LocalLLaMA
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Of course, it would be better if governments would pass sensible laws on AI training. These lawsuits are a complete waste. But you can see the problem in Europe. The copyright industry has too much power. You don't get good laws. (In fairness, Japan did pretty well.)
That needs to be considered in fair use, but I don't see what difference it would make here.
That's a line by the copyright lobbyists. But economics doesn't work like that.
In a competitive market, producers must pass on costs. EG coffee and cocoa beans have become more expensive on world markets in the last year, so now coffee and chocolate are more expensive in stores.
AI is quite competitive. If AI firms are forced to pay license fees, then AI subscriptions will become more expensive for consumers. The money goes straight from everyone to rights-holders; a few people at the top.
Sure. I mean we're a bit different at both sides of the Atlantic. Europe regulates a lot more. We're not supposed to be ripped off by big companies, they're not supposed to invade our privacy, pollute the environment unregulated... Whether we succeed at that is a different story. But I believe that's the general idea behind social democracy and the European spirit. We value our freedom from being used and that's also why we don't have a two weeks notice and we do have regulated working hours and a lot of rules and bureaucracy. The US is more freedom to do something. Opportunity. And in my eyes that's the reason why it's the US with a lot of tech giants and AI companies. That just fosters growth. Of course it also includes negative effects on society and the people. But I don't think "right" and "wrong" are fitting categories here. It's a different approach and everything has consequences. We try to balance more, and Europe is more balanced than the US. But that comes at a cost.
Well, I don't think there is a lot of good things about copyright to begin with. Humanity would be better off if information were to be free and everyone had access to everything, could learn, remix and use and create what they like.
I think of copyright more as an necessary evil. But somehow we needed Terry Pratchett to be able to make a living by writing novels. My favorite computer magazine needs to pay their employees. A music band can focus on a new album once they get paid for that... So I don't think we need copyright in specific. But we need some way so people write books, music etc... Hollywood also did some nice movies and tv shows and they cost a lot of money.
I don't have an issue with AI users paying more. Why should we subsidise them, and force the supply chain to do work for a set price? That's not how other businesses work. The chocolate manufacturer isn't the only one making profit, but an entire chain from farmer to the supermarket gets to take part in earning money, which culminates in one product. I don't see why it has to be handled differently for AI.
And what I like about the approach in Europe is that there is some nuance to it. I mean I don't agree 100% but at least they incentivise companies to be a bit more transparent, and they try to differentiate between research to the benefit of everyone and for-profit interest. And they try to tackle bad use-cases and I think that's something society will appreciate once the entire internet is full of slop and misinformation by bad actors. Though, I don't think we have good laws for that as of now.
I know those narratives, as the humanities people call this. I don't know if you know the term. You know commercials. They rarely give you facts. They don't give you technical data about performance, durability, or such. Usually, a commercial is a little story, maybe just a few nice people having fun. When you see the product and think about buying, you can see yourself living that story. Maybe you see yourself in a new car speeding unhindered down an empty road; not stuck in traffic like those suckers you see every day in reality.
You don't convince people with facts. You use psychological manipulation. If you think about history, people mostly believed religious stories about what happened in the world. That many people in developed countries defer to scientific facts is unusual. Of course, many don't. The stories are much nicer. Let's face it: The only reason we put up with ugly, meaningless facts is because we are reliant on technology.
We want the good life. We want to be healthy, and not having to worry about food or shelter. We want comforts, like flowing hot and cold water; an extravagant luxury for most humans throughout history and even today. In war, we want the best weapons, so that it is the other guys who do the dying.
So the question is: Do you prefer the feel-good-story or do you want a society that works for everyone?
You cannot have both.
I'm a bit in the science/facts bubble. I mean sure, advertisements and narratives are effective, and I'm not exempt. But I'd like to know the truth. And have politics based on scientific evidence. The goal is to strive and have a nice life, eveyone should be happy if possible. And then we use science to tell what kind of laws we need. Are all students delegating their homework to ChatGPT and they don't learn anything anymore? Find ways so school achieves it's goal. Do we confuse reality and fiction? Find ways to mitigate for that, e.g. watermarking. Do we loose all artists and creative people? Find ways so they can be part of society... I mean sometimes we can have a cake and eat it too, especially with technology. But we need to be clever.
I mean in the past we've adopted to new technology. One example which is often cited in context with AI is channging from horses to cars. That was very disruptive as well. I think today's situation is a bit different. And for example copyright barely works in the digital age. But AI is likely going to have a massive impact on society. Maybe we need to re-think capitalism. That's not necessarily good or bad or a "narrative". But somehow things need to be addressed.
Europe has clearly chosen a path that will increase its technological dependency on either the US or China. It's not likely to play a large role in figuring out the future economic order. We'll see how long it can continue on this path.
Its AI policies are reminiscent of Feudalism. People create AI, but then they have to pay a levy to people who have contributed nothing. But they have rights awarded by the government. AI is not the only area where the EU is shifting to policies that facilitate wealth extraction rather than creation. I don't think that is domestically sustainable. Sooner or later the European nations will try to extract wealth from each other and that will be the end. It doesn't have to go that far. Maybe we will just see a stagnation and decline, as in South America.
Is your stands limited to AI or do you generally condone paying a levy? Like towards Spotify or Netflix or Hollywood, because I could as well skip that and watch the newest movies without obeying their copyright...
I mean it's not nothing, there is some effort people put into things. Like the Wikipedia is super useful for machine learning. My computer code on Github teaches AI programming. And I can see the crawlers at my own server and today I had to update my config because it's been hammered by Alibaba. Dozens of different IP addresses, fake user agent and they completely overloaded my database with requests. It's not like I don't contribute or am part of a different world?!