this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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Privacy

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[–] AfricanExpansionist@lemmy.ml 9 points 4 months ago (13 children)

Obligatory: I'm anti-AI, mostly anti-technology

That said, I can't say that I mind LLMs using copyrighted materials that it accesses legally/appropriately (lots of copyrighted content may be freely available to some extent, like news articles or song lyrics)

I'm open to arguments correcting me. I'd prefer to have another reason to be against this technology, not arguing on the side of frauds like Sam Altman. Here's my take:

All content created by humans follows consumption of other content. If I read lots of Vonnegut, I should be able to churn out prose that roughly (or precisely) includes his idiosyncrasies as a writer. We read more than one author; we read dozens or hundreds over our lifetimes. Likewise musicians, film directors, etc etc.

If an LLM consumes the same copyrighted content and learns how to copy its various characteristics, how is it meaningfully different from me doing it and becoming a successful writer?

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 7 points 4 months ago

If an LLM consumes the same copyrighted content and learns how to copy its various characteristics, how is it meaningfully different from me doing it and becoming a successful writer?

That is the trillion-dollar question, isn’t it?

I’ve got two thoughts to frame the question, but I won’t give an answer.

  1. Laws are just social constructs, to help people get along with each other. They’re not supposed to be grand universal moral frameworks, or coherent/consistent philosophies. They’re always full of contradictions. So… does it even matter if it’s “meaningfully” different or not, if it’s socially useful to treat it as different (or not)?
  2. We’ve seen with digital locks, gig work, algorithmic market manipulation, and playing either side of Section 230 when convenient… that the ethos of big tech is pretty much “define what’s illegal, so I can colonize the precise border of illegality, to a fractal level of granularity”. I’m not super stoked to come with an objective quantitative framework for them to follow, cuz I know they’ll just flow around it like water and continue to find ways to do antisocial shit in ways that technically follow the rules.
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