Comment by tptacek
6 days ago
Adobe is one of the most successful corporations in the history of commerce; the piracy technologists enabled wrecked most media industries.
Again, the argument I'm making regarding artists is that LLMs are counterfeiting human art. I don't accept the premise that structurally identical solutions in software counterfeit their originals.
> Adobe is one of the most successful corporations in the history of commerce; the piracy technologists enabled wrecked most media industries.
I guess that makes it ok then for artists to pirate Adobe's product. Also, I live in a music industry hub -- Nashville -- you'll have to forgive me if I don't take RIAA at their word that the music industry is in shambles, what with my lying eyes and all.
> Again, the argument I'm making regarding artists is that LLMs are counterfeiting human art. I don't accept the premise that structurally identical solutions in software counterfeit their originals.
I'm aware of the argument you are making. I imagine most of the people here understand the argument you are making. Its just a really asinine argument and is propped up by all manner of special pleading (but art is different, programmers are all naughty pirates that deserve to be punished) and appeals to authority (check my post history - I've established my bona fides.)
There simply is no serious argument to be made that LLMs reproducing one work product and displacing labor is better or worse than an LLM reproducing a different work product and displacing labor. Nobody is going to display some ad graphic from the local botanical garden's flyer for their spring gala at The Met. That's what is getting displaced by LLM. Banksy isn't being put out of business by stable diffusion. The person making the ad for the botanical garden's flyer has market value because they know how to draw things that people like to see in ads. A programmer has value because they know how to write software that a business is willing to pay for. It is as elitist as it is incoherent to say that one person's work product deserves to be protected but another person's does not because of "creativity."
Your argument holds no more water and deserves to be taken no more seriously than some knucklehead on Mastodon or Bluesky harping about how LLMs are going to cause global warming to triple and that no output LLMs produce has any value.
Well, I disagree with you. For the nth time, though, I also don't grant the premise that LLMs are violative of the IPR of programmers. But more importantly than anything else, I just don't want to hear any of this from developers. That's not "your arguments are wrong and I have refuted them". It's "I'm not going to hear them from you".
> For the nth time, though, I also don't grant the premise that LLMs are violative of the IPR of programmers.
I wish you all the best waiting for a future where the legislature and courts decide that LLM output is violative of copyright law only in the visual arts.
> I just don't want to hear any of this from developers.
Well, you seem to have posted about the wrong topic in the wrong forum then. But you’ve heard what you’ve wanted to hear in the discussion related to this post, so maybe that doesn’t really matter.