Human society is built around humans so there is a reason I’m allowed to store art and stories in my brain; I and the vast majority of people can do jack all with it, pose little threat to the owners if we could, would draw attention if we did, and it’s not worthwhile or feasible to sue an entire population of content consumers for consuming content so people act smart and pick and choose their battles so society can function.
LLMs and diffusion models don’t “consume content” and the content they produce doesn’t come from inspiration, greed, boredom or any number of human traits. They don’t remember the Target logo to go shop there or a college class they took to apply for a job so they can be a tax paying member of society.
>LLMs and diffusion models don’t “consume content” and the content they produce doesn’t come from inspiration, greed, boredom or any number of human traits.
No LLMs use a cold and calculating algorithm to produce content that it equivalent and at times Better than anything a human can produce. When a human consumes content produced by an LLM it is indistinguishable from content that came from inspiration, greed, boredom or any number of human traits. You can't tell. That is the future. We can identify flaws now but we all know those flaws will be rapidly disappearing.
What the LLM tells us, what it teaches us, is that the human condition is trivial. We are a biological machines made out of wetware and the LLM is a solid state machine made out of silicon. Two machines that make content. We like to pretend that the stuff that comes from inspiration, greed or boredom as if those are things that have deep intrinsic meaning in the universe. No. It's a lie we tell ourselves. We make up the meaning, and so does the LLM.
Society is fucking changing. Creativity, art, works of inspiration... all that stuff will become as common as water and plastic cups. That's just the way things are accept it or don't.
But here's the thing. Don't pull justice into the mix. Don't say that a crime was committed because an LLM produced something better and faster than a human could. Don't call obviously original writing and original art a COPY when it is obviously NOT. These are the same tactics used by patent trolls.
This is a twisting of justice because people are afraid. No different from how a patent troll twists justice because people want profit.
“Don't say that a crime was committed because an LLM produced something better and faster than a human could. Don't call obviously original writing and original art a COPY when it is obviously NOT. These are the same tactics used by patent trolls.”
The law is arbitrary, written by humans, not by some platonic ideal inherent in the universe. It doesn’t need to be applied equally to people and tools.
The people producing these models just want profit as much as any patent troll and like them will interpret the law in such a way that benefits them or fight to change it so they can realize that profit.
It’s easier to go after the models and prevent copyright for AI generated works than to take issue with all of their users which is what we’re seeing in the courts.
“Society is fucking changing”
I agree with you there.
I’m not fundamentally opposed to AI generated anything actually but the training is problematic and I don’t see society as ready for it.
It would be an easier pill to swallow if we had a shortage of writers/artists/etc and this was the solution to that.
But humans like LLMs do have copyrighted content. That means humans are breaking the law that LLMs are also breaking.