So… Let’s steal to advance our country. Really nice.
There’s not just a desperation for Skynet by US government, like protecting oil from EVs/renewables, this is also about creating new oligarchs to fund electoral results that oppress Americans/humanity.
which technically makes piracy legal because that’s the gov endorsing piracy
Legal for them, not for us
Peasants like us can contribute to global leadership by being wage slaves and cannon fodder
amen, brother!
Those were supposed to be the clanker jobs while we humans guided technical innovation, pursued art, culture, philosophy, and solving the biggest problems of humanity.
Nah we might need to accept reality. You need to be rich enough to make some bullshit company that uses A.I. then you can pirate legally using that A.I. as an excuse.
so Norm was right. …
should update torrent client to say “LLM training agent” instead, legally safe /s
I consider myself somewhat of a LLM.
there’s a Morrissey song about that
Remember that it’s always morally acceptable to break in and destroy AI data centers. The only ones harmed are not people.
Whatever, fuck AI slop.
So… pay for it? It’s not like the money isn’t there
Actually, is not
True. Profit is about the only thing these companies will never generate, but there’s still money being thrown at them, it’s just being spent on bonuses, mergers, and data centers.
Scrapers could peel off 1B of that to pay for what they’re taking (like the pay for antique, print only books—because they can’t physically steal those) instead of just robbing the commons if they really wanted to, if they thought that anything they were doing was ethically defensible or financially sustainable. ___
Where’s all the people shouting how awesome capitalism is, private ownership, the communists will come steal everything from you.
Here come capitalists to steal everything you own so they can make more money. Copyright, shmopyright. They’ve also got eminent domain on their side to build walls and data centers
Firmly an example of capitalism cannibalism themselves.
It may not abolish copyright but it is causing cracks.
Copyright was always a scam, non personal information should be free. Multiple people can have the same good idea, walling of access to a good idea behind capital blocks human progress.
Before anyone says something, yes artists deserve to eat… just like everyone else. Being economically productive should not be a condition for that. Make your art for fun and enjoy the honor of being copied with a sidedish of UBI.
15 years of non transferable copyright encourages creativity.
Some things (field of medicine/environmentalism) can’t wait 15 years for an effective democratised solution.
The idea that someone would be rewarded for limiting access to such solution sickens me.
Naturally they would deserve global praise possible in the form of a reward for creating the idea that changed the world for the better, but capitalism is designed to not do so.
To often in industry the actual creative inventor gets nothing, while the company they work under gets the patent to exploits the demand.
If employees owned the means of production, this would be a moot point… Just pointing that out for people.
It would be way less of a problem for sure, but not moot. An individual inventor can still stop other people from using an identical solution simply for being first to file the paperwork.
Sure, evidence?
Most big authors and artists dedicate their lives to their craft because, and this is true, once they finish writing a book or recording a song, they’ll get paid for people who buy or stream them. Without copyright, there’s zero reason to pay them.
Seems highly arbitrary. I always think about how early airplane tech was almost all developed in Europe because no one in America could work on anything adjacent after the Wright Bros patented their flyer. Intellectual property is intellectual theft.
It comes from this paper. Using existing data on recordings and books we obtain a point estimate of around 15 years for optimal copyright term
It makes sense that some copyright protection is beneficial to society as it encourages new works.
But I think the important part is to ensure copyright is non transferable. Then large corporations cannot build (and charge for) large libraries.
If we didnt have copyright laws then the wealthy would just copy everyone’s good ideas and ensure the people who created those ideas get little to nothing, like Amazon making their own versions of every popular item and selling it for less than the original product.
You must be joking, the vast majority of patents are owned by large corporations.
Can you give me one example of where copyright is protecting an average wealth citizen?
Enforcing copyright requires you to have the economic resources to create lawsuits when it gets infringed. Sometimes enforcing your rights can costs into millions of dollars. Infringers often have the resources to delay the legal case till you the rightsholder have no more money left to continue.
Places like china don’t care about it either and they will just copy and sell on the western market anyway.
Some sources for the later
Just because the copyright system has been perverted and bastardized by regulatory capture doesn’t mean the concept of copyright is bad. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
It’s mostly a nothing-burger right now:
This new Trump administration brief is not a ruling, as the case is being tried in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and the authors of the brief do not have jurisdiction.
The U.S. copyright office somewhat contradicts the brief:
The training process [also] implicates the right of reproduction.
– https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ Part 3, III, B.
Tho, the same documents do mention that “fair use” defenses can apply, but as always they depend on a lot of factors specific to individual acts of possible infringement.
Aaron Schwartz’s prosecution was always bullshit. RIP.
“Retain”? What in the actual fuck are you talking about? You surrendered that ages ago.
Gotta keep the voters believing the US is the best at everything.
Yeah, the forms of government propped up by capitalism tend to side with capitalism.
Precedent that copyright is not legally enforceable
Precedent that laws don’t apply to billionaires.
Crime is legal now.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be as upset if the playing field was level. Alright, you can slurp up and remix the world’s works, but so can anyone, for any reason, for free. Personally, I think use restrictions should only target commercial use, but I’m sure that’s a much more divisive topic. We have a law that is not being applied to those most likely to abuse it at scale.
Precendent was already there. Copyright has never been enforceable when it’s transformative. Collage is legal, so was training neural nets before the copyright industry saw money in it.
No one is saying they output of an llm is copyright (this is a different debate).
What people are talking about is they stole copyright work. They pirated from torrent sights mass amounts of data. That’s the violation at problem.
Chinese models like Kimi are already competing head-to-head with Claude Opus in term of capability. And the main reason that kimi isn’t as widely used as Claude is because Chinese companies aren’t burning investors money to keep subscription prices low. I wonder how long will this dominance can last. Since investor money will eventually run out. and once that happens, what plans do they have to keep competing with free open weight models that already closed the gap.
The problem with capitalism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.
So hear me out.
From a purely strategic standpoint, the ultimate goal is artificial general intelligence. Eventually, humanity is going to get there. The question is who gets there first, and what they do with it.
The country that achieves genuinely transformative AGI first could potentially gain an enormous strategic advantage. And if AGI is capable of significantly accelerating AI research itself, that advantage could compound very quickly: AGI helps develop better AI, which accelerates scientific and technological development, which produces even more capable AI.
Whoever gets there second may not necessarily be permanently incapable of catching up, but they could find themselves facing a massive technological and economic gap that becomes increasingly difficult to close.
And here’s where I think things get uncomfortable.
The countries competing to develop this technology are not necessarily going to have the same restrictions. Some countries may be considerably less concerned about copyright, training data, ethical restrictions, censorship, or what subjects an AI is permitted to discuss.
I’m not saying those concerns aren’t legitimate. They absolutely are. But from a purely geopolitical standpoint, there is a potential danger in one country imposing significant self-restraints while its competitors don’t.
Because if AGI really does become as transformative as many people believe it could be, this isn’t just another technology race. It could become a race over scientific advancement, industrial capacity, military technology, economic productivity, and potentially the ability to develop even more advanced AI.
And, honestly, I would rather the United States and other democratic countries reach that point first than China, North Korea, or another highly authoritarian state.
That doesn’t mean I think democratic countries are incapable of abusing powerful technology. Of course they are. The point is that who controls a technology this powerful matters enormously.
So when people talk about AI development purely in terms of corporate profits or whether AI companies should be allowed to train on particular datasets, I think they’re sometimes missing the much larger geopolitical picture.
We’re potentially talking about a technology that could fundamentally alter the balance of power between nations.
That’s a very different conversation.
Disclaimer: I’m not necessarily advocating for AI or LLMs here. I’m simply trying to look at the situation from a purely strategic/geopolitical perspective and consider how governments and other actors might view the race toward AGI.
Well said.
explain why an AGI would propel intellectual and economic growth past its creator’s peers.
we already feed all of human knowledge into these dumbass chatbots and don’t get anything out of it other than super-autist pattern recognition.
“but if it could think, it would immediate solve all the problems plaguing humanity” – says the dumbass AI bro.
You know, it’s stuff like this that continues to irritate me to absolutely no end.
These dumbass chatbots you are referring to have already significantly changed the industry, for better or worse. The change has occurred. There are already so many things happening with these LLMs that are changing the way industries operate, and they aren’t even that good yet. Your personal bias against this technology has absolutely nothing to do with its applications.
The changes will increasingly be about computational power and the ability to process information at speeds and scales we have never seen before.
And this is where the potential of AGI becomes enormous.
Imagine an entity or device capable of taking essentially the entirety of human knowledge available to it, understanding the relationships between that information, reasoning across multiple fields simultaneously, and processing it at a speed and scale no human being could ever match. Now imagine that system being able to conduct research, identify patterns, generate and test hypotheses, design experiments, write software, analyze enormous datasets, and continuously improve its understanding of a problem.
That isn’t magic. That is essentially the direction this technology is moving toward. Current LLMs are crude and limited compared with what a true AGI would theoretically be capable of, but they are already demonstrating the basic premise: machines can process and synthesize information in ways that are extremely useful to humans.
An AGI capable of reliably doing those things could provide an absolutely massive advantage to humanity. Scientific research that takes teams of humans years could potentially be accelerated dramatically. Complex engineering problems could be attacked from thousands of different approaches simultaneously. Medical research, materials science, energy production, climate modeling, mathematics, and countless other fields could benefit from having an intelligence capable of working continuously across enormous bodies of information.
That doesn’t mean AGI would automatically make everything better. There are enormous risks, economic consequences, alignment problems, and questions about who controls such a system. Those are legitimate things to debate.
But dismissing the technology because you personally dislike current LLM chatbots doesn’t answer the question of what the technology could become.
Go use the technology. Stop being a Luddite when it comes to LLMs. It is already being used as a tool. It already does things that are useful and makes many tasks easier for humans. I know that’s an unpopular opinion on this platform, but it remains true regardless of how much you dislike the technology.
And, for the record, we have not fed “all of human knowledge” into an LLM. These systems are trained on enormous collections of available data, and there are legitimate and significant controversies surrounding the inclusion of copyrighted material in those datasets. Whether copyrighted works should be used for AI training without permission or compensation is a completely legitimate question. But that issue is separate from whether the underlying technology has useful applications.
The point is that AGI doesn’t need to possess every piece of human knowledge to be revolutionary. It needs to be capable of acquiring, understanding, reasoning about, and applying information at a scale and speed that humans cannot match.
If we ever achieve that, the question won’t be whether AGI can benefit humanity. The question will be how humanity chooses to use an intelligence with capabilities vastly beyond those of any individual human being.
