A true government shutdown, yes. But here, all the nation-state-defining stuff (military, border control, police) stays up, and only parts of it shut down.
But the intended insight isn't stupid, and "the exception proves the rule" is a natural, easily-inferred contraction of "the rarity of finding an exception proves the general validity of the rule".
Yes, but in common usage it has come to also mean "the [rarity of finding an] exception proves the [general validity of] the rule", and it was clear from context which one the parent meant.
It's because shops were traditionally named after the people who owned them. There are still loads of shops bearing people's names, even now.
"Sainsbury's" supermarket used to be "J. Sainsbury's" named after its founder John Sainsbury, &c. "Morrisons" was "Wm Morrison" founded by William Morrison. So when you refer to a shop you say Sainbury's as in [Mr.] Sainsbury's shop, or "Morrison's" as in Mr. Morrison's shop.
Then this becomes so ingrained it gets misapplied sometimes. I don't think I'd ever say Asda's though. But I would say Tesco's, even though Tesco is the initials of three people.
>I think the order here is reversed: If you ask the public for money, it's fair to perform a public service. If you just do something you wanted to do anyways, and probably would have done anyways, then it might be viewed as less-than-charitable to ask others for money to help you achieve your goal for yourself (even if other people might benefit somewhat too). Especially when you are far richer (like 100+ times richer) than the people you're asking for money.
I get the where you're coming from, but it's this exact attitude that ends up with critical infra like OpenSSL being maintained ad hoc by some devoted geek for a pittance, who inevitably can't keep up with critical patches.
If the $200k were going towards such a geek, or towards maintaining code that everyone uses, that'd be better.
As it stands, the money is going to lawyers, who will argue over the right to utter the word "javascript" in a commercial context (rather than, say, "JS"). So zero coding or maintenance.
You're assuming that arguing in court over being allowed to use 1 specific word in a commercial context is a good thing to spend $200,000 on at all, which is quite an assumption, regardless of who does the arguing.
I agree with you that it'd be better if Deno took your suggestion, and spent the money on a Programming Geek, rather than being distracted from their core mission for trivial, semantic matters. The latter is how we actually end up with critical infra like OpenSSL being maintained ad hoc by some devoted geek for a pittance, who inevitably can't keep up with critical patches.
I mean, I'll be the first to admit that I've argued about a word on the internet before, but at no point did it ever cross my mind that I should spend $200,000 doing so.
You have just convinced me to stop using the word J8t. It is not worth even $1 to me to be able to use that word. If Oracle wants to claim ownership, that claim can just be added to the legacy of Oracle. It's a bit stupid to be legally forced to stop using the word, but such is the nature of any discussion involving Oracle.
How about Deno put up $10,000 to sponsor a renaming contest? In honor of Deno, I propose VajaScript.
1) I was curious why they can't just attach two partial blades onsite to make a longer one, and the article makes some attempt to address it, so, to save you from reading the whole thing:
>Shipping them in multiple pieces and reassembling them on-site won’t work because the joints would create weak spots. Junctions would also add too much weight compared with that of blades made from single pieces of polymer, says Doug Arent, executive director at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory Foundation and emeritus NREL researcher.
>“It comes down to the stress engineering of the components,” Arent says. Blades could one day be 3D-printed on-site, which could negate the need for an airplane, but that research is still in early stages, he says. (Lundstrom says 3D-printed blades will never happen, since it would require a large, sophisticated manufacturing facility to be built at every wind farm.)
2) I'm also curious if anyone has done the numbers on how long it takes these large turbines to pay back the energy cost of flying them there? You would have to a) find out how much more energy they make from the same footprint compared to smaller wind turbines, and b) how much more energy it takes to fly them there compared to transporting the smaller ones (and I'd be curious about a smaller plane vs ones that can be transported on the ground).
The energy content of the max fuel load of a 747 is something like 2.5 gWh. The specifics of the site matter an awful in how fast that pays back.
So like if the extra generation were 1 megawatt with a capacity factor of 30%, you are looking at 7500 hours, less than a year, to yield that much energy.
That's a lot of assumptions, but the delivery flights probably average less fuel than that, and one of the benefits of size is that the capacity factor goes up.
While I'm sure it feels good and validating to have this called copyright infringement, and be compensated, it's a mixed blessing at best. Remember, this also means that your works will owe compensation to anyone you "trained" off of. Once we accept that simply "learning from previous copyrighted works to make new ones" is "infringement", then the onus is on you to establish a clean creation chain, because you'll be vulnerable to the exact same argument, and you will owe compensation to anyone whose work you looked at in learning your craft.
It's a good thing that laws can be different for AI training and human consumption. And I think the blog post you linked makes that argument, too, so I'm not sure why you'd contort it into the idea that humans will be compelled to attribute/license information that has inspired them when creating art.
The inconsistency you're talking about is only based on the premise that LLMs and humans are "basically the same thing and thus should be treated the exact same way in this kind of situation". But I don't really see why that would be the case in the first place.
Now don't take me wrong, I'm not saying that a rushed regulatory response is a good thing, it's more about the delivery of your reply. I see those arguments a lot: people smugly saying "Well, YOU too learn from things, how about that? Not so different from the machine huh?" and then continuing the discussion based on that premise, as if we were supposed to accept it as a fact.
Because the onus is on you to show the substantive difference. Learning from copyrighted works has always been accepted as free and unrestricted, up until 2022. Before that, nobody (to a rounding error) thought that simply being influenced by a previous copyright work meant you owed a license fee. If anything, people would have been livid about restrictions on their right to learn.
Only when big-corp critics needed another pretense to support a conclusion they long agreed with for other reasons, did they decide that the right to learn from your exposure to a copyright work was infringement.
If you're interested in the similarities and genuinely curious, you could look at the article linked above, which shows how both LLMs and humans store a high-level understanding of their training set. It's a way deeper parallel than "it's all learning" -- but you have to be willing to engage with the other side rather than just strawman it.
> Because the onus is on you to show the substantive difference
It literally is not. If the defense for your copyright infringement is "my machine is actually the same as a human" then it's your obligation to substantiate that argument.
You left out 'For human beings, not for billion dollar corporate for profit unlimited scaling products intended to replace all creative work'.
If human beings were working for Anthropic, training, and then being contracted out by Anthropic, the exact same rules would apply as historically. Anthropic is not being unfairly treated.
Don't talk about strawmanning when paragraph 2 doesn't describe any argument I've been making. The similarity IS an argument you've advanced. The person you're arguing with does exist and Disney + other bad actors ARE trying to profiteer off of their outrage to tighten up copyright... but I'm not that guy, I really only attacked your argument.
Either way, you seem to be asking for a genuine conversation so I'll take this a bit more seriously.
I hope you will forgive me for not engaging with the entire article top-to-bottom right now. For time's sake, I've queried ChatGPT to extract quotes from the article related to your main point (the similarity between human thinking and LLM predictions) so that I can ctrl+F them. This is a well written and organized article, so I believe that even looking at disconnected sections should give me a clear view of the argument that's being made.
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From the section: “Understanding” in tools.
The author rightfully spends some time disambiguating his use of "understanding", and comparing traditional scripting to LLMs, drawing a parallel with human processes like mathematics and intuition (respectively). The section ends with this quote:
> That’s why I think that the process of training really is, both mechanically and philosophically, more like human learning than anything else
Which is the meat of the argument you're making to say that both should be evaluated in the court.
I can easily tell when reading this that the author is skillful and genuine in his concerns over IP and its misuses, and I really respect that. The issue I raise with the whole argument however did not change from my initial response. While he does have a good understanding of how LLMs operate.
↑↑↑↑↑↑ At this point in writing my reply, I then planned to call into questions his credentials in the other main expertise, namely brain science, as I most often saw this argument come from tech people and less so brain scientists. What I found instead was not the ultimate own I hoped for, but rather a mixed bag of things that really are similar[1] and other articles that expressed some big differences in other aspects[2]. As such, I cannot in good faith say that your argument is unsubstantiated, only that brain science (an expertise in which I have absolutely no authority) is still torn on the subject.
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Doesn't mean my first reply is suddenly null and void. If I can't prove or disprove "LLMs and humans think alike", I can still discuss the other conclusion you (and the article) draw from it "-> ...and thus, should and will be treated equally in the eyes of the law". This brings yet another expertise (law) that I am woefully unqualified to talk about, but I need to ask: why would that be the "only natural" conclusion? I'll refer to your other reply:
> laws can be arbitrary, and ignore constraints like consistency! It’s just something sane people try to avoid.
You look at the inconsistencies in law like they're a design flaw, but are they really? Law is meant to accommodate humans, society is a system with an amount of edge cases that I cannot possibly imagine.
In the very next section of the article called "Training is not copying", he calls out inaccurate uses of the world "reproduction" and "storing", he also cites another article, which I'll quote:
> The complaint against Stable Diffusion characterizes this as “compressing” (and thus storing) the training images, but that’s just wrong. With few exceptions, there is no way to recreate the images used in the model based on the facts about them that are stored. Even the tiniest image file contains many thousands of bytes; most will include millions. Mathematically speaking, Stable Diffusion cannot be storing copies …
This reads to me like arguing semantics, yes, most artists yelling out in outrage do not know the ins and outs of training a diffusion model. But I don't think this completely annihilates or addresses their concerns.
When people say "it's not technically reproduction", it doesn't stop the fact that today, LORAs exists to closely imitate the artstyle with much less training resources, and in the case of LORAs, it's not "a vast, super diluted training set", it's "super fine tuning based on an existing model, and an additional (but much smaller) batch of training data directly taken from (and laser-focused on) a specific person.
Now do I know what would happen if [patreon-having-guy] tries to take someone to justice because he made a LORA to specifically target him? I do not, I haven't checked a legal precedent for this but when there will be, it's a decision that will be taken by humans in a court. (As for what will immediately happen, he will Streisand his way to 27 other dudes doing the same thing out of spite)
I got a bit sidetracked, but all of that is to say, law is by people for people. In the end, there's nothing that tells us whether or not "LLMs and Humans think the same" will directly translate to "...so LLMs shall be treated like humans in the court".
The LLM can't go to prison, it can't make money to pay for damages, having an ironclad rule like that would just make things less convenient. Code is not law, and (thankfully) law is not code. I feel like some people (I'm not saying YOU did it) advocating for "treating LLMs as humans" do so as a means to further alleviate corporate responsibility for anything.
All in all, I'm don't just question the parallel, I question "why" the parallel, "why" in this discussion. For the author of your article, I can easily see that he IS genuine with his concerns about IP and the consequences of a Kneejerk regulatory response to it.
Your initial reply in the context of this thread on the other hand? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it reads like a taunt. It reads like "we'll see who gets the last laugh", so forgive me if I assumed that wrongly, because this was the reason my first reply was the way it was.
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One last thing that I have to get out of my system (a tiny rant if you will). I feel like there is an attitude problem in the expertise of tech regarding... quite literally any other craft. I suppose it exists in other fields but this is where I see it the most because I'm also in this field.
The topic we've been discussing is an intersection between tech, brain science, and law, a single of those fields is already very hard, you could dedicate your life to it and still learn more things. Yet when it comes to the "LLM = humans" debate, it seems like everyone suddenly has all the qualifications required, never mind that people dedicating their life to brain science are still saying "we don't fully get it", never mind that people who spend their life in law have yet to experience and set a precedent for the whole shift that's going to happen, tech people talk as if tech is the only thing that's needed to make the world turn.
Generative tech has exacerbated (or expanded) this attitude to even more fields, I don't think it's any surprise that there is such animosity between the tech and creative people when the guy that is spearheading generative music says "people don't enjoy making music", when all the communication around it is "adapt or die", "we figured it out", "we SOLVED art", "you will be left behind", and then calling anyone that does not agree a luddite.
The reason I replied is not because I want IP laws to tighten, nor because I genuinely believe we could "get rid of AI" (btw AI is a blanket term that makes things worse for everyone discussing it), you were just unlucky enough to be the n-th person to bring up that argument I've seen many times before on a night where I had some free time.
So thanks for giving me the occasion to write that down. I do not think this threads warrants either of us to show too much hostility, but as you said, the whole conversation about current-day genAI touches on so much more than just genAI, it's very easy to find something about it that annoys someone on either side.
I think you're focusing too much on whether LLMs are "really human-like" or not. That's a distraction, and I shouldn't have made reference to it. Let me zoom out to a broader point:
It has never been a part of copyright to include the right to be influenced by the copyright work. Period. It's been the diametric opposite. Copyright as always existed, and been justified, as a way to get good, new works out into the public, so that later works can be influenced by them. The fact that one work was influenced by another has never, by itself, been a reason to consider it infringement. Not until 2022, when AIs actually got good at it.
When you argue for AI training as copyright infringement, you're saying that "the fact that your work was influenced by previous works, means you owe license fees". This is wholly without precedent[1], and was widely rejected until the moment some activists realized it could be a legal tool against Bad People. It's a Pandora's Box no one really wants (except perhaps very large media companies who will be able to secure general "learning licenses" for mass libraries of works). That was the the point emphasized in my original comment: If Anthropic is infringing because they base new works on old ones, so are you. You too owe licensing fees for every work you observed that fed into how you create. If that feels like an expansion of what copyright is supposed to cover ... that's the point.
For every single work of literature, you can go back and say "aha, this is clearly influenced by X, Y, Z". Precisely zero people were going out insisting that the author therefore owed fees to all those other creators, because the idea is absurd. Or was, until 2022, when some people needed a pretense for a conclusion they long supported for unrelated reasons ("Facebook must suffer"). So I think my second paragraph is justified.
"If you read 100 horror novels and write a new one based on everything you've noticed in them, you don't owe the authors jack squat. But if you have a machine help you compile the insights, suddenly, you've infringed the authors' rights." Yeah, you do need to justify that.
[1] I agree there are going to be cases where it, say, was captured too closely, but not for the general case, and it's further weakened when it's "imitating" a thousand styles at once.
LLMs cannot create copyrightable works. Only humans can do that [0]. So LLMs are not making new copyrightable works.
[0] not because we're so amazingly more creative. But because copyright is a legal invention, not something derived from first principles, and has been defined to only apply to human creations. It could be changed to apply to LLM output in the future.
> Once we accept that simply "learning from previous copyrighted works to make new ones" is "infringement"
It's not, because LLMs are not making new copyrightable works.
To make a copyrightable work you must put some creative act into it. Just copying someone else's work does not enable you to claim copyright. But LLMs cannot put creative work into their works, because only humans are capable of copyrightable creation - so therefore it is infringing.
An infinitely scaling commercial for profit product designed to replace every creative by applying software processing to previous works is treated very differently than a sentient human being and their process of creativity.
The fact AI proponents can't see that is insane. Reminds me of the quote:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm missing something, and I don't like to defend FB, but ...
AIUI, they have a system for using data they receive to target ads. They tell people not to put sensitive data in it. Someone does anyway, and it gets automatically picked up to target ads. What are they supposed to do on their end? Even if they apply heuristics for "probably sensitive data we shouldn't use"[1], some stuff is still going to get through. The fault should still lie with the entity that passed on the sensitive data.
An analogy might be that you want to share photos of an event you hosted, and you tell people to send in their pics, while enforcing the norm, "oh make sure to ask before taking someone's photo", and someone insists that what they sent in was compliant with that rule, when it wasn't. And then you share them.
Companies don't get to do whatever they want just because they didn't put any safegaurds in place to prevent illegally using the data they collected.
The correct answer is to look at the data and verify it's legal to use.
I might be sympathetic of a tiny startup who has increased costs, but it's a cost of doing business just like anything else. And Facebook has more than enough resources to put safegaurds in place, and they definitely should have known better by now, so they should get punished for not complying.
> The correct answer is to look at the data and verify it's legal to use.
So repeal Section 230 and require every site to manually evaluate all content uploaded for legality before doing anything with it? If it’s not reasonable to ask sites to do that, it’s not reasonable to ask FB to do the same for data you send them.
Your position seems to vary based on how big/sympathetic the company in question is, which is not very even-handed and implicitly recognizes the burden of this kind of ask.
Not before doing anything with it, just before processing it for specific business use cases like targeting.
Running a forumn is fine, and I don't care if someone inputs a fake SSN on a forumn post.
I DO care if someone inputs a fake SSN on a financial form I provided, and it is actually my responsibility to prevent that. That's what KYC is and more.
"We're scot free, because we told *wink* people to not sell us sensitive data. We get the benefit from it, and we make it really easy for people to sign up and get paid to give us this data that we 'don't want.'"
Please don't sell me cocaine *snifffffffff*
> The fault should still lie with the entity that passed on the sensitive data.
Some benefits to making it be both:
* Centralize enforcement with more knowledgable entities
* Enforce at a level where the misdeeds can actually be identified and have scale, rather than death from a million cuts
* Prevent the central entity from using deniable proxies and cut-throughs to do bad things
This whole notion that we want so much scale, and that scale is an excuse for not paying attention to what you're doing or exercising due diligence, is repugnant. It pushes some cost down but also causes a lot of social harm. If anything, we should expect more ownership and responsibility from those with concentrated power, because they have more ability to cause widescale harm.
>"We're scot free, because we told wink people to not sell us sensitive data. We get the benefit from it, and we make it really easy for people to sign up and get paid to give us this data that we 'don't want.'"
>Please don't sell me cocaine snifffffffff
Maybe there's something in discovery that substantiates this, but so far as I can tell there's no "wink" happening, officially or unofficially. A better analogy would be charging amazon with drug distributing because some enterprising drug dealer decided to use FBA to ship drugs, but amazon was unaware.
I don’t like the analogy because “hosting an event” is a fuzzy thing. If you are hosting an event with friends you might be able to rely on the shared values of your friends and the informal nature of the thing to enforce this sort of norm.
If you are a business that host events and your business model involves photos of the event, you should have a professional approach to knowing if people consented to have their photos shared, depending on the nature of the venue.
At this point it is becoming barely an analogy though.
>I don’t like the analogy because “hosting an event” is a fuzzy thing. If you are hosting an event with friends you might be able to rely on the shared values of your friends and the informal nature of the thing to enforce this sort of norm.
You can't, though -- not perfectly, anyway. Whatever the informal norms, there are going to be people who violate them, and so the fault shouldn't pass on to you when you don't know someone is doing that. If anything, the analogy understates how unreasonable it is to FB, since they had an explicit contractual agreement for the other party not to send them sensitive data.
And as it stands now, websites aren't expected to pre-filter for some heuristic on "non-consensual user-uploaded photographs" (which would require an authentication chain), just to take them down when informed they're illegal ... which FB did (the analog of) here.
>If you are a business that host events and your business model involves photos of the event, you should have a professional approach to knowing if people consented to have their photos shared, depending on the nature of the venue.
I'm not sure that's the standard you want to base this argument on, because in most cases, the "professional approach" amounts to "if you come here at all, you're consenting to be photographed for publication, take it or leave it lol". FB had a stronger standard than this.
> I'm not sure that's the standard you want to base this argument on, because in most cases, the "professional approach" amounts to "if you come here at all, you're consenting to be photographed for publication, take it or leave it lol". FB had a stronger standard than this.
It depends on the event and the nature of the venue. But yes, it is a bad analogy. For one thing Facebook is not an event with clearly delineated borders. It should naturally be given much higher scrutiny than anything like that.
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