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The AI genie is here. What we're deciding now is whether we all have access to it, or whether it's a privilege afforded only to rich people, corporations, and governments. (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by IncognitoErgoSum@kbin.social to c/tech@kbin.social

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I know a lot of people want to interpret copyright law so that allowing a machine to learn concepts from a copyrighted work is copyright infringement, but I think what people will need to consider is that all that's going to do is keep AI out of the hands of regular people and place it specifically in the hands of people and organizations who are wealthy and powerful enough to train it for their own use.

If this isn't actually what you want, then what's your game plan for placing copyright restrictions on AI training that will actually work? Have you considered how it's likely to play out? Are you going to be able to stop Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the NSA from training an AI on whatever they want and using it to push propaganda on the public? As far as I can tell, all that copyright restrictions will accomplish to to concentrate the power of AI (which we're only beginning to explore) in the hands of the sorts of people who are the least likely to want to do anything good with it.

I know I'm posting this in a hostile space, and I'm sure a lot of people here disagree with my opinion on how copyright should (and should not) apply to AI training, and that's fine (the jury is literally still out on that). What I'm interested in is what your end game is. How do you expect things to actually work out if you get the laws that you want? I would personally argue that an outcome where Mark Zuckerberg gets AI and the rest of us don't is the absolute worst possibility.

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[–] Ragnell@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (24 children)

@IncognitoErgoSum I don't think you can. Because THIS? Is not a model of how humans learn language. It's a model of how a computer learns to write sentences.

If what you're going to give me is an oversimplified analogy that puts too much faith in what AI devs are trying to sell and not enough faith in what a human brain is doing, then don't bother because I will dismiss it as a fairy tale.

But, if you have an answer that actually, genuinely proves that this "neural" network is operating similarly to how the human brain does... then you have invalidated your original post. Because if it really is thinking like a human, NO ONE should own it.

In either case, it's probably not worth your time.

[–] throwsbooks@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (22 children)

But, if you have an answer that actually, genuinely proves that this “neural” network is operating similarly to how the human brain does… then you have invalidated your original post. Because if it really is thinking like a human, NO ONE should own it.

I think this is a neat point.

The human brain is very complex. The neural networks trained on computers right now are more like collections of neurons grown together in a petri dish, rather than a full human brain. They serve one function, say, recognizing or generating an image or calculating some probability or deciding on what the next word should be in a sequence. While the brain is a huge internetwork of these smaller, more specialized neural networks.

No, neural networks don't have a database and they don't do stats. They're trained through trial and error, not aggregation. The way they work is explicitly based on a mathematical model of a biological neuron.

And when an AI is developed that's advanced enough to rival the actual human brain, then yeah, the AI rights question becomes a real thing. We're not there yet, though. Still just matter in petri dishes. That's a whole other controversial argument.

[–] IncognitoErgoSum@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (21 children)

I don't believe that current AIs should have rights. They aren't conscious.

My point is was purely that AIs learn concepts and that concepts aren't copyrightable. Encoding concepts into neurons (that is, learning) doesn't require consciousness.

[–] throwsbooks@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh, 100%. They're way too rudimentary. NNs alone don't go through the sense-think-act loops that necessitates a conscious autonomous agent. One day, maybe, but again, we're at the brain matter in petri dish stage.

I agree on the concepts thing too. People learn to paint by imitating what they see around them, their favourite artists, their favourite comics and cartoons. Then, over time with practice and experimentation, these things get encoded, but there's always that influence there somewhere.

Midjourney just has the benefit of being able to learn from way more imagery in a way shorter of an amount of time and practice way faster than any living human. So like, I get why artists are scared of it, but there's definitely a fundamental misunderstanding around how these things work floating around.

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