30
Agreed. The AI is rolling already, we can't stop it now. All we can do is make sure that this technology benefits everyone, not just coroprations.
Seriously, the average person has two FAR more immediate problems than not being able to create their own AI:
-
Losing their livelihood to an AI.
-
Losing their life because an AI has been improperly placed in a decision making position because it was sold as having more capabilities than it actually has.
1 could be solved by severe and permanent economic reforms, but those reforms are very far away. 2 is also going to need legal restrictions on what jobs an AI can do, and restrictions on the claims that an AI company can make when marketing their product. Possibly a whole freaking government agency designated for certifying AI.
Right now, it's in our best interest that AI production is slowed down and/or prevented from being deployed to certain areas until we've had a chance for the law to catch up. Copyright restrictions and privacy laws are going to be the most effective way to do this, because it will force the companies to go back and retrain on public domain and prevent them from using AI to wholesale replace certain jobs.
As for the average person who has the computer hardware and time to train an AI (bear in mind Google Bard and Open AI use human contractors to correct misinformation in the answers as well as scanning), there is a ton of public domain writing out there.
The endgame, though, is to stop scenario 1 and scenario 2, and the best way to do that is any way that forces the people who are making AI to sit down and think about where they can use the AI. Because the problem is not the speed of AI development, but the speed of corporate greed. And the problem is not that the average person LACKS access to AI, but that the rich have TOO much access to AI and TOO many horrible plans about how to use it before all the bugs have been worked out.
Furthermore, if they're using people's creativity to make a product, it's just WRONG not to have permission or to not credit them.
Losing their life because an AI has been improperly placed in a decision making position because it was sold as having more capabilities than it actually has.
I would tend to agree with you on this one, although we don't need bad copyright legislation to deal with it, since laws can deal with it more directly. I would personally put in place an organization that requires rigorous proof that AI in those roles is significantly safer than a human, like the FDA does for medication.
As for the average person who has the computer hardware and time to train an AI (bear in mind Google Bard and Open AI use human contractors to correct misinformation in the answers as well as scanning), there is a ton of public domain writing out there.
Corporations would love if regular people were only allowed to train their AIs on things that are 75 years out of date. Creative interpretations of copyright law aren't going to stop billion- and trillion-dollar companies from licensing things to train AI on, either by paying a tiny percentage of their war chests or just ignoring the law altogether the way Meta always does, and getting a customary slap on the wrist. What will end up happening is that Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Elon Musk and his companies, government organizations, etc. will all have access to AIs that know current, useful, and relevant things, and the rest of us will not, or we'll have to pay monthly for the privilege of access to a limited version of that knowledge, further enriching those groups.
Furthermore, if they're using people's creativity to make a product, it's just WRONG not to have permission or to not credit them.
Let's talk about Stable Diffusion for a moment. Stable Diffusion models can be compressed down to about 2 gigabytes and still produce art. Stable Diffusion was trained on 5 billion images and finetuned on a subset of 600 million images, which means that the average image contributes 2B/600M, or a little bit over three bytes, to the final dataset. With the exception of a few mostly public domain images that appeared in the dataset hundreds of times, Stable Diffusion learned broad concepts from large numbers of images, similarly to how a human artist would learn art concepts. If people need permission to learn a teeny bit of information from each image (3 bytes of information isn't copyrightable, btw), then artists should have to get permission for every single image they put on their mood boards or use for inspiration, because they're taking orders of magnitude more than three bytes of information from each image they use for inspiration on a given work.
Except an AI is not taking inspiration, it's compiling information to determine mathematical averages.
A human can be inspired because they are a human being. A Large Language Model cannot. Stable Diffusion is not near the complexity of a human brain. Just because it does it faster doesn't mean it's doing it the same way. Human beings have free will and a host of human rights. A human being is paid for the work they do, an AI program's creator is paid for the work it did. And if that creator used copyrighted work, then he should be having to get permission to use it, because he's profitting off this AI program.
I would tend to agree with you on this one, although we don't need bad copyright legislation to deal with it, since laws can deal with it more directly. I would personally put in place an organization that requires rigorous proof that AI in those roles is significantly safer than a human, like the FDA does for medication.
I would too, but we need TIME to get that done and right now, lawsuits will buy us time. That was the point of my comment.
Except an AI is not taking inspiration, it's compiling information to determine mathematical averages.
The AIs we're talking about are neural networks. They don't do statistics, they don't have databases, and they don't take mathematical averages. They simulate neurons, and their ability to learn concepts is emergent from that, the same way the human brain is. Nothing about an artificial neuron ever takes an average of anything, reads any database, or does any statistical calculations. If an artificial neural network can be said to be doing those things, then so is the human brain.
There is nothing magical about how human neurons work. Researchers are already growing small networks out of animal neurons and using them the same way that we use artificial neural networks.
There are a lot of "how AI works" articles in there that put things in layman's terms (and use phrases like "statistical analysis" and "mathematical averages", and unfortunately people (including many very smart people) extrapolate from the incorrect information in those articles and end up making bad assumptions about how AI actually works.
A human being is paid for the work they do, an AI program's creator is paid for the work it did. And if that creator used copyrighted work, then he should be having to get permission to use it, because he's profitting off this AI program.
If an artist uses a copyrighted work on their mood board or as inspiration, then they should pay for that, because they're making a profit from that copyrighted work. Human beings should, as you said, be paid for the work they do. Right? If an artist goes to art school, they should pay all of the artists whose work they learned from, right? If a teacher teaches children in a class, that teacher should be paid a royalty each time those children make use of the knowledge they were taught, right? (I sense a sidetrack -- yes, teachers are horribly underpaid and we desperately need to fix that, so please don't misconstrue that previous sentence.)
There's a reason we don't copyright facts, styles, and concepts.
Oh, and if you want to talk about something that stores an actual database of scraped data, makes mathematical and statistical inferences, and reproduces things exactly, look no further than Google. It's already been determined in court that what Google does is fair use.
The AIs we're talking about are neural networks. They don't do statistics, they don't have databases, and they don't take mathematical averages. They simulate neurons, and their ability to learn concepts is emergent from that, the same way the human brain is.
This is not at all accurate. Yes, there are very immature neural simulation systems that are being prototyped but that's not what you're seeing in the news today. What the public is witnessing is fundamentally based on vector mathematics. It's pure math and there is nothing at all emergent about it.
If an artist uses a copyrighted work on their mood board or as inspiration, then they should pay for that, because they're making a profit from that copyrighted work.
That's not how copyright works, nor should it. Anyone who creates a mood board from a blank slate is using their learned experience, most of which they gathered from other works. If you were to write a book analyzing movies, for example, you shouldn't have to pay the copyright for all those movies. You can make a YouTube video right now with a few short clips from a movie or quotes from a book and you're not violating copyright. You're just not allowed to make a largely derivative work.
So to clarify, are you making the claim that nothing that's simulated with vector mathematics can have emergent properties?
load more comments
(7 replies)
@IncognitoErgoSum Gonna need a source on Large Language Models using neural networks based on the human brain here.
EDIT: Scratch that. I'm just going to need you to explain how this is based on the human brain functions.
I'm willing to, but if I take the time to do that, are you going to listen to my answer, or just dismiss everything I say and go back to thinking what you want to think?
Also, a couple of preliminary questions to help me explain things:
What's your level of familiarity with the source material? How much experience do you have writing or modifying code that deals with neural networks? My own familiarity lies mostly with PyTorch. Do you use that or something else? If you don't have any direct familiarity with programming with neural networks, do you have enough of a familiarity with them to at least know what some of those boxes mean, or do I need to explain them all?
Most importantly, when I say that neural networks like GPT-* use artificial neurons, are you objecting to that statement?
I need to know what it is I'm explaining.
@IncognitoErgoSum I don't think you can. Because THIS? Is not a model of how humans learn language. It's a model of how a computer learns to write sentences.
If what you're going to give me is an oversimplified analogy that puts too much faith in what AI devs are trying to sell and not enough faith in what a human brain is doing, then don't bother because I will dismiss it as a fairy tale.
But, if you have an answer that actually, genuinely proves that this "neural" network is operating similarly to how the human brain does... then you have invalidated your original post. Because if it really is thinking like a human, NO ONE should own it.
In either case, it's probably not worth your time.
If what you're going to give me is an oversimplified analogy that puts too much faith in what AI devs are trying to sell and not enough faith in what a human brain is doing, then don't bother because I will dismiss it as a fairy tale.
I'm curious, how do you feel about global warming? Do you pick and choose the scientists you listen to? You know that the people who develop these AIs are computer scientists and researchers, right?
If you're a global warming denier, at least you're consistent. But if out of one side of you're mouth you're calling what AI researchers talk about a "fairy tail", and out of the other side of your mouth you're criticizing other people for ignoring science when it suits them, then maybe you need to take time for introspection.
You can stop reading here. The rest of this is for people who are actually curious, and you've clearly made up your mind. Until you've actually learned a bit about how they actually work, though, you have absolutely no business opining about how policies ought to apply to them, because your views are rooted in misconceptions.
In any case, curious folks, I'm sure there are fancy flowcharts around about how data flows through the human brain as well. The human brain is arranged in groups of neurons that feed back into each other, where as an AI neural network is arranged in more ordered layers. There structure isn't precisely the same. Notably, an AI (at least, as they are commonly structured right now) doesn't experience "time" per se, because once it's been trained its neural connections don't change anymore. As it turns out, consciousness isn't necessary for learning and reasoning as the parent comment seems to think.
Human brains and neural networks are similar in the way that I explained in my original comment -- neither of them store data, neither of them do statistical analysis or take averages, and both learn concepts by making modifications to their neural connections (a human does this all the time, whereas an AI does this only while it's being trained). The actual neural network in the above diagram that OP googled and pasted in here lives in the "feed forward" boxes. That's where the actual reasoning and learning is being done. As this particular diagram is a diagram of the entire system and not a diagram of the layers of the feed-forward network, it's not even the right diagram to be comparing to the human brain (although again, the structures wouldn't match up exactly).
But, if you have an answer that actually, genuinely proves that this “neural” network is operating similarly to how the human brain does… then you have invalidated your original post. Because if it really is thinking like a human, NO ONE should own it.
I think this is a neat point.
The human brain is very complex. The neural networks trained on computers right now are more like collections of neurons grown together in a petri dish, rather than a full human brain. They serve one function, say, recognizing or generating an image or calculating some probability or deciding on what the next word should be in a sequence. While the brain is a huge internetwork of these smaller, more specialized neural networks.
No, neural networks don't have a database and they don't do stats. They're trained through trial and error, not aggregation. The way they work is explicitly based on a mathematical model of a biological neuron.
And when an AI is developed that's advanced enough to rival the actual human brain, then yeah, the AI rights question becomes a real thing. We're not there yet, though. Still just matter in petri dishes. That's a whole other controversial argument.
I don't believe that current AIs should have rights. They aren't conscious.
My point is was purely that AIs learn concepts and that concepts aren't copyrightable. Encoding concepts into neurons (that is, learning) doesn't require consciousness.
@IncognitoErgoSum If they don't have consciousness, then they aren't comparable to a human being being inspired. It is that simple.
The human who created the AI is profitting from the AI's work, but that human was not inspired by the works he used to train the AI. He fed them into a machine to help make that machine. It doesn't matter how close the machine is to human thought, it is a machine that is making something for other to profit from.
The people who created the AI took work without permission, used it to build and refine a machine, and are now using that machine to profit. They are selling that machine to people who would otherwise hire the people who did the work that was taken without permission and used to build the machine. This is all sorts of fucked up, man.
If an AI's creation is comparable to a direct human's creation, then it belongs to the AI. Whatever it is, it doesn't belong to the guys who built the AI OR the guys who BOUGHT the AI. Which is actually one of the demands from the WGA, that AI-generated scripts have NOBODY listed as the writer and NOBODY able to copyright that work.
SAG-AFTRA just got a contract offer that says background performers would get their likeness scanned and have it belong to the studio FOREVER so that they can simply generate these performers through AI.
This is what is happening RIGHT NOW. And you want to compare the output of an AI to a human's blood sweat and tears, and argue that copyright protections would HURT people rather than help them avoid exploitation.
Because that is what the AI programmers are doing, they are EXPLOITING living authors, living artists, living performers to create a machine that will replace those very people.
The copyright system, which yes is exploited and manipulated by these corporations, is still the only method we have to protect small-time creatives FROM those corporations. And right now, those corporations are poised to use AI to attack small-time creatives.
So yes, your comparison to human inspiration is a damned fairy tale. Because it whitewashes the exploitation of human workers by equating them to the very machine that's being used to exploit them.
Lots to unpack here.
First of all, the physical process of human inspiration is that a human looks at something, their optic nerves fire, those impulses activate other neruons in the brain, and an idea forms. That's exactly how an AI takes "inspiration" from images. This stuff about free will and consciousness is metaphysics. There's no meaningful difference in the actual process.
Secondly, let's look at this:
SAG-AFTRA just got a contract offer that says background performers would get their likeness scanned and have it belong to the studio FOREVER so that they can simply generate these performers through AI.
This is what is happening RIGHT NOW. And you want to compare the output of an AI to a human's blood sweat and tears, and argue that copyright protections would HURT people rather than help them avoid exploitation.
I'll say right off that I don't appreciate the "you're a bad person" schtick. Switching to personal attacks stinks of desperation. Plus, your personal attack on me isn't even correct, because I don't approve of the situation you described any more than you do. The reason they're trying to slip that into those people's contracts is because those people own their likenesses under existing copyright law. That is, you don't have to come up with a funny interpretation of copyright law where concepts can be copyrighted but only if a machine learns them. They need a license to use those people's likenesses regardless of whether they use an AI or Photoshop or just have a painter do it. Using AI doesn't get them out of that -- if it did; they wouldn't need to try to put it into the contract.
In other words, they aren't using an AI to attack anyone; they're using a powerful bargaining position to try to get people to sign away an established right they already have according to copyright law. That has absolutely nothing to do with anything I'm talking about here, except that you want to attach it to what I'm talking about so you can have something to rage about.
And here's the thing. None of you people ever gave a shit when anybody else's job was automated away. Cashiers have had their work automated away recently and all I hear is "ThAt'S oKaY bEcAuSe tHeIr jOb sUcKs!!!!!!111" Artists have been actually violating the real copyright of other artists (NOT JUST LEARNING CONCEPTS) with fanart (which is a DERIVATIVE WORK OF A COPYRIGHTED CHARACTER) for god only knows how long and there's certainly never been a big outcry about that.
It sucks to be the ones looking down the business end of automation. I know that because as a computer programmer I am too. On the other hand, I can see past the end of my own nose, and I know how amazing it would be if lots of regular people suddenly had the ability to do the things that I do, so I'm not going to sit there and creatively interpret copyright law in an attempt to prevent that from happening. If you're worried about the effects of automation, you need to start thinking about things like a universal healthcare and universal income, not just ESTABLISH SPECIAL PROTECTIONS FOR A TINY SUBSET OF PEOPLE WHOM YOU HAPPEN TO LIKE. It just seems a bit convenient, and (dare I say) selfish that the point in history that we need to start smashing the machines happens to be right now. Why not the printing press or the cotton gin or machines that build railroads or looms or or robots in factories or grocery store kiosks? The transition sucked for all those people as well. It's going to suck for artists, and it'll suck for me, but in the end we can pull through and be better off for it, rather than killing the technology in its infancy and calling everyone a monster who doesn't believe that you and you alone ought to have special privileges.
We need to be using the political clout we have to push us toward a workable post-scarcity economy, as opposed to trying to preserve a single, tiny bit of scarcity so a small group of people can continue to do something while everybody else is automated away and we all end up ruled by a bunch of rent-seeking corporations. Your gatekeeping of the ability of people to do art isn't going to prevent any of that.
P.S. We seem to be at the very beginning of a major climate disaster these last couple weeks, so we're probably all equally fucked anyway.
Dude, I'm not calling you a bad person. I am calling you out of touch with a very real problem.
Look, you asked what the endgame was for people who hoped that copyright would get applied to AI. I TOLD you. We want to slow down the deployment of AI by large companies and establish legal protections for creatives and others who
You responded by comparing the AI to those human creatives, which honestly is a trap I fell into. Because it derails us from the point, which is those creatives need legal protection. The legal system will see AI as a tool no matter HOW similar or dissimilar it is to a human being until an AGI comes along that is granted legal personhood. Then those legal restrictions won't apply to that AGI, and it will instead fall under the legal restrictions applied to people.
Because the intended use of art is communication between PEOPLE. And the person involved in AI right now is the person who feeds it the art and makes a machine to create what they desire. This is not the intended use case. It is not intended to create machines, it is intended to inspire people.
So unless your AI is LEGALLY classified as a person, applying copyright restrictions to it will not apply to a human reader that is inspired.
I DEFINITELY want a legal distinction between using my writing to make a machine and reading my writing.
Because using the work of creatives to make an AI is exploitation. And I don't think we should preserve the right of a corporation to exploit creatives just so that the average person can ALSO exploit creatives.
But if it makes you happy, how about we get a copyright ala Creative Commons that can allow an individual to create an AI using the copyrighted work for non-profit reason, but restrict corporations from doing so with an AI used for profit, and considers any work created by this AI to be noncopyrighted.
But if it makes you happy, how about we get a copyright ala Creative Commons that can allow an individual to create an AI using the copyrighted work for non-profit reason, but restrict corporations from doing so with an AI used for profit, and considers any work created by this AI to be noncopyrighted.
Honestly, I think keeping the output of AI non-copyrighted is probably the best of both worlds, because it allows individuals to use AI as an expressive tool (you keep separating "creatives" from "average people", which I take issue with) while making it impractical for large media companies to use.
At any rate, the reason copyright restrictions would just kill open source AI is that it strikes me as incredibly unlikely that you're going to be able to stop corporations from training AI on media that they own outright. Disney has a massive library of media that they can use as training data, and no amount of stopping open source AI users from training AI on copyrighted works is going to prevent Disney from doing that (same goes for Warner Bros, etc). Disney, which is known for exploiting its own workers, will almost certainly use that AI to replace their animators completely, and they'll be within their legal rights to do so since they own all the copyrights on it.
Now consider companies like Adobe, Artstation, and just about any other website that you can upload art to. When you sign up for those sites, you agree to their user agreement, which has standard boilerplate language that gives them a sublicenseable right to use your work however they see fit (or "for business purposes", which means the same thing). In other words, if you've ever uploaded your work anywhere, you've already given someone else the legal right to train an AI on your work (even with a creative interpretation of copyright law that allows concepts and styles to be copyrighted), which means they're just going to build their own AI and then sell it back to you for a monthly fee.
But artists and writers should be compensated every time someone uses an AI trained on their work, right? Well, let's look at ChatGPT for a moment. I have open source code out there on github, which was almost certainly included in ChatGPT's training data. Therefore, when someone uses ChatGPT for anything (since the training data doesn't go into a database; it just makes tiny tiny little changes to neuron connection weights), they're using my copyrighted work, and thus they owe me a royalty. Who better to handle that royalty check but OpenAI? So now you get on there and use ChatGPT, making use of my work, and some of the "royalty fee" they're now charging goes to me. Similarly, ChatGPT has been trained on some of whatever text you've added to the internet (comments, writing, whatever, it doesn't matter), so when I use it, you get royalties. So far so good. Now OpenAI charges us both, keeps a big commission, and we both pay them $50/month for the privilege of access to all that knowledge, and we both make $20/month because people are using it, for a net -$30/month. Who wins? OpenAI. With a compensation scheme, the big corporations win every time and the rest of us lose, because it costs money to do it, and open source can't do it at all. Better to skip the middle man, say here's an AI that we all contributed to and we all have access to.
So again, what specifically is your plan to slow down deployment? Because onerous copyright restrictions aren't going to stop any of the people who need to be stopped, but they will absolutely stop the people competing with those people.
@IncognitoErgoSum Honestly? Arguing against AI to anyone I can find and supporting any legal action to regulate the industry. That includes my boss when he considers purchasing an AI service.
If find something that's mine has been used to train an AI, I am willing to join a class action suit. The next work contract renegotiation I have will take into account the possibility of my writing being used to train, and it'll be a no. I'm supporting the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes because those contracts will set important precedents on how AI can be used in creative industries at least, and will likely spread to other industries.
And I think if enough people don't buy into the hype, and are skeptical, and public opinion remains against it, then it's less likely AI will be used in industries that need a strict safety standard until we get a regulatory agency for it.
I get it, then.
It's more about the utilitarian goal of convincing people of something that it's convenient for you if the public believes it, in order to protect yourself and your immediate peers from automation, as opposed to actually seeking the truth and sticking going with established legal precedent.
Legally, your class action lawsuit doesn't really have a leg to stand on, but you might manage to win anyway if you can depend on the ignorance of the judge and the jury about how AI actually works, and prejudice them against it. If you can get people to think of computer scientists and AI researches as "tech bros" instead of scientists with PHDs, you might be able to get them to dismiss what they say as "hype" and "fairy tales".
I still say you're wrong about how the AI actually works, man. You're looking at it with rose-colored goggles, head filled with sci-fi catch phrases. But it's just a math machine.
I'm looking at it with a computer science degree and experience with AI programming libraries.
And yes, it's a machine that simulates neurons using math. We simulate physics with math all the way down to the quantum foam. I don't know what your point is. Whether it's simulated neurons or real neurons, it learns concepts, and concepts cannot be copyrighted.
I have a sneaking suspicion since you switched tactics from googling the wrong flowchart to accusing me of not caring about workers due to a contract dispute that's completely unrelated to anything of the copyright stuff I'm talking about, I have a feeling you at least suspect that I know what I'm talking about.
Anyway, since you're arguing based on personal convenience and not fact, I can't really trust anything that you say anyway, because we're on entirely different wavelengths. You've already pretty much indicated that even if I were to convince you I'm right, you'd still go on doing exactly what you're doing, because you're on a crusade to save a small group of your peers from automation, and damn the rest of us.
Best of luck to you.
Yeah, we're on different wavelengths. But I do have over twenty years in cyber transport and electronics. I know the first four layers in and out, including that physical layer it seems just about all programmers forget about completely.
It's not learning. It's not reading. It's not COMPREHENDING. It is processing. It is not like a person.
I admit, I'm firing from any direction I can get an angle at because this idea that these programs are actual AGI and are comparable to humanity is well... dangerous. There are people with power and influence who want to put these things in areas that WILL get people hurt. There are people who are dying to put them to work doing every bit of writing from scripts to NOTAMs and they are horrifically unreliable because they have no way of verifying the ACCURACY of what they right. They do not have the ability to make a judgement, which is a key component of human thinking. They can only favor the set result coming through the logic gate. If A and B enter, B comes out. If A and A enter, A comes out. It has no way to evaluate whether A or B is the actual answer.
You call it a small group of my peers, but everyone is in trouble because people with money are SEVERELY overestimating the capabilities of these programs. The danger is not that AI will take over the world, but that idiots will hand AI the world and AI will tank it because AI does not come with the capabilities needed to make actual decisions.
So yeah, I bring up the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike. Because that happens to be the best known example of the harm being done not by the AI, but by the people who have too much faith in the AI and are ready to replace messy humans of all stripes with it.
And I argue with you, because you have too much faith in the AI. I'm not impressed by your degree to be perfectly honest because in my years in the trade I have known too many people with that degree who think they know way more than they do and end up having to rely on people like me to keep them grounded in what actually can be accomplished.
What, specifically, do you think I'm wrong about?
If it's the future potential of AI, that's just a guess. AGI could be 100 years away (or financially impossible) as easily as it could be 5 years. AGI is in the future still, and nobody is really qualified to guess when it'll come to fruition.
If you think I'm wrong about the present potential of AI, I've already seen individuals with no budget use it to express themselves in ways that would have required an entire team and lots of money, and that's where I believe its real potential right now lies. That is, opening up the possibility for regular period to express themselves in ways that were impossible for them before. If Disney starts replacing animators with AI, I'll be right there with you boycotting them. AI should be for everyone, not for large corporations that can already afford to express themselves however they want.
If you think I'm wrong that AIs like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion do their computing with simulated neurons, let me know and I'll try to find some literature about it from the source. I've had a lot of AI haters confidently tell me that it doesn't (including in this thread), and I don't know if you're in that camp or not.
load more comments
(10 replies)
Oh, 100%. They're way too rudimentary. NNs alone don't go through the sense-think-act loops that necessitates a conscious autonomous agent. One day, maybe, but again, we're at the brain matter in petri dish stage.
I agree on the concepts thing too. People learn to paint by imitating what they see around them, their favourite artists, their favourite comics and cartoons. Then, over time with practice and experimentation, these things get encoded, but there's always that influence there somewhere.
Midjourney just has the benefit of being able to learn from way more imagery in a way shorter of an amount of time and practice way faster than any living human. So like, I get why artists are scared of it, but there's definitely a fundamental misunderstanding around how these things work floating around.
Many things in life are a privilege for these groups. AI is no different.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with this. It will only be a privilege for these groups of we choose to artificially make it that way. And why would you want to do that?
Do you want to give AI exclusively to the rich? If so, why?
I think he was just stating a fact.
For something to be a fact, it needs to actually be true. AI is currently accessible to everyone.
I disagree. I can barely run a 13B parameter model locally. Much less a 175B parameter model like GPT3. Or GPT4, whatever that model truly is. Or whatever behemoth of a model the NSA almost certainly has and just hasn't told anyone about. I'll eat my sock if the NSA doesn't have a monster LLM along with a myriad of other special purpose models by now.
And even though the research has (mostly) been public so far, the resources needed to train these massive models is out of reach for all but the most privileged. We can train a GPT2 or GPT-Neo if we're dedicated, but you and I aren't training an open version of GPT4.
AI is more than just ChatGPT.
When we talk about reinterpreting copyright law in a way that makes AI training essentially illegal for anything useful, it also restricts smaller and potentially more focused networks. They're discovering that smaller networks can perform very well (not at the level of GPT-4, but well enough to be useful) if they're trained in a specific way where reasoning steps are spelled out in the training.
Also, there are used nvidia cards currently selling on Amazon for under $300 with 24 gigs of ram and AI performance almost equal to a 3090, which puts group-of-experts models like a smaller version of GPT-4 within reach of people who aren't ultra-wealthy.
There's also the fact that there are plenty of companies currently working on hardware that will make AI significantly cheaper and more accessible to home users. Systems like ChatGPT aren't always going to be restricted to giant data centers, unless (as some people really want) laws are passed to prevent that hardware from being sold to regular people.
I want to be clear that I don't disagree with your premise and your assertion that AI training should be legal regardless of copyright of the training material. My only point was that the original commenter said the ultra-elites have privilege over us little guys, and he was right in that regard. I have no ideas how that plays into his opinion on this whole matter, only that what he said on its face is accurate.
But you can run it.
I've got a commodity GPU and I've been doing plenty of work with local image generation. I've also run and fine-tuned LLMs, though more out of idle interest than for serious usage yet. If I needed to do more serious work, renting time on cloud computing for this sort of thing actually isn't all that expensive.
The fact that the very most powerful AIs aren't "accessible" doesn't mean that AI in general isn't accessible. I don't have a Formula 1 racing car but automobiles are still accessible to me.
If we're just talking about what you can do, then these laws aren't going to matter because you can just pirate whatever training material you want.
But that is beside my actual point, which is that there is a practical real-world limit to what you, the little guy, and they, the big guys, can do. That disparity is the privilege that OP way back up at the top mentioned.
I have no idea what that original commenter's opinion on copyright vs training is. Personally I agree with the OP-OP of the whole thread. Training isn't copying, and even if it were the public interest outweighs the interests of the copyright holders in this regard. I'm just saying that in the real world there is a privilege that that the elites and ultra-corps have over us, regardless of what systems we set up unless capitalism and society as a whole is upended.
At this point we're just bickering over semantics.
load more comments
(4 replies)
I've been thinking along your line. My concern has been that dictatorships would violate the western copyright and would thus go further than the west and especially europeans, who are heading to very strict laws. It's a nightmare scenario.
And your concern on the rich only makes sense to me, too.
You have not clearly defined the danger. You just said "ai is here". Well, lawyers are here too and they have the law on their side. Also the ai will threaten their model, so they will probably have no mercy anyway and will work full time on the subject.
Wealthy and powerful corporations fear the law above anything else. A single parliament can shut down their activity better than anyone else on the planet.
Maybe you talk from the point of view of a corrupt country like the USA, but the EU parliament, which BTW doesn't host any GAFAM, is totally ready to strike hard on the businesses founded on AI.
See, people doesn't want to lose their job to a robot and they will fight for it. This induces a major threat to the ai: people destroying data centers. They will do it. Their interests will converge with the interest of the people caring about global warming. Don't take the ai as something inevitable. An ai has a high dependency on resources and generates unemployment and pollution, and a questionable value.
An AI requires:
Energy
Water
High tech hardware
Network
Security
Stability
Investments
It's like a nuclear powerplant but more fragile. If an activist group takes down a datacenter hosting an ai, who will blame them? The jury will take turns to high five them.
I don't think the EU is so lawless as to allow blatant property destruction, and if it is, I can't imagine such a lack of rule of law will do much for the EU's future economic prosperity.
I'm probably just a dumb hick American though.
The economic prosperity came bundled with an ecological debt, provoked by the overusage of oil. Oil is cheap and makes everything cheap. Remove oil and everything increase in price. The "prosperity" is behind us now. I don't see how an AI described above would bring in term of prosperity.
There is a debate in France about the morality of acting against the law when it comes to protesting against global warming. And a datacenter is in the jurisdiction of the people fighting against global warming.
We should not take order for granted. Keep in mind that the temperature will ramp up slowly each year, destroying our environment a little bit more each year. When the time of sacrifice will come I bet that the AI will be very high on the list.
And a datacenter is in the jurisdiction of the people fighting against global warming.
Let me know when a judge agrees with this. Hell, I'll shoot $100 to you.
Why do you think people will build data centers in Europe when they can build them elsewhere?
Tell us, I don't know. All I know is that when a data center will require more water than the environment can provide, there will be conflicts for water, and the people living around will protest. And the most active of them will pull the plug at night or funny stuff like that. Data centers are fragile things.
As the technology improves, data centers that run AI will require significantly less cooling. GPUs aren't very power-efficient for doing AI stuff because they have to move a lot of data around from their memory to their processor cores. There are AI-specific cards being worked on that will allow the huge matrix multiplications to happen in place without that movement happening, which will mean drastically lower power and cooling requirements.
Also, these kinds of protestors are the same general group of people who stopped nuclear power from becoming a bigger player back in the 1960s and 70s. If we'd gone nuclear and replaced coal, we almost certainly wouldn't be sitting here at the beginning of what looks to be a major global warming event that's unlike anything we've ever seen before. It wouldn't have completely solved the problem, but it would have bought us time. An AI may be able to help us develop ideas to mitigate global warming, and it seems ridiculous to me to go all luddite and smash the machines over what will be a minuscule overall contribution to it given the possibility that it could help us solve the problem.
But let's be real here; these hypothetical people smashing the machines are doing it because they've bought into AI panic, not because they're afraid of global warming. If they really want to commit acts of ecoterrorism, there are much bigger targets.
I can't believe that you are blaming the green people! Those people are the one who consume the less and begged you to consume less. Did you do it? No, you didn't. Had people like you listened then we wouldn't be in our current situation. You wanted the ultimate comfort no matter what and you listened to nothing. We've been talking about greenhouse effect since the previous century.
You will never move a boat with nuclear, you will never move an airplane with nuclear, you will never fertilize a field with nuclear. Stop dreaming.
Also, these kinds of protestors are the same general group of people who stopped nuclear power from becoming a bigger player back in the 1960s and 70s. If we'd gone nuclear and replaced coal, we almost certainly wouldn't be sitting here at the beginning of what looks to be a major global warming event that's unlike anything we've ever seen before. It wouldn't have completely solved the problem, but it would have bought us time.
Short sighted view of the problem. First there is not enough uranium for everyone.
Second, nuclear power is reserved to stable countries.
Third, there is no uranium in the EU, making it yet another tool for pressuring countries.
An AI may be able to help us develop ideas to mitigate global warming, and it seems ridiculous to me to go all luddite and smash the machines over what will be a minuscule overall contribution to it given the possibility that it could help us solve the problem.
HAHAHA!
"The AI will save us!"
Eat less meat! How hard is it to compute! So turn off your stupid AI and eat less meat. Do it now, stop eating meat.
You know exactly what to do, you just DONT WANT TO DO IT BECAUSE YOU ARE LAZY AND ADDICTED TO COMFORT.
If you don't do what ten thousands of scientists are telling you to do right now then you will never do what a robot tells you to do. Your face when the AI will tell you to stop eating meat. "But this is not possible, we can't do this, the AI is wrong! We need a bigger AI!!"
omg, the denial.
But let's be real here; these hypothetical people smashing the machines are doing it because they've bought into AI panic, not because they're afraid of global warming. If they really want to commit acts of ecoterrorism, there are much bigger targets.
Like the tires of your car.
You will never move a boat with nuclear,
I assume you haven't heard of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines.
Also, nuclear power can be stored in batteries and capacitors and then used to move electric vehicles (including boats, planes, and tractors), so I don't know what the hell you're even talking about.
Eat less meat! How hard is it to compute! So turn off your stupid AI and eat less meat. Do it now, stop eating meat.
I've actually cut my meat consumption way down.
That being said, a person using AI consumes an absolutely minuscule amount of power compared to a person eating a steak. One steak (~20kwh) is equivalent to about 60 hours of full time AI usage (300W for an nvidia A100 at max capacity), and most of the time a person spends using an AI is spent idling while they type and read, so realistically it's a lot longer than that.
Again, your hypothetical data center smashers are going after AI because they hate AI, not because they care about the environment. There are better targets for ecoterrorism. Like my car's tires, internet tough guy.
I assume you haven't heard of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines.
You are talking about military equipment. I'm talking about trade. There are more than 100k cargo ships today.
Also, nuclear power can be stored in batteries and capacitors and then used to move electric vehicles (including boats, planes, and tractors), so I don't know what the hell you're even talking about.
You will never, ever, EVER make 100k cargo ships move on battery power.
There are better targets for ecoterrorism
The latest buzzword.
Wow, you have this all planned out, don't you?
If that's what Europe is like, they'll build their data centers somewhere else. Like the corrupt USA. Again, you'll be taking away your access to AI, not theirs.
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
30 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
124 readers
1 users here now
This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the latest developments, trends, and innovations in the world of technology. Whether you are a tech enthusiast, a developer, or simply curious about the latest gadgets and software, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as artificial intelligence, robotics, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and more. From the impact of technology on society to the ethical considerations of new technologies, this category covers a wide range of topics related to technology. Join the conversation and let's explore the ever-evolving world of technology together!
founded 2 years ago