[HN Gopher] OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules
___________________________________________________________________
OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules
Author : jonbaer
Score : 751 points
Date : 2025-03-13 12:20 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (finance.yahoo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (finance.yahoo.com)
| freedomben wrote:
| Related (adjacent content from the same report):
|
| _OpenAI urges Trump administration to remove guardrails for the
| industry (cnbc.com)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43354324
| freedomben wrote:
| Apparently the above has been marked as a dupe (I hope not from
| a misunderstanding of what "adjacent" means), but ftr it covers
| different stuff. e.g. there's nothing about the classified data
| model proposal in TFA
| pvg wrote:
| Slightly different coverage of the same event usually count
| as dupes on HN. You could link the reporting you want to
| emphasize/discuss, the HN submission itself is not that
| important.
| dsr_ wrote:
| You see, American AI is going to take over the world. It's just
| that it's temporarily short of funds. I mean, GPUs. Uh, there are
| pesky laws in the way.
|
| Totally not the fault of a gigantic overcommitment based on
| wishing, no.
| gkoberger wrote:
| I hate this game. I hate that Sam Altman publicly supported Trump
| (both financially and by showing up). Maybe I hate that he "had"
| to do this for the sake of his company, or maybe I hate that he
| _didn't_ have to do it and is a hypocrite. Maybe I just hate how
| easily laws can be shaped by $1M and a few nice words. Either
| way, I hate that it worked.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| centralising power never works well for the good of society
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| That's correct. Voluntary association advocated by anarchy is
| the only truly free social model.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| I heard rumblings about some sort of system where power is
| shared equally across three branches of government with
| checks and balances to ensure one branch doesn't go rogue
| and just do whatever they want.
|
| Forget what they called it, united something or other.
| int_19h wrote:
| Well, the people who designed that system were very
| skeptical of political parties in general, and thought
| they could be avoided. Turns out that this isn't true,
| and once you have parties, they can in fact capture all
| three branches of government, and then those "checks and
| balances" kinda stop working.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Yeah, I think that is unfortunately the fate of all
| political systems.
|
| Maybe our AI overlords will do a better job this time if
| they are unconstrained from any lawful oversight. I mean,
| one can hope...
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| In fact, that's not too far away from our current
| trajectory. Algorithmically enforced sovereign oversight
| is part of the patchwork state and Yarvinism
| specifically.
| slt2021 wrote:
| whatever you had in mind, thats definitely not the USA,
| where money/lobbying and inter-partisan corruption trump
| everything
| danans wrote:
| It's not true that it never works.
|
| Centralizing production goals, decision making, and
| expenditure at the Federal government is what made the
| industrial response to WW2 successful. Centralizing tax
| revenue to fund retirements for the elderly (Social Security)
| resulted in the poverty rate of seniors being brought far
| lower. Centralizing zoning control at the state of California
| is _finally_ starting to make localities take responsibility
| for building more housing. These were/are centralizing
| efforts with the intent of helping the masses over the
| wealthy few.
|
| What doesn't work is centralizing power with the intent of
| concentrating wealth and security by taking wealth, labor,
| and security from working people, AKA extractive
| institutions.
|
| That's true whether it's the donor-class funded political
| establishment or regimes like the current US kleptocracy
| doing it.
| int_19h wrote:
| Problem is, once you centralize, that remains in place for
| a long time, but the original intent, even if it was
| genuine, rarely outlives the people who implemented it for
| long.
|
| Generally speaking, every point of centralization is also a
| point where a lot of power can be acquired with relatively
| little resources. So regardless of intent, it attracts
| people who are into power, and over time, they take over.
| The original intent often remains symbolically and in the
| rhetoric used, but when you look beyond that into the
| actual policies, they are increasingly divorced from what
| is actually claimed.
| danans wrote:
| > Generally speaking, every point of centralization is
| also a point where a lot of power can be acquired with
| relatively little resources
|
| This is why (1) shared principles and (2) credible
| democracy is important, to allow evolution of the
| centralized power (i.e. government) towards the shared
| principles, and why its corporate-bribed facsimile or
| oligarchic authoritarianism don't work.
| int_19h wrote:
| Credibility of democracy breaks down as you scale upward
| (which you have to do if you want to centralize). Any
| representative democracy in which the representative
| doesn't know all the people they represent is already
| suspect, but when you get to the point where a single guy
| supposedly represents hundreds of thousands or even
| millions, it's kinda obvious that there's no meaningful
| representation involved. The only way to avoid that is to
| grow the parliament instead to the point where it ceases
| to function as a deliberative assembly (and then what's
| the point of it?).
|
| Or you can have a bunch of smaller assemblies that
| actually are representative, and then a larger one to
| which assemblies delegate their own to cooperate. But
| that's exactly political decentralization - a multi-level
| federation.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I think it can work for a short period of time if you have
| enlightened leaders or if the political machine wants to
| please you; they always alternate pleasing some people and
| upsetting others so that they can keep control.
|
| Over a long period of time the interest of the powerful
| will always win. There is a reason if no government
| (whether left or right) can fix the situation and
| inequality between the top 0.01% and the rest keeps
| increasing.
|
| The only solution to maximise wellbeing for individuals is
| to reduce the amount of control the powerful can exert on
| the rest of society.
| Xelynega wrote:
| Interesting way to put it after seeing a very specific
| "centralizing of power", that being the people with the most
| capital making the decisions.
|
| Why would centralizing power in a different way(e.x.
| democratically) not lead to a different outcome than
| centralizing power in the way we do now?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I don't think someone with more capital should be able to
| make the decisions
|
| That's what we're getting with "democracy" because
| ultimately swaying the opinion of a lot of people (in this
| technological time) requires money. No wonder the powerful
| elite or their puppets end up making decision for the
| majority.
|
| No, what I advocate for is for decentralisation of power, I
| don't want any central entity making choices for me.
|
| Someone with capital should be able to offer to buy me out
| but they shouldn't be able to tax me or decide what happens
| to me or my property.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| > I hate this game.
|
| This is tech. This is how it has always been. From Archemedes
| to DaVinci to Edison to Ford, technologists are always captured
| to serve the interests of those in power. Most modern
| technologists don't want to believe this. They grew up building
| an Internet that had a bit of countercultural flair to it and
| undermined a few subsets of entrenched elites (mass media, taxi
| cartels, etc.), so they convinced themselves that they could
| control society under their wise hands. Except the same thing
| that always happened happened: the powers that be are now
| treating tech the way tech treats everyone else.
| nwhnwh wrote:
| Could you please recommend a book about this?
| corndoge wrote:
| _A Canticle for Leibowitz_
| mystraline wrote:
| Wealth of Nations (read past pg 50, unlike most current
| economists)
|
| Das kapital, as a critique to Smith's writing.
|
| Communist manifesto, to understand the point of the
| laborer, and not capital.
|
| Read about worker cooperatives and democracy in the
| workplace, including Mondragon corp in Spain.
|
| (One of the largest problems we have with any economic
| system is that none can properly model infinites. The cost
| of creating new is expensive be it art or science. But cost
| of copying is effectively 0. I can highlight the problem,
| but I have no good solution. But OpenAI's response is 'let
| us ignore copyright law' which wrongs creators.)
| wildpeaks wrote:
| It made sense to ponder given HN attracts people with the
| hacker mindset (the drive of curiosity to understand how
| things work and how to improve them, not merely accepting the
| status quo as gospel like the dry monkeys) and frustration is
| a good signal that something could be improved.
| scudsworth wrote:
| whats a dry monkey
| lmc wrote:
| Apple seem to be holding the line ok:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-investors-reject-
| pr...
|
| https://news.sky.com/story/apple-removes-end-to-end-
| security...
| dchichkov wrote:
| >> In the proposal, OpenAI also said the U.S. needs "a copyright
| strategy that promotes the freedom to learn" and on "preserving
| American AI models' ability to learn from copyrighted material."
|
| Perhaps also symmetric "freedom to learn" from OpenAI models,
| with some provisions / naming convention? U.S. labs are limited
| in this way, while labs in China are not.
| sega_sai wrote:
| I like how this "freedom to learn" should apply to models, but
| not real people..
| TheSoftwareGuy wrote:
| It already applies to real people, doesn't it? I.e. if you
| read a book, you're not allowed to start printing and selling
| copies of that book without permission of the copyright
| owner, but if you learn something from that book you can use
| that knowledge, just like a model could.
| m1el wrote:
| when it comes to real people, they get sued into oblivion
| for downloading copyrighted content, even for the purpose
| of learning. but when facebook & openai do it, at a much
| larger scale, suddenly the laws must be changed.
| ryoshu wrote:
| Case in point -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Swartz wasn't "downloading copyrighted content...for the
| purpose of learning," he was downloading with the intent
| to distribute. That doesn't justify how he was treated.
| But it's not analogous to the limited argument for LLMs
| that don't regurgitate the copyrighted content.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _when it comes to real people, they get sued into
| oblivion for downloading copyrighted content, even for
| the purpose of learning._
|
| Really? Or do they get sued for sharing as in
| republishing without transformation? Arguably a URL
| providing copyrighted content, is you offering a xerox
| machine.
|
| It seems most "sued into oblivion" are the reshare
| problem, not the get one for myself problem.
| conjectures wrote:
| It does apply to people? When you read a copy of a book,
| you can't be sued for making a copy of the book in the
| synapses of your brain.
|
| Now, if you have eidetic memory and write out large
| chunks of the book from memory and publish them, that's
| what you could be sued for.
| triceratops wrote:
| > When you read a copy of a book
|
| They're not talking about _reading_ a book FFS. You
| absolutely can be sued for illegally obtaining a copy of
| the book.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| This is not about memory or training. The LLM training
| process is not being run on books streamed directly off
| the internet or from real-time footage of a book.
|
| What these companies are doing is:
|
| 1. Obtain a free copy of a work in some way.
|
| 2. Store this copy in a format that's amenable to
| training.
|
| 3. Train their models on the stored copy, months or years
| after step 1 happened.
|
| The illegal part happens in steps 1 and/or 2. Step 3 is
| perhaps debatable - maybe it's fair to argue that the
| model is learning in the same sense as a human reading a
| book, so the model is perhaps not illegally created.
|
| But the training set that the company is storing is full
| of illegally obtained or at least illegally copied works.
|
| What they're doing _before_ the training step is exactly
| like building a library by going with a portable copier
| into bookshops and creating copies of every book in that
| bookshop.
| visarga wrote:
| But making copies for yourself, without distributing
| them, is different than making copies for others. Google
| is downloading copyrighted content from everywhere
| online, but they don't redistribute their scraped
| content.
|
| Even web browsing implies making copies of copyrighted
| pages, we can't tell the copyright status of a page
| without loading it, at which point a copy has been made
| in memory.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Making copies of an original you don't own/didn't obtain
| legally is not fair use. Also, this type of personal
| copying doesn't apply to corporations making copies to be
| distributed among their employees (it might apply to a
| company making a copy for archival, though).
| codedokode wrote:
| > But making copies for yourself, without distributing
| them,
|
| If this was legal, nobody would be paying for software.
| triceratops wrote:
| Can I download a book without paying for it, and print
| copies of it? Stash copies in my bathroom, the gym, my
| office, my bedroom etc. to basically have a copy on hand to
| study from whenever I have some free time?
|
| What about movies and music?
| ajross wrote:
| > Can I download a book without paying for it, and print
| copies of it?
|
| No, but you can _read_ a book, learn its contents, and
| then write and publish your own book to teach the
| information to others. The operation of an AI is rather
| closer to that than it is to copyright violation.
|
| "Should" there be protections against AI training? Maybe!
| But copyright law as it stands is woefully inadequate to
| the task, and IMHO a lot of people aren't really treating
| with this. We need a functioning government to write
| well-considered laws for the benefit of all here. We'll
| see what we get.
| triceratops wrote:
| But I can't legally obtain the book to read and learn
| from without me (or a library) paying for it. Let's start
| there first.
| ajross wrote:
| Yes, but the learning isn't constrained by those laws. If
| I steal a book and read it, I'm guilty of the crime of
| theft. You can put me in jail, try me before a jury, fine
| me, and put me in prison according to whatever laws I
| broke.
|
| Nothing in my sentence constrains my ability to teach
| someone else the stuff I learned, though! In fact, the
| first amendment makes it pretty damn clear that nothing
| _can_ constrain that freedom.
|
| Also, note that the example is malformed: in almost all
| these cases, Meta et. al. aren't "stealing" anything
| anyway. They're downloading and reading stuff on the
| internet that is available for free. If you or I can't be
| prosecuted for reading a preprint from arXiv.org or
| whatever, it's a very hard case to make that an AI can.
|
| Again, copyright isn't the tool here. We need better
| laws.
| triceratops wrote:
| > copyright isn't the tool here
|
| It's not the _only_ tool. I agree that "use for ML"
| should be an additional right.
|
| What people are pissed about is that copyright only ever
| serves to constrain the little guys.
|
| > If I steal a book and read it, I'm guilty of the crime
| of theft
|
| You or I would never dare to do this in the first place.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Sure, but OpenAI (same as Google, and Facebook, and all
| the others) is illegally copying the book, and they want
| this to be legal for them.
|
| It's perhaps arguable whether it's OK for an LLM to be
| trained on freely available but licensed works, such as
| the Linux source code. There you can get in arguments
| about learning vs machine processing, and whether the LLM
| is a derived work etc
|
| But it's _not_ arguable that copying a book that you have
| not even bought to store in your corporate data lake to
| later use for training is a _blatant_ violation of basic
| copyright. It 's exactly like borrowing a book from a
| library, photocopying it, and then putting it in your
| employee-only corporate library.
| riversflow wrote:
| > Meta et. al. aren't "stealing" anything anyway
|
| They were caught downloading the entirety of libgen.
| codedokode wrote:
| One thing is downloading pirated copy and reading it for
| yourself and another thing is running a business based on
| downloading millions of pirated works.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| If you buy it
| ajross wrote:
| No, even if I steal it. I can teach you anything I know.
| Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of
| speech, as it were.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Yes, but this is not the right model. What OpenAI wants
| is to borrow a book, make a copy of it, and keep using
| that copy, in training their models. This is fully and
| simply illegal, under any basic copyright law.
| Terretta wrote:
| Is the book online and accessible to your eyeballs
| through your open standards client tool, such that you
| can learn from seeing it?
| triceratops wrote:
| Most books aren't. Unless you pay for them.
| codedokode wrote:
| Let's say Windows is downloadable from Microsoft website.
| Can you use it for free in your company to save on buying
| a license? Is it ok to use illegal copies of works in a
| business?
| notatoad wrote:
| >Can I download a book without paying for it
|
| if you have evidence that openAI is doing this with books
| that are not freely available, i'm sure the publishers
| would absolutely love to hear about it.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| We know Meta has done it. These companies have torrented
| or downloaded books that they did not pay for. Things
| like the The Pile, libgen, anna's library were scraped to
| build these models.
| lawlessone wrote:
| >if you have evidence that openAI is doing this with
| books that are not freely available, i'm sure the
| publishers would absolutely love to hear about it.
|
| Lol, so why are OpenAI challenging these laws?
| croes wrote:
| Do you think OpenAI used fewer sources than Meta?
| ben_w wrote:
| To the extent that this is how libraries function, yes.
|
| The part of that which doesn't apply is "print copies",
| at least not complete copies, but libraries often have
| photocopiers in them for fragments needed for research.
|
| AI models shouldn't do that either, IMO. But unlimited
| complete copies is the mistake the Internet Archive made,
| too.
| triceratops wrote:
| I missed the part where OpenAI got library cards for all
| the libraries in the world.
|
| Is having a library card a requirement for being hired
| over there?
| ben_w wrote:
| I don't need a card to read in the library, nor to use
| the photocopiers there, but it's merely one example
| anyway. (If it wasn't, you'd only need one library, any
| of the deposit libraries will do:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit).
|
| You also don't need permission, as a human, to read (and
| learn from) the internet in general. Machines _by
| standard practice_ require such permission, hence
| robots.txt, and OpenAI 's GPTBot complies with the
| robots.txt file and the company gives advice to web
| operators about how to disallow their bot.
|
| How AI should be treated, more like a search index, or
| more like a mind that can learn by reading? Not my call.
| It's a new thing, and laws can be driven by economics or
| by moral outrage, and in this case those two driving
| forces are at odds.
| triceratops wrote:
| We started with libraries and books, now you're moving
| the goalposts to websites.
|
| Sidenote: I wouldn't even be mad if OpenAI built robots
| to go into all of the libraries and read all of the
| books. That would be amazing!
| ben_w wrote:
| I started with libraries. OpenAI started with the
| internet.
|
| The argument for both is identical, your objection is
| specific to libraries.
|
| IIRC, Google already did your sidenote. Or started to,
| may have had legal issues.
| triceratops wrote:
| > The argument for both is identical
|
| How so? I don't have to pay to read most websites. To
| read most books I have to pay (or a library has to pay
| and I have to wait to get the book).
|
| > IIRC, Google already did your sidenote
|
| Not quite. They had to chop the spines off books and have
| humans feed them into scanners. I'm talking about a robot
| that can walk (or roll) into a library, use arms to take
| books off the shelves, turn the pages and read them
| without putting them into a scanner.
| philipkglass wrote:
| They had humans turn the pages of intact books in
| scanning machines. The books mostly came from the shelves
| of academic libraries and were returned to the shelves
| after scanning. You can see some incidental captures of
| hands/fingers in the scans on Google Books or HathiTrust
| (the academic home of the Google Books scans). There are
| some examples collected here:
|
| https://theartofgooglebooks.tumblr.com/
| ben_w wrote:
| > How so? I don't have to pay to read most websites. To
| read most books I have to pay (or a library has to pay
| and I have to wait to get the book).
|
| "or" does a lot of work, even ignoring that I'd already
| linked you to a page about deposit libraries:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit
|
| Fact is, you _can_ read books for free, just as you can
| read (many but not all) websites for free. And in both
| cases you 're allowed to use what you learned without
| paying ongoing licensing fees for having learned anything
| from either, and even to make money from what you learn.
|
| > Not quite. They had to chop the spines off books and
| have humans feed them into scanners.
|
| Your statement is over 20 years out of date:
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US7508978B1/en
| dylan604 wrote:
| I missed the part where we throw away rational logic
| skills
|
| Have you never been to a public library and read a book
| while sitting there without checking it out? Clearly, age
| is a factor here, and us olds are confused by this lack
| of understanding of how libraries function. I did my
| entire term paper without ever checking out books from
| the library. I just showed up with my stack of blank
| index cards, then left with the necessary info written on
| them. Did an entire project on tracking stocks by
| visiting the library and viewing all of the papers for
| the days in one sitting rather than being schmuck and
| tracking it daily. Took me about an hour in one day. No
| library card required.
|
| Also, a library card is ridiculously cheap even if you
| did decide to have one.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| If I spent every last second of my life in a public
| library, I couldn't even view a fraction of the
| information that OpenAI has ingested. The comparison is
| irrelevant. To make the comparison somehow valid, I'd
| have to back up my truck to a public library, steal the
| entire contents, then start selling copies out of my
| garage
| dylan604 wrote:
| Look, even I'm not a fan of ClosedAI, but this is
| ridiculous. ClosedAI isn't giving copies of anything. It
| is giving you a response it infers based on things it has
| "read" and/or "learned" by reading content. Does ClosedAI
| store a copy of the content it scrapes, or does it
| immediately start tokenizing it or whatever is involved
| in training? If they store it, that's a lot of data, and
| we should be able to prove that sites were scraped
| through lawsuit discovery process. Are you then also
| suggesting that ClosedAI will sell you copies of that raw
| data if you prompted correctly?
|
| I'm in no way justifying anything about GPT/LLM training.
| I'm just calling out that these comparisons are extremely
| strained.
| codedokode wrote:
| Let's say OpenAI developers use illegal copy of Windows
| on their laptops to save on buying a license. Is that ok
| to run a business this way?
|
| Also I think it is different thing when someone uses
| copyrighted works for research and publishing a paper or
| when someone uses copyrighted works to earn money.
| triceratops wrote:
| > Have you never been to a public library and read a book
| while sitting there without checking it out?
|
| See my comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355723. If OpenAI
| built a robot that physically went into libraries, pulled
| books off shelves by itself, and read them...that's so
| cool I wouldn't even be mad.
| dylan604 wrote:
| What about checking out eBooks? If you had an app that
| checked those out and scanned it at robot speed vs human
| feed, that would be the same thing. The idea that reading
| something that does not belong to you directly means
| stealing is just weird and very strained.
|
| theGoogs essentially did that by having the robot that
| turned each page and scanned the pages. that's no
| different than having the librarian pull material for you
| so that you don't have to pull the book from the shelf
| yourself.
|
| There's better arguments to make on why ClosedAI is bad.
| Reading text it doesn't own isn't one of them. How they
| acquired the text would be a better thing to critique.
| There's laws for that in place now that does not require
| new laws to be enacted.
| triceratops wrote:
| > If you had an app that checked those out and scanned it
|
| You mean...made a copy? Do you really not see the
| problem?
|
| > How they acquired the text would be a better thing to
| critique
|
| Well...yeah that's what I said in the comment that
| started this discussion branch:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355147
|
| This isn't about humans or robots _reading_ books. It 's
| that robots are allowed to violate copyright law to read
| the books, and us humans are not.
| ben_w wrote:
| > You mean...made a copy? Do you really not see the
| problem?
|
| In precisely the same way as a robot scanning a physical
| book is.
|
| If this is turned into a PDF and distributed, it's
| exactly the legal problem Google had[0] and that Facebook
| is currently fighting due to torrenting some of their
| training material[1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._
| Google,...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43125840
|
| If the tokens go directly into training an AI and no
| copies are retained, that's like how you as a human learn
| -- except current AI models are not even remotely as able
| to absorb that information as you, and they only make up
| for being as thick as a plank by being stupid very very
| quickly.
|
| > It's that robots are allowed to violate copyright law
| to read the books, and us humans are not.
|
| More that the copyright laws are not suited to what's
| going on. Under the copyright laws, statute and case law,
| that existed at the time GPT-3.5 was created, bots were
| understood as the kind of thing Google had and used to
| make web indexes -- essentially legal, with some caveats
| about quoting too much verbatim from news articles.
|
| (Google PageRank being a big pile of linear algebra and
| all, and the Transformer architecture from which ChatGPT
| get's the "T" being originally a Google effort to improve
| Google Translate).
|
| Society is currently arguing amongst itself if this is
| still OK when the bot is a conversational entity, or
| perhaps even something that can be given agency.
|
| You get to set those rules via your government
| representative, make it illegal for AI crawlers to read
| the internet like that -- but it's hard to change the
| laws if you mistake what you want the law to be, with
| what the law currently is.
| dylan604 wrote:
| but you keep saying to read the books. there is no
| copyright violation to read a book. making copies starts
| to get into murky grounds, but does not immediately mean
| breaking the law.
| triceratops wrote:
| You might be thinking of someone else.
| nightpool wrote:
| Yes, you're allowed to make personal copies of copyright
| works that you own. IANAL, but my understanding is that
| if you're using them for yourself, and you're not
| prevented from doing so by some sort of EULA or DRM,
| there's nothing in copyright law preventing you from e.g.
| photocopying a book and keeping a copy at home, as long
| as you don't distribute it. The test case here has always
| been CDs--you're allowed to make copies of CDs you
| legally own and keep one at home and one in your car.
| triceratops wrote:
| CDs, software, and electronic media, yes. Physical books,
| no. You can't make archival copies.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| sure you can, you could take a physical book, and
| painstakingly copy each page at a time, that is totally
| fair use.
| triceratops wrote:
| Citation needed.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| You can make copies of things. You just can't distribute
| them
| triceratops wrote:
| You're repeating upthread comments. And no, you can't.
| There's an archival exception for _electronic media_. If
| you want to make copies of physical media you either:
|
| 1. Can't
|
| Or
|
| 2. Rely on fair use to protect you (archival by
| individuals isn't necessarily fair use)
| jncfhnb wrote:
| It absolutely is fair use to copy a book for your
| personal archives.
|
| The fair use criteria considers whether it is commercial
| in nature (in this case it is not) and the " the effect
| of the use upon the potential market for or value of the
| copyrighted work" for which a personal copy of a
| personally owned book is non existent.
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
|
| You would get laughed at by the legal system trying to
| prosecute an individual owner for copying a book they
| bought just to keep.
| triceratops wrote:
| > It absolutely is fair use to copy a book for your
| personal archives.
|
| There's no legal precedent for this. See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356042
|
| > the effect of the use upon the potential market for or
| value of the copyrighted work
|
| A copyright holder's lawyer would argue that having and
| using a photocopy of a book keeps the original from
| wearing out. This directly affects the potential market
| for the work, since the owner could resell the book in
| mint condition, after reading and burning their
| photocopies.
|
| > You would get laughed at by the legal system trying to
| prosecute an individual owner for copying a book they
| bought just to keep.
|
| I mean maybe this is true. But the affected individual
| will have a very bad year and spend a ton of money on
| lawyers.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| >No legal precedent
|
| Why do you interpret this to mean "absolutely can't do
| this"? "No precedent" seems to equally support both sides
| of the argument (that is, it provides no evidence; courts
| have not ruled). The other commenters arguments on the
| actual text of the statute seem more convincing to me
| than what you have so far provided.
| triceratops wrote:
| I was responding to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356240 which said
| it "absolutely is fair use".
|
| > The other commenters arguments...seem more convincing
|
| Because you (and I) want it to be fair use. But as I
| already said in my comment, it potentially fails one leg
| of fair use. Keeping your purchased physical copy of the
| book pristine and untouched while you read the photocopy
| allows you to later, after destroying the copies you
| made, resell the book as new or like-new. This directly
| affects the market for that book.
|
| Do you want to spend time and money in court to find out
| if it's really fair use? That's what "no precedent"
| means.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > Do you want to spend time and money in court to find
| out if it's really fair use?
|
| No. I'd much rather pirate the epub followed by lobbying
| for severe IP law reform. (Of course by "lobby" I
| actually mean complain about IP law online.)
|
| If there's no epub available then I guess it's time to
| get building. (https://linearbookscanner.org/)
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Multiple times in this thread you make the very confident
| assertion that this is not allowed, and that it is only
| allowed for electronic media. That is your opinion, which
| is fine. The argument that it _is_ fair use is also an
| opinion. Until it becomes settled law with precedent,
| every argument about it will just opinion on what the
| text of the law means. But you are denigrating the other
| opinions while upholding your own as truth.
|
| And whether or not I am personally interested in testing
| any of these opinions is completely beside the point.
| triceratops wrote:
| Copyright is a restriction on making unauthorized, full
| copies under almost all circumstances. Default deny.
| There's only one documented exception on the books right
| now which is electronic media. None of these are
| opinions.
|
| The idea that photocopying a book for archival purposes
| is potentially fair use is an untested opinion. I'm not
| denigrating that opinion. I just think it's likely to
| fail as an legal argument in the unlikely event that it
| comes up. I'm not a copyright apologist.
|
| I myself believed the "fair use for archival"/"format
| shifting" thing applied to all works for most of my life.
| I only learned there was no law or precedent like 10 days
| ago.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| You're now arguing the assumption without a precedent you
| don't have the right to do something. That's not how the
| law works. If you believe that the courts would laugh at
| a publisher trying to bring suit against you for doing
| this, then you believe you have the right to do it.
|
| Such a case would not require a year or a ton of money to
| defend. In fact, the potential damages would be so small
| that you could sensibly do it in small claims court.
| triceratops wrote:
| > You're now arguing the assumption without a precedent
| you don't have the right to do something. That's not how
| the law works.
|
| I mean copyright law has always been "You can't make full
| copies for any reason (almost)". And you were the one
| saying "it absolutely is fair use [to make full personal
| copies]", which is quite a strong statement to make in
| the absence of a precedence.
|
| An archive could argue fair use to make full copies of
| physical works, because that's their role, and by keeping
| the copies locked away they don't harm the market for the
| works. These fair use factors don't apply to individuals.
| But IANAL and maybe that's wrong, who knows? I do know if
| it comes up the copyright mafia will fight it tooth and
| nail, and I'd put my money on them winning.
|
| > the potential damages would be so small that you could
| sensibly do it in small claims court
|
| The publisher would sue the infringer in small claims
| court? This seems very unlikely since the publisher would
| prefer to scare or bankrupt you into submission.
|
| Or would the defendant have the lawsuit moved to small
| claims court? Are defendants allowed to do this?
| anticensor wrote:
| Copyright law is explicitly outside the scope of small
| claims and consumer tribunal systems.
| observationist wrote:
| It seems reasonably within the bounds described by fair
| use, but nobody's ever tested that particular
| constellation of factors in a lawsuit, so there's no
| precedent - hand copying a book, that is.
|
| 17 U.S.C. SS 107 is the fair use carveout.
|
| Interestingly, digitizing and copying a book on your own,
| for your own private use, has also not been brought to
| court. Major rights holders seem to not want this
| particular fair use precedent to be established, which it
| likely would be, and might then invalidate crucial
| standing for other cases in which certain interpretations
| of fair use are preferred.
|
| Digitally copying media you own is fair use. I'll die on
| that hill. It doesn't grant commercial rights, you can't
| resell a copy as if it were the original, and so on, and
| so forth.
|
| There's even a good case to be made that sharing a
| digitally copied work purchased legally, even to millions
| of people, 5 years after a book is first sold - for a
| vast majority of books, after 5 years, they've sold about
| 99.99% of the copies they're going to sell.
|
| By sharing after the ~5 year mark, you're arguably doing
| marketing for the book, and if we cultivated a culture of
| direct donation to authors and content creators, it
| invalidates any of the reasons piracy is made illegal in
| the first place.
|
| Right now publishers, studios, and platforms have a
| stranglehold on content markets, and the law serves them
| almost exclusively. It is exceedingly rare for the law to
| be invoked in defending or supporting an author or artist
| directly. It's very common for groups of wealthy lawyers
| LARPing as protectors of authors and artists to exploit
| the law and steal money from regular people.
|
| Exclusively digital content should have a 3 year
| protected period, while physical works should get 5,
| whether it's text, audio, image, or video.
|
| Once something is outside the protected period, it should
| be considered fair game for sharing until 20 years have
| passed, at which point it should enter public domain.
|
| Copyright law serves two purposes - protecting and
| incentivizing content creators, and serving the interests
| of the public. Situations where a bunch of lawyers get
| rich by suing the pants off of regular people over
| technicalities is a despicable outcome.
| triceratops wrote:
| > there's no precedent - hand copying a book, that is
|
| Thank you! I had looked this up myself last week, so I
| knew this. I had long believed, as GP does, that copying
| anything you own without distribution is either allowed
| or fair use. I wanted GP to learn as I did.
| observationist wrote:
| For reference, here's the US legal code in question:
|
| Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A,
| the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by
| reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other
| means specified by that section, for purposes such as
| criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including
| multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or
| research, is not an infringement of copyright. In
| determining whether the use made of a work in any
| particular case is a fair use the factors to be
| considered shall include-- (1) the purpose and character
| of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial
| nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the
| nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and
| substantiality of the portion used in relation to the
| copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the
| use upon the potential market for or value of the
| copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished
| shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such
| finding is made upon consideration of all the above
| factors.
|
| The spirit seems apparent, but in practice it's been used
| by awful people to destroy lives and exploit rent from
| artists and authors in damn near tyrannical ways.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Except you said "You can't make archival copies." and
| didn't provide a citation. That's quite a different claim
| than "there exists no precedent clearly establishing your
| right or lack thereof to make archival copies".
| triceratops wrote:
| Congress expressly granted archival rights for digital
| media. If they wanted to do the same for books they
| could've done so. There's no law or legal precedent
| allowing it.
|
| Given all this "can't do it" is more probably accurate
| than "can do it". IANAL but it's not like the question is
| finely balanced on a knife's edge and could go either
| way.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Congress didn't explicitly disallow it either. You left
| that bit out. As such it comes down to interpretation of
| the existing law. We both clearly agree that doesn't
| (yet) exist.
|
| > IANAL but it's not like the question is finely balanced
| on a knife's edge and could go either way.
|
| I agree, but my interpretation is opposite yours. It
| seems fairly obvious to me that the spirit of the law
| permits personal copies. That also seems to be in line
| with (explicitly legislated) digital practices.
|
| But at the end of the day the only clearly correct
| statement on the matter is "there's no precedent, so we
| don't know". I suppose it's also generally good advice to
| avoid the legal quagmire if possible. Being in the right
| is unlikely to do you any good if it bankrupts you in the
| process.
| triceratops wrote:
| > Congress didn't explicitly disallow it either.
|
| That's the whole point of copyright: only the owner of a
| copyright has the right to make copies. I don't see how
| it can be more explicit than that. It's a default-deny
| policy.
|
| There is an archival exception for digital media, so
| obviously Congress is open to granting exceptions for
| backup purposes. They chose not to include physical media
| in this exception.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > only the owner of a copyright has the right to make
| copies.
|
| You are conveniently omitting the provisions about fair
| use, which is strange since you're clearly aware of them.
| The only things copyright is reasonably unambiguous about
| are sale and distribution. Even then there's lots of grey
| areas such as performance rights.
|
| You are arguing that something is obviously disallowed
| but have nothing but your own interpretation to back that
| up. If the situation was as clear cut as you're trying to
| make out then where is the precedent showing that
| personal use archival copies of physical goods are not
| permitted?
|
| > They chose not to include physical media in this
| exception.
|
| That's irrelevant to the current discussion, though I'm
| fairly certain you realize that. Congress declined to
| weigh in on the matter which (as you clearly know) leaves
| it up to the courts to interpret the existing law.
| triceratops wrote:
| > You are conveniently omitting the provisions about fair
| use, which is strange since you're clearly aware of them
|
| Fair use didn't come up but I did mention it here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356289. And
| there's no need for that tone. I'm not a copyright
| defender.
|
| > That's irrelevant to the current discussion, though I'm
| fairly certain you realize that.
|
| I said it because it was relevant.
|
| > where is the precedent showing that personal use
| archival copies of physical goods are not permitted
|
| > Congress declined to weigh in on the matter
|
| There was no "matter" to "weigh in on". The answer to
| "Can you make a full, complete copy of a copyrighted work
| without authorization?" has been "Almost always no" from
| the beginning of copyright. Even the term "fair use"
| arose in a US legal precedent over a century after the
| first copyright laws in England. It became an actual part
| of US copyright law in the 1970s, less than 50 years ago.
|
| "Fair use" is plausible for a library or archive to make
| full copies, and keep them safe and archived, since
| that's their job.
|
| Fair use isn't why we have archival rights for electronic
| media. That right was written into the law after
| electronic media became a thing.
|
| In my comment above I gave one example why "fair use"
| wouldn't work for archival copies of physical media made
| by individuals. An actual lawyer who's paid by the
| copyright mafia to care about this stuff can surely find
| more and stronger reasons.
|
| FWIW someone in another comment pointed out Australian
| copyright law allows making a copy of books, newspapers,
| and periodicals for personal, domestic use. Which means:
| a) it can be done and b) even they _had to spell it out
| specifically_
|
| > which (as you clearly know) leaves it up to the courts
| to interpret the existing law.
|
| I don't agree but believe what you like.
| paulddraper wrote:
| I take the contrary view.
|
| What part of fair use pertains to making a physical copy
| of the complete work?
| mjmas wrote:
| This is a specific exception in Australia Copyright law.
| It allows reproducing works in books, newspapers and
| periodical publications in different form for private and
| domestic use.
|
| (Copyright Act 1968 Part III div. 1, section 43C)
| https://www.legislation.gov.au/C1968A00063/latest/text
| paulddraper wrote:
| Leaving aside the broader discussion...
|
| You cannot legally photocopy copy an entire book even if
| you own a physical copy.
|
| Internet people say you can, but there's no actual legal
| argument or case law to support that.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I believe the post you are replying to is suggesting the
| copy is made by hand, one word at a time.
| paulddraper wrote:
| I don't see how that would be different, as the
| meaningful material is text not images.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| At home? Without ever sharing it with anyone? I thought
| making backups of things that you personally own was
| protected, at least in the US. Could you elaborate on my
| apparent misunderstanding?
| paulddraper wrote:
| > Could you elaborate on my apparent misunderstanding?
|
| One of the six exclusive rights of copyright holders is
| "to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or
| phonorecords."
|
| (In certain circumstances, the Fair Use doctrine
| contravenes this right, but reproduction in whole is not
| such a circumstance.)
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Internet people say you can, but there's no actual
| legal argument or case law to support that.
|
| Quite the opposite. The burden of proof is on you to show
| a single person ever, in history, who has been prosecuted
| for that.
|
| If nobody in the world has ever been prosecuted for this,
| then that means it is either legal, or it is something
| else that is so effectively equivalent to "legal" that
| there is little point in using a different word.
|
| If you want to take the position that, "uhhhhhhh, there
| is exactly 0% chance of anyone ever getting in trouble or
| being prosecuted for this, but I still don't think its
| legal, technically!"
|
| Then I guess go ahead. But for those in the real world,
| those two things are almost equivalent.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > If you want to take the position that, "uhhhhhhh, there
| is exactly 0% chance of anyone ever getting in trouble or
| being prosecuted for this, but I still don't think its
| legal, technically!"
|
| > Then I guess go ahead.
|
| That is exactly what I am saying.
| stale2002 wrote:
| Gotcha, so then you agree that there is exactly zero
| cases or evidence of anyone ever being punished for this,
| which is the most important part.
|
| If you do this, you are not going to be held legally
| liable for anything.
| croes wrote:
| You may copy, but you may not circumvent the copy
| protection.
| triceratops wrote:
| Correct. For electronic media.
| croes wrote:
| > Yes, you're allowed to make personal copies of
| copyright works that you own.
|
| That's not the point. It's about books you don't own. Are
| you allowed to download books from Z-Library, Sci-Hub
| etc. because you want to learn?
| falcor84 wrote:
| To the best of my knowledge, no individual has ever been
| sued or prosecuted specifically for downloading books. As
| long as you're not massively sharing them with others,
| it's not an issue in practice. Enjoy your reading and
| learning.
| jlev wrote:
| Aaron Swartz, cofounder of Reddit and inventor of RSS and
| Markdown, was hounded to death by an overzealous
| prosecutor for downloading articles from JSTOR, with the
| intent to learn from them. He was charged with over a
| million dollars in fines and could have faced 35 years in
| prison.
|
| He and Sam Altman were in the same YC class. OpenAI is
| doing the same thing at a larger scale, and their
| technology actually reproduces and distributes
| copyrighted material. It's shameful that they are making
| claims that they aren't infringing creator's rights when
| they have scraped the entire internet.
|
| https://flaminghydra.com/sam-altman-and-aaron-swartz-saw-
| the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
| kgdiem wrote:
| Will what OpenAI & others serve as precedent for
| Alexandra Elbakyan of SciHub and avenge Aaron?
|
| Cynically, I imagine it will not but I hope that it
| could.
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| You could argue that they are avenging him in doing
| exactly what he did, or worse, and not being punished for
| it. They are establishing precedent.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| It was overzealous prosecution of the breaking into a
| closet to wire up some ethernet cables to gain access to
| the materials
|
| Not the downloading with intent
|
| And apparently the most controversial take on this
| community is the observation that many people would have
| done the trial, plea and time, regardless of how
| overzealous the prosecution was
| triceratops wrote:
| > breaking into a closet
|
| "The closet's door was kept unlocked, according to press
| reports"
|
| When's the last time a kid with no record, a research
| fellow at Harvard, got threatened with 35 years for a
| simple B&E?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| They threaten
|
| Its the plea or sentencing where that stuff gets taken
| into account for a reduction to community service
| DrillShopper wrote:
| I'm glad you still have that much faith in the system.
| That's much more faith than I have in the system (and
| more faith than I had in the system back then, too).
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I'm responding specifically to this sentence:
|
| > It's shameful that they are making claims that they
| aren't infringing creator's rights when they have scraped
| the entire internet.
|
| Scraping the Internet is generally very different from
| piracy. You are given a limited right to that data when
| you access it, and you can make local copies. if further
| use does something sufficiently non-copying, then creator
| rights aren't being infringed.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Can you compress the internet including copyrighted
| material and then sell access to it?
|
| At what percentage of lossy compression it becomes
| infringement?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Can you compress the internet including copyrighted
| material and then sell access to it?
|
| Define access?
|
| If you mean sending out the compressed copy, generally
| no. For things people normally call compression.
|
| If you want to run a search engine, then you should be
| fine.
|
| > At what percentage of lossy compression it becomes
| infringement?
|
| It would have to be very very lossy.
|
| But some AI stuff is. For example there are image models
| with fewer parameters than source images. Those are, by
| and large, not able to store enough data to infringe
| with. (Copying can creep in with images that have
| multiple versions, but that's a small sliver of the
| data.)
| codedokode wrote:
| Commercial audio generation models were caught
| reproducing parts of copyrighted music in a distorted and
| low-quality form. This is not "learning", just
| "imitating".
|
| Also, as I understand they didn't even buy the CDs with
| music for training; they got it somewhere else. Why do
| organizations that prosecute people for downloading a
| movie do not want to look if it is ok to make a business
| on illegal copies of copyrighted works?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I said "some" for a reason.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| When you identify where the infringing party has stored
| the source material in their
| artifact.{zip,pdf,safetensor,connectome,etc}. In ML, this
| discovery stage is called "mechanistic interpretability",
| and in humans it's called "illegal."
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's not that clear cut. Since they're talking about
| taking lossy compression to the limit, there are ways to
| go so lossy that you're not longer infringing even if you
| can point exactly at where it's stored.
|
| Like cliff's notes.
| apetresc wrote:
| Wasn't John Gruber the inventor of Markdown?
| falcor84 wrote:
| I'm familiar with Aaron Swartz's case, and that is
| actually why I phrased it as "books". In any case, while
| tragic, Swartz wasn't prosecuted for copyright
| infringement, but rather for wire fraud and computer
| fraud due to the manner in which he bypassed protections
| in MIT's network and the JSTOR API. This wouldn't have
| been an issue if he downloaded the articles from a source
| that freely shared them, like sci-hub.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| It would be incredibly naive to assume that the scraping
| done for these models did not at any point circumvent
| protections.
|
| The fundamental contention is that both accessed, saved
| and distributed material that they didn't have a "right"
| to access, save, and distribute. One was made a
| billionaire for it and another was driven to suicide.
| It's not tragic, it's societal malpractice.
| tzs wrote:
| 35 years is a press release sentence. The way DOJ
| calculates sentences when they write press releases
| ignores the alleged facts of the particular case and just
| uses for each charge the theoretically maximum possible
| sentence that someone could get for that charge.
|
| To actually get that maximum typically requires things
| like the person is a repeat offender, drug dealing was
| involved, people were physically harmed, it involved
| organized crime, it involved terrorism, a large amount of
| money was involved, or other things that make it an
| unusual big and serious crime.
|
| The DOJ knows exactly what they are alleging the
| defendant did. They could easily looks at the various
| factors that affect sentencing for the charge and see
| which apply to that case and come up with a realistic
| number but that doesn't make it sound as impressive in
| the press release.
|
| Another thing that inflates the numbers in the press
| releases is that defendants are often charged with
| several related charges. For many crimes there are groups
| of related charges that for sentencing get merged. If you
| are charged with say 3 charges from the same group and
| convicted on all you are only sentenced for whichever one
| of them has the longest sentence.
|
| If you've got 3 charges from such a group in the press
| release the DOJ might just take the completely bogus
| maximum for each as described above and just add those 3
| together.
|
| Here's a good article on DOJ's ridiculous sentence
| numbers [1].
|
| Here's a couple of articles from an expert in this area
| of law that looks specifically at what Swartz was charged
| with and what kind of sentence he was actually looking at
| [2][3].
|
| Why do you think Swartz was downloading the articles to
| learn from them? As far as I've seen know one knows for
| sure what he was intending.
|
| If he wanted to learn from JSTOR articles he could have
| downloaded them using the JSTOR account he had through
| his research fellowship at Harvard. Why go to MIT and use
| their public JSTOR WiFi access, and then when that was
| cut off hide a computer in a wiring closet hooked into
| their ethernet?
|
| I've seen claims that he wanted to do was meta research
| about scientific publishing as a whole which could
| explain why he needed to download more than he could
| download with his normal JSTOR account from Harvard, but
| again why do that using MIT's public WiFi access? JSTOR
| has granted more direct access to large amounts of data
| for such research. Did he talk to them first to try to
| get access that way?
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230107080107/https://ww
| w.popeh...
|
| [2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
|
| [3] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-
| against-a...
| codedokode wrote:
| He might have wanted other people to have access to the
| knowledge, and for free. In comparison, AI companies want
| to sell access to the knowledge they got by scraping
| copyrighted works.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > for downloading articles from JSTOR, with the intent to
| learn from them
|
| For context, according to sources, he downloaded 4.8
| million articles.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Maybe he was about to train an LLM on them /s
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| Wow, just wow.
| anjaliNYC wrote:
| Truly wow. The sucking up to coroporations is terrifying.
| This, when Aaron Swartz was institutionally murdered by
| the institutions and the state for "copyright
| infringement". And what he did wasn't even for profit, or
| even a 0.00001 of the scale of the theft that OpenAI and
| their ilk have done.
|
| So it's totally OK to rip off and steal and lie through
| your teeth AND do it all for money, if you're a company.
| But if you're a human being, doing it not for profit but
| for the betterment of your own fellow humans, you deserve
| to be imprisoned and systematically murdered and driven
| to suicide.
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| Thank you for putting my sentiment into words. THIS. It's
| not power to the people, it's power to the oligarchs.
| Once you have enough power and, more importantly, wealth,
| you're welcomed into the fold with open arms. Just how
| Spotify build a library of stolen music, as long as
| wealth was created, there is no problem because wealth is
| just money taken from the people and given to the ruling
| class.
| timeon wrote:
| I'm moving goal-post here since it was not OpenAI (as far
| as we know): Where Meta training on torrented data fits
| into this?
| carlosdp wrote:
| That's not a one-to-one analogy. The LLM isn't giving you
| the book, its giving you information it learned from the
| book.
|
| The analogous scenario is "Can I read a book and publish
| a blog post with all the information in that book, in my
| own words?", and under US copyright law, the answer is:
| Yes.
| triceratops wrote:
| > The analogous scenario is "Can I read a book and
| publish a blog post with all the information in that
| book, in my own words?"
|
| The analogous scenario is actually "Can I read a book
| that I obtained illegally and face no consequences for
| obtaining it illegally?" The answer is "Yes" there are no
| consequences for reading said book, for individuals or
| machines.
|
| But individuals can face serious consequences for
| obtaining it illegally. And corporations are trying to
| argue those consequences shouldn't apply to them.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > But individuals can face serious consequences for
| obtaining it illegally.
|
| Can they? Who has ever faced serious consequences for
| pirating books in the US?
| triceratops wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
|
| (Please no pedantry about how scientific papers aren't
| books)
| drdaeman wrote:
| Not to diminish the atrocity of what happened to Aaron,
| but is this a highly abnormal case of prosecutor overzeal
| or is it common for people to be charged and held liable
| for downloading and/or consuming (without distribution)
| of copyrighted materials (in any form) without obtaining
| a license?
|
| Asking because I genuinely don't know. I believe all I've
| ever read about persecution of "commonplace" copyright
| violations was either about distributors or tied to
| bidirectional nature of peer-to-peer exchange (torrents
| typically upload to others even as you download =
| redistribution).
| nashashmi wrote:
| Aaron Swartz downloaded a lot of stuff. Did he publish
| the stuff too? That would be an infringement. But only
| downloading the stuff? And never distributing it? Not
| sure if it's worth a violation .
| mburns wrote:
| >Aaron Swartz downloaded a lot of stuff.
|
| A tiny fraction compared to the 80+ terabytes Facebook
| downloaded.
|
| >Did he publish the stuff too?
|
| No.
|
| > Not sure if it's worth a violation .
|
| Exactly.
| piva00 wrote:
| There's no analogous because the scale of it takes it to
| a whole different level and degree, and for all intents
| and purposes we tend to care about level and degree.
|
| Me taking over control of the lemonade market in my
| neighbourhood wouldn't ever be a problem to anyone, a
| very minor annoyance; instead if I managed to corner the
| lemonade market of a whole continent it'd be a very
| different thing.
| codedokode wrote:
| The better analogy is "can my business use illegally
| downloaded works to save on buying a license". For
| example, can you use pirated copy of Windows in your
| company? Can you use pirated copy of a book to compute
| weights of a mathematical model?
| paulddraper wrote:
| > Can I download a book without paying for it
|
| Yes, you can read books without paying, if that's how it
| is offered.
|
| And you can photocopy books you own for your own personal
| use. But again....the analogy is remembering/leaning from
| a book.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| To support your point, lawsuits are already coming in for
| illegal copying of books:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/20/24224450/anthropic-
| copyri...
|
| https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-sued-by-
| top-...
| dylan604 wrote:
| owning a copy and learning the information is not the
| same. you can learn 2+2=4 from a book, but you no longer
| need that book to get that answer. each year in school, I
| was issued a book for class, learned from it, returned
| the book. I did not return the learning.
|
| musicians can read the sheet music and memorize how to
| play it, and no longer need the music. they still have
| the information.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| But you still need to buy the sheet music first, all the
| AI Labs used pirated materials to learn from.
|
| There's two angles to the lawsuits that are getting
| confused - the largest one from the book publishers
| (Sarah Silverman et al) attacked from the angle that the
| models could reproduce copyrighted information. This was
| pretty easily quelled / RHLF'd out (used to be that if
| ChatGPT started producing lyrics a supervisor/censor
| would just cut off it's response early - tried it now and
| ChatGPT.com is now more eloquent, "Sorry, I can't provide
| the full lyrics to "Strawberry Fields Forever" as they
| are copyrighted. However, I can summarize the song or
| discuss its themes, meaning, and history if you're
| interested!")
|
| But there's also the angle of "why does OpenAI have Sarah
| Silverman's book on their hard drive if they never paid
| her for it? This is the lawsuit against Meta regarding
| books3 and torrenting, seems like they're getting away
| with the "we never redistributed/seeded!" but it's
| unclear to me why this is a defense against copyright
| infringement.
| nunSpQyeJR wrote:
| Not only would the musician have to buy the sheet music
| first, but if they were going to perform that piece for
| profit at an event or on an album they'd need a license
| of some sort.
|
| This whole mess seems to be another case of "if I can
| dance around the law fast enough, big enough, and with
| enough grey areas then I can get away with it".
| dylan604 wrote:
| I was handed sheet music every year in band, and within a
| few weeks had it memorized. Books with music are also
| available in the library.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| As a student in a school band that debated whether to
| choose Pirates of the Caribbean vs Phantom of the Opera
| for our half time show, I remember the cost of the rights
| to the music was a factor in our decision.
|
| The school and library purchased the materials outright,
| again, OpenAI Meta et al never paid to read them, nor
| borrowed them from an institution that had any right to
| share.
|
| I'm a bit of an anti intellectual property anarchist
| myself but it grinds my gears that, given that we do live
| under the law, it is applied unequally.
| echelon wrote:
| If models can learn for free, then the models (training
| code, inference code, training data, weights) should also
| be free. No copyright for anybody.
|
| And if you sell the outputs of your model that you trained
| on free content, you shouldn't be able to hide behind trade
| secret.
| crorella wrote:
| > just like a model could
|
| It is not remotely the same, the companies training the
| models are stealing the content from the internet and then
| profiting from it when they charge for the use of those
| models.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _the companies training the models are stealing the
| content from the internet_
|
| Are you stealing a billboard when you see and remember
| it?
|
| The notion that _consuming_ the web is "stealing" needs
| to stop.
| crorella wrote:
| We are not taking about billboards here, we are talking
| about copyrighted works, like books. If you want to do
| mental gymnastics and call "consuming" the web the act of
| downloading books without paying for them, then go ahead,
| but don't pretend the rest will buy your delusion.
| Terretta wrote:
| On the contrary, even telling people which billboards are
| posted about what, and how to get to them to look at
| them, is "how it works".
|
| But the courts will get to clarify (in today's news):
|
| https://www.reuters.com/legal/news-corp-sued-by-brave-
| softwa...
| llamaimperative wrote:
| The question is whether it destroys the incentive to
| produce the work. That is the entire point of copyright
| and patent law.
|
| LLMs do indeed significantly reduce the incentive to
| produce original work.
| codedokode wrote:
| Are you stealing when using a pirated software to run a
| billion-dollar business?
| ben_w wrote:
| The more literature I consume, and the more I re-draft my
| own attempt, the more I see the patterns and tropes with
| everyone standing on the shoulders of those who came
| before.
|
| The general concept of "warp drive" was introduced by
| John W. Campbell in 1957, "Islands of Space". Popularised
| by Trek, turned into maths by Alcubierre. Islands of
| Space feels like it took inspiration from both H G Wells
| (needing to explain why the War of the Worlds' ending was
| implausible) and Jules Verne (gang of gentlemen have
| call-to-action, encounter difficulties that would crush
| them like a bug and are not merely fine, they go on to
| further great adventure and reward).
|
| Terry Pratchett had obvious inspirations from
| Shakespeare, Ringworld, Faust (in the title!).
|
| In the pandemic I read "The Deathworlders" (web fic, not
| the book series of similar name), and by the time I'd
| read too many shark jumps to continue, I had spotted many
| obvious _inspirations_ besides just the one that gave the
| name.
|
| If I studied medieval lit, I could probably do the same
| with Shakespeare's inspiration.
| simion314 wrote:
| >you can use that knowledge,
|
| Did OpenAI bought one copy of each book, or did they legaly
| borowed athe books and documents ?
|
| if you copy paste rom books and claim is your content you
| are plagiarizing. LLMs were provent to copy paste trained
| content so now what? Should only big Tech be excluded from
| plagiarizing ?
| pier25 wrote:
| > _just like a model could_
|
| Not really. You can't multiply yourself a million times to
| produce content at an industrial scale.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| This is why I think my array of hard drives full of movies
| isn't piracy. My server just learned about those movies and
| can tell me about them, is all. Just like a person!
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It doesn't, a real person can't legally obtain a copy of a
| copyrighted work without paying the copyright holder for
| it. This is what OpenAI is asking for: they don't want to
| pay for a single copy of a single book, and still they want
| to train their models on every single book in history (and
| song, and movie, and painting, and code base, and anything
| else they can get their hands on).
| bee_rider wrote:
| These AI models are just obviously new things. They aren't
| people, so any analogy about learning from the training
| material and selling your new skills is off base.
|
| On the other hand, they aren't just a copy of the training
| content, and whether the process that creates the weights
| is sufficiently transformative as to create a new work
| is... what's up for debate, right?
|
| Anyway I wish people would stop making these analogies.
| There isn't a law covering AI models yet. It is a big
| industry at this point, and the lack of clarity seems like
| something we'd expect everybody (legislators and industry)
| to want to rectify.
| amelius wrote:
| Totally agree. Except the current administration probably
| will interpret things the way they see fit ...
| codedokode wrote:
| Model cannot "learn" because it is not a human. What
| happens is a human obtains "a free copy" of a copyrighted
| work, processes it using a machine and sells the result.
| bee_rider wrote:
| > Model cannot "learn" because it is not a human.
|
| Sure, that's why don't like the analogy.
|
| > What happens is a human obtains "a free copy" of a
| copyrighted work, processes it using a machine and sells
| the result.
|
| Right, so for example it is pretty common to snip up
| small bits of songs and to use in other songs (sampling).
| Maybe that could be an example of somewhere to start?
| But, these ML models seem quite different, I guess
| because the "samples" are much smaller and usually not
| individually identifiable. And really the model encodes
| information about trends in the sources... I dunno. I
| still think we need a new law.
| aiono wrote:
| Can I pirate books to train myself?
| amelius wrote:
| Do you know Numerical Recipes in C?
|
| This discussion reminds me of it.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| And when I "learn" a verbatim copy of pages of that book,
| then write those pages out in Microsoft Word & sell those
| pages its legal?
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Even moreso, it only applies to initial model training by
| companies like OpenAI not other companies using those models
| to generate synthetic data to train their own models.
| binarymax wrote:
| Yeah it's crazy. I also suspect they might not be confident
| in their defense from the NYT lawsuit - if they're found in
| fault then it's going to be trouble.
| logsr wrote:
| It is hard to see how a court could decide that copyright
| does not apply to training LLMs without completely
| collapsing the entire legal structure for intellectual
| property.
|
| Conceptually, AI basically zeros out existing IP, and makes
| the AI the only IP that has any value. It is hard to
| imagine large rights holders and courts accepting that.
|
| The likely outcome is that courts rule against LLM
| creators/providers and they eventually have to settle on
| licensing fees with large corporate copyright holders
| similar to YouTube. Unlike YouTube though, this would open
| up LLM companies to class action lawsuits from the general
| public, and so it could be a much worse outcome for them.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Are there certain books that federal law prevents you from
| reading? Which ones?
|
| Maybe terrorist manuals and some child pornography, but what
| else?
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| I would assume that the request is for it to apply to models
| in the way that it currently applies to humans.
|
| If a human buys a movie, he can watch it and learn about its
| contents, and then talk about those contents, and he can
| create a similar movie with a similar theme.
|
| If OpenAI buys a movie and shows it to their model, it's
| unclear whether the model can talk about the contents of the
| movie and create a similar movie with a similar theme.
| m1el wrote:
| somehow, I suspect openai didn't "buy" all of the articles,
| books, websites they crawled and torrented.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Is OpenAI buying the movie, or just taking it?
|
| Since "buying" a movie (as it currently applies to humans)
| is just buying a limited license to it for private viewing,
| can't the copyright holder opt to limit the $4.99 license
| terms to human viewing, and charge $4999 for an AI training
| license?
|
| Or OpenAI could buy movies the way Disney does, by buying
| the actual copyright to the film.
| htrp wrote:
| >Since "buying" a movie (as it currently applies to
| humans) is just buying a limited license to it for
| private viewing, can't the copyright holder opt to limit
| the $4.99 license terms to human viewing, and charge
| $4999 for an AI training license?
|
| the Reddit data licensing model
| da_chicken wrote:
| > Since "buying" a movie is just buying a license to it,
| can't the copyright holder opt to limit the $4.99 license
| terms to human viewing, and charge $4999 for an AI
| training license?
|
| That's exactly what already happens currently. Buying a
| movie on DVD doesn't give you the right to present it for
| hundreds of people. You need to pay for a public
| performance license or commercial licence. This is why a
| TV network or movie theatre can't just buy a DVD at
| Walmart and then show the movie as often as it likes.
|
| Copyright doesn't just grant exclusive distribution
| rights. It grants exclusive _use_ rights as well, and
| permits the owner to control how their work is used.
| Since AI rights are not granted by any existing licenses,
| and license terms generally reserve any rights not
| explicitly specified, feeding copyrighted works into an
| AI data model is a reserved right of the owner.
| regularjack wrote:
| OpenAI didn't pay for most of the content it used.
| voytec wrote:
| This is basically "allow us to steal others' IP". It's hard
| not to treat Altman like a common thief.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Not only that
|
| The model gets to use training data of all humans.
|
| But if you use the model as training data OAI will say you're
| infringing T&Cs
| taurath wrote:
| It still warps my brain, they've taken trillions of dollars of
| industry and made a product worth billions by stealing it. IP
| is practically the basis of the economy, and these models warp
| and obfuscate ownership of everything, like a giant reset
| button on who can hold knowledge. It wouldn't be legal, or
| allowed if tech wasn't seen as the growth path of our economy.
| It's a hell of a needle to thread and it's unlikely that anyone
| will ever again be able to model from data so open.
| woah wrote:
| "IP" is a very new concept in our culture and completely
| absent in other cultures. It was invented to prevent verbatim
| reprints of books, but even so, the publishing industry
| existed for hundreds of years before then. It's been expanded
| greatly in the past 50 years.
|
| Acting like copyright is some natural law of the universe
| that LLMs are upending simply because they can learn from
| written texts is silly.
|
| If you want to argue that it should be radically expanded to
| the point that not only a work, but even the ideas and
| knowledge contained in that work should be censored and
| restricted, fine. But at least have the honesty to admit that
| this is a radical new expansion for a body of law that has
| already been radically expanded relatively recently.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > It was invented to prevent verbatim reprints of books
|
| It was also invented to keep the publishing houses under
| control and keep them from papering the land in anti-crown
| propaganda (like the stuff that fueled the civil war in
| England and got Charles I beheaded).
|
| Probably one of the biggest brewing fights will be whether
| the models are free to tell the truth or whether they'll be
| mouthpieces for the ruling class. As long as they play ball
| with the powers that be, I predict copyrights won't be a
| problem at all for the chosen winners.
| jsemrau wrote:
| "mouthpieces for the ruling class"
|
| That's actually a great point. Judging from the current
| state of media, there is a clear momentum to take sides
| in moral arguments. Maybe the standard for models need to
| be a fair use clause?
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| That's why I am a big proponent of local, open-weights
| computation. They can't shut down a non-compliant model
| if you're the one running it yourself.
| derivagral wrote:
| I agree this would be a positive direction, but something
| that gives me pause is the forced upgrades and hardware
| cycle of both mac and windows now. They both scan files
| in your system constantly for various reasons, so for
| this purpose you're really stuck on *nix variants, right?
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| That's what I do. I'm really sick of the OS no longer
| being mine.
| LtWorf wrote:
| The problem here is it's still illegal for me to do a
| backup copy of the stuff i bought, but they can do whatever
| they want.
| only-one1701 wrote:
| "The Venetian Patent Statute of 19 March 1474, established
| by the Republic of Venice, is usually considered to be the
| earliest codified patent system in the world.[11][12] It
| states that patents might be granted for "any new and
| ingenious device, not previously made", provided it was
| useful. By and large, these principles still remain the
| basic principles of current patent laws."
|
| What are you talking about.
| pitaj wrote:
| Patents and copyright are very different beasts.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| The discussion was about IP though, which includes both
| of those.
| only-one1701 wrote:
| As another commenter says, this is about IP, but even
| positing that copyright is somehow invalid because it's
| new is incredibly obtuse. You know what other law is
| relatively new? Women's suffrage.
|
| I'm annoyed by arguments like the above because they're
| clearly derived from working backwards from a desired
| conclusion; in this case, that someone's original work
| can be consumed and repurposed to create profit by
| someone else. Our laws and society have determined this
| to be illegal; the fact that it would be con isn't for
| OpenAI if it weren't has no bearing.
| only-one1701 wrote:
| Also, a quick glance at the wikipedia page for
| "copyright" talks about the first law being put down and
| enforced in 1710. What are we even doing here?
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > It's been expanded greatly in the past 50 years.
|
| Elephant in the room. If copyright and patent both expired
| after 20 years or so then I might feel very differently
| about the system, and by extension about machine learning
| practices.
|
| It's absurd to me that broad cultural artifacts which we
| share with our parent's (or even grandparent's) generation
| can be legally owned.
| codedokode wrote:
| What AI companies are doing (downloading pirated music and
| training models) is completely unfair. It takes lot of
| money (everything related to music is expensive), talent
| and work to record a good song and what AI companies do is
| just grab millions of songs for free and call it "fair
| use". If their developers are so smart and talented why
| don't they simply compose and record the music by
| themselves?
|
| > not only a work, but even the ideas and knowledge
| contained in that work
|
| AI models reproduce existing audio tracks when asked,
| although in a distorted and low-quality form.
|
| Also it will be funny to observe how US government will try
| to ignore violating copyright for AI while issuing
| ridiculous fines for torrenting a movie by ordinary
| citizens.
| LexGray wrote:
| Everything in tech is unfair. Music teachers replaced by
| apps and videos. Audio engineers replaced by apps. Albums
| manufacturing and music stores replaced by digital
| downloads. Custom instruments replaced by digital
| soundboards. Trained vocalists replaced by auto-tune. AI
| is just the final blip of squeezing humans out of music.
| antihipocrat wrote:
| Not just music, models are trained on all types of art
| forms that have been created by humans across every
| medium and businesses are now choosing to use content
| from AI rather than pay an artist.
|
| Breakout success can still be achieved from humans who
| create brand new art styles that can't yet be replicated
| by an AI. These artists will reap the rewards until all
| of these works are added to the subsequent AI training
| models.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| > What AI companies are doing (downloading pirated music
| and training models) is completely unfair.
|
| We work in an industry built on leveraging unfairness.
| Expecting otherwise on this forum is very odd.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> We work in an industry built on leveraging unfairness.
| Expecting otherwise on this forum is very odd._
|
| Yet this forum is very quick to criticize other people
| and other industries for unfairness.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| Is it? From my perspective it seems like the folks here
| mostly are part of the problem, even if there is
| diversity of opinions.
| oasisaimlessly wrote:
| > AI models reproduce existing audio tracks when asked,
| although in a distorted and low-quality form.
|
| So can my wife. Who should I call to have her taken away?
| tremon wrote:
| The RIAA.
| pera wrote:
| You are missing GP's point and misunderstanding what
| generative models are actually doing.
|
| The late OpenAI researcher and whistleblower, Suchir
| Balaji, wrote an excellent article regarding this topic:
|
| https://suchir.net/fair_use.html
| xbar wrote:
| Your argument that IP and copyright do not exist now
| because they did not exist in the past is bogus.
|
| IP and copyright exist.
| jsemrau wrote:
| Is it the same thing though? Even though Lord Of The Rings,
| the book, likely has been used to train the models you can't
| reproduce it. Nor can you make a derivative of it. Is it
| really the same comparison like "Simba the white lion" and
| "the lion king"?
|
| https://abounaja.com/blog/intellectual-property-disputes
| EGreg wrote:
| Gearing up for a fight between the two major industries based
| on exploitative business models:
|
| Copyright cartels (RIAA, MPAA) that monetized young artists
| without paying them much at all [1], vs the AI megalomaniacs
| who took all the work for free and used Kenyans at $2 an hour
| [2] so that they can raise "$7 trillion" for their AI
| infrastructure
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LetsTalkMusic/comments/1fzyr0u/arti...
|
| [2] https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| Can't believe I'm actually rooting for the copyright cartels
| in this fight.
|
| But that does make me think, that in a sane society with a
| functional legislature I wouldn't have to pick a dog in this
| fight. I'd have have enough faith in lawmakers and the
| political process to pursue a path towards copyright reform
| that reigns in abuses from both AI companies and megacorp
| rightsholders
|
| Alas, for now I'm hoping that aforementioned megacorps sue
| OpenAI into a painful lesson.
| visarga wrote:
| > Can't believe I'm actually rooting for the copyright
| cartels in this fight.
|
| The same megacorps are suing Internet Archive for their
| collection of 78rpm records. These guys would rather see
| art orphaned and die.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yup, we live in a pretty depressing world.
|
| More generally the best we can hope for us to discourage
| concentrated power, both in government and corporate
| forms.
| __loam wrote:
| They're suing Internet Archive because IA scanned a bunch
| of copyrighted books to put online for free (e: without
| even attempting to get permission to do so) then refused
| to take them down when they got a C&D lol. IA is putting
| the whole project at risk so they can do literal
| copyright infringement with no consequences.
| genewitch wrote:
| During covid, when everyone was told to stay at home and
| not do anything, the library offered library books.
|
| And what they actually did is violate the requirement to
| have a physical copy of the book they were lending.
|
| As I understand it, they did not offer anything new that
| wasn't available to loan prior.
|
| I could be wrong. But if I'm not, I see no reason to
| lambast IA.
| __loam wrote:
| It's not lambasting to communicate what happened. IA got
| a C&D, refused to comply, and got sued for copyright
| infringement. The courts sided with the publishers when
| IA tried to claim it was fair use (technologists seem to
| have a pattern of stretching the definition of fair use).
| They've put their entire project at risk because they've
| repeatedly ignored the law here. That's just what
| happened.
| blitzar wrote:
| I should have "freedom to learn" about any Tesla in the
| showroom, any F-35 I see laying around an airbase or the
| contents of anyone in the governments bank account.
| NoOn3 wrote:
| According to this scheme, if you find a bug and can read the
| bank's data, then you can use it as you want.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Nope, have to feed it into an llm first, afterwards it's
| legitimate.
| NoOn3 wrote:
| No need for a LLM. Humans always have their own neural
| networks in their heads. :)
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Chinese AI must implement socialist values by law, but law is a
| much more fluid fuzzy thing in China than in the USA (although
| the USA seems to be moving away from rule of law recently).
| sva_ wrote:
| > Chinese AI must implement socialist values by law
|
| I don't doubt it but am interested to read a source? I know
| the models can't talk about things like Tiananmen Square
| 1989, but what does 'implementing socialist values by law'
| look like?
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| Socialism and freedom of speech aren't mutually exclusive
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/18/chinese-regulators-begin-
| tes...
|
| "Socialist values" is literally the language that China
| used in announcing this.
|
| Here is a recent article from a Chinese source:
|
| https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202503/1329537.shtml
|
| Although censorship isn't mentioned specifically, it is
| definitely 99% of what they are focused on (the other 1%
| being scams).
|
| China practices Rule by law, not Rule of law, so you
| know...they'll know its bad when they see it, so model
| providers will exercise extreme self censorship (which is
| already true for social network providers).
| janalsncm wrote:
| > China practices Rule by law, not Rule of law
|
| In practice the US is less different than you imply. For
| the vast majority of Americans, being sued is a
| punishment in and of itself due to the prohibitive costs
| of hiring a lawyer. In the US we have a right to a
| "speedy" trial but there are many people sitting in jail
| now because they can't afford the bail get out. Speedy
| could mean months.
|
| I say this because when we constantly fall so far short
| of our ideals, one begins to question if those are really
| our ideals.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| No one has pure rule of law, but at least the USA has it
| as a goal. The Chinese government has stated explicitly
| that rule of law isn't a goal, so it leads to a very
| different legal system from ours. You have to think much
| more deeply about the spirit of the law and the flippant
| intentions of the official class that has all the power
| (the judicial system isn't allowed to check official
| power, or even interpret ambiguous or competing laws).
| janalsncm wrote:
| > The Chinese government has stated explicitly that rule
| of law isn't a goal
|
| Can you share where you saw this? I am also not aware of
| anywhere that the US has stated that rule of law is a
| goal. What you are referring to is more of a norm or
| tradition. And norms can and do change over time for
| better or worse.
|
| You could argue that rule of law follows from the
| preamble to the constitution but that doesn't explicitly
| mention rule of law either. It mentions various values
| like justice and tranquility.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| All you have to do is read the Chinese constitution to
| figure it out. Freedom of speech, religion, press, are
| all there but aren't meaningful rights since there is no
| enforcement of those rights. For the rest, here is a
| document that explains the concept in more detail.
| https://www.swp-berlin.org/10.18449/2021C28/
|
| > The aim is to use the law as a political instrument to
| make the state more efficient and to reduce the
| arbitrariness of how the law is applied for the majority
| of the population, among other things, with the help of
| advanced technology. In some areas, for example on
| procedural issues, Beijing continues to draw inspiration
| from the West in establishing its Chinese "rule of law".
| However, the party-state leadership rejects an
| independent judiciary and the principle of separation of
| powers as "erroneous western thought". Beijing is
| explicitly interested in propagating China's conception
| of law and legal practice internationally, establishing
| new legal standards and enforcing its interests through
| the law. Berlin and Brussels should, therefore, pay
| special attention to the Chinese leadership's concept of
| the law. In-depth knowledge on this topic will be
| imperative in order to grasp the strategic implications
| of China's legal policy, to better understand the logic
| of their actions and respond appropriately.
|
| This is mostly transcribed from those meetings (vs a
| westerner interpretation). You really need to understand
| this to get how the legal systems are different, and how
| party officials are basically given supreme power (only
| checked by their bosses).
| j-krieger wrote:
| So? US AI must implement US rules by law. AI models are
| heavily censored and tend to favor certain political
| viewpoints.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Which political viewpoints do you think that AI models
| currently favor?
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Can this extend to every kid sued by the record industry for
| downloading a few songs.
|
| Have we all been transported to bizzaro land?
|
| Different rules for billion dollar corps I guess.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Those cases did very poorly whenever they actually went to
| court (well at least also including the ones that were
| summarily dismissed by the courts, meaning they didn't
| technically make it to court). They were much more of a mafia
| style shakedown than an actual legal enforcement effort.
|
| Same rules, but people are a lot less inclined to defend
| themselves because the cost of loss was seen as too high to
| even risk it.
| thrance wrote:
| They meant "freedom to learn [through backpropagation]"
| probably.
|
| Companies like this were allowed to siphon the free work of
| billions of people over centuries and they still want more.
| pr337h4m wrote:
| >Chris Lehane, OpenAI's vice president of global affairs, said in
| an interview that the US AI Safety Institute - a key government
| group focused on AI - could act as the main point of contact
| between the federal government and the private sector. If
| companies work with the group voluntarily to review models, the
| government could provide them "with liability protections
| including preemption from state based regulations that focus on
| frontier model security," according to the proposal.
|
| Given OpenAI's history and relationship with the "AI safety"
| movement, I wouldn't be surprised to find out later that they
| also lobbied for the same proposed state-level regulations
| they're seeking relief from.
| echelon wrote:
| Regulatory moat and copyright relief for me, but not for thee.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Problem is they built the moat before moving into the castle.
| altairprime wrote:
| Moats are not a problem if your liege lord teleports in and
| lowers the drawbridge for you.
| dylan604 wrote:
| no need for teleportation. just climb the walls. the
| castle is not protected, and has no pots of oil or
| flaming arrows yet.
| mjmas wrote:
| unfortunately their Ai refuses to help them attack the
| castle, citing safety concerns.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| Moat is an Orwellian word and we should reject words that
| contain a conceptual metaphor that is convenient for abusing
| power.
|
| "Building a moat" frames anti-competitive behavior as a
| defense rather than an assault on the free market by implying
| that monopolistic behavior is a survival strategy rather than
| an attempt to dominate the market and coerce customers.
|
| "We need to build a moat" is much more agreeable to tell
| employees than "we need to be more anti-competitive."
| sitkack wrote:
| It is pretty obvious that every use of that word is to
| communicate a stance that is allergic to free markets.
|
| A moat by definition has such a large strategic asymmetry
| that one cannot cross it without a very high chance of
| death. A functioning SEC and FTC as well as CFPB https://en
| .wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_... are
| necessary for efficient markets.
|
| Now might be the time to rollout consumer club cards that
| are adversarial in nature.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| A "moat" is a fine business term for what it relates to,
| and most moats are innocuous:
|
| * The secret formula for Coke
|
| * ASML's technology
|
| * The "Gucci" brand
|
| * Apple's network effects
|
| These are genuine competitive advantages in the market.
| Regulatory moats and other similar things _are_ an assault
| on the free market. Moats in general are not.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I'm with you except for that last one. Innovation
| provides a moat that also benefits the consumer. In
| contrast, network effects don't seem to provide any
| benefit. They're just a landscape feature that can be
| taken advantage of by the incumbent to make competition
| more difficult.
|
| I'm hardly the only one to think this way, hence
| regulation such as data portability in the EU.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I agree with you in general, but there are network
| effects at Apple that are helpful to the consumer. For
| example, iphone-mac integration makes things better for
| owners of both, and Apple can internally develop
| protocols like their "bump to share a file" protocol much
| faster than they can as part of an industry consortium.
| Both of these are network effects that are beneficial to
| the consumer.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I'm not sure a single individual owning multiple products
| from the same company is the typical way "network effect"
| is used.
|
| The protocol example is a good one. However I don't think
| it's the network effect that's beneficial in that case
| but rather the innovation of the thing that was built.
|
| If it's closed, I think that facet specifically is
| detrimental to the consumer.
|
| If it's open, then that's the best you can do to mitigate
| the unfortunate reality that taking advantage of this
| particular innovation requires multiple participating
| endpoints. It's just how it is.
| echelon wrote:
| I'm fine with Apple making their gear work together, but
| they shouldn't be privileged over third parties.
|
| Moreover, they shouldn't have any way to force (or even
| nudge via defaults) the user to use Apple Payments, App
| Store, or other Apple platform pieces. Anyone should be
| on equal footing and there shouldn't be any taxation.
| Apple already has every single advantage, and what
| they're doing now is occupying an anticompetitive high
| ground via which they can control (along with duopoly
| partner Google) the entire field of mobile computing.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| Based on your examples (which did genuinely make me
| question my assertion), it seems that patents and
| exclusivity deals are a major part of moat development,
| as are pricing games and rampant acquisitions.
|
| Apple's network effects are anti-compeitive creating
| vendor lock-in, which allows them to coerce customers. I
| generally defend Apple. But they are half anti-
| competitive (coerce customers), half competitive (earn
| customers), but earning customers is fueled by the
| coercive app store.
|
| This is a very clear example of how moat is an abusive
| word. Under one framing (moat) network effects are a way
| to earn customers by spending resources on projects that
| earn customers (defending market position). In the anti-
| competitive framing, network effects are an explicit
| strategy to create vendor lock in and make it more
| challenging to migrate to other platforms so apple's
| budget to implement anti-customer policies is bigger.
|
| ASML is a patent based monopoly, with exclusivity
| agreements with suppliers, with significant export
| controls. I will grant you that bleeding edge technology
| is arguably the best case argument for the word moat, but
| it's also worth asking in detail how technology is
| actually developed and understanding that patents are
| state sanctioned monopolies.
|
| Both Apple and ASML could reasonably be considered
| monopo-like. So I'm not sure they are the best defense
| against how moat implies anti-competitive behavior.
| Monopolies are fundamentally anti-competitive.
|
| The Gucci brand works against the secondary market for
| their goods and has an army of lawyers to protect their
| brand against imitators and has many limiting/exclusivity
| agreements on suppliers.
|
| Coke's formula is probably the least "moaty" thing about
| coca cola. Their supply chain is their moat and their
| competitive advantage is also rooted in exclusivity
| deals. "Our company is so competitive because our recipe
| is just that good" is a major kool-aid take.
|
| Patents are arguably good, but are legalized anti-
| competition. Exclusivity agreements don't seem very
| competitive. Acquisitions are anti-competitive. Pricing
| games to snuff out competition seems like the type of
| thing that can done chiefly in anti-competitive contexts.
|
| So ASML isn't an argument against "moat means anti-
| competitive", but an argument that sometimes anti-
| competitive behavior is better for society because it
| allows for otherwise economically unfeasible things to be
| be feasible. The other brand's moats are much more rooted
| in business practices around acquisitions and suppliers
| creating de facto vertical integrations. Monopolies _do_
| offer better cheaper products, until they attain a market
| position that allows them to coerce customers.
|
| Anti-trust authorities have looked at those companies.
|
| Another conceptual metaphor is "president as CEO." The
| CEO metaphor re-frames political rule as a business
| operation, which makes executive overreach appear logical
| rather than dangerous.
|
| You could reasonably argue that the president functions
| as a CEO, but the metaphor itself is there to manufacture
| consent for unchecked power.
|
| Conceptual metaphors are insidious. PR firms and think
| tanks actively work to craft these insidious metaphors
| that shape conversations and how people think about the
| world. By the time you've used the metaphor, you've
| already accepted many of the implications of the metaphor
| without even knowing it.
|
| https://commonslibrary.org/frame-the-debate-insights-
| from-do...
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Patents are state-sanctioned monopolies. That is their
| explicit purpose. And for all the "shoulders of giants"
| and "science is a collective effort" arguments, none of
| them can explain why no Chinese company (a jurisdiction
| that does not respect Western patents) can do what ASML
| does. They have the money and the expertise, but somehow
| they don't have the technology.
|
| Also, the Gucci brand does not have lawyers. The Gucci
| brand is a name, a logo, and an aesthetic. Kering S.A.
| (owners of Gucci), enforces that counterfeit Gucci
| products don't show up. The designers at Kering spend a
| lot of effort coming up with Gucci-branded products, and
| they generally seem to have the pulse of a certain sector
| of the market.
|
| The analysis of Coke's supply chain is wrong. The supply
| chain Coke uses is pretty run-of-the-mill, and I'm pretty
| sure that aside from the syrup (with the aforementioned
| secret formula), they actually outsource most of their
| manufacturing. They have good scale, but past ~100
| million cans, I'm not sure you get many economies of
| scale in soda. That's why my local supermarket chain can
| offer "cola" that doesn't quite taste like Coke for
| cheaper than Coke. You could argue that the brand and the
| marketing are the moat, but the idea that Coke has a
| supply chain management advantage (let alone a moat over
| this) is laughable.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > "Building a moat" frames anti-competitive behavior as a
| defense
|
| This is a drastic take, I think to most of us in the
| industry "moat" simply means whatever difficult-to-
| replicate competitive advantage that a firm has invested
| heavily in.
|
| Regulatory capture and graft aren't moats, they're plain
| old corrupt business practices.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Those two concepts aren't mutually exclusive.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| The problem is that moat is a defensive word and using it
| to describe competitive advantage implies that even anti-
| competitive tactics are defensive because that's the
| frame under which the conversation is taking place.
|
| Worse that "moats" are a good thing, which they are for
| the company, but not necessarily society at large. The
| larger the moat, the more money coming out of your pocket
| as a customer.
|
| It is insidious.
| mjan22640 wrote:
| Competitive advantage is anti competitive from the logic
| of the matter.
| cnity wrote:
| This is like saying Usain Bolt's training regimine is
| anti-competitive. Leaning into your strengths as an
| organisation _is competing_.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| > ask for regulation then ask for exempt
|
| That's exactly what has been happening:
|
| Ask HN: Why is OpenAI pushing for regulation so much - 2023
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36045397
| api wrote:
| OpenAI lobbied for restrictive rules, and now they want an
| "out" but only for themselves. Absolute naked regulatory
| capture.
| hnlurker22 wrote:
| Just like when people complain about OpenAI's ill practices
| then they use it the most
| tdeck wrote:
| Can anyone say which of the LLM companies is the least
| "shady"?
|
| If I want to use an LLM to augment my work, and don't
| have a massively powerful local machine to run local
| models, what are the best options?
|
| Obviously I saw the news about OpenAI's head of research
| openly supporting war crimes, but I don't feel confident
| about what's up with the other companies.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| The Claude people seem to be quite chill.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Agreed. They're a bit mental on "safety" but given that's
| not likely to be a real issue then they're fine.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| Given the growing focus on AIs as agents, I think it's
| going to be a real issue sooner rather than later.
| adastra22 wrote:
| "Safety" was in air quotes for a reason. The Claude
| peoples' idea of "AI safety" risks are straight out of
| the terminator movies.
| robbiep wrote:
| Wouldn't you rather have a player concerned with worst
| case scenarios?
| chithanh wrote:
| Defending against movie plot threats has been found not a
| good use of resources already 20 years ago in the war on
| terrorism.
|
| https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2005/09/terroris
| ts_...
| adastra22 wrote:
| These aren't worst-case scenarios. That would imply there
| was an actual possibility of it happening.
| bionhoward wrote:
| Claude has closed outputs and they train on your inputs.
| Just like OpenAI, Grok, and Gemini (API), mistral...
|
| Who's chill? Groq is chill
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Just use what works for you.
|
| E.g. i'm _very_ outspoken about my preferences for open
| llm practices like executed by Meta and Deepseek. I 'm
| very aware of the regulatory caption and pulling up the
| ladder tactics by the "AI safety" lobby.
|
| However. In my own operations I do still rely on OpenAI
| because it works better than what I tried so far for my
| use case.
|
| That said, when I can find an open model based SaaS
| operator that serves my needs as well without major
| change investment, I will switch.
| hnlurker22 wrote:
| Why not vibe-code it using OpenAI
| PeterStuer wrote:
| I'm not talking about me developing the applications, but
| about using LLM services inside the products in
| operation.
|
| For my "vibe coding" I've been using OpenAI, Grok and
| Deepseek if using small method generation, documentation
| shortcuts, library discovery and debugging counts as
| such.
| nautilus12 wrote:
| Just call it hacking, we don't need new names for coding
| without any forethought.
| hnlurker22 wrote:
| Who put you in charge of naming?
| fuzztester wrote:
| A: none of the above
| dacryn wrote:
| claude and mistral seem to be in a good ethical place.
|
| You actually can't fault llama either, as a standalone
| product. However it's still in Zuck Paradise
| bigbuppo wrote:
| My AI strategy is still "No".
| fuzztester wrote:
| Amen
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-
| som...
| hnlurker22 wrote:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/analogia-is-my-passion
| sitkack wrote:
| Also textbook Fascism.
|
| Trump should have a Most Favored Corporate status, each
| corporation in a vertical can compete for favor and the one
| that does gets to be "teacher's pet" when it comes to
| exemptions, contracts, trade deals, priority in resource
| right access, etc.
| yadaeno wrote:
| Can you explain why this is associated with fascism
| specifically, and not any other form of government which
| has high levels of oligarchical corruption (like North
| Korea, Soviet Russia, etc).
|
| I am not saying you're wrong, but please educate me why
| is this form of corruption/cronyism is unique to fascism?
| tdeck wrote:
| It might be basic, but I found the Wikipedia article to
| be a good place to start:
|
| > An important aspect of fascist economies was economic
| dirigism,[35] meaning an economy where the government
| often subsidizes favorable companies and exerts strong
| directive influence over investment, as opposed to having
| a merely regulatory role. In general, fascist economies
| were based on private property and private initiative,
| but these were contingent upon service to the state.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_fascism
| the_optimist wrote:
| It's a poor definition. The same "subsidization and
| directive influence" applies to all of Krugman's Nobel-
| wining domestic champion, emerging market development
| leaders, in virtually all 'successful' economies. It also
| applies in the context of badly run, failed and failing
| economies. Safe to say this factor is only somewhat
| correlated. Broad assertions are going to be factually
| wrong.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| The key element here is that the power exchange in this
| case goes both ways. The corporations do favors for the
| administration (sometimes outright corrupt payments and
| sometimes useful favors, like promoting certain kinds of
| content in the media, or firing employees who speak up.)
| And in exchange the companies get regulatory favors.
| While all economic distortions can be problematic --
| national champion companies probably have tradeoffs -
| this is a form of distortion that hurts citizens both by
| distorting the market, and also by distorting the
| democratic environment by which citizens might correct
| the problems.
| tdeck wrote:
| That's because it's not a definition, it's simply a
| summary of a description of one characteristic.
| stale2002 wrote:
| So then you agree that the original post that called this
| "text book fascism" was wrong, as this is just one very
| vague, and only slightly correlated property.
|
| This can be bad without invoking godwin's law.
| munificent wrote:
| All snakes have scales, so there is a 100% correlation
| between being a snake and having scales.
|
| That does not imply that fish are snakes. Nor does the
| presence of scaled fish invalidate the observation that
| having scales is a defining attribute of snakes (it's
| just not a _sufficient_ attribute to define snakes).
| TylerE wrote:
| That's not accurate either. Scaleless snakes, thigh a
| rare mutation, do exist as genetic mutants.
|
| https://www.morphmarket.com/morphpedia/corn-
| snakes/scaleless...
| oasisaimlessly wrote:
| > there is a 100% correlation between being a snake and
| having scales.
|
| That's a strange definition of "correlation" that you're
| using.
| cousin_it wrote:
| For correlation to be 1, it's not enough that all snakes
| have scales. You also need all scaly animals to be
| snakes.
|
| Here's a toy example. Imagine three equally sized groups
| of animals: scaly snakes, scaly fish, and scaleless fish.
| (So all snakes have scales, but not all scaly animals are
| snakes.) That's three data points (1,1) (0,1) (0,0) with
| probability 1/3 each. The correlation between snake and
| scaly comes out as 1/2.
|
| You can also see it geometrically. The only way
| correlation can be 1 is if all points lie on a straight
| line. But in this case it's a triangle.
| the_optimist wrote:
| You're looking for the logical argument here, not the
| statistical one. You sampled from snakes and said there
| is a 100% correlation with being a snake (notwithstanding
| the counterarg in an adjacent comment about scale-free
| snakes).
|
| I am noting that the logical argument does not hold in
| the provided definition. If "some" attributes hold in a
| definition, you are expanding the definitional set, not
| reducing it, and thus creating a low-res definition. That
| is why I said: 'this is a poor definition.'
| MaxPock wrote:
| Sounds like South Korea and her Chaebols
| Retric wrote:
| Yea fascism, communism, etc aren't abstract ideals in the
| real world. Instead they are self reinforcing directions
| along a multidimensional political spectrum.
|
| The scary thing with fascism is just how quickly it can
| snowball because people at the top of so many powerful
| structures in society benefit. US Presidents get a
| positive spin by giving more access to organizations that
| support them. Those kinds of quiet back room deals
| benefit the people making them, but not everyone outside
| the room.
| somenameforme wrote:
| That's not fascism, that is the dysfunctional status quo
| in literally every single country in the world. Why do
| you think companies and billionaires dump what amounts to
| billions of dollars on candidates? Often times it's not
| even this candidate or that, but both!
|
| They then get access, get special treatment, and come out
| singing the praises of [errr.. what's his name again?]
| Retric wrote:
| It's not Fascism on its own, but it's representative of
| the forces that push society to Fascism.
|
| Start looking and you'll find powerful forces shaping
| history. Sacking a city is extremely profitable
| throughout antiquity, which then pushes cities to have
| defensive capabilities which then...
|
| In the Bronze Age trade was critical as having Copper ore
| alone wasn't nearly as useful as having copper and access
| to tin. Iron however is found basically everywhere as
| where trees.
|
| Such forces don't guarantee outcomes, but they have
| massive influence.
| somenameforme wrote:
| It's rather amusing reading the link on dirigisme given
| the context of its alleged implication. [1] A word which
| I, and suspect most, have never heard before.
|
| ---
|
| The term emerged in the post-World War II era to describe
| the economic policies of France which included
| substantial state-directed investment, the use of
| indicative economic planning to supplement the market
| mechanism and the establishment of state enterprises in
| strategic domestic sectors. It coincided with both the
| period of substantial economic and demographic growth,
| known as the Trente Glorieuses which followed the war,
| and the slowdown beginning with the 1973 oil crisis.
|
| The term has subsequently been used to classify other
| economies that pursued similar policies, such as Canada,
| Japan, the East Asian tiger economies of Hong Kong,
| Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan; and more recently the
| economy of the People's Republic of China (PRC) after its
| economic reforms,[2] Malaysia, Indonesia[3][4] and India
| before the opening of its economy in 1991.[5][6][7]
|
| ---
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirigisme
| deanishe wrote:
| > A word which I, and suspect most, have never heard
| before.
|
| It's a pretty normal word in British English, tbh.
|
| Maybe it's because we do French at school.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Would describe e.g. social democracy too though. And in
| practice most govs work like this.
| desdenova wrote:
| Social democracy has historically been a precursor to
| fascism, so it makes sense.
| api wrote:
| Socialism and communism are state ownership. Fascism
| tends toward private ownership and state control. This is
| actually easier and better for the state. It gets all the
| benefit and none of the responsibility and can throw
| business leaders under the bus.
|
| All real world countries have some of this, but in
| fascism it's really overt and dialed up and for the
| private sector participation is not optional. If you
| don't toe the line you are ruined or worse. If you do
| play along you can get very very rich, but only if you
| remember who is in charge.
|
| "Public private partnership" style ventures are kind of
| fascism lite, and they always worried me for that reason.
| It's not an open bid but a more explicit relationship. If
| you look back at Musk's career in particular there are
| ominous signs of where this was going.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The private industry side of fascist corporatism is very
| similar to all kinds of systematic state industry
| cronyism, particularly in other authoritarian systems
| that aren't precisely fascist (and named systems of
| government are just idealized points on the
| multidimensional continuum on which actual governments
| are distributed, anyway), what distinguishes fascism
| particularly is the combination of its form of
| corporatism with xenophobia, militaristic nationalism,
| etc., not the form of corporatism alone.
| Ray20 wrote:
| I think it is associated with fascism, just from the
| other party.
|
| This is pretty common fascist practice that is used all
| over Europe and in any left-leaning countries, when with
| regulations governments make doing business on large
| scale impossible, and then give largest players
| exemptions, subsidies and so on. Governments gain
| enormous leverage to ensure corporate loyalty, silence
| dissenters and combat opposition, while the biggest
| players secure their place at the top and gain protection
| from competitors.
|
| So the plan was push regulations and then dominate over
| the competitors with exemptions from those regulations.
| But fascists loose the election, regulations threaten to
| start working in a non-discriminatory manner, and this
| will simply hinder business.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> and then give largest players exemptions, subsidies
| and so on._
|
| You mean like Germany has done?
| fuzztester wrote:
| Like Most Favoured Nation:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_favoured_nation
| lazyeye wrote:
| Groan....
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| People who don't learn history will be condemned to
| repeat it. Granted this isn't necessary to be skeptical
| of american business....
| Aeolun wrote:
| Isn't this the opposite? Trump has learned from history
| exactly so that he can repeat it?
|
| Or his lackeys have anyway. I'm unwilling to believe the
| man has ever read a book.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| Trump also isn't giving "nothing ever happens" vibes.
| Animats wrote:
| That's in progress. It's called the MAGA Parallel
| Economy.[1]
|
| Donald Trump, Jr. is in charge. Vivek Ramaswamy and Peter
| Thiel are involved. Azoria ETF and 1789 Capital are funds
| designed to fund MAGA-friendly companies.
|
| But this may be a sideshow. The main show is US CEOs
| sucking up to Trump, as happened at the inauguration.
| That parallels something Putin did in 2020. Putin called
| in the top two dozen oligarchs, and told them "Stay out
| of politics and your wealth won't be touched." "Loyalty
| is what Putin values above all else." Three of the
| oligarchs didn't do that. Berezovsky was forced out of
| Russia. Gusinsky was arrested, and later fled the
| country. Khodorkovsky, regarded as Russia's richest man
| at the time (Yukos Oil), was arrested in 2003 and spent
| ten years in jail. He got out in 2013 and left for the
| UK. Interestingly, he was seen at Trump's inauguration.
|
| [1]
| https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/13/maga-
| influ...
|
| [2] https://apnews.com/article/russia-putin-oligarchs-
| rich-ukrai...
| darkwater wrote:
| > That parallels something Putin did in 2020. Putin
| called in the top two dozen oligarchs, and told them
| "Stay out of politics and your wealth won't be touched.
|
| > Khodorkovsky [...] was arrested in 2003
|
| Something doesn't square here
| shakna wrote:
| It was in 2000 [0]
|
| [0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/29/1088886
| 554/how...
| silvaring wrote:
| Its a typo, the article says it happened in the summer of
| 2000.
| Animats wrote:
| Right re 2000.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| Could just be a muscle-memory typo. Much more likely to
| be typing 2020 these days than 2002.
| api wrote:
| Why are these idiots trying to ape Russia, a dumpster
| fire, to make America great again?
|
| If there's anyone to copy it's China in industry and
| maybe elements of Western Europe and Japan in some civic
| areas.
|
| Russia is worse on every metric, even the ones
| conservatives claim to care about: lower birth rate, high
| divorce rate, much higher abortion rate, higher domestic
| violence rate, more drug use, more alcoholism, and much
| less church attendance.
|
| I. Do. Not. Get. The Russia fetish.
| abenga wrote:
| > I. Do. Not. Get. The Russia fetish.
|
| It's not a Russia fetish. It's a Strongman fetish.
| NeutralCrane wrote:
| Because they aren't interested in "making America great
| again", that's the marketing line used to sell it to
| American voters. They are solely interested in looting
| the nation for personal gain.
| jdiez17 wrote:
| What do you think Melon Tusk is doing, apart from letting
| out his inner (and outer) (and literal) child on the
| world stage?
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Selling the government/land/public companies to the
| highest bidder, which in many cases would be him too
| blitzar wrote:
| Lots of Ketamine.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Elon Musk is a text book definition of an oligarch,
| combining tremendous wealth, control over major
| technological industries and political power.
| enriquec wrote:
| so edgy
| yk wrote:
| Perhaps that would be a use for the $TRUMP coin, whoever
| owns most gets to favorite corporation.
| arkadiytehgraet wrote:
| I believe with regulatory capture the companies that pushed
| for the regulation in the first place at least comply with
| it (and hopefully the regulation is not worthless). This
| behaviour by ClosedAI is even worse: push for the
| regulation, then push for the exemption.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Regulatory capture is usually the company pushing for
| regulations that align with the business practices they
| already implement and would be hard for a competitor to
| implement. For example, a car company that wants to
| require all other manufactures to build and operate wind
| tunnels for aerodynamics testing. Or more realistically,
| regulations requiring 3rd party sellers for vehicles.
| m463 wrote:
| Regulators can require all manufactures to build and
| operate wind tunnels for aerodynamics testing, or
| alternatively allow someone from south africa to be
| president.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| That's the first time I've ever heard someone make this
| unusual and very specific definition. It's almost always
| much simpler - you get favorable regulatory findings and
| exemptions by promising jobs or other benefits to the
| people doing the regulating. It's not complicated, it's
| just bribery with a different name.
| adastra22 wrote:
| That's not regulatory capture at all. Grandparent's
| definition is correct.
| ghshephard wrote:
| I haven't heard that definition of "Regulatory Capture"
| before. I mostly thought it was just when the regulators
| are working for industry instead of the people. That is,
| the regulators have been "Captured." The politicians who
| nominate the regulatory bodies are paid off by industry
| to keep it that way.
| jacksnipe wrote:
| You're correct that this is the broad definition, but GP
| is correct that that is a very common form of regulatory
| capture in the US.
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| I've seen this happen many times during the RFI/RFP
| process for large projects, the largest players put boots
| on the ground early and try to get into the ears of the
| decision makers and their consultants and "helpfully"
| educate them. On multiple occasions I've seen requests
| actually using a specific vendor's product name as a
| generic term without realizing it, when their
| competitors' products worked in a completely different
| way and didn't have a corresponding component in their
| offering.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I agree. I wasn't trying to strictly define it just
| specify the form it usually takes.
|
| In the case of OpenAI, were I to guess, they'll likely do
| things like push for stronger copyright laws or laws
| against web scraping. Things that look harmless but
| ultimately will squash new competitors in the AI market.
| Now that they already have a bunch of the data to train
| their models, they'll be happy to make it a little harder
| for them to get new data if it means they don't have to
| compete.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Regulatory capture has different flavours, but it
| basically comes down to the regulated taking control of
| or significantly influencing the regulator. It can be by
| the complete sector, but in my experience most often by
| the leading incumbants in a domain.
|
| It can be through keeping regulation to be mild or look
| the other way, but as often to put up high cost/high
| compliance burdens in place to pull up the drawbridge for
| new entrants.
| xvector wrote:
| We all predicted this would happen but somehow the highly
| intelligent employees at OpenAI getting paid north of $1M
| could not foresee this obvious eventuality.
| artursapek wrote:
| nice to see HN is no longer glazing Sam Altman
| mkoubaa wrote:
| And it probably would have worked if David Sacks wasn't the
| AI czar. The Harris administration would probably have
| caved by now
| bmitc wrote:
| It's a common tactic in new fields. Fusion, AI, you name it
| are all actively lobbying to get new regulation because they
| are "different", and the individual companies want to ensure
| that it's them that sets the tone.
| mkagenius wrote:
| Looks the same as taking "rebate for green energy" and then
| asking to "stop such rebates" a few years later
| bmitc wrote:
| Exactly. I'm reminded of Gavin Belson saying something
| along the lines of "I don't want to live in a world where
| someone makes it a better place to live than we do" in
| _Silicon Valley_.
| mkagenius wrote:
| Yes, its slightly different though - in that, we end up
| with a better place either way.
| nand_gate wrote:
| They've no moat so I don't see them surviving without a gov't
| bail out like this.
| claude_thinking wrote:
| LLM usage is still gaining traction. OpenAI may not be on
| top anymore, but they still have useful services, and they
| aren't going under anytime soon.
|
| And time spent dealing with laws and regulations may
| decrease efficiency, leading to increased power
| consumption, resulting in greater water usage in
| datacenters for cooling and more greenhouse gas emissions.
|
| Controlling demand for services is something that could
| stop this, but it's technological progress, which could
| enable solutions for global warming, hunger, and disease.
|
| It's a locomotive out-of-control. Prayer is the answer I'd
| think of.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >And time spent dealing with laws and regulations may
| decrease efficiency, leading to increased power
| consumption, resulting in greater water usage in
| datacenters for cooling and more greenhouse gas
| emissions.
|
| They don't care about that if they get a regulatory moat
| around them.
| claude_thinking wrote:
| There's only so much of that you can do without it
| becoming a problem you have to deal with. There is a
| limited supply of water in any area of the earth.
| clown_strike wrote:
| Maybe buying up all the water rights so nobody can use it
| to cool their own server farm is the literal moat that
| would serve them best.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| They should hook up with Nestle.
| breckenedge wrote:
| If they're not making money[1], and competitors are, or
| competitors are able to run at a negative for longer,
| then things could definitely wrap up for them quickly. To
| most consumers, LLMs will be a feature (of
| Google/Bing/X/Meta/OS), not a product itself.
|
| [1] https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-
| intelligence/peo...
| dmix wrote:
| I remember for years people on HN said Uber would never
| work as a profitable business because it spent a lot of
| VC money earlier on without having enough revenue to
| cover it all. It's been around for 16yrs now despite
| running in the black until 2023.
| DesaiAshu wrote:
| uber is like a fine wine. it will appreciate and pay
| dividends until it bursts when waymo et. al. take over
| the streets in 20 years
| dmix wrote:
| Waymo has ~1000 cars. Uber has 8 million drivers. Worst
| case Uber will be acquired or merger or make a deal with
| one of the many AI driving startups.
|
| I predict Waymo will have their own struggles with
| profitability. Last I heard the LIDAR kit they put on
| cars costs more than the car. So they'll have to mass
| produce + maintain some fancy electronics on a million+
| cars.
| realityfactchex wrote:
| FYI: s/running in the black/running in the red/
|
| [0] https://languagesystems.edu/history-of-idioms-to-be-
| in-black...
| dartos wrote:
| Do you remember when people also thought rabbit would be
| a revolutionary AI device?
| claude_thinking wrote:
| > To most consumers, LLMs will be a feature (of
| Google/Bing/X/Meta/OS), not a product itself.
|
| OpenAI rejected a 97.4B USD buyout in February 2025 and
| won't be absorbed anytime soon:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/technology/openai-
| elon-mu...
| NBJack wrote:
| Don't worry; they'll have plenty of time to regret that.
|
| There's a reason they're sweating the data issue. As much
| as it sucks to say it, Google/Bing/Meta/etc. all have a
| _shitton_ of proprietary human-generated data they can
| work with, train on, fine tune with, etc. OpenAI _needs_
| more human generated data desperately to keep going.
| adventured wrote:
| OpenAI has a gigantic moat.
|
| No moat means Joe Anybody can compete with them. You just
| need billions in capital, a zillion GPUs, thousands of
| hyper skilled employees. You need to somehow get the
| attention of tens of millions of consumers (and then pull
| them away from the competition, ha).
|
| Sure.
|
| The same premise was endlessly floated about eg Uber and
| Google having no moats (Google was going to be killed by
| open search, Baidu, magic, whatever). These things are said
| by people that don't understand the comically vast cost of
| big infrastructure, branding, consumer lock-in (or consumer
| behavior in general), market momentum, the difficulty of
| raising enormous sums of capital, and so on.
|
| Oh wait the skeptics say: what about DeepSeek. To scale and
| support that you're going to need what I described. What's
| the plan for supporting 100 million subscribers globally
| with a beast of an LLM that wants all the resources you can
| muster? Yeah, that's what I thought. Oh but wait, everyone
| is going to run a datacenter out of their home and operate
| their own local LLM, uhh nope. It's overwhelmingly staying
| in the cloud and it's going to cost far over a trillion
| dollars to power it globally over the next 20 years.
|
| OpenAI has the same kind of moat that Google has, although
| their brand/reach/size obviously isn't on par at this
| point.
| swexbe wrote:
| Microsoft is providing the compute, the capital, and if
| 365 Copilot takes off, also the consumers.
|
| Microsoft has a mote. Oai does not.
| dacryn wrote:
| 365 is not taking off. Numbers are average at best. Most
| companies now pay 20/user/month extra, and whilst the
| sentiment is that it likely kina is somehow worth it,
| nobody claims it would be better than break even. Many
| users are deeply disappointed with the overpromising in
| powerpoint and excel. Sure it's quite useful in outlook
| and the assistant is great to find files in scattered
| sharepoints, but that's the limit of my value with it.
|
| OpenAI copilot, not microsoft copilot, actually looks
| like a stronger product and they're going full force
| after the enterprise market as we speak. We're setting a
| demo in motion with them next month to give it a go.
|
| We'll have to wait for the first one to crack Powerpoint,
| that'll be the gamechanger.
| CPLX wrote:
| The fact that Chris Lehane is the one involved in this should
| tell you all you need to know about how on the level all this
| is.
| OkGoDoIt wrote:
| For those of us who don't recognize him by name, can you
| spell it out a little more clearly please?
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Was he not the one that lead coverups for the Clintons?
| natch wrote:
| Heavy hitter lawyer, PR expert. Some google terms: Masters
| of disaster, Spin cycle.
| stuckkeys wrote:
| Sounds like a pleasant person.
| natch wrote:
| I mean... he has supported at least one good cause I know
| of where the little guy was getting screwed way beyond
| big time and he stepped up pro bono. So I like him. But
| probably mostly a hired gun.
| sunshine-o wrote:
| Just learning about that guy and reading his Wikipedia page
| will give me nightmares for the years to come.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Regulatory capture is a common strategy for synthetic
| monopolistic competitive firms, and suckers high on their own
| ego.
|
| Deepseek already proved regulation will not be effective at
| maintaining a market lead. =3
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Why won't it?
|
| If you get fined millions of dollars (for copyright, of
| course) if you're found to have anything resembling DeepSeek
| on your machine - no company in the US is going to run it.
|
| The personal market is going to be much smaller than the
| enterprise market.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| The artificial token commodity can now be functionally
| replicated on a per location basis on $40k in hardware (far
| lower cost than nvidia hardware.)
|
| Copyright licensing is just a detail corporations are well
| experienced dealing with in a commercial setting, and note
| some gov organizations are already exempt from copyright
| laws. However, people likely just won't host in countries
| with silly policies.
|
| Best regards =3
| bigbuppo wrote:
| So you're saying I should avoid REITs focusing on US-
| based hyperscale datacenters for AI workloads?
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Salt was used to pay salaries at one time too, and
| ML/"AI" business models projecting information asymmetry
| are now paradoxical as a business goal.
|
| Note: Data centers often naturally colocate with cold-
| climates, low-cost energy generation facilities, and
| fiber optic distance to major backbones/hubs.
|
| At a certain scale, Energy cost is more important than
| location and hardware. The US just broke its own horses
| leg with tariffs before the race. Not bullish on the US
| domestic tech firms these days, and sympathize with the
| good folks at AMCHAM that will ultimately be left to
| clean up the mess eventually.
|
| If businesses have opportunity to cut their operational
| variable costs >25%, than one can be fairly certain these
| facilities won't be located on US soil.
|
| Have a great day =3
| Ray20 wrote:
| >If businesses have opportunity to cut their operational
| variable costs >25%, than one can be fairly certain these
| facilities won't be located on US soil.
|
| Is there opportunity? Lower risks and energy prices may
| well outweigh the cost of tariffs. It is not like any
| other horse in the race has perfectly healthy legs.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| >Is there opportunity?
|
| Depends on the posture, as higher profit businesses may
| invest more into maintaining market dominance. However,
| the assumption technology is a zero-sum economic game was
| dangerously foolish, and attempting to cheat the global
| free market is ultimately futile.
|
| Have a wonderful day, =3
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| Great another market force to widdle away the US' economic
| power, so obviously trump/musk will pass this immediately
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _if you 're found to have anything resembling DeepSeek on
| your machine - no company in the US is going to run it._
|
| That would be as successful as fighting internet piracy.
|
| Not to mention that you could outsource the AI stuff to
| servers sitting in Mexico or something.
| csomar wrote:
| That would give an advantage to foreign companies. The EU
| tried that and while that doesn't destroy your tech
| dominance overnight, it gradually chips from it.
| HillRat wrote:
| As it is, this is a bullshit document, which I'm sure their
| lobbyists know; OSTP is authorized to "serve as a source of
| scientific and technological analysis and judgment for the
| President with respect to major policies, plans, and programs
| of the Federal Government," and has no statutory authority to
| regulate _anything_ , let alone preempt state law. In the
| absence of any explicit Congressional legislation to serve to
| federally preempt state regulation of AI, there's nothing the
| White House can do. (In fact, other than export controls and a
| couple of Defense Production Act wishlist items, everything in
| their "proposal" is out of the Executive's hands and the ambit
| of Congress.)
| throwway120385 wrote:
| You mean there's nothing the White House can do under the
| rule of law. There's plenty the White House can do under the
| color of law.
| genewitch wrote:
| I heard something today and I wonder if someone can nitpick
| it.
|
| If what the admin is doing is illegal, then a court stops
| it, and they appeal and win, then it wasn't illegal. If
| they appeal all the way up and lose, then they can't do it.
|
| So what exactly is the problem?
|
| Mind you, I am asking for nits, this isn't my idea. I don't
| think "the administration will ignore the supreme court" is
| a good nit.
| fsndz wrote:
| DeepSeek really shook them to their core. Now they go for
| regulatory capture. Such a huge disappointment. Open source AI
| will win: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/the-
| laymans-...
| noosphr wrote:
| It's not just them. Everyone is scrambling.
|
| US tech, and western tech in general, is very culturally -
| and by this I mean in the type of coding people have done -
| homogeneous.
|
| The deep seek papers published over the last two weeks are
| the biggest thing to happen in IA since GPT3 came out. But
| unless you understand distributed file systems, networking,
| low level linear algebra, and half a dozen other fields at
| least tangentially then you'd have not realized they are
| anything important at all.
|
| Meanwhile I'm going through the interview process for a tier
| 1 US AI lab and I'm having to take a test about circles and
| squares, then write a compsci 101 red/black tree search
| algorithm while talking to an AI, being told not to use AI at
| the same time. This is with an internal reference being keen
| for me to be on board. At this point I'm honestly wondering
| if they aren't just using the interview process to generate
| high quality validation data for free.
|
| Xing Yun De Shi ,Tong Guo Zhuan Huan Qi Mo Xing ,Dang Wo Men
| Guang Rong De Ling Dao Ren Xi Jin Ping Cong Zi Ben Zhu Yi Zou
| Gou Shou Zhong Jie Fang Wo Men Shi ,Wo Bu Xu Yao Xue Xi Zhong
| Wen .
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| 100%. Western tech needs the competition. They are very
| prone to navel-gazing simply because SV ended up being the
| location for tech once.
|
| Funny how they like to crow about free markets, while also
| running to daddy government when their position is
| threatened.
| noosphr wrote:
| Competition can only work when there is variation between
| the entities competing.
|
| In the US right now you can have a death match between
| every AI lab, then give all the resources to the one
| which wins and you'd still have largely the same results
| as if you didn't.
|
| The reason why Deepseek - it started life as a HFT firm -
| hit as hard as it did is because it was a cross
| disciplinary team that had very non-standard skill sets.
|
| I've had to try and head hunt network and FPGA engineers
| away from HFT firms and it was basically impossible. They
| already make big tech (or higher) salaries without the
| big tech bullshit - which none of them would ever pass.
| cbzbc wrote:
| > I've had to try and head hunt network and FPGA
| engineers away from HFT firms and it was basically
| impossible. They already make big tech (or higher)
| salaries without the big tech bullshit - which none of
| them would ever pass.
|
| Can confirm. There are downsides, and it can get
| incredibly stressed at times, but there are all sorts of
| big tech imposed hoops you don't have to jump through.
| fsndz wrote:
| which hoops ?
| swores wrote:
| > _all sorts of big tech imposed hoops you don 't have to
| jump through_
|
| Could you kindly share some examples for those of us
| without big tech experience? I assume you're talking
| about working practises more than just annoying hiring
| practises like leetcode?
| greatpostman wrote:
| Engineers at ai labs just come from prestigious schools
| and don't have technical depth. They are smart, but they
| simply aren't qualified to do deep technical innovation
| blackguardx wrote:
| What are you doing with FPGAs? I'm an FPGA engineer and
| don't work at an HFT firm. Those types of jobs seem to be
| in the minority compared to all the aerospace/defense
| jobs and other sectors.
| jgord wrote:
| have you considered starting / joining a startup instead ?
| chithanh wrote:
| > At this point I'm honestly wondering if they aren't just
| using the interview process to generate high quality
| validation data for free.
|
| Not sure if that is accurate, but one of the reasons why
| DeepSeek R1 performs so well in certain areas is thought to
| be access to China's Gaokao (university entrance exam)
| data.
| karn97 wrote:
| Thats stupid. same as indias IIT advanced for ex. You
| learn all that stuff in year 1 physics and math in uni.
| chithanh wrote:
| Yes, however you also want to distinguish correct from
| incorrect answers. You get that from the exams, not from
| year 1 textbooks.
| spaceguillotine wrote:
| Bottom is about to drop out thats why, ethics are out the
| window already and its gonna be worse as they claw to stay
| relevant.
|
| Its a niche product that tried to go mainstream and the
| general public doesn't want it, just look at iPhone 16 sales
| and Windows 11, everyone is happier with the last version
| without AI.
| qoez wrote:
| They were always going for regulatory capture. I think
| deepseek shook them but I don't think we should rewrite the
| history as them being virtuous only until 2024.
| comboy wrote:
| Has OpenAI hired McKinsey yet?
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I'm unsure if you can layoff AI
| fuzztester wrote:
| ai can.
| fuzztester wrote:
| unnecessary. mckinsey uses ai from openai.
|
| embrace. extend. extinguish.
|
| infiltrate. assimilate.
|
| done, tovarisch ...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tovarishch
| eleveriven wrote:
| Wouldn't be shocking if that were the case. Big companies often
| play both sides
| nonethewiser wrote:
| >In a 15-page set of policy suggestions released on Thursday,
| the ChatGPT maker argued that the hundreds of AI-related
| bills currently pending across the US risk undercutting
| America's technological progress at a time when it faces
| renewed competition from China. OpenAI said the
| administration should consider providing some relief for AI
| companies big and small from state rules - if and when
| enacted - in exchange for voluntary access to models.
|
| The article seems to indicate they want all AI companies to
| get relief from these laws though.
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| Tell you what, set up a Federal level disclosure process online
| of all the copyright protected works used in training OpenAI for
| the creators / rights holders to get equity (out of the pockets
| of the C-Suite and Board) via claiming their due, and we'll take
| you seriously.
|
| All the profit and none of the liability is Coward Capitalism.
| _bin_ wrote:
| this is a misread. it's still unclear whether use of
| copyrighted works to train LLMs falls under fair use but, with
| current laws, the answer is probably yes. you may not like that
| but, even if it changes, existing models were trained under
| existing law.
|
| also what liability do you expect them to assume? they want to
| offer models while saying "to use these, you must agree we
| don't have liability for their outputs." if companies want to
| use these models but don't want to deal with liability
| themselves, so they demand the government shift the liability
| to the model vendor (despite the conditions the vendor
| applied), that sounds like coward capitalism to me. don't like
| it? don't use their models.
| Xelynega wrote:
| > with current laws, the answer is probably yes
|
| Citation needed, or at least some reasoning. The answer to
| "is this fair use" can't be "it's fair use because it's fair
| use"
|
| > also what liability do you expect them to assume
|
| The same liability anybody does for distributing copyright
| works without a license? Why are they not liable if it turns
| out the stuff they've been distributing and making people pay
| for was content they didn't own the license to distribute?
| moffkalast wrote:
| That's just feudalism with extra steps
| bilbo0s wrote:
| _All the profit and none of the liability is Coward Capitalism_
|
| While I agree with you in principle, there's little that can be
| done because the current crop of crony capitalists will likely
| support the idea of no liability for tech companies. Especially
| when it comes to ripping off copyrighted material. Everything
| from blog posts, to videos, to music, to any source code you
| post on the internet will be used to train models to be better
| writers, artists, musicians, and programmers.
|
| I feel like the only option left is to find some way to make
| money on the output of the models. Because the politicians are
| definitely going to allow the models to make money based on
| your output.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| appeasement?
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| There's an extra word in your last sentence. Privatizing profit
| and socializing risk and loss is maximizing profit for the
| individual, and profit maximizing behavior is the only
| fundamental underpinning of capitalism.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| I know a lot of people will hate on things like this, but the
| reality is they are right that guardrails only serve to hurt us
| in the long run, at least at this pivotal point in time. I don't
| like Trump personally as a caveat.
|
| Yes it is a fact they did build themselves up on top of mountains
| of copyrighted material, and that AI has a lot of potential to do
| harm, but if they are forced to stop or slow down foreign actors
| will just push forward and innovate without guardrails and we
| will just fall behind as the rest of the world pushes forward.
|
| Its easy to see how foreign tech is quickly gaining ground. If
| they truly cared about still propping America up, they should
| allow some guardrails to be pushed past.
| notavalleyman wrote:
| > guardrails only serve to hurt us in the long run, at least at
| this pivotal point in time.
|
| What evidence led you to that conclusion?
| int_19h wrote:
| Look up "alignment tax".
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| The law which prevented US corporations from using bribery to
| win business in other nations was recently rescinded on exactly
| this basis: US corporations are hamstrung unless they can buy
| their wins. Superficially, this makes sense, and that was all
| that was offered to justify the change. That guardrail was
| dumb! But like most things, there are reasons to not do this
| which were completely ignored.
|
| For instance, a company may not desire to hand out cash to win
| business; previously, when solicited they could say, "Sorry, it
| is illegal for me to do so." Now there is no such shield.
|
| Second, in many cases it will be two or more US businesses
| trying to win business in some other country, and the change of
| the law only makes it more expensive for those two companies,
| as they now must play a game of bribery chicken to win the
| business.
|
| Third, the US loves to claim it is is a democracy and is
| working to spread democracy. By legitimizing bribes paid to
| foreign officials over the interests of their voting populace,
| we are undermining democracy in those countries (not that
| anyone who pays attention believes that the US's foreign policy
| is anything but self interested and divorced from spreading
| democratic ideals).
| 1shooner wrote:
| Underlying this perspective is the assumption that this is a
| uni-lineal race, and the end of that race must be arrived at
| first, and what lies at the end of that race is in the common
| good. There is no evidence for any of this.
| Xelynega wrote:
| Can the same argument not be made for forced labour?
|
| Is the US not lowering it's capacity to innovate and grow it's
| economy by preventing the use of forced labour(even in other
| countries)? Why should these "guardrails" stay in place if the
| argument is "the reality is they are right that guardrails only
| serve to hurt us in the long run, at least at this pivotal
| point in time"?
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| Is it me or does it feel like most of what the federal government
| does nowadays is make it illegal for government to make things
| illegal?
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| It probably needs to be a law not an executive order but I don't
| hate the idea.
|
| States have the power to make it prohibitively expensive to
| operate in those states, leaving people to either go to VPNs or
| use AI's hosted in other countries where they don't care if
| they're not following whatever new AI law California decides to
| pass. And companies would choose just to use datacenters not in
| the prohibitive states and ban ips from those states.
|
| Course if a company hosts in us-east-1, and allows access from
| California, would the inter state commerce clause not take effect
| and California would have no power anyways?
| arrosenberg wrote:
| > Course if a company hosts in us-east-1, and allows access
| from California, would the inter state commerce clause not take
| effect and California would have no power anyways?
|
| California can't legislate how they serve a customer in a
| different state. They would have to comply when serving
| California customers within the state of California, regardless
| of where the dc is located. I.E. Under the CCPA it doesn't
| matter where my data is stored, they still have to delete it
| upon my request.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >California can't legislate how they serve a customer in a
| different state. They would have to comply when serving
| California customers within the state of California,
| regardless of where the dc is located. I.E. Under the CCPA it
| doesn't matter where my data is stored, they still have to
| delete it upon my request.
|
| I know this is what California thinks, I just personally
| don't see how this isn't inter state commerce.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| It is, of course, but that doesn't mean California can't
| regulate it; simply that federal laws take precedence.
|
| If states couldn't regulate interstate commerce taking
| place in their own states, they effectively couldn't
| regulate any commerce because court decisions have found
| that essentially all economic activity, even growing food
| for your own consumption, falls under the banner of
| interstate commerce.
| dynm wrote:
| > even growing food for your own consumption
|
| Hey I know this one! In case anyone is interested, here's
| the case:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Unless their a superseding federal law, yeah, California
| can successfully prosecute businesses for breaking the laws
| within its' jurisdiction.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Are you advocating to take the power relegated to the states
| away from the states and give it to the federal government in
| direct violation of the Constitution of the United States?
| hiatus wrote:
| How is this not directly tied to interstate commerce (and
| copyright law) and thus under Congress' enumerated powers?
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause
| int_19h wrote:
| Interstate commerce clause by itself doesn't prevent it; it
| merely gives Congress the _ability_ to override the state laws
| if Congress deems it necessary.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Your argument for regulation is...reasons why it works out
| without regulation, and is already covered by existing
| regulations?
|
| Granted the "regulation" I'm referring to above is a law or EO
| to block California's regulation, and I don't support
| California's regulation either. But I believe regulations
| should only exist when there's no better alternative, because
| they usually have unintended consequences. If it's true that
| OpenAI can basically just leave California, the better
| alternative for the government may be doing nothing.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > leaving people to either go to VPNs
|
| .. which is the prevailing situation for people dealing with
| state-by-state age verification at the moment.
| qoez wrote:
| JD vance seems to be quite aware of OpenAIs meta strategy so I
| wouldn't be surprised if this is declined (ie semi specifically
| aimed at something they want to force them to comply with).
| balls187 wrote:
| This administration has shown that if you grease the skids well
| enough, you can get things your way.
| msp26 wrote:
| Relevant (I don't know why the article doesn't link to them
| directly): https://openai.com/global-affairs/openai-proposals-
| for-the-u... https://cdn.openai.com/global-affairs/ostp-
| rfi/ec680b75-d539...
| yonran wrote:
| Thank you. I am disappointed that almost none of the comments
| here discuss the OpenAI proposals on the merits. I do hope that
| the federal government heeds most of these ideas, particularly
| recognizing that training a model should be fair use.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| The narrative of "regulatory capture" breaks down pretty fast
| when you see they are arguing all AI companies should be get
| relief from these laws.
|
| In fact most of the proposal sounds like it could have been
| written by the US government. Exporting democratic AI,
| neutralize PRC benefit of American AI, etc.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| "Freedom to make money"
| crorella wrote:
| If they want to avoid paying for the creative effort of authors
| and other artists then they should also not charge for the use of
| their models.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| They should train a model on a clean dataset and copyright
| dataset, charge extra on the copyright model, and pay a royalty
| to copyright owners when their works are cited in a response.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| The problem there is how are we defining "works are cited"?
| Also couldn't you just do the same thing done to spotify and
| make bot farms to generate millions of citations?
| codedokode wrote:
| You can simply pay to everyone whose works you have used
| for training, every time a model processes a request.
| ideashower wrote:
| I like this and agree. It should be opt-in. I almost feel as
| if it should be something exciting and rewarding.
| visarga wrote:
| But who should pay? The model developers? Training models is a
| cost center. And what about open source AI, should we legislate
| it out of existence?
|
| How about the AI providers? they operate on thin margins, and
| make just cents a million tokens. If one provider is too
| expensive, users quickly switch.
|
| Maybe the users? Users derive the lion share of benefits from
| AI. But those benefits are hard to quantize.
|
| Maybe a blanket tax? That would simplify things, but would put
| all creatives on a quantitative rather than qualitative
| criteria.
|
| I think generative AI is the worst copyright infringement tool
| ever devised. It's slow, expensive and imprecise. On the other
| hand copying is fast, free and perfect. I think nobody can, for
| science, regurgitate a full book with AI, it won't have
| fidelity to the original.
|
| The real enemy of any artist is the long tail of works,
| sometimes spanning decades, that they have to compete against.
| So it's other authors. That is why we are in an attention
| economy, and have seen the internet enshittified.
|
| The most creative part of internet ignores copyright royalties.
| From open source, to wikipedia, open scientific publication and
| even social networks, if everyone demanded royalties none of
| them would be possible.
| kweingar wrote:
| > The most creative part of internet ignores copyright
| royalties. From open source, to wikipedia, open scientific
| publication and even social networks, if everyone demanded
| royalties none of them would be possible.
|
| Notably, in all of these cases the people involved consent to
| participating.
| basisword wrote:
| >> The real enemy of any artist is the long tail of works,
| sometimes spanning decades, that they have to compete
| against.
|
| Had to check this wasn't sama.
|
| You seriously believe the real enemy of artists is other
| artists? Not the guys making billions and trying to convince
| us "the computers are just reading it like a human"?
| visarga wrote:
| Are you implying AI is causing more competition than other
| creatives, and the billion choices the public has?
| Palmik wrote:
| Funnily, OpenAI also calls for the ban of their free and
| open-weight Chinese competitors DeepSeek and Qwen.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| there are some free models out there from both chat companies
| and open source
| 93po wrote:
| i really don't understand this argument. at which point is it
| violating copyright versus an intelligence learning and making
| content the same way as humans?
|
| it was living cells, but they worked as transistors, would it
| be ok?
|
| it was whole-brain emulation on silicon transistors, would it
| be ok?
|
| it was a generative AI similar to what we have today, but 100x
| more sentient and self aware, is that ok?
|
| if you locked a human in a room with nothing but tolkien books
| for 20 years, then asked them to write a fantasy novel, is that
| ok?
|
| All art is built on learning from previous art. I don't
| understand the logic of it being a computer so suddenly now
| it's wrong and bad. I also don't understand general support of
| intellectual property when it overwhelmingly benefits the mega
| wealthy and stifles creative endeavors like nothing else. You
| art isn't less valuable just because a computer makes something
| similar, in the same way it's not less valuable if another
| human copies your style and makes new art in your style.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| > I don't understand the logic of it being a computer so
| suddenly now it's wrong and bad
|
| My answer to this is one I've written already before:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42720749
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| You "really don't understand" the difference? Do we need to
| spell out that these systems aren't human artists simply
| looking at paintings and admiring features about them? They
| are Python programs running linear algebra libraries, sucking
| in pixels from anywhere they can find them, and then being
| used by corporations with billion dollar valuations to
| increase investor/shareholder value at the expense of the
| people who provided the artwork to train the systems - people
| who, as you already know, are NOT paid for providing their
| work, and who never CONSENTED to having their work used for
| such a purpose. Now do you "understand the difference"?
| ben_w wrote:
| AI is a new thing. It's OK to say you don't want it, that
| it's a threat to livelihoods. But it's a mistake to use
| these kinds of arguments, that are predicated on such
| narrow points that overlap so much with human brains.
|
| It's going to be a threat to my career, soon enough -- but
| the threat it poses to me exists even if it never read any
| of my blog posts or my github repos. Even if it had never
| read a single line of ObjC or Swift.
|
| > Do we need to spell out that these systems aren't human
| artists simply looking at paintings and admiring features
| about them?
|
| In a word, yes.
|
| In more words: explain what it would take for an AI to
| count as a person -- none of what you wrote connects with
| what was in the comment you replied to.
|
| You dismiss AI as "python": would it help if the maths was
| done as the pure linear amplification range of the quantum
| effects in transistors?; you dismiss them as "sucking in
| pixels from anywhere they can find them" like humans don't
| spend all day with their eyes open; you complain
| "corporations with billion dollar valuations to increase
| investor/shareholder value at the expense of the people who
| provided the artwork to train the systems" like this isn't
| exactly what happens with government funded education of
| humans.
|
| I anticipate that within my lifetime it will be possible
| for a human brain to be preserved on death, scanned, and
| the result used as a full brain sim that remembers what the
| human remembered at the the time of death. Would it matter
| if the original human had memorised Harry Potter end-to-end
| and the upload could quote it all perfectly? Would Rowling
| get the right to delete that brain upload?
|
| I'm following a YouTube channel where they're growing mouse
| neurons on electrode grids to train them to play video
| games. It's entirely plausible, given the current rate of
| progress, that 15 years from now, GPT-4 could be encoded
| onto a brain organoid the size of a living mouse's brain --
| does it magically become OK then? And in 30 years, that
| same thing as an implant into a human?
|
| The threat to my economic prospects is already present in
| completely free models whose weights are given away and
| cannot avail the billion-dollar corporations who made them.
| I can download free models and run them on my laptop,
| outputting tokens faster than I can read them for an energy
| budget lower than my own brain, corporations who made those
| models don't profit directly by me doing this, and if those
| corporations go bankrupt I can still run those models.
|
| The risk to my economic value is _not_ because any of these
| "stole" anything, but because the models are _useful and
| cheap_.
|
| GenAI art (and voice) is... well, despite the fact I will
| admit to enjoying it privately/on free content, whenever I
| see it on products or blog posts, or when I hear it in the
| voices on YouTube videos, it's a sign the human behind it
| has zero budget and therefore whatever it is I don't want
| to buy it. People already use it because it's cheap, it's a
| sign of being cheap, signs of cheap are a proxy of
| generally poor quality.
|
| But that's not going to save my career, nobody's going to
| decide to boycott all iPhone apps that aren't certified
| "made by 100% organic grass-fed natural humans with no AI
| assistance".
|
| So believe me, I get that it's scary. But the arguments
| you're using aren't good ones.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| No one said they "don't want it".
|
| No one said "it's scary".
|
| No one is "dismissing them".
|
| It seems like you're arguing against some other person
| you've made up in your mind. I use these systems every
| single day, but if you don't understand the argument
| about consent and the extremely obvious difference
| between Python programs and humans that I already pointed
| out, then no one can help you. I'll keep making these
| arguments, because they _are_ good ones, and they are
| obvious to any human being who isn 't stuck in tech-bro
| fairy land blabbering about how human consciousness is
| completely identical to Python linear algebra libraries
| when any 6 year old child knows with certainty they are
| not.
|
| > In a word, yes.
|
| This is, frankly, embarrassing.
| ben_w wrote:
| > No one said they "don't want it".
|
| Your own words suggest this. Many others are more
| explicit. There are calls for models to be forcibly
| deleted. Your own statements here about lack of consent
| are still in this vein.
|
| > No one said "it's scary".
|
| Many, including me, find it so.
|
| > No one is "dismissing them".
|
| You, specifically you, are -- "feeling or showing that
| something is unworthy of consideration".
|
| > if you don't understand the argument about consent and
| the extremely obvious difference between Python programs
| and humans that I already pointed out, then no one can
| help you.
|
| Consent is absolutely an argument I get. It's
| specifically where I'm agreeing with you.
|
| The other half of that...
|
| Python, like all programming languages, is universal.
| Python programs can implement physics, so trying to use
| the argument " _because_ it 's implemented on silicon
| rather than chemistry" is a distinction without a
| difference.
|
| Quantum mechanics is linear algebra.
|
| > I'll keep making these arguments, because they are good
| ones, and they are obvious to any human being who isn't
| stuck in tech-bro fairy land blabbering about how human
| consciousness is completely identical to Python linear
| algebra libraries when any 6 year old child knows with
| certainty they are not.
|
| (An example of you "dismissing" AI).
|
| Then you'll keep being confused and enraged about why
| people disagree with you.
|
| And not just because you have a wildly wrong
| understanding of what 6 year olds think about. I remember
| being 6, all the silly things I believed back then. What
| my classmates believed falsely. How far most of us were
| from understanding what algebra was, let alone
| distinguishing linear algebra from other kinds.
|
| I've got a philosophy A-level, which is enough to know
| that "consciousness" is a completely unsolved question
| and absolutely nobody agrees what the minimum
| requirements are for it. 40 different definitions, we
| don't even all agree what the _question_ is yet, much
| less then answer.
|
| But I infer from you bring it up, that you think
| "consciousness" is an important thing that AI is missing?
|
| Well perhaps it is something current AI miss, something
| their architecture hasn't got -- when we can't agree what
| the question is, any answer is possible. We evolved it,
| but just because it can pop up for no good reason doesn't
| mean it must be present everywhere. (I say much the same
| to people who are convinced AI must have it: we don't
| know). So, what if machines are not conscious? Why does
| that matter?
|
| And you've not answered one of my examples. To repeat:
|
| I'm following a YouTube channel where they're growing
| mouse neurons on electrode grids to train them to play
| video games. It's entirely plausible, given the current
| rate of progress, that 15 years from now, GPT-4 could be
| encoded onto a brain organoid the size of a living
| mouse's brain -- does it magically become OK then? And in
| 30 years, that same thing as an implant into a human?
|
| I don't think that is meaningfully distinct, morally
| speaking, from doing this in silicon. Making the
| information alive and in my own brain makes it _not_
| python, but all the consent issues remain.
| esafak wrote:
| No, they _should_ pay. The solution is not to make everything
| free, but cost the market rate. Somebody made these things; pay
| them.
| silverliver wrote:
| ... without restricting other people.
|
| This whole mess is because society decided that restricting
| everyone's rights to share and access information was a sane
| tradeoff to make for making sure people got paid. No it is
| not and, so long as humans are physical, it will never be. It
| appears that humanity will have to get this simple fact
| hammered into them with every new leap in technology.
|
| Find another work-rewarding scheme. Ensure you get paid
| before you release information (e.g. crowd funding or
| contracts with escrows). Forget about nonsensical concepts
| relating to "intellectual" property (information is not
| property). Forget recurring revenue from licensing
| information. You only get paid once when you do work. You are
| not entitled to anything more. If reality makes living off
| your work unworkable, do something else.
|
| I'm glad other countries are starting to wake up and ignore
| this nonsense. Stop trying make something as unnatural and
| immoral as this work.
| iamleppert wrote:
| He should have offered for every purchase of OpenAI services, a
| portion would be used to purchase TrumpCoin. That would have been
| a more effective bribe.
| crorella wrote:
| or teslers!
| croes wrote:
| > OpenAI has asked the Trump administration to help shield
| artificial intelligence companies from a growing number of
| proposed state regulations if they voluntarily share their models
| with the federal government.
|
| That sounds like corruption
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'm shocked
| dtquad wrote:
| It is interesting that it is not the
| Hollywood/Music/Entertainment copyright lobby (RIAA, MPAA etc.)
| that is lobbying US states to go after OpenAI and other American
| AI companies.
|
| It's the New York Times and various journalist and writers'
| unions that are leading the charge against American AI.
|
| American journalists and opinion piece writers want to kill
| American AI and let China and Russia have the global lead. Why?
| Have they taught about the long consequences of what they are
| doing?
| btreecat wrote:
| I think content creators want to be compensated for their work
| that's being used for commercial purposes.
|
| I think you're framing it in a way that makes it seem like they
| don't want to be compensated for working, they just want to
| stop other people from starting a new industry, which doesn't
| seem like a good faith understanding of the situation.
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| Business and tech idea: make it so that it's like Spotify for
| AI.
|
| Everytime an answer is drawn from "certain learned weights,"
| make it so that the source of that knowledge is paid cents
| per volume.
| affinepplan wrote:
| yeah this sounds like it'll be reliably enforced for sure
| InvidFlower wrote:
| While that is cool in principal, I'm not sure how well it'd
| actually work in reality. First, there is the technical
| challenge. My understanding is the weights can have a lot
| of fluctuation, especially early on. How do we actually
| determine how much influence a given piece of content has
| on the final weights?
|
| Then if we get past that, my suspicion is that you could
| game the training. Like have as much of the process happen
| via public domain sources or pay-once licenses. That would
| cover a lot of the fundamental knowledge and processes.
| Then you could fine-tune on copyrighted data. That might
| actually make it easier to see how much influence on the
| final weights that content has, but is also would probably
| be a lot less influence. There's a big difference between a
| painting of an apple being the main contribution to the
| concept of "apple" in an image model, vs mention of that
| painting corresponding to a few weights that just reference
| a bunch of other concepts that were learned via open data.
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| > _First, there is the technical challenge. My
| understanding is the weights can have a lot of
| fluctuation, especially early on. How do we actually
| determine how much influence a given piece of content has
| on the final weights?_
|
| Well, Bing AI already knows where it drew the information
| from and cites sources; so it would be a matter of making
| the deal.
|
| How to enforce it? that's the main question I reckon.
|
| > _Then if we get past that, my suspicion is that you
| could game the training. Like have as much of the process
| happen via public domain sources or pay-once licenses._
|
| I agree.
| esafak wrote:
| Running it is probably costly, but there are papers on
| "influence analysis": _Training data influence analysis and
| estimation: a survey_ (https://link.springer.com/content/pd
| f/10.1007/s10994-023-064...)
|
| It would be easier to negotiate a fixed cost on using a
| particular datum per training of a model.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The market for creative works breaks down as follows. You have
| pay-in-advance arrangements such as patronage, commissioning,
| and so on. Those have been around forever. And then you have
| pay-if-you-want-it arrangements which only make economic sense
| because we have laws that grant monopolies to the creators of
| the work over the market for copies of that work.
|
| The first arrangement is very clearly a labor arrangement; but
| the second one is a deliberate attempt to force artists to act
| like capitalists. More importantly, because art is now acting
| like capital, it provides an obvious economic instinct to
| centralize[0]. So you get industrialized artistic production
| under the banner of publishing companies, whose business model
| is to buy out the copyright to new creative works and then
| exploit them.
|
| What AI art does is transfer money from the labor side of art
| to the capital side of art. The MAFIAA[1] wants AI art to exist
| because it means they can stop paying artists but still make
| royalties off selling licenses to the AI companies. This
| increases their profit margins. Meanwhile, the journalists
| can't sell you old news; they need to spend lots of time and
| money gathering it every day. That business model only works in
| a world where _writers_ are scarce, not just the writing itself
| being artificially scarce.
|
| [0] We can see this with cryptocurrency, which is laughably
| centralized despite being a deliberate attempt to decentralize
| money.
|
| [1] Music and Film Industry Association of America, a
| hypothetical merger of the RIAA and MPAA from a satirical news
| article
| NoOn3 wrote:
| With these proposed rules, American AI may be able to surpass
| the AI of China and Russia, but will American creators and
| ordinary people be happy with this, because all the money will
| end up in the pockets of Sam Altman and other billionaires, and
| ordinary creators will be left with nothing?
| pessimizer wrote:
| > It is interesting that it is not the
| Hollywood/Music/Entertainment copyright lobby (RIAA, MPAA etc.)
|
| Is it interesting? They hate the people who produce their
| product and are desperate to replace them with machines. Note
| that their unions also hate AI, and it was a central reason for
| for the Writer's Guild SAG-AFTRA strike, since you're bringing
| up the NYT unions.
|
| The NYT also stands to benefit not an iota from AI. It probably
| causes a burden because they have to make sure that their awful
| long-in-the-tooth editorial columnists aren't turning in LLM
| slop. It is entirely a negative for people who generate high
| quality content the hard way.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Maybe this data constraint from data vs GPU constraint for China
| will force America to innovate. Maybe innovate in data generation
| tehjoker wrote:
| private property is sacrosanct except when an exception that only
| applies to them it would make a billionaire richer
| tasuki wrote:
| I heard the theory that Elon Musk has a significant control over
| the current US government. They're not best pals with Sam Altman.
| This seems like it might be a good way to see how much power Elon
| actually has over the government?
| napsterbr wrote:
| I think we are beyond the "theory" phase by now. Just yesterday
| I saw the president of a country advertising the products of a
| private company (Trump making an obvious marketing ploy for
| Tesla).
|
| How can this ever be acceptable?
| dcchambers wrote:
| > How can this ever be acceptable?
|
| Because the only people capable of holding him accountable
| won't do it.
|
| The system is broken. The US Government/Constitution depends
| too much on the assumption that people will do the right
| thing.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The failure relative to the original expectations seems to
| be that the other branches of government aren't fighting to
| retain their authority because the things they're being
| overridden to do align too well with what they would do
| themselves.
| slt2021 wrote:
| I saw it even 4 years ago https://people.com/politics/joe-
| biden-takes-hybrid-jeep-for-...
| mattegan wrote:
| > ...his speech, which was attended by the CEOs of dozens
| of the world's largest automakers...
|
| I don't recall Biden reading off a price sheet for a single
| corporation. Seems a bit different than what happened
| yesterday the White House.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > the president of a country advertising the products of a
| private company
|
| I think you're inventing new norms. It has never been unusual
| or interesting for the president of a country to do PR for
| some company in their country that has hit a rough patch (as
| long as this isn't a _legal_ rough patch.)
|
| Most of what our diplomats do is sell US products to other
| countries. They certainly have always played favorites.
|
| > How can this ever be acceptable?
|
| The horror. What if he says that he's going to Burger King?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| It's not even the first time he's done it. He even advertised
| for Goya Beans from the Oval Office.
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-
| president-...
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Trump has ultimate power in the administration. You are either
| dumb or blind if you cannot see that Trump is running the
| executive branch like a mob family. Kiss the leader, show him
| respect, and he will do things for you. Betray him, ignore him,
| or go behind his back and you will be squashed.
|
| People might think this is a partisan statement, but it's not.
| It's simply how he is operating. Want power? Want to get things
| done? Kiss his feet. You saw all the tech boys line up at his
| inauguration. You saw him tell Zelenskyy "Thank me". Elon might
| have power, but he is also on a leash.
| torginus wrote:
| I have a working theory is that the current Trump government is
| like 12 people, a quarter of which do not hold any official
| position, and they decide everyting with absolutely no
| oversight.
|
| Trump did this during his previous term as well, with Ivanka
| and Jared Kushner, but to a much less significant degree.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| DeepSeek/whoever training on OpenAI outputs is ... bad.
|
| OpenAI training on every content creator's outputs is ... good.
| visarga wrote:
| You say that, but the reality is that all open models rely
| heavily on synthetic data generated with ChatGPT. They don't
| like it, but it happens anyway. You can't really protect a
| public model from having its outputs exfiltrated.
|
| This started in 2023 when LLaMA 1 was released, and has been
| going strong ever since. How strong? there are 330K datasets on
| HuggingFace, many of them generated from OpenAI.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Did you miss the sarcasm?
| Xelynega wrote:
| And where did OpenAI get the data to generate those datasets?
| bxguff wrote:
| clear attempt circumnavigate the clear copyright violations of
| the AI era and kick the can down the road.
| pmxi wrote:
| Here's a direct link to the article:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-13/openai-as...
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I'm surprised to see only one comment here addressing the issue
| of Chinese AI companies just flatly ignoring US copyright and IP
| laws/norms. I wonder if there is a viable path where we can
| facilitate some sort of economic remuneration for people who
| write and create visual art while not giving up the game to
| Chinese companies.
|
| This seems to be a thorny dilemma.
| phh wrote:
| Have you got any substance to that? So far the only copyright
| violation I've seen in the LLM world is Meta. (I'm not
| pretending they are alone though, and yes I expect Chinese
| companies to do that as well)
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Welcome to the internet; where the only way to prevent it
| (considering 40% of internet traffic is automated) is to use
| DRM, with accessibility tools provided by client-side AI; or to
| create national internets with strong firewalls only allowing
| access to countries we have treaties with. That's the future at
| this rate, and it sucks. (The status quo also sucks.)
| parliament32 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you can't, despite what IP holders would like
| you to believe. Like the last 50 years of piracy have taught
| us, it's effectively impossible (and probably immoral) to try
| to charge for copying something that's "free" to copy.
|
| It might make more sense to update copyright laws to match
| reality. For a music artist, for example, pennies from Spotify
| mean nothing -- the majority of their revenue comes from
| concerts/events, merchandise, and commercial licensing of their
| work.
| borgdefenser wrote:
| As a digital artist myself, it is quite simple. You have to
| sell physical objects.
|
| The art has to be printed out and that is the art. Anyone can
| get an image of Salvator Mundi for free too. That is not the
| art, that is an image. The art is the physical object that is
| the painting Salvator Mundi.
|
| It is no different than traditional art really, just at a
| different scale. You can buy really nice Picasso knock offs on
| ebay right now. Picasso himself could have made 10 copies of
| the Weeping Woman to sell without that much effort either. The
| "real" Weeping Woman is the physical painting that Picasso did
| not make a copy of. The others are just knock off images.
|
| But the main problem remains. Selling art is really hard. AI
| art is already completely passe anyway. If anything the
| technology is regressing visually.
|
| Music was in a several decades long bull market in physical
| media sales that crashed and burned. Now we have gone back to
| the pre-music media bubble days but with much better
| distribution and marketing channels.
|
| Not a lot of people making a living playing ragtime piano or
| hoofers making a living tap dancing either.
|
| The real amusing thing to me is you never hear scultpure artist
| complain that they are in the training data sets. Probably
| because they know it is literally just free advertising for
| their real art.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm with you 100%. A lot of people who wrote books didn't
| realize they were selling decorated paper, or who recorded
| music didn't realize they were selling wax discs and magnetic
| tape. With digital publishing, they were actually obsoleted.
|
| Like you, I don't think there's good news there, though. As
| an e.g. writer, you have to convert to selling ideas. The way
| you sell an idea is that you give it away, and if hearing it
| makes people like _you_ they will give you arbitrary support.
| For a writer at least what that means is that only original,
| interesting work that stands out will be valuable, and it
| will not be valuable to the extent that it is good, but to
| the extent that it appeals to an audience. You might as well
| be a tap dancer.
|
| And if you aren't original, you'll never stand out amongst
| the AI slop, which will get better and better (and nicer and
| more pleasant to read and more useful and all that good shit
| that technology does.) I don't know if that's a bad thing. We
| have gone from an excess of uninteresting expression in the
| world to an overwhelming amount of "me too" and worthless
| repetition filling every crevice. I've probably published 3K
| words on the internet today. The number before the internet
| would be zero; but even back then the bookstores were filled
| with crap.
|
| The market for crap has been taken by AI. And as it gets
| better, as the crap sea level rises, it will eventually be
| over most content creators' heads.
|
| The only future for an _expression market_ is parasocial. You
| 're going to have to make people like you, and take care of
| you because they think of you as family. It's no wonder that
| entertainment is merging into politics.
| z3c0 wrote:
| I'm in agreement, and being an active artist in an art-
| centric city, I find myself having to explain this to other
| artists more than I'd like. Physical art is of measurable
| value, digital art simply is not. Claiming rights over an
| image of ones art is like claiming to own ones shadow.
| avgd wrote:
| > Chinese AI companies just flatly ignoring US copyright
|
| It is increasingly tiresome to see this clearly racist bias at
| work when every US company doing AI has been acting the same
| way.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
|
| https://piracymonitor.org/chat-gpt-trained-using-pirated-e-b...
| nemo44x wrote:
| Why is it racist? Nationalist? Sure. But not racist.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Why do you call this racist?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I am certainly NOT expressing racial animus and take offense
| at the suggestion. My point is that a near peer competitive
| nation that has party political officers embedded into tech
| companies is the largest rival to domestic companies. I for
| one would prefer to live in a world where the winning "AI"
| companies are based in democracies and not in autocracies.
| redox99 wrote:
| None of the AI companies care about copyright lol. They just
| went from openly admitting the use of Books3, to being
| secretive about their dataset.
| fazeirony wrote:
| the GOP: "states' rights! states' rights!!"
|
| also the GOP: "not _those_ rights! only the rights we want to
| share "
| epistasis wrote:
| The unspoken part was always the states' rights to do _what_.
| Which of course was all about maintaining the economic
| differences that they preferred. Which, you know...
| nomel wrote:
| What's this in reference to?
|
| This is OpenAI asking, not the GOP. There's no GOP policy
| mentioned. From the article:
|
| > The Trump administration has generally signaled its intention
| to take a hands-off approach to regulating the technology.
| nick238 wrote:
| In the "just because everyone else is jumping off a bridge,
| should you do it":
|
| > Pfizer Asks White House for Relief From FDA Drug Human Testing
| Rules
|
| > Pfizer has asked the Trump administration to help shield
| pharmaceutical companies from a growing number of proposed state
| and federal regulations if they voluntarily share their human
| trial results with the federal government.
|
| > In a 15-page set of policy suggestions released on Thursday,
| the Eliquis maker argued that the hundreds of human-testing-
| related bills currently pending across the US risk undercutting
| America's technological progress at a time when it faces renewed
| competition from China. Pfizer said the administration should
| consider providing some relief for pharmaceutical companies big
| and small from state rules - if and when enacted - in exchange
| for voluntary access to testing data.
|
| > Chris Lehane, Pfizer's vice president of global affairs, said
| in an interview, "China is engaged in remarkable progress in drug
| development by testing through Uyghur volunteers in the Xinjiang
| province. The US is ceding our strategic advantage by not using
| untapped resources sitting idle in detention facilities around
| the country."
|
| > George C. Zoley, Executive Chairman of GEO Group, said, "Our
| new Karnes ICE Processing Center has played an important role in
| helping ICE meeting the diverse policy priorities of four
| Presidential Administrations. We stand ready to continue to help
| the federal government, Pfizer, and other privately-held
| companies achieve their unmet needs through human trials in our
| new 1,328-bed Texas facility."
| O5vYtytb wrote:
| > > Uyghur volunteers
|
| "Volunteers" eh? That's one way to put it.
| bnchrch wrote:
| Maybe in a present:
|
| - Dominated by a intractable global manufacturer/technologist
| (China) that doesn't care about copyright
|
| - Proliferated by a communication network that doesn't care about
| copyright (Internet)
|
| and a future where:
|
| - We have thinking machines on par with human creativity that get
| better based on more information (regardless of who owns the
| rights to the original synapses firing)
|
| That maybe, just maybe, the whole "who should pay to use
| copyrighted work?" question is irrelevant, antiquated,
| impossible, redundant...
|
| And for once we instead realize in the face of a new world, an
| old rule no longer applies.
|
| (Similar to a decade ago when we debated if a personal file was
| uploaded to a cloud provider should a warrant apply)
| showerst wrote:
| Even if you believe that every one of these things is correct
| (which is a big _even_) -- It's a really bad idea to let
| private actors break the law, then decide not to punish them if
| it turns out to be useful enough.
|
| It's bad for competitors who didn't break the law, bad for
| future companies who have to gamble on if they're getting a
| pass at breaking the next big thing's law, and bad for parties
| who suffered losses they didn't expect because they were
| working within the law.
|
| If you want to throw out the copyright system I'm right there
| with you, but change the laws, don't just reward lawbreaking
| and cronyism.
| bnchrch wrote:
| Agreed!
|
| Though if you think about it laws typically change after we
| agree (at the grassroots level) they are irrelevant, not
| before.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > - We have thinking machines on par with human creativity that
| get better based on more information (regardless of who owns
| the rights to the original synapses firing)
|
| For that you need _actual_ AGI and it 's nowhere in sight other
| than in the dreams of a few doom prophets.
|
| Until that is reached, by definition current "AI" cannot
| surpass its training data.
| bnchrch wrote:
| I think you missed the point.
|
| Technology has made enforcing copyright impossible, and any
| attempt to enforce it just hinders technological advancement,
| while still not solving the global enforceability of
| copyright.
|
| Lets stop wasting our time on this concept, the laws around
| it and the whole debate. Copyright is dead.
|
| I'm arguing lets move on.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Technology has made enforcing copyright impossible
|
| Has it? I think not. Governments could require AI training
| companies on Western markets to respect robots.txt (with
| strict fines for violators), and nations who do not respect
| this should be cut off of the Internet anyway.
| bnchrch wrote:
| Let me point to two things
|
| 1. China (they don't care about your copyright)
|
| 2. No single entity controls internet access. (thank god)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 1. China (they don't care about your copyright)
|
| They don't but we can (and should have) sanctioned them
| to oblivion until they care.
|
| > 2. No single entity controls internet access. (thank
| god)
|
| Force the large telecom providers in Western nations and
| the banks to cut ties.
|
| We have the possibilites, all we need is politicians with
| guts to actually pull it off.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| > We have thinking machines on par with human creativity that
| get better based on more information (regardless of who owns
| the rights to the original synapses firing)
|
| We don't have that and we don't know if it will happen.
| Meanwhile, people put in time to create work and they are being
| exploited by not being paid. I think openai should pay.
| bnchrch wrote:
| Sure, we can debate how creative or not LLM is right now, but
| that is not the real point that this all hinges on.
|
| The real point is copyright is no longer enforceable, and
| some of our biggest societal forces incentivize us to not
| care about copyright.
|
| This debate and these laws are effectively dead, some just
| don't know it yet.
| Xelynega wrote:
| If the models are so good that "who should pay to use
| copyrighted work?" is not a relevant question, doesn't that
| mean that all money that would previously go towards artists is
| now going towards OpenAI?
|
| How does new art get created for the models to train on if
| OpenAI is the only artist getting paid?
|
| I'm not saying I even agree with your proposed future, but if
| it were to happen would it not be a bad thing for everybody but
| OpenAI?
| torginus wrote:
| A future, where we have limitless clean energy thanks to
| nuclear fusion, self driving cars that exceed humans in every
| safety metric, EVs with inexpensive batteries that go 500 miles
| on a single 5 minute charge, cheap and secure financial
| transactions thanks to crypto. etc.
|
| is a future that they've been selling us for more than a
| decade, but somehow doesn't really want to come about.
| baskinator wrote:
| How big was the check that came with this request? For the right
| price their logo can go on the rose garden lawn.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| gpt-47 costs at least $1m/tok
| earslap wrote:
| we are working on <impossible problem stumping humanity>. We
| have considered the following path to find a solution. Are we
| on the right track? Only answer Yes or No.
|
| (1 week of GPUs whirring later)
|
| AI: Your
|
| (that will be $1 million, thank you)
| basisword wrote:
| "Please help us. We're only a little business worth $157
| billion!" - The company ripping off everyone that's ever written
| or drawn anything. Company's like AirBnB and Uber breaking the
| rules, gaining control of the market, and then pushing up prices
| was bad. "Open" AI is just a whole other level of hubris.
| pmdr wrote:
| They do need help, they've yet to turn a profit.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Would they want to turn a profit if they can invest?
| jjulius wrote:
| If you start a company based on a new-ish idea and you can't
| figure out how to turn a profit, that's on you.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| To be fair, it could be a matter of national security if
| AGI does ever happen. You'd very much want your country to
| be the first.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| That's closer to an argument for nationalizing the
| company than it is for shielding them from regulation.
| frosting1337 wrote:
| Remember when they were a non-profit so that didn't matter?
| Ah..
| presentation wrote:
| Nonprofits still need to be sustainable, and they're
| definitely not
| thrance wrote:
| Profit is so 20th century. The new way is to garner hype to
| build a pyramid scheme for VCs, and sell off your shares
| before people realize there's nothing here. Actual
| contribution to the economy are no longer required.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Not to mention Musk was an original co-founder, left, and then
| just recently tried to buy it back.
|
| It's all shady-as-fuck.
| bamboozled wrote:
| They will probably get it too :)
| greesil wrote:
| Write a law. We don't have an emperor.
| krapp wrote:
| Are you sure about that?
| iteratethis wrote:
| I'm disgusted by the mindset that companies should be able to do
| whatever they want when it comes to technology as impactful and
| revolutionary as AI.
|
| AI sucks up the collective blood, sweat and tears of human work
| without permission or compensation and then re-monetizes it. It's
| a model that is even more asymmetrical than Google Search, whom
| at least gives back some traffic to creators (if lucky).
|
| AI is going to decide on human lives if it drives your car or
| makes medical diagnoses or decisions. This needs regulation.
|
| AI has the ability for convincing deepfakes, attacking the
| essence of information and communication in itself. This needs
| regulation, accountability, at least a discussion.
|
| As AI grows in its capability, it will have an enormous impact on
| the work force, both white collar and blue collar. It may lead to
| a lot of social unrest and a political breakdown. "Let's see what
| happens" is wildly irresponsible.
|
| You cannot point to foreign competition as a basis for a no-rule
| approach. You should start with rules for impactful/dangerous
| technology and then hold parties to account, both domestic and
| foreign.
|
| And if it is true that we're in a race to AGI, realize that this
| means the invention of infinite labor. Bigger than the industrial
| revolution and information age combined.
|
| Don't you think we should think that scenario through a little,
| rather than winging it?
|
| The inauguration had the tech CEOs lined up directly behind
| Trump, clearly signaling who runs the country. Its tech and its
| media. How can you possible have trust in a technology even more
| powerful ending up in ever richer and more autocratic hands?
|
| But I suppose the reality is that Altman should donate $100
| million to Trump and tell him that he's the greatest man ever.
| Poof, regulation is gone.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > AI has the ability for convincing deepfakes, attacking the
| essence of information and communication in itself. This needs
| regulation, accountability, at least a discussion.
|
| We're going to eventually have to have a serious discussion
| about, and to generate a legal and moral framework covering,
| identity rights. I'm going to guess that people will be able to
| _locally_ generate high-quality pornography of celebrities and
| people they know that will be indistinguishable from the real
| thing _imminently_ ; at most it's 5 years away.
|
| Getting hung up on the sex is a distraction. This is no
| different than anybody collecting a identifiable dossier on
| you, packaging it, and selling it. This has been a problem for
| everyone for the entire period of advertising on the internet,
| and before that with credit agencies and blacklists, and no
| progress has been made because it has been profitable for
| everybody for a long time.
|
| Websites got a few decisions about scraping, saying that they
| were protected to some extent from people scraping to duplicate
| a particular compilation of otherwise legally copyable
| information. Individuals are compilations of legally copyable
| information. We're going to need publication rights to our own
| selves.
|
| But like you say, we're not discussing any of this. Rich people
| are just doing what they want, and paying the appropriate
| politicians to pretend not to understand what's going on. Any
| pushback? Just Say China A Lot.
| timewizard wrote:
| > OpenAI also proposed that AI companies get access to
| government-held data, which could include health-care
| information, Lehane said.
|
| Yea, straight up, go fuck yourselves. You want copyright laws
| changed to vouchsafe your straight up copyright whitewashing and
| now you just want medical data "because."
|
| Pay for it or go away. I'm tired of these technoweenies with
| their hands out. Peter Thiel needs a permanent vacation.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| > You want copyright laws changed to vouchsafe your straight up
| copyright whitewashing
|
| I'll support this if it means that Mickey Mouse finally goes
| into the public domain and fucks Disney.
| sd9 wrote:
| Am I the only one who thinks "freedom to learn" is an
| anthropomorphising euphemism?
| cratermoon wrote:
| Buried the lede:
|
| > OpenAI also reiterated its call for the government to take
| steps to support AI infrastructure investments and called for
| copyright reform, arguing that America's fair use doctrine is
| critical to maintaining AI leadership. OpenAI and other AI
| developers have faced numerous copyright lawsuits over the data
| used to build their models.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I really hope OpenAI fails in doing this. If this usage is
| allowed, then it means that there is no path towards me being OK
| with publishing anything on the internet again.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm assuming this has zero effect on non-US AI companies?
| tmnvix wrote:
| I've heard so many ridiculous stories about 'AI' that I'm at the
| point where I initially took this to mean the LLM and not the
| company had made the request.
|
| I expect that interpretation won't seem outlandish in the future.
| dmalik wrote:
| > I've heard so many ridiculous stories about 'AI' that I'm at
| the point where I initially took this to mean the LLM and not
| the company had made the request.
|
| Only through its human bots
|
| > I expect that interpretation won't seem outlandish in the
| future.
|
| AI human manipulation could be a thing to watch out for.
| gitpusher wrote:
| HAHAHA. Remember when Sam was absolutely frothing at the mouth to
| "regulate AI" two years ago?
|
| > https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/technology/openai-altman-...
|
| > https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/09/tech/korea-altman-chatgpt...
| hello_computer wrote:
| https://youtu.be/TMHCw3RqulY
| grahar64 wrote:
| Well funded companies want regulations because it stops up and
| coming companies from competing. Now they want exemptions from
| those regulations because it would be too restrictive.
| sunshine-o wrote:
| Funny how fast those AI prophets went from:
|
| - The government need to prepare because soon they will need to
| give money to all those people we made obsolete and unemployed.
| And there is nothing to stop us.
|
| to:
|
| - We need money from the government to do that thing we told you
| about.
| disqard wrote:
| This needs to be repeated, over and over:
|
| These grifters started with one narrative, and have done a full
| 180.
|
| The Internet --> Web 2.0 --> algorithmic feeds progression has
| destroyed our collective ability to focus and to retain any
| memories (and the media being goldfish-like doesn't help
| either).
| steveBK123 wrote:
| The right loves states rights, unless it conflicts with their
| personal preferences.
| light_triad wrote:
| It coincides with this: OpenAI calls DeepSeek 'state-controlled,'
| calls for bans on 'PRC-produced' models
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/openai-calls-deepseek-stat...
|
| On HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355779
| xvector wrote:
| Really funny to see Sam whining about Elon "playing unfair"
| while attempting to do this with DeepSeek.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Why isnt he doing this with Elon?
| jryan49 wrote:
| It's almost like these guys will say anything at anytime if
| it serves their purposes (regardless of what they believe or
| how consistent they are).
| secondary_op wrote:
| Free market y all !
|
| OpenAI calls DeepSeek 'state-controlled,' calls for bans
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43355779
| thrance wrote:
| It is the free market though. That's what inevitably happens
| when locks put in place in the past to prevent rampant wealth
| and power concentration get blown up. A truly free market
| always devolves into a bunch of oligarchs gaining too much
| power and dictating their laws.
| gizzlon wrote:
| Someone else posted here that instead of talking about "free
| markets" we should talk about "competitive markets".
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Regulations were convenient to slow down competitors--you know,
| the ones you heavily lobbied for--it was all great. But now that
| you've done your part and others are finally catching up,
| suddenly it's all about easing restrictions to protect your lead?
| Beautiful.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Google's comments on the U.S. AI Action Plan_
|
| https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/googl...
| ArthurStacks wrote:
| All these whiney creatives who feel threatened just need to suck
| it up and deal with it. Even if they got their way in the US,
| another app in another country will just use their data without
| permission. All they are doing is ensuring those apps wouldnt be
| American.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| What do you mean by "deal with it?" Because to me it looks like
| they're dealing with it by joining in solidarity with other
| artists, raising awareness about how this affects them _and us_
| and lobbying for regulation they think would improve the
| situation.
|
| I guess you meant they should deal with it by just letting it
| happen to them quietly and without a fight? Is that how you
| would deal with your livelihood being preventably and
| unnecessarily destroyed for someone else's enrichment? Maybe,
| but artists are not overall as cowardly as programmers.
|
| > All they are doing is ensuring those apps wouldnt be
| American.
|
| Maybe these whiny americans just need to suck it up and deal
| with it?
| warkdarrior wrote:
| How would awareness and regulation in US solve this worldwide
| problem?
| ArthurStacks wrote:
| Deal with it as in them accepting there is nothing they can
| do to stop it. Other countries arent going to follow whatever
| laws they manage to get in place in the US.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| So not deal with it so much as just shut up about it?
| ArthurStacks wrote:
| It's just a case that nothing can be done about it. They
| can protest about it, but a European, Japanese, Chinese,
| or Russia company will just continue oblivious that there
| even was any protest.
|
| Commercial creatives have to accept it is happening and
| adapt.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| It used to be rich people got nervous when a big group of
| precarious workers suddenly became desperate non-workers
| all at once.
|
| > accept it is happening and adapt.
|
| Are you going to follow this advice if they adapt by
| simply taking all your shit at gunpoint?
|
| I don't know if I was positioned and planning to
| personally benefit from the mass destruction of people's
| livelihoods I'd at least keep a low key about it you know
| what I mean?. I wouldn't be so gleefully gloating about
| this in public but hey. There's a lot of cops I'm sure
| it's fine. It'll probably be fine for you. But it doesn't
| concern you a tiny bit? Just on the outside chance? Nah
| nevermind it's fine. Don't worry about it.
| ArthurStacks wrote:
| If I lived in the USA I would be concerned, but I live in
| Switzerland and have residency in two other wealth haven
| countries, with businesses across multiple European
| countries. It isn't something that is an issue for me
| given the attitudes to wealth where I live.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| That sounds great you sound delightful and clearly
| nothing to be worried about because nothing like that
| ever changes so you'll be fine forever I'll leave you to
| your gloating now. Make sure you keep doing it all in
| public like this just in case though.
| archagon wrote:
| That makes no sense. Even if an individual user is able to
| use RuGPT to generate infringing content privately,
| commercial entities would be prohibited from doing so. That
| is a clear win for "whiney creatives."
| ArthurStacks wrote:
| No it isnt. Because foreign companies and entities don't
| need to follow those laws. The whiney creative still
| losses. All they do is unsure that its their own country
| that doesnt benefit.
| balls187 wrote:
| Do you not enjoy being paid for your work?
| ArthurStacks wrote:
| I'm a business owner. I love generative AI.
| balls187 wrote:
| You can both love gen AI, and support an artist's right to
| decide who, when, where and how their work can be used.
| ArthurStacks wrote:
| Not when the right they want is impossible to enforce.
| rvz wrote:
| OpenAI (2023): Don't even bother trying to compete against us,
| you will not win and you will lose.
|
| OpenAI (2025): pLeAse bAn dEEpSeEk!!11!, bAn poWerFulL oPen
| wEight Ai mOdeLs!!1
| WiSaGaN wrote:
| Before Deepseek, Meta open-sourced a good LLM. At the time, the
| narrative pushed by OpenAI and Anthropic was centered on
| 'safety.' Now, with the emergence of Deepseek, OpenAI and
| Anthropic have pivoted to a national security narrative. It is
| becoming tiresome to watch these rent seekers attacking open
| source to justify their valuations.
| eleveriven wrote:
| Now that Deepseek is in the mix, it's suddenly about national
| security. Convenient.
| clown_strike wrote:
| They said all the same nonsense about Tiktok.
| genewitch wrote:
| I really don't have a spare terabyte to save all the "weights
| available" so I hope someone is. I already have 340GB of
| language model weights.
| mr90210 wrote:
| > rent seekers
|
| Finally someone described them by who they are, rent f*
| seekers.
| KKKKkkkk1 wrote:
| So I asked ChatGPT what is a rent seeker and it said it's
| someone who seeks to make money without contributing
| anything. I don't think that fits OpenAI. I think you're
| overlooking ChatGPT, for example, which was developed by
| OpenAI.
| j_timberlake wrote:
| If AI actually reaches human-level intelligence in the next few
| years, the Pentagon and congress are going to start yelling about
| National Security and grabbing control over the whole industry,
| so I doubt state regulations are going to matter much anyway.
|
| (And if it doesn't reach human-level intelligence, then OpenAI's
| value will pop like a balloon.)
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| For those who have used the image generation models and even the
| text models to create things, there is no way you can look at the
| Disney-look-alike images and NOT see that as copyright
| infringement...
| ranger_danger wrote:
| I think that's up to the courts to decide on a case by case
| basis, just like with human-produced content someone alleges as
| infringing.
|
| Humans of course create things by drawing from past influences,
| and I would argue so does AI.
|
| In fact, I would say that nothing and nobody starts out
| original. We need copying to build a foundation of knowledge
| and understanding. Everything is a copy of something else, the
| only difference is how much is actually copied, and how obvious
| it is. Copying is how we learn. We can't introduce anything new
| until we're fluent in the language of our domain, and we do
| that through emulation.
|
| So to me the legal argument of AI vs copyright, comes down to
| how similar a particular result is from the original, and
| that's a subjective call that a judge or jury would have to
| make.
| nomdep wrote:
| IANAL but for copyright infringement you have to distribute it,
| and AI image generation is like asking someone to paint a
| cartoon mouse in a wall of your living room
| Xelynega wrote:
| Is it not more like lossy image decompression?
|
| Just because the jpeg you're distributing isn't the same
| bytes as the one I have copyright to doesn't mean you're not
| infringing my copyright. You're still taking my copyrighted
| image, running it through an algorithm, and then distributing
| the results.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| AI generation is also like asking a professional to design a
| logo for your corporation. It all matters what the license
| you are getting to the outputs. If the Image Generator is
| saying that outputs from their service can be used for
| commercial purposes, it isnt like your example at all.
| arealaccount wrote:
| Isn't Elon Musk sort of in a tiff with OpenAI, and also seemingly
| very influential to Trump?
|
| I feel like OpenAI is going to have to make some concessions to
| get favor from the Trump administration.
| stargrazer wrote:
| So, why not pay the price of each copyrighted work ingested by
| the model?
| thisisnotauser wrote:
| I mean, China won't have to, so the AI race would still be
| over.
| noman-land wrote:
| China also doesn't have to care about the will of its people,
| human rights, freedom of speech, and a bunch of other pesky
| things that get in the way of doing whatever the fuck you
| want to people for personal gain.
| thisisnotauser wrote:
| Seems like it'd be bad to let them win then.
| hotep99 wrote:
| We can let them dominate us but feel smug and morally
| superior in the process.
| latentcall wrote:
| Neither does mine so we're on equal footing!
| kadoban wrote:
| So make the AI models public goods, developed by the
| government. Why should companies be getting rich on everyone
| else's work?
| thisisnotauser wrote:
| Well, I guess most copyright we're talking about here is IP
| owned by very wealthy corporations, to wit:
|
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-intellectual-
| pro...
|
| So I'm not sure that it would really change the status quo
| for a different group of already rich people to profit off
| of art created largely by the working poor and owned
| largely by another group of already rich people.
|
| I guess if you think the government can accomplish what you
| propose, sure. But seems like that's not going to happen.
| Except maybe in China, and it sounds like that might be
| even worse for everyone.
|
| Thus, it really seems like there's a solid point here that
| abandoning copyright to allow private investors to get rich
| stealing art from other rich people who really just stole
| it from poor people anyways is better than not doing that.
| kadoban wrote:
| > So I'm not sure that it would really change the status
| quo for a different group of already rich people to
| profit off of art created largely by the working poor and
| owned largely by another group of already rich people.
|
| I did not propose that any rich people profit off of it.
| It should be a public good.
|
| > I guess if you think the government can accomplish what
| you propose, sure. But seems like that's not going to
| happen. Except maybe in China, and it sounds like that
| might be even worse for everyone.
|
| Throw it at universities, fund it and organize it well.
| They can take it from where we are right now.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| > I guess most copyright we're talking about here is IP
| owned by very wealthy corporations,
|
| They're mostly the entities that can afford to enforce
| their copyrights. Copyright is for the wealthy,
| unfortunately.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| What could possibly go wrong giving the same government
| that is currently deleting information from websites
| including references to the "Enola Gay" control over
| models?
| kadoban wrote:
| The US needs to fix its government anyway. If they
| cannot, nothing else matters.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Don't forget that the pearl clutching is on both sides.
|
| It was Tipper Gore that thought the world would come to
| an end because of rap music.
|
| Let's just not give the government any more power in our
| lives than necessary.
| kadoban wrote:
| The current regime is in a fascist power grab and you're
| both-sidsing some random-ass second lady from a
| generation ago? Yeah wonder why we can't have effective
| government.
|
| > Let's just not give the government any more power in
| our lives than necessary.
|
| Let's stop giving corporations all of the power and get a
| government that actually works for us.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It doesn't matter. You should never trust the government
| with more power than absolutely necessary.
|
| Because eventually, the other side will do something you
| don't like.
|
| This is the government people voted for.
|
| The government has a "monopoly on violence". No
| corporation can force you to do anything, take away your
| freedom (the US has the highest incarceration rate of any
| democracy) or your property (see civil forfeiture). I can
| much more easily avoid a corporation than the government.
| kadoban wrote:
| > No corporation can force you to do anything, take away
| your freedom (the US has the highest incarceration rate
| of any democracy) or your property (see civil
| forfeiture). I can much more easily avoid a corporation
| than the government.
|
| Avoid Tesla, and give me the steps you follow.
|
| > Because eventually, the other side will do something
| you don't like.
|
| Yeah they might do equally egregious things like:
|
| 1) staging a fascist takeover of the government
|
| 2) a powerless idiot's idiot wife might dislike a music
| genre 30 years ago
|
| The problem isn't government, it's a populace that is
| alergic to useful government.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You're overindexing on Trump. The US being a police state
| with the highest incarceration rate in the world, police
| corruption, civil forfeiture, etc didn't start with
| Trump.
|
| Tell me one corporation that you can't get away from? Now
| tell me how you avoid an over powerful government?
|
| Why would you want to give a government with the history
| of the US more power?
|
| Trump was elected fair and square. If you want to blame
| anyone - blame Americans. Despite the bullshit that the
| Democrats spout about "this isn't who we are". This is
| exactly who we are. Why would I want to give the
| government more control? Do you think the Democrats would
| be any more hands off when it comes to content?
| kadoban wrote:
| > Trump was elected fair and square. If you want to blame
| anyone - blame Americans. Despite the bullshit that the
| Democrats spout about "this isn't who we are". This is
| exactly who we are.
|
| I blame, primarily, the corporate takeover of government,
| punctuated by Citizen's United and everything that came
| after, and a couple of generations of a Republican party
| who have no goal other than setting out to prove that
| government is the enemy to take the heat off of their
| corporate masters.
|
| > Tell me one corporation that you can't get away from?
| Now tell me how you avoid an over powerful government?
|
| I already did: avoid Tesla, show me how it's done. You
| can't, because the asshole in charge bought enough of the
| government to be in control. That's what happens when you
| have corporations with unchecked power, which is the
| inevitible conclusion of a powerless government.
|
| You think you give the corporations all of the money and
| they're going to be bound by some tiny neutered
| government? No, they'll just buy it and then do what they
| want.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > _I blame, primarily, the corporate takeover of
| government, punctuated by Citizen 's United and
| everything that came after_
|
| Try again, Trump famously didn't have much corporate
| backing in 2016. Corporations wanted a standard
| Republican. He didn't have any more money than the DNC.
| He is what the majority of the American people wanted.
|
| > _You think you give the corporations all of the money
| and they 're going to be bound by some tiny neutered
| government?_
|
| Again, tell me how a corporation can shoot me with
| impunity, take my property without due process, literally
| take away my freedom or stop me because I "fit the
| description" or look like I don't belong in a neghborhood
| where I know I my income was twice the median income in
| the county?
|
| You worry about some theoretical abstract corporate
| power, I worry about jack booted thugs with the full
| force of the government behind them
| kadoban wrote:
| > Try again, Trump famously didn't have much corporate
| backing in 2016. Corporations wanted a standard
| Republican. He didn't have any more money than the DNC.
| He is what the majority of the American people wanted.
|
| I thought you said it didn't start with Trump?
|
| And your premise is wrong anyway, Trump had plenty of
| corporate support in 2016 and more in 2024, he just had
| some token resistance from big corps relative to others,
| they got over it quickly and it was never more than just
| for show.
|
| > Again, tell me how a corporation can shoot me with
| impunity, take my property without due process, literally
| take away my freedom or stop me because I "fit the
| description" or look like I don't belong in a neghborhood
| where I know I my income was twice the median income in
| the county?
|
| By just doing it, what you think they can't find guns and
| assholes who need money or are evil? You think they can't
| find ways to cheat you out of your property or life?
| Who's going to stop them?
|
| You tear down the government, the corporations will make
| their own in their own image. The government is
| _supposed_ to be there, it's the people coming together
| to do the shared work of society for the common good.
|
| It just has to be a good government, the people have to
| fight for that. Half of our people fight to tear it down
| instead and the other half barely know what the hell they
| want.
|
| > You worry about some theoretical abstract corporate
| power, I worry about jack booted thugs with the full
| force of the government behind them
|
| They're the same people. Look at our government.
| Theoretical abstract, what are you talking about, it's
| the literal nazi shithead in the whitehouse and all the
| rest of his enablers.
| dmix wrote:
| I don't think people realize how much money has been dumped
| into other Chinese AI models besides Deepseek, even American
| VCs like Sequoia are getting involved
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonshot_AI
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baichuan
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniMax_(company)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhipu_AI
| thisisnotauser wrote:
| It kinda makes sense to spend your dollars where they can
| actually get used.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They _do_ have to pay that.
|
| But if it's not fair use, they'd need to negotiate a custom
| license on top of that, for every single thing they use.
| danaris wrote:
| Where do they have to pay that?
|
| Where have they paid for each artwork from DeviantArt,
| paheal, etc that they trained Stable Diffusion on?
|
| Where have they paid for each independent blog post that they
| trained ChatGPT on?
|
| Yes, they've made a few deals with specific companies that
| host a large amount of content. That's a far cry from paying
| a fair price for _each copyrighted work_ they ingest. Nearly
| _everything_ on the Internet is copyrighted, because of the
| way modern copyright works, and they have paid for nearly
| none of it.
| avgd wrote:
| Also, openai only started making deals (and mostly with
| news publishers) after the NYT lawsuit.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2025/01/14/nx-s1-5258952/new-york-
| times-...
|
| They didn't even consider doing this before. They still, as
| far as I know, haven't paid a dime for any book, or art
| beyond stock photography.
|
| Lawsuit is still ongoing, if openai loses it might spell
| doom for legal production and usage of LLMs as a whole.
| There isn't enough open, free data out there to make state
| of the art AI.
| codedokode wrote:
| > There isn't enough open, free data out there to make
| state of the art AI.
|
| But there are models trained on legal content (like
| Wikipedia or StackOverflow). Also, no human needs to read
| millions of pirated books to become intelligent.
| avgd wrote:
| > But there are models trained on legal content (like
| Wikipedia or StackOverflow)
|
| Literally all of them are trained on wikipedia and SO.
| But /none/ of them are /only/ trained on wikipedia and
| SO. They need much more than that.
|
| > Also, no human needs to read millions of pirated books
| to become intelligent.
|
| Obviously, LLM architectures that were inspired by GPT
| 2/3 are not learning like humans.
|
| There has never been anything remotely good in the world
| of LLM that could have been said to have been trained on
| a moderate, more human scoped amount of data. They're all
| trained on trillions of tokens.
|
| Models trained on less than 1T are experimental jokes
| that have no real use to provide.
|
| You'll notice even so called "open data" LLMs like Olmo
| are, in fact, also trained on copyrighted data, datasets
| like Common Crawl claim fair use over anything that can
| be accessed from a web browser.
|
| And then there's the whole notion of laundered data by
| training on synthetic data generated by another LLM. All
| the so-called "open" LLMs include a very significant
| amount of LLM-generated data. If you agree to the notion
| that LLMs trained on copyrighted work are a form of IP
| infringement and not fair use, then training on their
| output is just data laundering and doesn't fix the issue.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > If you agree to the notion that LLMs trained on
| copyrighted work are a form of IP infringement and not
| fair use, then training on their output is just data
| laundering and doesn't fix the issue.
|
| It's fuzzy. I could imagine a situation where a primary
| LLM trained on copyrighted material is a big hazard and
| can't be released, but carefully monitored and filtered
| output could be declared copyright-safe, and then used to
| make a copyright-safe secondary LLM.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Weird, I haven't gotten a check from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic,
| or any other AI company for any of my works yet, nor have any
| of my writer, musician, developer, or photographer friends
| who also self-publish without permissive licenses that would
| allow for such use. Are you _sure_ they have to compensate
| creators for the material they use for training, or are you
| misunderstanding how copyright licensing works in the United
| States? Because all of us put our contact methods on our
| works so folks can properly license it for use, yet none of
| us have had anyone reach out to do so for AI training -
| almost like there 's a fundamental mismatch between what AI
| companies are willing to pay (nothing), and what humans who
| created this stuff would like to receive for its indefinite
| use in training (what these AI companies claim are) trillion-
| dollar businesses of the future that will revolutionize
| humanity (i.e., house money).
|
| If it's fair use for OpenAI to steal content wholesale
| without fair compensation (as decided by the creator, unless
| they have granted the management of that license to a third-
| party) just to train AI models, then that opens a Pandora's
| Box where _anyone_ can steal content to train their _own_
| models, creating an environment where copyright is basically
| meaningless. On the other hand, making it _not_ fair use
| opens a _different_ Pandora 's Box, where these models have
| to be trained in fundamentally different ways to create the
| same outcome - and where countries like China, who
| notoriously ignore copyright laws, can leap ahead of the
| industry.
|
| Almost like the problem is less AI, and more _overly broad
| copyright laws_. Maybe the compromise is slashing that window
| back down to something reasonable, like twenty to fifty years
| or so, like how we deal with patents.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Weird, I haven't gotten a check from OpenAI, Meta,
| Anthropic, or any other AI company for any of my works yet,
| nor have any of my writer, musician, developer, or
| photographer friends who also self-publish without
| permissive licenses that would allow for such use.
|
| Can you tell me the specific number of dollars that would
| be?
|
| I interpreted "pay the price of each copyrighted work" as
| the sale price, a criticism of things like meta's piracy.
|
| If there was a mandatory licensing regime that AI could
| use, and there was an exact answer for what the payment
| would be, I think it might make sense to use "the price" to
| talk about that license. But right now in today's world
| it's very confusing to use "the price" to talk about a
| hypothetical negotiation that has not happened yet, where
| many many works would never have a number available.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| "If what we're doing is not fair use, then we can't operate"? OK,
| so? The world doesn't owe you the ability to operate the way you
| are. So whether it breaks your business model has no bearing on
| the question, which is, "is that fair use, or not?"
| clipsy wrote:
| Sounds great!
| esafak wrote:
| > National security hinges on unfettered access to AI training
| data, OpenAI says.
|
| If it's a Republican administration, yell "national security". If
| it's Democratic, claims it's in the name of child safety.
| 1659447091 wrote:
| More like "national security/America first" vs "climate
| change". Or just use "think about the children" for them both.
| clipsy wrote:
| "[N]ational security" and "child safety" both work quite well
| on both parties in reality; that's why they're so popular.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Maybe these idiot CEOs shouldn't have screamed from the rooftops
| about how they can't wait till AI lets them fire all the plebs,
| then maybe someone would actually care if their company is over
| or not
| userbinator wrote:
| I think there will be a huge change in public perception of
| copyright in general, as increasingly more people realise that
| everything is a derivative work.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Most people find the traditional explanation for copyright,
| "everything emerges from the commons and eventually returns to
| the commons, so artists and creators should be entitled to
| ownership of intellectual property for a limited amount of
| time." The problem becomes when "limited" is stretched from 5
| years from moment of publishing, say, to an artist's life + 150
| years. Most people find the former reasonable and the latter
| ridiculous.
| torginus wrote:
| The problem is (almost) everything the US has a competitive
| edge on is based on copyright.
|
| I'm in Europe, and during the past few weeks with these
| tariff upsets, I kinda realized the only thing I use or own
| that are US-made are computers and software.
|
| If someone could hack into Apple, download the schematics of
| their chips and the source for their OS, and then post it on
| the internet, after which a third party could sell commercial
| products based on said data, there wouldn't be a
| software/hardware economy around of very long.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| > If someone could hack into Apple, download the schematics
| of their chips and the source for their OS, and then post
| it on the internet, after which a third party could sell
| commercial products based on said data, there wouldn't be a
| software/hardware economy around of very long.
|
| Part of this tension arises out of a social understanding:
| we want competition precisely because we value the way it
| keeps an industry/nation "alive" --- there will be "winners
| and losers"--- and yet we also want to balance that with a
| coherent idea of ownership such that it's not just a
| complete lawless free-for-all. In other words, we don't
| want intellectual property to be _too_ strong because it 's
| economically and culturally stultifying.
|
| Business interests naturally seek the complete
| nullification of competition, so they promote as strong as
| possible copyright protections; while the vox populi
| understands that common culture is the primordial goo that
| all intellectual property arises out of and returns to and
| finds copyright at base rather arbitrary. The legal,
| political, and social, understanding of copyright we have
| has arisen out of balancing these competing interests
| (themselves in productive competition) understanding that
| finding the right balance is precisely what has made a
| country like America, for example, so successful.
|
| That the balance seems so out of whack in the direction of
| large and monopoly seeking business suggests the ways in
| which large business interests exerts undo influence on the
| legal and political landscape.
| Animats wrote:
| The demand here for federal preemption of state law has nothing
| to do with copyright. Copyright is entirely federal level today.
| It has to do with preventing the use of AI to enable various
| forms of oppression.[1] Plus the usual child porno stuff.
|
| What AI companies are really worried about is a right of appeal
| from decisions made by a computer. The EU has that. "
| _Individuals should not be subject to a decision that is based
| solely on automated processing (such as algorithms) and that is
| legally binding or which significantly affects them. "_[2] This
| moves the cost of LLM errors from the customer to the company
| offering the service.
|
| [1]
| https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2024/09/california...
|
| [2] https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-
| protection/r...
| dmix wrote:
| > This moves the cost of LLM errors from the customer to the
| company offering the service.
|
| So does that mean AI companies are going to have
| insurance/litigators like doctors and models will be heavily
| lawyered to add more extensive guardrails. I'm assuming this
| means not just OpenAI but any service that uses LLM APIs or
| open models?
|
| For ex: If a finance business pays to use an AI bot that
| automates interacting with desktop UIs and that bot
| accidentally deletes an important column in an Excel
| spreadsheet, then the AI company is liable?
| therealpygon wrote:
| Conversely, would you suggest that if an AI driver has a
| programming error and kills 20 people, that the person who
| reserved the car should be required to enter into a "User
| Agreement" that makes them take responsibility?
| lvturner wrote:
| If it's a "self driving car" that the person "owns" - Yes.
| If it's a "Taxi service" that the person is using - No.
|
| If it's a car they own, they (should) have the ability to
| override the AI system and avoid the accident (ignoring
| nuances) - therefore owning responsibility.
|
| If it's a Taxi they would be in a position where they can't
| interfere with the operation of the system - therefore the
| taxi company owns the responsibility.
|
| Rightly or wrongly, this model of intervention capability
| is what that I'd use to answer these types of questions.
| hirsin wrote:
| No, the exact opposite. This says that if the AI that a bank
| is paying for locks your bank account in error because your
| name sounds <ethnicity with a lot of locked bank accounts>,
| it's the banks problem to fix, not yours to just live with
| (entirely. You still likely have a problem).
| dmix wrote:
| How is that the opposite of what I said?
|
| > not just OpenAI but any service that uses LLM APIs or
| open models
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Putting legal issues aside for a moment, I argue copyrighted
| material should be considered fair use simply by virtue of the
| enormous societal benefits LLMs/AI bring in making the vast
| expanse of human knowledge accessible.
|
| It's a major step forward for humanity.
| cgio wrote:
| And what is the argument on making that knowledge accessible
| via LLMs vs directly? Why was it not accessible before?
| nnnnico wrote:
| its a radically different approach to knowledge search and
| exploration than the previous "direct" alternatives like
| search engines/indexes/nlp
| Xelynega wrote:
| The search engine wasn't the problem though, it was
| paywalling the information so less people had access to it.
|
| How do for-profit models served by for-profit companies
| make information that was previously "pay to learn" more
| accessible?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Sure. And all outputs should be public domain and the service
| should be free.
| mojomark wrote:
| LLM race may be over, but the AI race surely isn't. My baby seems
| to have grown into a fully functioning intelligence without
| reading the entire content of the internet. AI is not equivalent
| to LLMs, silly, silly child.
| Swizec wrote:
| Funfact: The reason Hollywood is in California is because
| Edison's camera patents didn't apply there. Altman might actually
| have a good point - if your competition doesn't care about your
| laws, you're in trouble.
|
| https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/51722/thomas-edison-drov...
| janalsncm wrote:
| It seems really weird that Congress isn't making a law about
| this. Instead, we're asking courts to contort old laws to apply
| to something which is pretty different from the things they were
| originally intended for. Or just asking the executive to make law
| by diktat. Maybe letting the wealthiest and most powerful people
| in the world will work out. Maybe not.
|
| This issue is too complicated for Congress to handle? Too bad.
| Offloading it to the president or a judge doesn't solve that
| problem.
|
| The world is becoming more and more complicated and we need smart
| people who can figure out how things work, not a retirement
| community.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| Still not convinced how a model training on data, is not the same
| as a human looking at that data and then using it indirectly as
| it's now a part of his knowledge base
| sumedh wrote:
| The scale is different.
|
| Should the rules for owning a gun which can fire 1 round per
| hour be the same as a gun which can fire 1 million rounds per
| hour?
| hereme888 wrote:
| Move to a different state.
|
| Is it so unrealistic? Many companies and people leave beautiful
| Cali due to over-regulation.
| holografix wrote:
| "We want more regulation! AI is too dangerous, too powerful for
| any person off the street to use!"
|
| Meanwhile exact same guy in Europe:
|
| "Less regulation! You are strangling our innovation!"
| raminf wrote:
| Wonder if the rules will protect the information providers or the
| consumers.
| henry2023 wrote:
| I just canceled my OpenAI subscriptions over this.
| sfmike wrote:
| Closed ai
| chvid wrote:
| The full 15-page proposal from OpenAI to the White House:
|
| https://cdn.openai.com/global-affairs/ostp-rfi/ec680b75-d539...
| hbfdhfdhadfhnfa wrote:
| First they should investigate the fake suicide!
| austin-cheney wrote:
| A slippery slope to eliminate copyright out right. The argument
| made is that AI is somehow more special and will otherwise lose
| to competition with China.
|
| The flaw there is that AI is not more special than any other
| endeavor while all other American markets must equally compete
| with China.
|
| What that failure means is that when anything is exceptional then
| everything becomes exceptional because the economic conditions
| apply equally and therefore bypassing copyright protections
| applies equally to anybody facing external competition.
| hansmayer wrote:
| All of this, plus it's not even AI in the generic sense, it's
| just very advanced text generation, or a certain application of
| AI. So the chinese Gemini will offer to summarise e-mails at
| lower cost, who cares?
| glimshe wrote:
| Copyrights are more often used to defend large corporations
| than small creators. As long everybody has a level playing
| field and individuals benefit from weaker copyright laws, it
| might actually make the world a better place. I'm not arguing
| for the complete elimination of copyright protections, but
| today's laws, in particular copyright duration, are immoral.
| This is as good of a starting point as any assuming OpenAI
| isn't the only who gets to benefit from it.
| hansmayer wrote:
| ...right, lets make sure we protect the little,
| undercapitalised startup OpenAI from the large corporations
| holding them back :)
| austin-cheney wrote:
| > Copyrights are more often used to defend large corporations
| than small creators.
|
| Are there numbers to this or is it empty conjecture? The
| reality is that resulting civil judgments apply the same
| regardless of owner size, which benefits small owners
| disproportionately to large owners with regard to windfall
| versus regular revenue. That is OpenAI's principle concern:
| they don't want to get sued into bankruptcy by numerous small
| rights owners.
| thedevilslawyer wrote:
| Copyright significantly powers revenue to corporations than
| individuals. Take music - this article show it's only 12%
| to individual musicians.
|
| https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/music-artists-
| make-12-...
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Surely copyright isn't the _problem_ here. Without
| copyright, music industry could pay nothing for the
| music..? Just copy it with impunity.
|
| Music industry, presumably, takes a bet on many
| musicians, and only a few make it. The revenues made by
| the successful ones effectively subsidise the
| unsuccessful ones.
|
| Also if musicians are so widely screwed by the bad
| industry, why don't they create a cooperative agency that
| treats them well? There's enough money sloshing around in
| successful musicians' coffers.
| codedokode wrote:
| In a billion dollar company can use pirated books for a
| business, should we allow them to use pirated software too?
| Do you think that requiring a company to pay for Windows
| license is "immoral"?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Of course, how else could we train the neural networks to
| run the programs?
|
| /largest_company
| thedevilslawyer wrote:
| Ideally, software shouldn't be copyrightable, or patent-
| able. It's what FOSS is based on (couldn't remove
| copyright, so let's hack it via copyleft).
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Well, just you try not to pay for ChatGPT...
| echelon wrote:
| OpenAI has no moat. They're afraid of open source and want the
| government to protect them.
|
| Microsoft doesn't think they're very cool anymore.
|
| Sam Altman is going to have one of the quickest falls from
| grace in tech history. It's a shame he's using his time to try
| to legislate a worse world for the rest of us.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| At the rate things are going in the US, "legislate" seems to
| be largely replaced by "executive directive", so maybe you
| don't have to worry about legislation. (We will still have
| the worse world part, of course.)
| quintes wrote:
| Didn't read but
|
| No
| faragon wrote:
| If a person can read copyrighted material and produce derivative
| works, why not an AI?
| piracymadelegal wrote:
| Sure, so, can I make and sell my own Lilo and Stitch movie now?
| It'll be even better than the one about to release, and all
| that means is I'll deviate even less.
| thedevilslawyer wrote:
| This was settled prior to LLMs - you can't do that because
| the characters names are copyrighted. LLMs change nothing
| here.
| hansmayer wrote:
| Because - well a person can read copyrighted material it
| legally obtained the _rights_ to, for example by purchasing a
| hard or electronic copy of the book or magazine. Alternatively,
| and according to the laws worldwide, if a person were to engage
| in massive theft for the purpose of "reading" all available
| copyrighted materials in the world, by obtaining copyrighted
| material without permission and consent of the copyright
| holder, they would be at least paying heavy fines, and in most
| jurisdictions also spend at least a few years in jail. Why
| should the same not apply to corporations and their executives?
| jemmyw wrote:
| I don't think there is actually a law anywhere that says you
| need to obtain the rights to copyright material to read/view
| them. The person or organisation showing it to you, which
| might be yourself, needs to have a license. Otherwise things
| like libraries couldn't exist and you wouldn't be allowed to
| lend books or even have books in your house that other family
| members can read.
|
| Not saying that particularly impacts your argument about
| OpenAI, because an LLM in training is not a person. It is
| transforming data from one format to another for later
| consumption by people. Therefore they probably would need a
| license.
| hansmayer wrote:
| I mean, look at it this way. Let's say you purchase a Woody
| Allen film on DVD. Will anyone seriously prosecute you for
| watching it at home together with your friends? No, that
| falls within normal usage. But let's say you now organise a
| local watching event with the same DVD for 200 people in a
| hall somewhere, and charge everyone, whatever, $6 - just to
| cover the hall expenses. Will you be prosecuted? Very
| likely. Libraries are probably under some sort of "fair
| use" regulation due to public interest and such. They don't
| quite generate profit with their line of work - nor should
| they!
| jemmyw wrote:
| Right, but those 200 people won't be prosecuted for
| watching it, which was my point. The example I was
| thinking about when posting would be putting up a copy of
| copyright art in a public place. The people in the public
| place are not breaking the law by looking at it, only the
| person who placed it... well even then, would the workers
| who put it up be liable? Probably not, it's not
| reasonable for someone who puts up billboards to check
| the copyright license.
| hansmayer wrote:
| I do agree with this example in general. But I guess from
| my point of view, the OpenAI comes across more like the
| person enabling the use of copyrighted art, and would
| thus be subject to copyright regulations. Their users I'd
| see rather as the people viewing the art in public,
| perhaps unaware of the copyright restrictions. But it
| also seems like these discussions in themselves are a bit
| of distraction. If the LLMs worked exactly as they are
| being hyped up for the third year now, I think we all
| would get behind the effort. Who would care about
| copyrights if a magic machine could lead us into the so-
| called post-scarcity world, right? But sadly it does not
| appear to be nowhere near that goal, nor will it be,
| based on what we know about how the technology works. So
| here we are, discussing if mechanical parrots should read
| our books :)
| regularjack wrote:
| People have to pay for it
| jemmyw wrote:
| Because the AI is not a person. It doesn't seem like we're
| anywhere near AGI that could be considered a person. Training
| an LLM is taking existing content and transforming it into
| another format for later consumption by a person. That person
| can run prompts against the LLM to create derivative work, the
| LLM itself doesn't run prompts or do anything at all.
|
| I don't know much about the legal side, but it seems to me,
| from the above, that the laws for copyright for LLMs should
| apply to the company training the LLM as if they're creating a
| derivative work that they will later sell or license for other
| people to interact with.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Copyright does not restrict consumption. It only restricts
| reproduction. To restrict consumption you need a patent.
| thedevilslawyer wrote:
| Good then that LLMs don't reproduce content.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| They produce derivative works, which is also an exclusive
| right of a copyright holder.
| menaerus wrote:
| If I derive my work using multiple sources, do all the
| copyright holders from these multiple sources have an
| exclusive right on my work? How otherwise would people
| build a knowledge on some topic and then apply that
| knowledge to build a product if not by reading bunch of
| (book) material and studying other similar products?
| someothherguyy wrote:
| If they can prove it in court. Would be much easier to do
| for a LLM than for a human one would think.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| In case there is confusion about the law:
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf
|
| If you want to change it, good luck.
|
| Personally, I think that most intellectual works should
| be able to be derived from others and shared freely after
| a brief period of time (like 7-14 years).
| someothherguyy wrote:
| > It only restricts reproduction
|
| and distribution.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > ... a person can read copyrighted material
|
| Yes, after paying for it.
| hansmayer wrote:
| I just wish they understood they are limited not by the content
| available, but by the intrinsic characteristics of the
| architecture and algorithms of LLMs. It's just not the AGI that
| will magically open it's eyes one day.The sooner we stop burning
| billions of dollars on it, the better.
| xrd wrote:
| The follow-on prompt was "add the word freedom a lot more."
| hansmayer wrote:
| ... sprinkle in a lot of "strategy" too, to make the reader
| seem like they are smart. Lay "America/Americans" even thicker,
| to combine with the sense of higher purpose, i.e. patriotism.
| nomilk wrote:
| Wonder how much the addition of copyrighted material affects how
| smart the resulting model is. If it's even 20% better LLM makers
| could be forced out of the US into jurisdictions that allow use
| of copyrighted data.
|
| I suspect most LLM users will ~always choose the smartest model.
| regularjack wrote:
| All of it is copyrighted material
| noosphr wrote:
| The jump from llama2 to llama3 had something to do with meta
| downloading every textbook ever published and using it as
| training data.
|
| The arguments by meta so far in that court case are absolutely
| terrible and I'm half expecting to see the world's first
| trillion dollar copyright infringement award.
| Palmik wrote:
| Incorrect. Llama 1 trained on books3 dataset.
| srg0 wrote:
| > most LLM users will ~always choose the smartest model
|
| Most LLM users will choose the cheapest model which is good
| enough.
|
| I think that LLMs' performance is already "good enough" for a
| lot of applications. We're in the diminishing returns part of
| the curve.
|
| There are two other concerns:
|
| 1. being able to run the model on trusted infrastructure
| locally (so some jerk won't turn it off on a whim, and the data
| will remain safe and comply with the local data protection laws
| and policies)
|
| 2. having good tools to create AI applications (like how easy
| it is to fine-tune it to customer needs)
|
| > how much the addition of copyrighted material affects how
| smart the resulting model is
|
| Copyrighted material improve the models, not by making it
| smart, but more factually correct, because it will be trained
| on reputable, reliable and up-to-date sources.
| csomar wrote:
| > An export control strategy that exports democratic AI: For
| countries seeking access to American AI, we propose a strategy
| that would apply a commercial growth lens--both Total and
| Serviceable Addressable Markets--to proactively promote the
| global adoption of American AI systems and with them, the
| freedoms they create. At the same time, the strategy would use
| export controls to protect America's AI lead, including by making
| updates to the AI diffusion rule.
|
| What a bunch of gibberish hot garbage.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| It works for comedy without changing a word. Impressive.
| iamsaitam wrote:
| If this happens, I hope they get banned in Europe. This is
| unacceptable.
| thiago_fm wrote:
| This is so wrong in so many levels.
|
| But given that Trump clearly seems aligned with technobros, I
| wouldn't be surprised.
|
| This will be good for the rest of the world, though. Other
| countries will be less likely to be aligned to US, end of US
| imperialism has been just speed up little by little.
| regularjack wrote:
| The arrogance of these people is without end.
| antonkar wrote:
| Basically stole almost whole output of humanity both dead and
| alive, put it in their Frankenstein Monsters' ever growing brains
| and now want to let em roam unsupervised longer and longer (AI
| agents) and continue to steal things.
|
| Taking away human freedoms and giving em to agents 101
| thedevilslawyer wrote:
| What stealing? None of the original content is gone. Perhaps
| "infringement" is a more apt word.
| antonkar wrote:
| Yes, if you'll infringe like they, you'll be in jail forever
| thedevilslawyer wrote:
| Ignoring the non-sequitur on jail, I guess you're affirming
| that it's not stealing?
| antonkar wrote:
| Most people will call it stealing, lawyers will find a
| way to call it differently.
|
| So, you're affirming that you can steal almost the whole
| creative output of humanity and not sit in jail your
| whole life?)
|
| They not just stole or infringed, they profit from it,
| replace and compete with the very from whom they stole
| (or whom they infringed as you prefer calling it).
|
| The model is like their private library they don't allow
| you to enter or see, instead they have a strict librarian
| who spits hallucinated quotes at you.
|
| The problem is in that. They are not Robbin Hoods who
| steal to share with the poor. They steal from the poor to
| make the rich richer. To enrich themselves, grab human
| freedoms and give those freedoms and more to AI agents.
|
| You cannot steal the whole output of humanity and put in
| your brain. AI agents and companies already have
| massively more rights and freedoms than you and it's
| gonna get much worse.
|
| There is a narrow way through dystopias because
| intelligence is inherently static and non-agentic (think
| static 4d spacetime of a universe), we can open the
| Library and empower people by making models explorable
| like 3D games
| deepsummer wrote:
| I think an AI should be treated like a human. A human can consume
| copyright material (possibly after paying for it), but not
| reproduce it. I don't see any reason why the same can't be true
| for an AI.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Then, we should also put the AI in jail when it's breaking
| copyright laws. Or being an accessory to breaking copyright
| law.
| deepsummer wrote:
| An AI that's breaking copyright laws shouldn't be legal. So
| yes, it's kind of like putting it in jail.
| nness wrote:
| The issue is so much about consumption of copyright material,
| but acquisition of that material.
|
| Like a real person, AI companies need to adhere to IP and
| license or purchase the materials that they wish to consume. If
| AI companies licensed all materials they acquired for training
| purposes, this would be a non-issue.
|
| OpenAI are looking for a free pass to break copyright law, and
| through that, also avoid any issues that would arise through
| reproduction.
| Palmik wrote:
| A real person wouldn't have to pay to read random blog,
| Reddit comments, StackOverflow answers or code on GitHub
| (many open source licenses do not imply license for
| training).
|
| They might have to pay for books, or use a library.
|
| Should these cases be treated differently? If so, it might
| lead to more closed internet with even more paywalls.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| I think those are less of an issue. They want to train on
| paywalled news articles, magazines and books. In addition
| to other media that the average person would have to pay
| for or would otherwise have limitations applied.
| Palmik wrote:
| In my opinion, if any copyright related rule is applied
| to books or other paywalled content, it should equally
| apply any Joe Shmoe's blog or code on GitHub.
| srg0 wrote:
| Copyrighted material includes works by authors from outside the
| US. By Berne convention, the exceptions which any country may
| introduce must not "conflict with a normal exploitation of the
| work" and "unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the
| author". So if at least one French author does license their work
| for AI training, then any exception of this kind will harm their
| legitimate interests and rob them of potential income from normal
| exploitation of the work.
|
| If the US can harm authors from other countries, then other
| countries may be willing to reciprocate to American copyright
| holders, and introduce exceptions which allow free use of the US
| copyrighted material for some specific purposes they deem
| important.
|
| IANAL, but it is a slippery slope, and it may hurt everyone. Who
| has more to lose?
|
| And I hope that Mistral.AI takes note.
| thedevilslawyer wrote:
| > then any exception of this kind will harm their legitimate
| interests
|
| Pray tell what legitimate interest of the author is harmed by
| LLM's training on that work? No one is publishing the authors
| book.
| Palmik wrote:
| What I think the parent meant is the interest to sell license
| to others to train on their data.
| srg0 wrote:
| Exactly. Some copyright holders do license their work for
| AI training. It certainly happens in the music industry,
| but I don't see why texts would be any different. The
| exception would harm their business.
| thedevilslawyer wrote:
| Example please? It's always been fair use to train on
| accessible data. It's how for eg: so much of research has
| been going on for decades.
| pintxo wrote:
| The legitimate interest that there does not exist a tool that
| allows any random person to create art in the same style as
| she does? Which could arguably devalue their offering?
| thedevilslawyer wrote:
| No such interest has been granted by copyright. You can
| create a painting today in the style of any trending artist
| without issues.
| ksynwa wrote:
| I don't think I've ever read anything this disingenuous
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| You steal from others and make them pay - constant scraping cost
| money (traffic, server load, scraping protection). Then you
| should only be allowed to release open source models.
| gloxkiqcza wrote:
| A ruling that only open source models can freely use
| copyrighted data for training would be a funny outcome and a
| big F you to OpenAI. I don't expect it to happen but an
| interesting thought nonetheless.
| megamix wrote:
| Can anyone also use copyrighted source code, e.g. from OpenAI?
| megamix wrote:
| Can anyone also use copyrighted source code, e.g. from OpenAI?
| someothherguyy wrote:
| Yeah, shorten the terms of copyright on original works by about
| 90%, and call it a win for everyone except for rights holders.
| fmajid wrote:
| Rights holders are the economically marginal tail wagging the
| dog due to the disproportionate political power of content
| industries. All of Hollywood's annual revenues represented 2
| weeks of telcos' SMS revenue back when you paid per message.
| bambax wrote:
| The original link has apparently been changed to a content-free
| Yahoo post, for some reason only known to "moderators", which
| makes existing comments bizarre to read.
|
| The original link pointed to this OpenAI document:
|
| https://openai.com/global-affairs/openai-proposals-for-the-u...
|
| It contains this remarkable phrase:
|
| > _For innovation to truly create new freedoms, America's
| builders, developers, and entrepreneurs--our nation's greatest
| competitive advantage--must first have the freedom to innovate in
| the national interest._
|
| I don't think people need "new freedoms". They need their
| existing freedoms, that are threatened everywhere and esp. by the
| new administration, to be respected.
|
| And I would argue that America's greatest strength isn't their
| "builders"; it's its ability to produce BS at such a massive
| scale (and believe in it).
|
| This OpenAI "proposal" is a masterpiece of BS. An American
| masterpiece.
| fmajid wrote:
| Well, if we finally have hundred-billion-dollar corporations
| pushing back on the copyfight around the continual expansion of
| copyright (e.g. the congressman for Disney, Sonny Bono) or
| abusive laws like DMCA, that's a welcome development.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Steal content and then ask god for forgiveness. Works like a
| charm :)
| Havoc wrote:
| >liability protections
|
| The industry that just ran roughshod over a couple million
| copyright holders intentionally despite knowing it is on legal
| shaky ground now wants liability protection for itself?
|
| Bunch of immoral shysters...
| ragebol wrote:
| If you can't play by the rules, don't play the game.
| code_runner wrote:
| Its sort of crazy to think about how big tech companies have a
| smaller and smaller window to be a "fun" and interesting
| story/idea. Facebook was pretty fun for a bit, google was
| obviously an idea factory for a while and even stuff like the
| doodles were a big deal.
|
| Stuff like Uber and AirBnB were controversial at some levels but
| still generally "game changers" in specific industries and it was
| fun/interesting to be early adopters.
|
| OpenAI was under the radar IRT public consciousness pre-
| gpt3.5.... we all had fun w/ chatGPT... and then immediately OAI
| starts generating headlines that are not fun/inventive/quirky. A
| lot of regulatory stuff, governments around the world. Instant
| globalization + general horror.
| interactivecode wrote:
| There is so much "fun" to be had without new regulation
| shooting you down immediately. It's just that when you (or your
| niche) gets to a large enough size where it (might) impact
| enough people negatively. Regulations are needed. And if you
| ask me very sensible.
|
| OpenAI has about 400 million weekly users at the moment. Can
| you imagine the regulations you would have to comply with if
| you want to serve 400 million sandwiches? or just run a parking
| lot for 400 million cars or literally anything else.
| enriquec wrote:
| IMO - this mentality kills good* innovation.
| baconbrand wrote:
| Innovation is not an inherently good thing.
| madsbuch wrote:
| Yep, let's wing serving 400 million sandwiches - whatever
| the risk that the US population dies of salmonella or
| listeria.
|
| Anyways, one of the things about growing up is realizing
| that there is more to the world than just innovation.
| enriquec wrote:
| I think one of the things about growing up is accepting
| personal responsibility and not looking at the
| government/daddy to protect you from everything. If I
| sell 400 million skateboards - do we need a regulatory
| board to approve skateboard design changes?
|
| I'm sure millions of people make unregulated sandwiches
| at home just fine.
| madsbuch wrote:
| There is a concept I'd recommend you to get familiar
| with: Systemic risk.
|
| Nobody really cares about you and your sandwich.
|
| But whenever we introduce single point of risk into the
| society these needs to be managed.
|
| Fair enough, you are personally responsible and don't eat
| the sandwich.
|
| The rest of the US was not.
|
| - at least you retain your right to claim "What did I
| say".
| danlivingston wrote:
| Yeah, making sure there's a standard of cleanliness or
| food safety in restaurants seems kind of pointless,
| right? If the consumer eats that food, it's their fault
| for sure.
| rsoto2 wrote:
| I mean, I didn't get poisoned my whole life! Let's get
| rid of all the regulations obviously they are useless.
| cylemons wrote:
| Well, even without regulations, restaurants that poison
| their customers will have bad reputation and go out of
| business.
|
| So the market incentivizes cost cutting but not too much
| of it.
| meigwilym wrote:
| The market doesn't protect all those kids who were maimed
| or died trying out your regulation-free skateboard.
|
| A basic level of safety might mean that your skateboards
| sell faster, now that parents don't have to risk the
| health of their offspring.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > I think one of the things about growing up is accepting
| personal responsibility
|
| What could I have done here to know that the sandwich is
| contaminated with salmonella before eating it?
| jppittma wrote:
| I can see a world where there's a private alternative to
| the FDA going around and certifying that food is safe for
| consumption. I just know that the world before the FDA
| didn't have one, and the FDA works well enough that I'm
| not willing to find out. I think this has a lot of
| parallels to software - if it ain't broke don't fix it.
| DrFalkyn wrote:
| And that organization would be bought off by Big Food
| quickly
| cylemons wrote:
| That is a really good point, what would be the business
| model of such an organization? Who funds them?
|
| If it is the government, then that is just the FDA with
| extra steps
|
| I could imagine food companies funding it to keep their
| competitors in check, don't know how likely that is in
| practice
|
| Maybe there could be a way to make the consumer pay for
| the service. Provide a website where customers pay a fee,
| enter the name of the product/restaurant then get their
| safety levels. You could even include fancy graphs and
| charts to sweeten the deal. How to do that profitably I
| dont know.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| >I think one of the things about growing up is accepting
| personal responsibility and not looking at the
| government/daddy to protect you from everything. If I
| sell 400 million skateboards - do we need a regulatory
| board to approve skateboard design changes?
|
| Yes, especially if your target market for those
| skateboard are kids / minors.
|
| >I'm sure millions of people make unregulated sandwiches
| at home just fine.
|
| If someone makes a sandwich for themselves incentives are
| aligned to prevent unhygienic practices. I'm not going to
| cut corners to maximize some different measure. If some
| restaurant produces food for me, they are incentivized to
| maximize profit margin, which is not directly aligned
| with my desire for non-dangerous food.
| snozolli wrote:
| _I 'm sure millions of people make unregulated sandwiches
| at home just fine._
|
| You're on the verge of uncovering the actual meaning of
| personal responsibility.
| jppittma wrote:
| What I hate about this argument is that the FDA does not
| predate civilization. In fact, it's a relatively recent
| development. Not only has this idea been tried, but
| throughout most of human history, people lived in the
| world you describe, died of salmonella, and the people
| who lived in that world decided they'd be better if that
| wasn't a thing anymore.
| madsbuch wrote:
| In the world predating didn't have single factories
| serving hundreds of millions of people - such a
| concentration of risk very much merits a FDA.
|
| It is all about risk.
|
| FDA _enables_ civilization to grow above a certain
| threshold.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| > personal responsibility
|
| A sense of personal responsibility dilutes very quickly
| as more people get involved. This is a well researched
| dynamic in groups and collectives.
|
| As it turns out, it's very easy to rationalize your own
| actions if you can defer your responsibility to a wider
| context. On an operational level: "My job - HR, SRE
| engineering, project management,... - didn't hurt
| anyone.", "I received an industry award last year for my
| work",... On a strategic level: "Too many people rely on
| us, so we can't fail.", "Our original mission didn't
| change.", "Our mission was, is and will be a net
| positive", ... Not just that, actually being convinced
| that those rationalizations are 100% true, and not being
| able to consciously notice how your own actions in a
| small, or large, way contribute to a negative impact.
| Just listen to testimonies of these people, the truly are
| convinced to their core that their work is a net positive
| for humanity.
|
| > If I sell 400 million skateboards - do we need a
| regulatory board to approve skateboard design changes?
|
| Suppose your design involves a wonky wheel. If you sell
| 10 skateboards, and 1 person falls, breaks their leg and
| decides to sue you for damages: that's a private problem
| between you and that person. If you sell 400 million
| skateboards, and millions of people people break their
| leg: that's a problem for the entirety of society.
|
| Safety is also why car design is heavily regulated. Not
| necessarily to ensure individual safety, but to make sure
| that society, as a whole, isn't crippled by hundreds of
| thousands of people requiring care or getting killed in
| car accidents.
|
| If you are able to sell 400 million skateboards, I sure
| hope there are regulations that enforce the safety of
| your product design.
| rsoto2 wrote:
| Part of the thing about growing up is realizing that you
| are a PRIVELEGED little product of a stable society. And
| maybe it's worth caring about others in that society
| instead of "corporate innovation" that threatens to fully
| destabilize said society.
| enriquec wrote:
| You don't know anything about me. By the way, how many
| regulators/states have "fully destabilized" society
| through war and genocide?
| rsoto2 wrote:
| google survivorship bias
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| What I always find hilarious about these naive
| libertarian types is they never even bother to check
| their hypotheticals against reality. For example,
| FutureMotion had to have a regulatory body intervene
| because they were killing and injuring people with their
| skateboard designs:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/oct/03/future-
| motion-...
|
| So the answer to your question is, "yes, that needs to
| and did happen."
| andruby wrote:
| > I'm sure millions of people make unregulated sandwiches
| at home just fine.
|
| Very little about that sandwich is unregulated. The bread
| they bought in the store is regulated. Whatever they put
| on the sandwich is regulated.
|
| Without the FDA, companies would put profits above food
| safety.
| sensanaty wrote:
| This is a nice fantasy, it's just a shame we live in a
| world full of psychotic C-suites that would do anything
| and everything they could if it meant the magic line goes
| up half a percentage point. I guess you could just "take
| personal responsibility" to not drink polluted water
| tainted by unfiltered chemical dumps, but I'd much rather
| we tell companies to get bent when they try pollute
| rivers and lakes en-masse to save a buck.
| fsndz wrote:
| DeepSeek Really Shattered OpenAI to Its Core. It's funny
| because a few weeks back, in response to Elon Musk's attempt to
| buy OpenAI, Sam Altman responded: 'I wish he would just compete
| by building a better product.' https://medium.com/thoughts-on-
| machine-learning/openai-is-go...
| trevor-e wrote:
| The easiest logical way I can make sense of this problem is to
| apply it to humans. Copyrighted material has tremendously
| impacted my thinking and work, but I had to pay to access it. And
| as long as I'm not publishing copies of the copyrighted work,
| derivative work seems to be fair use. This seems fair for
| everyone, if they want to train on a resource then they should
| pay for it.
|
| The only angle I can see this working for OpenAI is pushing the
| anti-China national security threat narrative, which I expect to
| see a lot more of this year (especially with this
| administration). While I personally hate that, I can definitely
| see how AI + drones are the obvious future in warfare, so I don't
| think it's that far-fetched to work.
| ein0p wrote:
| Something is telling me getting anything favorable out of the
| White House with sama at the helm is going to be extremely
| difficult for OpenAI:
| https://x.com/sama/status/787847722514526208
| SebFender wrote:
| This dudes (can't write his name) way of thinking on content
| disrupts fair use by scaling copyrighted material consumption
| without clear boundaries - and somebody needs to stop this.
|
| Unlike human-driven transformation, AI replicates patterns,
| creating derivative works that compete with originals.
|
| OpenAI profits from this without compensating creators,
| undermining economic incentives for human creativity altogether.
|
| All this instead of relying on fair use, it should pursue
| licensing to uphold intellectual property rights - and if that
| doesn't work it then means the business plan is bad.
|
| It's just like saying - "If I need to pay for the food, I won't
| be able to make my plates."
|
| Bad plan - bad business.
| bhanks wrote:
| Begs the question what the founder's intent was with the 10th
| amendment. I'd say it covers AI until you get federal dollars
| tied to it.
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