this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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The Internet Is About to Get Much Worse (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5400607

This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons, where a common resource is harmed by the profit interests of individuals. The traditional example of this is a public field that cattle can graze upon. Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody.

We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay.

But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As an open source contributor, I believe information (facts and techniques) should be free.

As an open source contributor, I also know that two-way collaboration only happens when users understand where the software came from and how they can communicate back to the original author(s).

The layer of obfuscation that LLMs add, where the code is really from XYZ open-source project, but appears to be manifesting from thin air... worries me, because it's going to alienate would-be collaborators from the original authors.

"AI" companies are not freeing information. They are colonizing it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The code that AI produces isn't "copied" from those original authors, though. The AI learned how to code from them, it isn't literally copying and pasting from them.

If you think a bit of code is "really from" XYZ open-source project, that's a copyright violation and you can pursue that legally. But you'll need to actually show that the code is a copy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your justification seems to rest on whether LLM training technically passes the legal standard of violating IP.

That's not a super compelling argument to me, because:

  1. Nobody designed current IP law with LLMs in mind
  2. I would wager that a vast majority of creators whose works were consumed by LLMs did not consider whether their license would permit such an act, and thus didn't meaningfully consent to have their work used this way (whether or not the law would agree)
  3. I would argue that IP law is heavily stacked in favor of platforms (who own IP, but do not create it) and against creators (who create, but do not own IP) and consumers

I don't think that there is fundamentally anything wrong with LLMs as a technology. My problem is that the economic incentives are misaligned with long-term stability of the creative pools that fuel these things in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Your justification seems to rest on whether LLM training technically passes the legal standard of violating IP.

That's basically all that I'm talking about here, yeah. I'm saying that the current laws don't appear to say anything against training AIs off of public data. The AI model is not a copy of that data, nor is its output.

Nobody designed current IP law with LLMs in mind

Indeed. Things are not illegal by default, there needs to be a law or some sort of precedent that makes them illegal. In the realm of LLMs that's very sparse right now for exactly the reason you say. Nobody anticipated it so nobody wrote any laws forbidding it.

I would wager that a vast majority of creators whose works were consumed by LLMs did not consider whether their license would permit such an act, and thus didn’t meaningfully consent to have their work used this way (whether or not the law would agree)

There are things that you can use intellectual property for that do not require consent in the first place. Fair use describes various categories of that. If it's not illegal to use copyrighted material without permission when training AIs, why would it matter whether the license permitted it or the author consented to it?

I would argue that IP law is heavily stacked in favor of platforms (who own IP, but do not create it) and against creators (who create, but do not own IP) and consumers

Wouldn't requiring licensing of data for the training of LLMs stack things even more in the favour of big IP-owning platforms?

Again, as I said before, if you think some specific bit of LLM output is violating the copyright of some code you wrote, there's already laws in place specifically covering that situation. You can go to court and show that the two pieces of code are substantially identical and sue for damages or whatever. The AI model itself is another matter, though, and I doubt any current laws would count it as a "copy" of the data that went into training it.

[–] NeoNachtwaechter -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The copyright violation has happened when the code got fed into that AI's greedy gullet, not when it came out of it's rear end.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That remains to be tested legally speaking, and I don't think it's likely to pass muster. If it was trained correctly (ie, no overfitting) the resulting AI model does not contain a copy of the training inputs in any identifiable sense.

[–] NeoNachtwaechter 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, the laws are probably muddy in Usa as usual, but rather clear here in the EU. But legal proceedings are slow, and Big Tech is making haste with their feeding.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

There are many jurisdictions beyond the US and EU, Japan in particular has been very vocal about going all-in on allowing AI training. And I wouldn't say the EU's laws are "clear" until they are actually tested.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

My open source project benefits hugely from the free to access LLM coding tools available, that's a far bigger positive than the abstract fear that someone might feel alienated because the guy copy pasting their code doesn't know who he's copying from?

And yes, obviously the LLM isn't copying code it's leaning from a huge range of sources and combining it to make exactly what you ask for (well not exactly but with some needling it gets there eventually) but even if it were that's still not disrupting collaboration because that's not how collaboration works - no one says 'instead of coding all the boring elif statements required for my fiction determining if something is a prime, I'll search code snippits and collaborate with them' every worthwhile collaborator to my project has been an active user of the software and wanted to help improve it or add functions - AI won't change that, and if it does it'll only be because it makes coding so easy I don't need collaborators