Comment by pyman
6 months ago
The problem with this thinking is that hundreds of thousands of teachers who spent years writing great, useful books and sharing knowledge and wisdom probably won't sue a billion dollar company for stealing their work. What they'll likely do is stop writing altogether.
I'm against Anthropic stealing teacher's work and discouraging them from ever writing again. Some teachers are already saying this (though probably not in California).
> The problem with this thinking is that hundreds of thousands of teachers who spent years writing great, useful books and sharing knowledge and wisdom probably won't sue a billion dollar company for stealing their work. What they'll likely do is stop writing altogether.
I think this is a fantasy. My father cowrote a Springer book about physics. For the effort, he got like $400 and 6 author copies.
Now, you might say he got a bad deal (or the book was bad), but I don't think hundreds of thousands of authors do significantly better. The reality is, people overwhelmingly write because they want to, not because of money.
I see where you are coming from: "My 8-yo son can also build websites".
Writing books is a profession.
Some people write full-time and make a living from it, through book sales, speaking gigs, teaching, or other related work.
Maybe ask Tim O’Reilly what he thinks about this so-called fantasy.
Like I said, Anthropic needs to stop stealing books or face the consequences.
No you don't see where I am coming from. And my father was a university professor. I am certainly not opposed to authors being fairly remunerated for their work, that's why I brought up that example.
My point is, the controversy is not an AI corporation vs 10^5 ordinary teachers. It's a battle of two corporations, or business models, if you will. But regardless of the result, most of the book authors will continue to get screwed, maybe the means will change. But it will not prevent them from writing, either. So I don't see any mass writers protests coming, sorry.
I also don't think Anthropic AI is going to be any less intelligent if it didn't read any modern fiction book, instead of reading a Wikipedia summary. Stories and myths are a human way of understanding the world, machines probably don't need them. And for non-fiction books - there really isn't that many irreplaceable high-profile authors out there. If it can't read, say, Feynman's Lectures on Physics, it can learn the same from 100s of other physics textbooks. Maybe they are slightly worse organized but why should superintelligence care?
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Stealing? In what way?
Training a generative model on a book is the mechanical equivalent of having a human read the book and learn from it. Is it stealing if a person reads the book and learns from it?
> In what way?
Downloading the book without paying for it, which is more or less what the judge said.
Depends on how closely that person can reproduce the original work without license or attribution
It actually depends on whether or not they reproduce it and especially what they do with the copy after making it.
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But a language model is not a person, it’s a copy machine with a blender inside.
Photocopying books in their entirety for commercial use is absolutely illegal.
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That will be sad, although there will still be plenty of great people who will write books anyway.
When it comes to a lot of these teachers, I'll say, copyright work hand in hand with college and school course book mandates. I've seen plenty of teachers making crazy money off students' backs due to these mandates.
A lot of the content taught in undergrad and school hasn't changed in decades or even centuries. I think we have all the books we'll ever need in certain subjects already, but copyright keeps enriching people who write new versions of these.
If you care so little about writing that AI puts you off it, TBH you're probably not a great writer anyhow.
Writers that have an authentic human voice and help people think about things in a new way will be fine for a while yet.
Yeah, people will still want to write. They might need new ways to monetize it... that being said, even if people still want to write they may not consider it a viable path. Again, have to consider other monetization.
They won't be needed anymore, once singularity is reached. This might be their thought process. This also exemplifies that the loathed caste system found in India is indeed in place in western societies.
There is no equality, and seemingly there are worker bees who can be exploited, and there are privileged ones, and of course there are the queens.
> They won't be needed anymore, once singularity is reached.
And it just so happens that that belief says they can burn whatever they want down because something in the future might happen that absolves them of those crimes.
:D
Note: My definition of singularity isn't the one they use in San Francisco. It's the moment founders who stole the life's work of thousands of teachers finally go to prison, and their datacentres get seized.
You can bet that this never gonna happen...
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