Comment by simoncion
6 days ago
> It's not a reasonable paraphrase of my argument either, but you know that.
To quote from your essay:
"But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.
The median dev thinks Star Wars and Daft Punk are a public commons. The great cultural project of developers has been opposing any protection that might inconvenience a monetizable media-sharing site. When they fail at policy, they route around it with coercion. They stand up global-scale piracy networks and sneer at anybody who so much as tries to preserve a new-release window for a TV show."
Man, you might not see the resemblance now, but if you return to it in three to six months, I bet you will.
Also, I was a professional musician in a former life. Given the content of your essay, you might be surprised to know how very, very fast and loose musicians as a class play with copyright laws. In my personal experience, the typical musician paid for approximately zero of the audio recordings in their possession. I'd be surprised if things weren't similar for the typical practitioner of the visual arts.
I agree this is a bad "collective punishment" argument from him, even if I think he's somewhat right in spirit because I as a software dev don't care in the slightest about LLMs training on code, text, videos, or images and fully believe it's equivalent to humans perceiving and learning from the output of others and I know many or most software devs agree on that point while most artists don't.
I think artists are very cavalier about IP, on average. Many draw characters from franchises that do not allow such drawing, and often directly profit by selling those images. Do I think that's bad? No. (Unless it's copying the original drawing plagiaristically.) Is it odd that most of the people who profit in this way consider generative AI unethical copyright infringement? I think so.
I think hypocrisy on the issue is annoying. Either you think it's cool for LLMs to learn from code and text and images and videos or you don't think any of it is fine. tptacek should bite one bullet or the other.
I don't accept the premise that "training on" and "copying" are the same thing, any more than me reading a book and learning stuff is copying from the book. But past that, I have, for the reasons stated in the piece, absolutely no patience for software developers trying to put this concern on the table. From my perspective, they've forfeited it.
> I don't accept the premise that "training on" and "copying" are the same thing...
Nor do I. Training and copying are clearly different things... and if these tools had never emitted -verbatim- nontrivial chunks of the code they'd ingested, [0] I'd be much less concerned about them. But as it stands now, some-to-many of the companies that build and deploy these machines clearly didn't care to ensure that their machines simply wouldn't plagiarize.
I've a bit more commentary that's related to whether or not what these companies are doing should be permitted here. [1]
[0] Based on what I've seen, when it happens, it is often with either incorrect copyright and/or license notifications, or none of the verbiage the license of the copied code requires in non-trivial reproductions of that code.
[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44166983>
Who is this "they" who have forfeited it?
What about the millions of software developers who have never even visited a pirate site, much less built one?
Are we including the Netflix developers working actively on DRM?
How about the software developers working on anti-circumvention code for Kindle?
I'm totally perplexed at how willing you are to lump a profession of more than 20 million people all into one bucket and deny all of them, collectively, the right to say anything about IP. Are doctors not allowed to talk about the society harms of elective plastic surgery because some of them are plastic surgeons? Is anyone with an MBA not allowed to warn people against scummy business practices because many-to-most of them are involved in dreaming those practices up?
This logic makes no sense, and I have to imagine that you see that given that you're avoiding replying to me.
2 replies →
I come from a family musicians (I'm the only non-musician in it).
Ah good. If one of your family were to bring a plagiarism suit against another musician (or company (regardless of whether that company's music was produced by humans or robots)) that'd clearly ripped off their work, would you decry them as a hypocrite?
If not, why not?
If so, (seriously, earnestly) kudos for being consistent in your thoughts on the matter.
And I'm the only one in mine who isn't either a musician or an author. I'm not sure why you believe that being in a creative family gives you some sort of divine authority to condemn the rest of us for our collective sins.