kibiz0r

So, I've drafted two replies to this so far and this is the third.

I tried addressing your questions individually at first, but if I connect the dots, I think you're really asking something like:

Is there a comprehensive mental model for how to think about this stuff? One that allows us to have technical progress, and also take care of people who work hard to do cool stuff that we find valuable? And most importantly, can't be twisted to be used against the very people it's supposed to protect?

I think the answer is either "no", or maybe "yes -- with an asterisk" depending on how you feel about the following argument...

Comprehensive legal frameworks based on rules for proper behavior are fertile ground for big tech exploitation.

As soon as you create objective guidelines for what constitutes employment vs. contracting, you get the gig economy with Uber and DoorDash reaping as many of the boss-side benefits of an employment relationship as possible while still keeping their tippy-toes just outside the border of legally crossing into IRS employee-misclassification territory.

A preponderance of landlords directly messaging each other with proposed rent increases is obviously conspiracy to manipulate the market. If they all just happen to subscribe to RealPage's algorithmic rent recommendation services and it somehow produces the same external effect, that should shield you from antitrust accusations -- for a while at least -- right?

The DMCA provisions against tampering with DRM mechanisms was supposed to just discourage removing copyright protections. But instead it's become a way to limit otherwise legitimate functionality, because to work around the artificial limitation would incidentally require violating the DMCA. And thus, subscriptions for heated seats are born.

This is how you end up with copyright -- a legal concept originally aimed at keeping publishers well-behaved -- being used against consumers in the first place. When copyright was invented, you needed to invest some serious capital before the concept of "copying" as a daily activity even entered your mind. But computers make an endless amount of copies as a matter of their basic operation.

So I don't think that we can solve any of this (the new problems or the old ones) with a sweeping, rule-based mechanism, as much as my programmer brain wants to invent one.

That's the "no".

The "yes -- with an asterisk" is that maybe we don't need to use rules.

Maybe we just establish ways in which harms may be perpetrated, and we rely on judges and juries to determine whether the conduct was harmful or not.

Case law tends to come up with objective tests along the way, but crucially those decisions can be reviewed as the surrounding context evolves. You can't build an exploitative business based on the exact wording of a previous court decision and say "but you said it was legal" when the standard is to not harm, not to obey a specific rule.

So that's basically my pitch.

Don't play the game of "steal vs. fair use", cuz it's a trap and you're screwed with either answer.

Don't codify fair play, because the whole game that big tech is playing is "please define proper behavior so that I can use a fractal space-filling curve right up against that border and be as exploitative as possible while ensuring any rule change will deal collateral damage to stuff you care about".

--

Okay real quick, the specifics:

How to guarantee authors are compensated for their works?

Allow them serious weaponry, and don't allow industry players to become juggernauts. Support labor rights wherever you can, and support ruthless antitrust enforcement.

I don't think data-dignity/data-dividend is the answer, cuz it's playing right into that "rules are fertile ground for exploitation" dynamic. I'm in favor of UBI, but I don't think it's a complete answer, especially to this.

Any one person can learn about the style of an author and imitate it without really copying the same piece of art. That person cannot be sued for stealing “style”, and it feels like the LLM is basically in the same area of creating content.

First of all, it's not. Anthropomorphizing large-scale statistical output is a dangerous thing. It is not "learning" the artist's style any more than an MP3 encoder "learns" how to play a song by being able to reproduce it with sine waves.

(For now, this is an objective fact: AIs are not "learning", in any sense at all close to what people do. At some point, this may enter into the realm of the mind-body problem. As a neutral monist, I have a philosophical escape hatch when we get there. And I agree with Searle when it comes to the physicalists -- maybe we should just pinch them to remind them they're conscious.)

But more importantly: laws are for people. They're about what behavior we endorse as acceptable in a healthy society. If we had a bunch of physically-augmented cyborgs really committed to churning out duplicative work to the point where our culture basically ground to a halt, maybe we would review that assumption that people can't be sued for stealing a style.

More likely, we'd take it in stride as another step in the self-criticizing tradition of art history. In the end, those cyborgs could be doing anything at all with their time, and the fact that they chose to spend it duplicating art instead of something else at least adds something interesting to the cultural conversation, in kind of a Warhol way.

Server processes are a little bit different, in that there's not really a personal opportunity cost there. So even the cyborg analogy doesn't quite match up.

How can we differentiate between a synthetic voice trained with thousand of voices but not the voice of person A but creates a voice similar to that of A against the case of a company “stealing” the voice of A directly?

Yeah, the Her/Scarlett Johansson situation? I don't think there really is (or should be) a legal issue there, but it's pretty gross to try to say-without-saying that this is her voice.

Obviously, they were trying to be really coy about it in this case, without considering that their technology's main selling point is that it fuzzes things to the point where you can't tell if they're lying about using her voice directly or not. I think that's where they got more flak than if they were any other company doing the same thing.

But skipping over that, supposing that their soundalike and the speech synthesis process were really convincing (they weren't), would it be a problem that they tried to capitalize on Scarlett/Her without permission? At a basic level, I don't think so. They're allowed to play around with culture the same as anyone else, and it's not like they were trying to undermine her ability to sell her voice going forward.

Where it gets weird is if you're able to have it read you erotic fan faction as Scarlett in a convincing version of her voice, or use it to try to convince her family that she's been kidnapped. I think that gets into some privacy rights, which are totally different from economics, and that could probably be a whole nother essay.

You're too kind. But I've only made it to this (still very incomplete) point by making lots of absolutely terrible arguments first, with plenty of failing-to-think-things-through and automatic hatred.

Most importantly, I listen to a lot of people who either disagree with my initial takes or just have lots of experience with policy in this space.

Cory Doctorow is always a great landmark for me, personally, because he embodies the pro-culture tech-forward pirate ethos while also stridently defending artists' rights and dignity.

Some great stuff from him includes:

• How to think about scraping
• What kind of bubble is AI?
• Chokepoint Capitalism
• Some of his crypto interviews, like I think his one for Life Itself was good even though the interviewer was pretty milquetoast
• His appearances on Team Human (with Douglas Rushkoff) and just Team Human in general

Ironically, this ancient video on the toxic history of copyright law -- and warning against regulating similar technology going forward -- makes some pretty good points against AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhBpI13dxkI

Also check out the actual history of the Luddites. Cool Zone Media has a lot of coverage of them.

Also Philosophy Tube has a good one about transhumanism that has a section dismantling the "it's just a tool" mindset you'll see pretty often on Lemmy regarding AI.

And CJTheX has a good transhumanism essay, too.

Decades of draconian copyright law really scrambled our brains until we forgot there was anything other than copyright, eh?

I'm not saying it's stealing. I've been in favor of sampling, scraping, and pirating since the 90s. Culture is a global conversation. It's perhaps the most important thing we've ever invented. And you have an innate right to participate, regardless of your ability to pay the tolls enacted by the chokepoint capitalists. I'm not against piracy, and I'm not in favor of expanding copyright law.

I'm against letting market forces -- those very same chokepoint capitalists -- signal-jam that all-important conversation for their own profit. I'm in favor of enforcing already-existing antitrust law. Something we've conveniently forgotten how to do for the past 70 years.

Charge them with anti-competitive business practices. Make them start over with artists who want to nurture their digital doppelgangers. That's fine. Just don't tell me the only option is "You must compete against an algorithmically-amplified version of yourself from now on, until you give up or you're done perfecting it".

My problem is less “someone might make a thing that arts better than real artists”

It’s more “someone is absolutely committed to making that thing using the labor of the artists they intend to marginalize and not only is nobody is stopping them, tons are cheering”

Katie Porter had a great response to this.

They can’t be defeated with voting, but they can be aided by not voting.

But yes, I also thank the level designers for putting in accessible weak points.

Probably worth teasing this apart.

There are:

• Fascist political candidates

…which can be formally appointed or rejected by voting

• Fascist organized groups

…which may attempt to physical seize power regardless of political climate, if the physical conditions seem right, but have a much easier time if the political conditions are favorable too

• Fascist cultural concepts

…which proliferate regardless of political and physical conditions, and can really only be managed through social norms, which are themselves often reinforced at the ballot box

Just because voting only directly impacts the first problem doesn’t mean it has zero impact on the other two.

In fact, it’s really hard to win the cultural battle and cast fascism as a niche extremist philosophy if it keeps almost winning elections.

So you’d rather for them to have written a different article, with similar substance, but not [as thoroughly] related to their area of study?

As a philosopher, I’m interested in how modern culture influences representations of the past. And the way Lucy has been depicted in newspapers, textbooks and museums may reveal more about us than it says about her.

To libertarians, yes.

So is RealPage not a tool, or are tools not inherently agenda-less?

I’m not saying all technology is bad, but I am saying all technology is biased.

And I’m not saying all AI must be exploitative, but its mechanics are such that the easiest path forward for it is exploitative.