Comment by ethbr1
7 months ago
The "fairness" argument is weaker than the "sustainable creation" one.
If LLMs could create quality literature, or social media create in-depth reporting, then I'd have no problem with the tide of technological progress flowing.
Unfortunately, recent history has shown that it's trivial for the market to cannibalize the financial model of creators without replacing it.
And as a result, society gets {no more that thing} + {watered down, shitty version}.
Which isn't great.
So I'd love to hear an argument from the 'fuck copyright, let's go AI' crowd (not the position you seem to be espousing) on what year +10 of rampant AI ingestion of copyrighted works looks like...
I guess the optimistic take would be that we will get novel, insightful synthesis of disparate fields of knowledge that no human so far was ever able to hold in their mind to contemplate their interrelations. And this will elevate the human spirit etc. The equivalent to the take that the Internet will bring peoples together and foster better understanding and love between people who so far were not in dialogue and this will bring peace and an understanding or how similar we all are etc etc. Not exactly how it played out in the end though. Or how social media and web 2.0 will bring enhanced democracy and transparency and clarity and that the common person will have a voice and so on.
So I'm not exactly naive, but we should then discuss this instead of the red herring of copyright.
I suppose another strongman would be that LLMs substantially decrease the cost of human creation (i.e. the HITL assistant use case) while producing an output of equivalent quality.
As a result of this, everything gets cheaper and more plentiful.
The counterargument I'd make to that would be the requirement that the human have creative skills, which might atrophy in the absence of business models supporting a career creating.
Generally, having cheap mass produced things can be great compared to only expensive artisanal stuff that only the rich can afford. Think about furniture, clothes etc. or all the other stuff you have in the house, compared to 100-150 years ago. Today we can buy pretty good mass produced furniture for example. A few generations ago people either did it themselves in a wonky way or paid a lot of money for a hand made carpentry option. Just like with LLMs. LLMs probably do a better job in general writing than a random person off the street. But it's not as good as the top performers. But it's much cheaper. It's a tradeoff.
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