There's can, and should, be exceptions - but lemm.ee has a federation policy where the standard for defederation is "directly harming lemm.ee users" and I think that should be the standard, as opposed to "users dislike the content, and there's a lot of it". (Hexbear is a big instance, there will be a lot of content.)
Indeed. I chose lemm.ee in part due to the federation policy, and I hope if we defederate it's because of hexbear "directly harming lemm.ee users", and not because people don't like the content.
I hold the opposite opinion in that creatives (I’d almost say individuals only, no companies) own all rights to their work and can impose any limitations they’d like on use. Current copyright law doesn’t extend quite that far though.
I think that point's worth discussing by itself - leaving aside the AI - as you wrote it quite general.
I came up with some examples:
Let's say an author really hates when quotes are taken out of context, and has stipulated that their book must only appear in whole. Do you think I should be able to decorate the interior of my own room with quotes from it?
What about an author that insists readers read no more than one chapter per day, to force them to think on the chapter before moving in. Would that be a valid use restriction?
If an author wrote a book to critique capitalism - and insists that is its purpose. But when I read the book, I interpreted it very differently, and saw in its pages a very strong argument for capitalism. Should I be able to use said book to make said argument for capitalism?
Taking your statement at face value - the answers should be: no (I can't decorate), yes (it's a valid restriction), and no (I can't use it to illustrate my argument). But maybe you didn't mean it quite that strict? What do you think on each example and why?
Except it's not a collection of stories, it's an amalgamation - and at a very granular level at that. For instance, take the beginning of a sentence from the middle of first book, then switch to a sentence in the 3-rd, then finish with another part of the original sentence. Change some words here and there, add one for good measure (based on some sentence in the 7-th book). Then fix the grammar. All the while, keeping track that there's some continuity between the sentences you're stringing together.
That counts as "new" for me. And a lot of stuff humans do isn't more original.
Just now, I tried to get Llama-2 (I'm not using OpenAI's stuff cause they're not open) to reproduce the first few paragraphs of Harry Potter and the philosophers' stone, and it didn't work at all. It created something vaguely resembling it, but with lots of made-up stuff that doesn't make much sense. I certainly can't use it to read the book or pirate it.
True - but I don't think the goal here is to establish that AI companies must purchase 1 copy of each book they use. Rather, the point seems to be that they should need separate, special permission for AI training.
Nobody is limiting how people can use their pc. This would be regulations targeted at commercial use and monetization.
... Google's proposed Web Integrity API seems like a move in that direction to me.
But that's besides the point, I was trying to establish the principle that people who make things shouldn't be able to impose limitations on how these things are used later on.
A pen is not a creative work. A creative work is much different than something that’s mass produced.
Why should that difference matter, in particular when it comes to the principle I mentioned?
A pen manufacturer should not be able to decide what people can and can't write with their pens.
A computer manufacturer should not be able to limit how people use their computers (I know they do - especially on phones and consoles - and seem to want to do this to PCs too now - but they shouldn't).
In that exact same vein, writers should not be able to tell people what they can use the books they purchased for.
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We 100% need to ensure that automation and AI benefits everyone, not a few select companies. But copyright is totally the wrong mechanism for that.
Some regulation proposals seem fine to me, like the proposed EU AI act.
But for some of the problems the article lists, like defamation or porn generation, you just can't prevent if you have free and open models out there. You can make these things harder - and people already work on that - but if I have a free and open model, I can also change it (and remove restrictions).
The only way to stop those uses would be to keep AI tightly controlled in a walled garden. In capitalism, those walled gardens will belong to companies.
I don't know, I'm much more concerned about the possibility that we develop huge automation capabilities that end up being controlled by very few people.
As for the specific issues in the article - yes, they're real problems. But every advance in communication and information technology makes it easier to surveil or defame, and can be used for bad policing.
Right now there's a push to regulate the internet to "prevent CSAM" by blocking encryption, and I'm afraid a push to regulate AI will not get better results.
Sure, we can ban predictive policing and demands some amounts of transparency (and the EU already wants to do that). But if we try to go further and impose restrictions on the AI models themselves, this will most likely solidify that AI is controlled by few powerful corporations. After all, highly regulated models by definition can't be free and open.
I've just read the abstract of the study - but it doesn't seem to be about people mindlessly copying the AI and producing biased text as a result. Rather, it's about people seeing the points the AI makes, thinking "Good point!" and adjusting their own opinion accordingly.
So it looks to me like it's just the effect of where done view points get more exposure.
Is that effect any different than the one you'd get if you have biased references, or biased search results, when doing the researchb for your writing?
If only Huawei was the only such system...