Comment by triceratops
9 hours ago
You're missing the point. This is the crux of munificent's argument IMO (and I've made variations of it as well)
> We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others.
You getting a summary of a copyrighted work from a friend is necessarily limited by the number of friends you have, the amount of time they have to read stuff and talk to you, and so on. Machines (and AIs) don't have any limitations.
Yes, true. But does that really shift the argument much? An AI is like the most well-read book nerd you’ve ever met. The AI has read everything. They still won’t recite Harry Potter for you at full length and reading what the original author wrote is part of the pleasure.
> An AI is like the most well-read book nerd you’ve ever met. The AI has read everything
But no real book nerd has read everything. Current law was designed for the capabilities of humans.
Sure, we could change current law, but I think that only forces an AI company to buy one copy of every book. I don’t think it gives any sort of royalty stream to anyone beyond that. Copyright is literally the right to make copies. Once I have acquired a copy, I can read it, summarize it, transform it, etc. in myriad ways.
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Does a literal book nerd profit megacorporations when they bring up books to you? While burning through a household worth of energy in the process? Also, I’d like to talk with such book nerd because they’d have opinions on books, potentially if I brought up something I have read we could exchange thoughts about it, they could make recommendations for me based on their complex experiences instead of statistics from Reddit comments. An LLM can do none of those, while also doing the former. It’s a lose-lose.
Also, a book nerd doesn’t take roughly ~all human created text to train to produce meaningful results. It’s just such a misplaced analogy and people have been making it ever since OpenAI announced chatgpt for the first time - why do people think “an LLM is just a human who read a lot”
Megacorporations making profit is not some evil that needs to be stopped. The economy is not zero sum.
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