The problem isn't that people aren't aware that the scale and magnitude differences are large and significant.
It's that the space of intellectual property LAW does not handle the robust capabilities of LLMs. Legislators NEED to pass laws to reflect the new realities or else all prior case law relies on human analogies which fail in the obvious ways you alluded to.
If there was no law governing the use of death stars and mass murder, and the only legal analogy is to environmental damage, then the only crime the legal system can ascribe is mass environmental damage.
Why do you think the obvious analogy is LLM=Human, and not LLM=JPEG or LLM=database?
I think you're overstating the legal uniqueness of LLMs. They're covered just fine by the existing legal precedents around copyrighted and derived works, just as building a death star would be covered by existing rules around outer space use and WMDs. Pretending they should be treated differently is IMO the entire lie told by the "AI" companies about copyright.
The google news snippets case is, in my non-lawyer opinion, the most obvious touch point. And in that case, it was decided that providing large numbers of snippets in search results was non-infringing, despite being a case of copying text from other people at-scale... And the reasons this was decided are worth reading and internalizing.
There is not an obvious right answer here. Copyright rules are, in fact, Calvinball, and we're deep in uncharted territory.
Their weights are derived from copyrighted works. Evaluating them preserves the semantic meaning and character of the source material. And the output directly competes against the copyrighted source materials.
The fact they're smudgy and non-deterministic doesn't change how they relate to the rights of authors and artists.
Nothing in copyright law talks about 'semantic meaning' or 'character of the source material'. Really, quite the opposite - the 'expression-idea dichotomy' says that you're copyrighting the expression of an idea, not the idea itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
(Leaving aside whether the weights of an LLM does actually encode the content of any random snippet of training text. Some stuff does get memorized, but how much and how exactly? That's not the point of the LLM, unlike the jpeg or database.)
And, again, look at the search snippets case - these were words produced by other people, directly transcribed, so open-and-shut from a certain point of view. But the decision went the other way.
>Their weights are derived from copyrighted works. Evaluating them preserves the semantic meaning and character of the source material.
That sounds like you're arguing that they should be legal. Copyright law protects specific expressions, not handwavy "smudgy and non-deterministic" things.
I'll remind you that all fanart is technically in a gray area of copyright infringement. Legally speaking, companies can take down and charge infringement for anything using their IP thars not under fair use. Collages don't really pass that benchmark.
Yoinnking their up and mass producing slop sure is a line to cross, though.
I'm not an expert, but I thought fan art that people try to monetize in some form is explicitly illegal unless it's protected by parody, and any non commercial "violations" of copyright is totally legal. Disney can't stop me from drawing Mickey in the privacy of my own house, just monetizing/getting famous off of them.
The difference is we're humans, so we get special privileges. We made the laws.
If we're going to be giving some rights to LLMs for convenient for-profit ventures, I expect some in-depth analysis on whether that is or is not slavery. You can't just anthropomorphize a computer program when it makes you money but then conveniently ignore the hundreds of years of development of human rights. If that seems silly, then I think LLMs are probably not like humans and the comparisons to human learning aren't justified.
If it's like a human, that makes things very complicated.
Scales of effect always come into play when enacting law. If you spend a day digging a whole on the beach, you're probably not going to incur much wrath. If you bring a crane to the beach, you'll be stopped because we know the hole that can be made will disrupt the natural order. A human can do the same thing eventually, but does it so slowly that it's not an issue to enforce 99.9% of the time.
That's just the usual hand-wavy, vague "it's different" argument. If you want to justify treating the cases differently based on a fundamental difference, you need to be more specific. For example, they usually define an amount of rainwater you can collect that's short of disrupting major water flows.
So what is the equivalent of "digging too much" in a beach for AI? What fundamentally changes when you learn hyper-fast vs just read a bunch of horror novels to inform better horror novel-writing? What's unfair about AI compared to learning from published novels about how to properly pace your story?
These are the things you need to figure out before making a post equating AI learning with copyright infringement. "It's different" doesn't cut it.
If they were a database, they would be unquestionably legal, because they're only storing a tiny fraction of one percent of the data from any document, and even that data is not any particular replica of any part of the document, but highly summarized and transformed.
I saw an old man yesterday use a foldable for the larger screen for larger fonts. Maybe he was a hardcore tech enthusiasts, but larger screens is an important use case for many.
I think Terrance makes a great general point in general, but the specific claim is not always true: complex dynamics can arise from simple initial conditions, therefore, simple changes could resolve those complex dynamics.
VC Funding dried up in the Life Sciences space by late 2021/early 2022 because there was too much investment during 2018-20 due to the "precision medicine" hype cycle.
Same thing happened to cybersecurity in 2022-23 and will happen in the Generative AI space in a couple years.
There are always expansions and contractions in each sector.
I went to Brooks Bargain in Wilmington, MA, to get a used Aeron chair for about $500 if I remember right. They had a ton of different kinds of chairs to try on site. I went there torn between Aeron or SteelCase.
I’ve heard good things about Granite State Office Furniture too, if you don’t mind hoofing it up to Manchester NH.
Steelcase vs. Aeron is mostly about preference for fabric vs. mesh. Though Hermann Miller also has other models that are basically stripped down Aerons or don't require as much personal adjustment.
>>> So why is that less of a concern than China controlling a media delivery service?
>> US Government likes US Government control because it's themselves.
> I know. That doesn't tell me why China controlling a social media algorithm is inherently any worse from yours or my perspective.
Why is it less of a concern to you if you control your bank account than if I do?
If we're not making obvious distinctions today, you should give me your bank account credentials, since we're all the same.
>> They don't want an adversary to have control.
> Is the "adversary" claim not undermined by them being a primary trade partner?
It is not. I have difficulty imagining your question is not founded on feigned ignorance.
China is an adversary of the US. Some optimistic and naive Western politicians in the 90s thought making them a "primary trade partner" would cause political changes that would eliminate the rivalry. They were wrong, and weakened their countries in the process. That's been clear for like ten years. Now their mistake needs to be dealt with.
You haven't made a point that I can see! I'm actually being genuine here, I don't know where this went off the rails for you exactly, but I would like my questions to be answered.
I'll just copypaste what I said in another thread to be as direct as possible:
I am being told that it's a "concern" but without an explanation. What are the material, concrete harms that can come from China directing the content algo?
I made a pretty simple and straightforward analogy, which you didn't get. Maybe you don't get the geopolitical relevance of media control, but I'd really hope you'd understand bank account control. You = the US polity, Me = China, Bank account = something an adversary could harm you by controlling.
> I'm actually being genuine here...but I would like my questions to be answered....
> I am being told that it's a "concern" but without an explanation. What are the material, concrete harms that can come from China directing the content algo?
If you're being truthful, I think you might be at the point where you have to do some basic reading first, because you seem to need more hand-holding and explanation than it's reasonable to expect. You may also have some conceptual deficits that are so basic they come off as feigned.
> I think you might be at the point where you have to do some basic reading first
You are making the claim, you should be able to back the claim up. You're actually writing very many words to avoid a direct explanation, which is even more confusing.
I wonder if once any post goes up that is relevant China's interests, an email goes out from some department in the CCP govt, then hordes of Chinese advocates descend on the comments section, arguing, diverting, obsfucating, and muddying the waters so much that no sensible conclusion can ever be made.
The harms are so obvious I am wondering why I am even discussing it.
Obviously giving your primary geo-strategic competitor (with a history of propaganda) access at massive scale to shape opinion, promote discord, polarisation etc etc in the next generation of youth is a bad thing.
Not to mention the harvesting of personal data at massive scale and who knows how that might be used in the context of an AI-driven future.
You'd have to be ridiculously naive not to see that.
> to shape opinion, promote discord, polarisation etc etc in the next generation of youth is a bad thing
I remain unconvinced that people aren't shaping their own opinions by continuing to pursue similar content to what they typically agree with already. And as we all know, at this current time TikTok's algo is indistinguishable from US competitors in the obvious way it buckets people into like-minded feeds + comments.
At minimum we should be consistent in what we claim is the bad behavior. If the algo is really the problem, start regulating all of them and do it now. To do otherwise is hypocrisy.
> who knows how that might be used in the context of an AI-driven future
I'm not sure we want to legislate and set rules based on a "who knows". If the outcome is bad you need to define that bad outcome.
"I remain unconvinced that people aren't shaping their own opinions by continuing to pursue similar content to what they typically agree with already. And as we all know, at this current time TikTok's algo is indistinguishable from US competitors in the obvious way it buckets people into like-minded feeds + comments..."
You have not the slightest clue whether this is true or not.
Why does China block all foreign social media access within its own borders?
Wouldnt it be wonderful if we in the West could advocate for our own interests inside China the way the Chinese can participate in our conversations.
trade partner does not exclude adversary. Look at US-Japan trade in the 30s up until just before WW2 when the US decision to embargo exports to Japan (to try to force Japan to stop its occupation of China) led to WW2. It was a pretty quick flip from major trading partner to war.
I know there is a documented case of a non-involved person getting injured, but do you have evidence that this attack was not 99% effective? The attack vector was the device specifically used only by involved people.
A 9 year old child was killed, proving this attack wasn't as targeted as you think. However Israel is happy to accept any amount of collateral damage as long as it doesn't happen to them.
Any child death is tragic, but this is really one of the most targeted strikes in the history of warfare. It is safe to believe that everyone that was given a pager for secret communication by a terrorist group, is associated with such group, probably in a military capacity. Furthermore, videos show that extremely close bystanders are left unhurt.
I think this only goes out to show that criticism towards Israel waging warfare is not really about the way that warfare is fought, but really on the right of Israel to fight at all. As no one in history has achieved a more precise attack in urban setting towards a non-uniformed organization ever.
There is no comprehensive information yet on the ratio of civilians to militants maimed by this attack, and any claims otherwise are propaganda.
If an enemy had exploded small remote controlled bombs in American supermarkets and homes targeting members of the American political parties, the sponsors of terrorism and oppressive dictatorships in many foreign countries, there is no question we would characterize it as a terrorist attack.
Yes. If China detonated several thousand bombs in Idaho civilian locations on the premise they were targeting militias, some of whom fought in Syria and/or against Chinese oppression of the Uyghurs, this would absolutely be an act of mass terrorism.
> but this is really one of the most targeted strikes in the history of warfare.
You are making that up and quoting yourself. There was not a single fire-control system onboard these pagers; there was no visual designation of the target, and no confirmation that it was being carried by it's owners. The target was broadly designated and not even discriminated on a case-by-case basis. A button was pressed, and consequences including the death of a child are now in play.
Israel has the capability to field targeted strikes on their own using domestic Litening and SPICE munitions (not to say they don't end up targeting civilians anyways). The unforunate bottom line is that this was an indiscriminate and presumptive attack that generally relies on a complete disregard for collateral damage. Innocent bystanders died, ones that would not be targeted by any morally accountable soldier in the command-and-control loop. That means an error was made, in civilized armies.
Thousands were injured, yes. How many of the thousands injured belonged to Hezbollah? It’s a safe bet that the majority of injuries were sustained by owners of these Hezbollah-supplied pagers.
International law allows, to some extent, collateral damage during war (and Israel and Hezbollah are certainly at war). What percentage of collateral damage would you say is acceptable here? 50%? 20%? None?
Hezbollah are also terrorists. You might think it is ok to fight terror with terror, all I am trying to point out is that this is indeed a response in kind.
Hamas may be the “legitimate” government of Gaza (or at least the most recently elected one), but Hezbollah is not the legitimate government of Lebanon; it’s a minority party with outsized influence in parts of Lebanon due to its militia and intelligence services.
I think the important argument for^1 is that this prevents other search engine from bidding on the slot. It certainly would be an issue for Google if Apple products defaulted to Bing.
I think there's some behind the scenes drama. It takes a LOT of time and investment from both sides to build up to a $23B offer. I wonder if there was something some Alphabet exec did to piss off the founders. Or Wiz was stringing Alphabet along to hype up the IPO.
It's that the space of intellectual property LAW does not handle the robust capabilities of LLMs. Legislators NEED to pass laws to reflect the new realities or else all prior case law relies on human analogies which fail in the obvious ways you alluded to.
If there was no law governing the use of death stars and mass murder, and the only legal analogy is to environmental damage, then the only crime the legal system can ascribe is mass environmental damage.