Niels AbildgaardMar 15

I have some mixed feelings on the commons, LLMs, ownership and economics. Would love some input.

I find this hard to navigate so I hope you all can extend me some grace if I mess up. Happy to read and engage, please send links. So... here goes:

I'm seeing a lot of reactions to LLM value extraction that stand on copyright, or where people are reducing their contribution to the commons as a response. This feels like throwing the game to me: the worst move in a hard situation.

#noAI #ai #llm

Show threadRaymond Neilson has moved to cosocial.caMar 15

@nielsa My position is, roughly:

  • copyright has always a dodge and a smudge, a truce of sorts, because nobody creates anything ex nihilo and disentangling the web of influence and cross-pollination is impossible, but people gotta get paid
  • as a legal construct, copyright may or may not protect any given form or piece of art, but most people aren't talking about the legal construct, but the terms of the above truce
  • ingestion is usually what's mentioned WRT copyright (see the Anthropic book settlement), but reproduction is the legal problem, and the AI companies have spent a lot of time suppressing regurgitation of the training data (to some effect but not complete elimination)
  • I think the moral case is easy to make and easy to understand, but the legal one is a minefield, and the real solution is some more explicit legislation and/or regulations
Show threadRaymond Neilson has moved to cosocial.caMar 15
@nielsa (all that said, I'm quite sympathetic to just outright banning image and video generation models entirely - they have absolutely no use case that's worth the utter shitpile they cause)
Show threadNiels AbildgaardMar 16
@delta_vee I think I broadly agree with your takes on all of these things. I always find legal solutions hard to argue about meaningfully, because I don't really respect the current global legal system. I don't think legislation will ever be the final solution - I think we should be preparing as much as we can for more structural change, rather than relying on existing (e.g. legal) structures.
Show threadRaymond Neilson has moved to cosocial.ca
@nielsa I think the structural change is going to have to be to some extent within the structures of the legal system, because for all its faults, that's ultimately the mechanism we have that's anything close to both a) democratically (ish) controlled, and b) plausibly effective at restraining corporate machinery
Mar 16 at 2:24pmWeb