Comment by Terretta
22 days ago
> violate copyright when training
If we could incrementally update our own brains by swapping cells for chips, what percentage of our brain has to be chips before us learning from a book is a violation of copyright?
When learning to recite a recent children's poem in kindergarten, what level of accuracy can a child attain before their ability to repeat it privately to one other person at a time is a copyright violation?
I don't think the concern is related specifically to training on computer chips with copyrighted content.
If you are going to use human brain cells to memorize protected content and sell it as a product, that's still an issue based on current copyright laws.
> If you are going to use human brain cells to memorize protected content and sell it as a product, that's still an issue based on current copyright laws.
And yet, that's all most billable hours at McKinsey, BCG, KPMG, are for. Those consultants memorized copyrighted stuff so your executives didn't have to.
It's very difficult to explain how GPT is not consulting.
The question there still comes down to what they did with the memorized content. There's nothing wrong with memorizing copyrighted content, there's legally a problem with trying to resell it without paying royalties under contract to the owner of the copyright.
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Once again...LLMs are not massive archives of data.
You would never want to use an LLM to archive your writings or documents. They are incredibly bad at this.
They were never designed to be archives though, of course they're bad at something that not only was not a goal bit is opposite of a primary design factor.
LLMs are massive, lossy compressed datasets. They were designed to store the gist of effectively all digital language content humans ever created so an inference engine could use that data space to predict what a person might say to a prompt.
They were never designed to regurgitate exact copies of the original sources just use your favorite zip algorithm for that.
The question would be how closely an LLM can regurgitate an answer before running into copyright issues, and how the original training dataset was obtained.
Want to abolish economic copyright alltogether? I could get behind that. Making a legal exception because of some imagined future metaphysical property of this particular platform sounds like being fooled.
Why not abolish copyright only when it suits multi-billion corporations and leave it in place for us, ordinary people who end up providing training data so that we can be replaced at our jobs?
Abolishing economic copyright while protecting (non-transferrable) moral rights is in this direction, I believe.
This is one issue with Microsoft's Total Recall thing, right? I wonder how they're dealing with that.
Others replied to this and I am still not sure what your point is. Are you saying big tech should be able to get away with this because LLMs are just like us humans?
> If we could incrementally update our own brains by swapping cells for chips, what percentage of our brain has to be chips before us learning from a book is a violation of copyright?
The same percentage at which you stop qualifying to be human and become an unthinking tool, fully controlled by its operator to do whatever they want, without free will of its own and without any ethical concerns about abuse and slavery, like is the case with all LLMs.
(Of course, it is a moot point, because creating a human-level consciousness with chips is a thought experiment not grounded in reality.)
> When learning to recite a recent children's poem in kindergarten, what level of accuracy can a child attain before their ability to repeat it privately to one other person at a time is a copyright violation?
Any level thanks to the concept called human rights and freedoms, famously not applied to machines and other unthinking tools.
This seems short sighted. The idea of when a "mechanical man" should be given the same rights as a man has been explored for a long time, as an echo of the past when people had the same debate about women and non-Europeans.
The ideas of FTL travel or existence of bearded people in the sky were also explored for a long time.
> as an echo of the past when people had the same debate about women and non-Europeans.
If you need help spotting the difference between skin color or gender variation and an imagined ability to imbue something we cannot even define (like consciousness) onto arbitrary substrates, I am not the right person for that.
If you think LLMs are like conscious humans and should be given the same rights, I don’t see anything wrong with it. You should realize, however, that this means the LLM industry would instantly be dead because you cannot really subject conscious humans to what LLMs are subjected to in order to be profitable.