this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
379 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37712 readers
568 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

In its submission to the Australian government’s review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Imagine being able to recall the important parts of a movie, it's overall feel, and significant themes and attributes after only watching it one time.

That's significantly closer to what current AI models do. It's not copyright infringement that there are significant chunks of some movies that I can play back in my head precisely. First because memory being owned by someone else is a horrifying thought, and second because it's not a distributable copy.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the thought of human memory being owned is horrifying. We’re talking about AI. This is a paradigm shift. New laws are inevitable. Do we want AI to be able to replicate small creators work and ruin their chances at profitability? If we aren’t careful, we are looking at yet another extinction wave where only the richest who can afford the AI can make anything. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to be concerned.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The question to me is how you define what the AI is doing in a way that isn't hilariously overbroad to the point of saying "Disney can copyright the style of having big eyes and ears", or "computers can't analyze images".

Any law expanding copyright protections will be 90% used by large IP holders to prevent small creators from doing anything.

What exactly should be protected that isn't?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

If I had the answer I’d be writing my congresswoman immediately. All I know is allowing AI unfettered access to just have all content is going to be a huge problem.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

How many movies are based on each other? It's a lot, even if it's just loosely based on it. If you stopped allowing that then you would run out of new things to do.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Let me ask you this: do you think our brains and LLM’s are, overall, pretty distinct? This is not a trick or bait or something, I’m just going through this methodically in hopes my position - which is shared by some others in this thread it seems - is better understood.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I don't think they work the same way, but I think they work in ways that are close enough in function that they can be treated the same for the purposes of this conversation.

Pen and pencil are "the same", and either of those and printed paper are "basically the same".
The relationship between a typical modern AI system and the human mind is like that between a pencil written document and a word document: entirely dissimilar in essentially every way, except for the central issue of the discussion, namely as a means to convey the written word.

Both the human mind and a modern AI take in input data, and extract relationships and correlations from that data and store those patterns in a batched fashion with other data.
Some data is stored with a lot of weight, which is why I can quote a movie at you, and the AI can produce a watermark: they've been used as inputs a lot. Likewise, the AI can't perfectly recreate those watermarks and I can't tell you every detail from the scene: only the important bits are extracted. Less important details are too intermingled with data from other sources to be extracted with high fidelity.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

my head [...] not a distributable copy.

There has been an interesting counter-proposal to that: make all copies "non-distributable" by replacing the 1:1 copying, by AI:AI learning, so the new AI would never have a 1:1 copy of the original.

It's in part embodied in the concept of "perishable software", where instead of having a 1:1 copy of an OS installed on your smartphone/PC, a neural network hardware would "learn how to be a smartphone/PC".

Reinstalling, would mean "killing" the previous software, and training the device again.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Right, because the cool part of upgrading your phone is trying to make it feel like its your phone, from scratch. Perishable software is anything but desirable, unless you enjoy having the very air you breathe sold to you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, depends on desirable "by whom".

Imagine being a phone manufacturer and having all your users running a black box only you have the means to re-flash or upgrade, with software developers having to go through you so you can train users' phones to "behave like they have the software installed"

It's a dictatorial phone manufacturer's wet dream.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, that's exactly my problem with it.