUSINESS! BWAH!”
Oh. Oh no. Such a shame.
Hey, me either. I guess I can steal too.
oh good. then fuck off. who knew copyright law would eventually be the good guy in a story.
You know that old adage, “You either die the villain or live long enough to become the hero.”
;)
that does not sound right, but I don’t know enough to argue about it.
I said it intentionally backwards. If I 'm now missing a joke in your comment I apologize. :)
“waaaaah please give us exemption so we can profit off of stolen works waaaaaaaahhhhhh”
pirated works 🙃
I’ve never made any money from pirating. Or at least I wouldn’t have if I would have ever done such a thing.
Oh, poor baby can’t make money with an illegal business model. How awful.
So search engines shouldn’t exist?
Perhaps. Or perhaps not in the way they do today. Perhaps if you profit from placing ads among results people actually want, you should share revenue with those results. Cause you know, people came to you for those results and they’re the reason you were able to show the ads to people.
Case law has been established in the prevention of actual image and text copyright infringement with Google specifically. Your point is not at all ambiguous. The distinction between a search engine and content theft has been made. Search engines can exist for a number of reasons but one of those criteria is obeisance of copyright law.
I mean, their goal and service is to get you to the actual web page someone else made.
What made Google so desirable when it started was that it did an excellent job of getting you to the desired web page and off of google as quickly as possible. The prevailing model at the time was to keep users on the page for as long as possible by creating big messy “everything portals”.
Once Google dropped, with a simple search field and high quality results, it took off. Of course now they’re now more like their original competitors than their original successful self … but that’s a lesson for us about what capitalistic success actually ends up being about.
The whole AI business model of completely replacing the internet by eating it up for free is the complete sith lord version of the old portal idea. Whatever you think about copyright, the bottom line is that the deeper phenomenon isn’t just about “stealing” content, it’s about eating it to feed a bigger creature that no one else can defeat.
I really think it’s mostly about getting a big enough data set to effectively train an LLM.
I really think it’s mostly about getting a big enough data set to effectively train an LLM.
I mean, yes of course. But I don’t think there’s any way in which it is just about that. Because the business model around having and providing services around LLMs is to supplant the data that’s been trained on and the services that created that data. What other business model could there be?
In the case of google’s AI alongside its search engine, and even chatGPT itself, this is clearly one of the use cases that has emerged and is actually working relatively well: replacing the internet search engine and giving users “answers” directly.
Users like it because it feels more comfortable, natural and useful, and probably quicker too. And in some cases it is actually better. But, it’s important to appreciate how we got here … by the internet becoming shitter, by search engines becoming shitter all in the pursuit of ads revenue and the corresponding tolerance of SEO slop.
IMO, to ignore the “carnivorous” dynamics here, which I think clearly go beyond ordinary capitalism and innovation, is to miss the forest for the trees. Somewhat sadly, this tech era (approx MS windows '95 to now) has taught people that the latest new thing must be a good idea and we should all get on board before it’s too late.
Users like it because it feels more comfortable, natural and useful, and probably quicker too. And in some cases it is actually better. But, it’s important to appreciate how we got here … by the internet becoming shitter, by search engines becoming shitter all in the pursuit of ads revenue and the corresponding tolerance of SEO slop
No, it legitimately is better. Do you know what Google could never do but that Copilot Search and Gemini Search can? Synthesize one answer from multiple different sources.
Sometimes the answer to your question is inherently not on a single page, it’s split across the old framework docs and the new framework docs and stack overflow questions and the best a traditional search engine can ever do is maybe get some of the right pieces in front of you some of the time. LLMs will give you a plain language answer immediately, and let you ask follow up questions and modifications to your original example.
Yes Google has gotten shitty, but it would never have been able to do the above without an LLM under the hood.
Sure, but IME it is very far from doing the things that good, well written and informed human content could do, especially once we’re talking about forums and the like where you can have good conversations with informed people about your problem.
IMO, what ever LLMs are doing that older systems can’t isn’t greater than what was lost with SEO ads-driven slop and shitty search.
Moreover, the business interest of LLM companies is clearly in dominating and controlling (as that’s just capitalism and the “smart” thing to do), which means the retention of the older human-driven system of information sharing and problem solving is vulnerable to being severely threatened and destroyed … while we could just as well enjoy some hybridised system. But because profit is the focus, and the means of making profit problematic, we’re in rough waters which I don’t think can be trusted to create a net positive (and haven’t been trust worthy for decades now).
So say the operators of piracy websites. I’m in favor of media piracy being legalized.
I don’t know for sure if you’re making the case that media piracy is more or less equivalent to AI being trained on stolen material (I may be reading that wrong)- but I’d like to add that media piracy isn’t making money on the backs of hard working people and forming a dystopia in which human art is drowned out by machine hallucinations.
In any case I agree that piracy should be legalized, or rather, that we rethink our approach to media availability and challenge the power and wealth of producers.
I stand by my opinion that learning systems training on copyrighted materials isn’t the problem, it’s companies super eager to replace human workers with automation (or replace skilled workers with cheaper, unskilled workers). The problem is, every worker not working is another adult (and maybe some kids) not eating and not paying rent.
(And for those of you soulless capitalists out there, people without food and shelter is bad. That’s a thing we won’t tolerate and start looking at you lean-and-hungry-like when it happens. That’s what gets us thinking about guillotines hungry for aristocrats.)
In my ideal world, everyone would have food, shelter, clothes, entertainment and a general middle-class lifestyle whether they worked or not, and intellectual-property temporary monopolies would be very short and we’d have a huge public domain. I think the UN wants to be on the same page as me, but the United States and billionaires do not.
All we’d have to worry about is the power demands of AI and cryptomining, which might motivate us to get pure-hydrogen fusion working. Or just keep developing solar, wind, geothermal and tidal power until everyone can run their AC and supercomputer.
it’s companies super eager to replace human workers with automation (or replace skilled workers with cheaper, unskilled workers). The problem is, every worker not working is another adult (and maybe some kids) not eating and not paying rent.
I agree this is the real problem. (And also shit like Microsoft’s “now I can attend three meetings at once” ad) However:
I stand by my opinion that learning systems training on copyrighted materials isn’t the problem
The industries whose works are being used for training are on the front lines of efforts to replace human workers with AI - writers and visual artists.
The industries whose works are being used for training are on the front lines of efforts to replace human workers with AI - writers and visual artists.
Much the way musicians were on the front line when recording was becoming a thing and movies were turning into talkies. But that’s the most visible pushout. We’re also seeing clerical work getting automated, and once autonomous vehicles become mastered, freight and courier work (driving freight is like a third of the US workforce).
This is much the same way that GMO technology is fine (and will be necessary) but the way Monsanto has been using it as DRM for seeds is unethical.
I think attacking the technology itself doesn’t serve to address the unethical part, and kicks the can down the line to where the fight is going to be more intense. But yes, we haven’t found our Mahsa Amini moment to justify nationwide general strikes.
As someone who dabbles in sociology (unaccredited), it’s vexed me that we can’t organize general strikes (or burning down precincts) until enough people die unjustly and horribly, and even then it’s not predictable what will do it. For now it means as a species we’re going gentle into multiple good nights.
As someone who dabbles in sociology (unaccredited), it’s vexed me that we can’t organize general strikes (or burning down precincts) until enough people die unjustly and horribly, and even then it’s not predictable what will do it. For now it means as a species we’re going gentle into multiple good nights.
I can’t tell for most of your post if you are agreeing with me, disagreeing with me, or just adding more info. However, I entirely agree with this bit here from you that I quoted.
1 Monsanto doesn’t even exist anymore
2 With the amount of AI money going into AI trucking, we could’ve bought more rail which is inherently automatable.
I stand by my opinion that learning systems training on copyrighted materials isn’t the problem, it’s companies super eager to replace human workers with automation (or replace skilled workers with cheaper, unskilled workers).
I mean it’s the heart of the issue.
OpenAI isn’t even the big issue regarding this. It’s other companies that are developing and training specialized LLMs on their own employees. These companies have the capital to take the loss on the project because in their eyes it’ll eventually turn into a gain as long as they get it right eventually.
GPT and OpenAI is just a minor distraction in regards to what is being cooked up behind the scenes, but I still wouldn’t give them a free pass for that either.
This has nothing to do with copyright.
It does. If the AI firms lose, the laws around copyrights tighten and major copyright holders profit. If they win, they get to do what they please and nobody can stop them. Either way, the public loses.
Phh, people without food and work can go to the
VenusX-enus mining company.
If openai gets to use copyrighted content for free, then so should every one else.
If that happens, no point making anything, since your stuff will get stolen anyway
I’m okay with it if they do some kind of open source GPL style license for the copyrighted material, like you can use all the material in the world to train your model, but you can’t sell your model for money if it was trained on copyrighted material.
You absolutely CAN sell GPL-licensed applications for money.
If that happens, no point making anything, since your stuff will get stolen anyway
From a capitalist’s point of view, yes, but we need a society that enables people to act from other incentives than making money. And there are plenty of other reasons to make things.
Everyone else does. Name one thing you have to pay for to view on the internet…lmfao
Pay me upfront to make it, subscribe to my patron. If you need my intellectual property to be guaranteed then pay me for a SLA support contract.
Otherwise everything I make is out some other interest and your benifit is just an unintended consequence or because of some charitable notion on my part.
Its crazy how much of the world is actually just this and not some nebulas notion on artificial scarcity of the idea of the things (IP).
Trademark would arguably be uneffected though since that has more to do with fraud protections.
