It's not just about IP. Have you considered how much an LLM trained on scraping websites might know about you? Would it reveal that information if I prompted it with something like "Create a short story about HN user jMyles and his home life"?
It might be best to know what these models have actually been trained on.
100s of millions of people used it for quite some time now, many on daily basis. Do we have any evidence that it “knows about you”? Why can’t we say that the “internet” knows too much about you?
To your latter question, you very much could. But pretty much the whole point of these models is to create connections between various bits of information. It obviously knows about some people (otherwise how could you ask it about famous people?). If it's been trained on everything you can trawl from the net, then why wouldn't it know about you?
But I don't know if people have been asking these bots about themselves. I don't have access to ChatGPT4. Anyone checked this?
I suspect the ChatGPT models haven't been trained on everything available online, so it wouldn't know much, but perhaps the next generation will.
Internet is basically a bunch of nodes with interconnected data. Any search index might be considered as an interconnected graph. Same way with LLMs, it’s nothing new, might be considered faster depending on the definition.
Comparing to celebrities, data about people are so sparse that it would look like noise. I would be surprised if it encoded anything useful.
Half of the internet and all media were obsessed with making it say the f-word and tricking it into saying that it would kill all the people. Attacking from the privacy is quite obvious but I didn’t see it mentioned. I asked about 10 random friends and myself and it didn’t recognize the names despite having plenty of search results.
In one of the interviews they mentioned that it was trained on 10% of the web. So should have enough data.
If people can not protect or make a living from their work then they lose some of the motivation to create, many will stop producing work altogether.
Interestingly, AI had to steal creators work to exist and did so without permission. AI in its current conception is cannibalising its own source material and risks being regulated out of existence.
Had OpenAI et all acted responsible and within copyright law, they would have only used free use material. Instead they scraped social media and creator websites on the basis that if it was online it's 'fair use'.
People have a right to protect their work.
I expect to see many lawsuits brought against AI companies in the next coming years.
Let's consider how this comment ages if the US eventually decides that what OpenAI, StabilityAI, et al have done *is* fair use. You're assuming that what they're doing is not when really there is no reason to think so.
To me this issue looks a lot like self-driving cars. There was not any law saying that a car had to have a human driver, so Google was able to have its self-driving cars go coast-to-coast and it was 100% legal.
Your point about people making a living from work is a good one though, how do we continue to incentivize art in a world where everything posted online is included in the training set for some ML model? Well, lots of people do create art without making any money off of it today, so there's that, and I think at the high-end people will still want artisinal art made by a real human being. In the middle I think a lot of art jobs will either radically change or disappear, like logo design will probably still include a person, but the tools they use will be totally different. That seems like a good thing. However, again, in the middle range, a few people will be able to do way more work which will drastically reduce the number of people who actually get paid to do art. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. We're not talking about like fine art, but logos, website backdrops, etc. Certainly if we see a problem where people cannot be paid to do *anything* then that is a huge problem that society will have to solve or else it will be imperiled as well as leaving a ton of people out to dry. I really see some form of UBI as the only way forward, and then perhaps many people who would like to get paid to do art, but can't, will produce art while on UBI? IDK. There are a lot of intertwined issued here.
What does a post intellectual property world even look like, though? I'm not aware of any convincing frameworks that our existing society could merge into.
> What does a post intellectual property world even look like, though?
It looks like Github! People sharing and collaborating to build new things. No lawyers getting in the way. Attribution is automatically handled by git logs.
Many parts of Github would not exist without intellectual property laws. If you post code, it's not just a free for all, you still have licenses and own your contributions if not specified otherwise. Especially company stuff would be much, much less open.
That's not to say that every facet of IP law is good, or even a judgement on it. Just pointing out that only parts of Github work like you describe.
Licensing is very important to open source. It is literally what drives and protects large scale open source innovation and stops it going extinct. It’s actually worth learning about GPL 3.0 and copy left licensing.
Anyway if that goes away. A lot of innovation will too. If privately owned LLMs go on consuming everything, not giving back to the communities that make them what they are. It may erode the system.
Building a future world where every child has access to humanity's best information makes me jump out of bed in the morning.
I agree it's an absolute daunting task, convincing people this is the way. This new freedom will not be given to people by the powers that be, they must demand it.
But I do believe that a small group of people can change the world. It's just about getting that initial group going, and sparking a flame.
> What's the point of this agonizing life support?
How about torturing companies who have abused IP/Copyright law for decades while regular users simply pirate and read/watch/listen to the things they want?
