but if you had infinite usable desk space then what, exactly, would be the argument against it?

So I guess we agree then. Circumstances make something more or less optimal, meaning they are not objectively more optimal in every situation. That was my entire point, nothing more.

That’s true, and if that’s the case then that definitely changes the choice. Although, afaik these smaller keyboards often come with software to remap keys or add macro’s at the driver level. (And for this choice specifically, 75% keyboard and higher do seem to mostly have both F keys and home/end). But yeah, some people’s use consist of just writing emails and streaming video, in which case they won’t care about any of that.

If a full-sized keyboard provides all the keys you reasonably need to do your tasks efficiently, then yes a full-sized keyboard is superior. But that is just not the use case for everyone, hence why it can’t be objectively so. Unless you want to imply that more keys even if you don’t need them is better anyways.

If so, you could argue this monstrosity of a keyboard (or something even bigger) is what everyone should be using if they have the space, since it has way more buttons than a full-sized keyboard, making it even more objectively superior. In reality you would not use more than 30% of the buttons on that keyboard, so the rest might as well not exist. But if you are, I don’t know, some macro-wizard playing 4 instances of WoW at the same time, maybe it is objectively superior for your needs, but for me a normal sized keyboard would do.

But to try and sense where you’re coming from, it should also be said that someone telling you their choice is better and disregarding that your criteria aren’t the same as theirs is being silly as well. And sometimes they can be stubborn and agitated about that as well - exactly the kind of hostility I meant in my initial comment. But someone’s got to step up and swallow their pride and accept it really is just all subjective at the end of the day.

While I love my full-sized keyboard, respectfully - who cares. The whole idea of a PC is the freedom to use whatever you want.

Keyboards, controllers, speech to text, a wii-mote, literal bananas/bread, eye/blink trackers, whatever suits you best. Insisting there’s a best device for everyone doesn’t change people’s minds and just leads to hostility when we should be glad more people are using the device that makes them happy. One day you might be one of them when your circumstances or preferences change.

Still better than having to go right as you step under the water, and then having to perform a sacred rain dance to hold it in

It’s hard not to see exactly what the US under Trump is doing with these kinds of hostile actions lately. They’re trying to create a situation where Europe and/or others can only reasonably respond back with actions they can brand as hostile in return (That, or bend the knee), so they can play the victim and weaponize that as propaganda to undermine the peaceful and friendly relationships between the common people, a foundation of keeping large scale peace since WW2. Disgusting and utterly sinister behavior. We must resist being played like that and fight back against that urge while remaining defiant of this circus.

Stocks for what? AI? I can’t have stocks for a technology. I could get stocks in companies that use AI, but the only ones that are on the stock market I’d rather die than support a single penny to since they abuse the technology (and technology in general). But they are not the only ones using the technology. I’m not really a fan of stocks to begin with, profit focused companies are a plague in my opinion.

Seems a bit strange to blame AI for this. Meta has always been garbage and using technology to it’s worst effects.

Plagiarism is not the same as copyright infringement. Why you think people probably plagiarize is doubly irrelevant then.

I never claimed it was, but as I said before, it is irrelevant because copyright infringement differs in places depending on the local laws, but plagiarism is usually the concept that guides the ethical position from which those laws are produced, which is why yes, it’s relevant.

Show me literally any example of the defendant’s use of “analysis” having any impact whatsoever in a copyright infringement case or a law that explicitly talks about it, or just stop repeating that it is in any way relevant to copyright.

This is an unreasonable request, and you know it to be. Again, we don’t share the same laws and different jurisdictions provide different exceptions like fair use, fair dealing, or just straight up exclusion from copyright for their use. But it is wholly besides my argument. You can look at any piece of modern media that exists in the same space and see ideas the two share, while not sharing the same expression of that idea. How some characters fulfill the same purpose, dress the same way, or have similar personalities. You are free to make a book with a plumber, a mustached man, someone wearing a red hat with the letter M on it, and someone that goes to save a princess from a castle, but if they’re not the same person they are most likely not considered to be the protected expression of Mario. Same ideas that make up Mario, one infringing, the other not.

Nobody goes to court over this because EVERYONE takes each others ideas, “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. It’s only when you step on the specific expression of an idea that it becomes realistically actionable, and at that point transformativeness is definitely discussed almost every single time, because it is critical to determining the copyright was actually infringed, or if not.

Wrong. The “all together” and “without adding new patterns” are not legal requirements. You are constantly trying to push the definition of copyright infringement to be more extreme to make it easier for you to argue.

I’m sorry but, are you really being this dishonest? I’ve mentioned EXPLICITLY in my last comment that I wasn’t giving a definition of copyright infringement, because it’s besides the point, and not what I’m claiming. Yet here you are saying I am “trying to push” a definition. We are not lawyers or law scholars speaking to each other, I am having a discussion with you as another anonymous person on a message board.

Unfortunately, an AI has no concept of ideas, and it simply encodes patterns, whatever they might happen to be.

You are just arguing semantics and linguistics, it’s meaningless. We are not talking technical specifics, not even a specific model, nor a specific technique to specific exactly how the information is encoded. It’s a rough concept of “ideas” / “data” / “patterns”: information. And AI definitely has that.

Again, you’re morphing the discussion to make an argument.

You mean, I’m making an argument. Because yes. I am. I don’t see why this negative framing is necessary nor why this is noteworthy enough to bring up, unless you really just want to make me look bad for no apparent reason.

Mario’s likeness has to be encoded into the model in some way. Otherwise, this would not have been the image generated for “draw an italian plumber from a video game”. There is absolutely nothing in the prompt to push GPT-4 to combine those elements. There are also no “new” patterns, as you put it. That’s exactly the point of the article. As they put it:

Yes, there is some idea/pattern of “Mario-ness” in the model, I said that. This was not me trying to say no material of Mario was used in training, but that it’s not like someone pasted direct images of Mario in there, but that AI models makes logical connections between concepts and even for things we cannot put a good name to does it make those connections, and will allow you to prompt for them, but that does not mean you should.

Clearly, these models did not just learn abstract facts about plumbers—for example, that they wear overalls and carry wrenches. They learned facts about a specific fictional Italian plumber who wears white gloves, blue overalls with yellow buttons, and a red hat with an “M” on the front.

These are not facts about the world that lie beyond the reach of copyright. Rather, the creative choices that define Mario are likely covered by copyrights held by Nintendo.

I sort of already explained this without mentioning this specific example, but I’ll make it extra clear.

In the article they prompted the AI for a “video game Italian plumber”. What person, if you asked them, to think of an “Italian video game plumber”, would not think of Mario? Maybe Luigi? I’ll tell you, because there are very damn few famous Italian video game plumbers. The prompt is already locked in on Mario, and even humans make the logical connection to Mario. It might have had billions of images and texts to use, but any time a relation to an “Italian video game plumber” showed up, there’s Mario.

So this whole point the article makes about it not learning abstract facts about plumbers, is complete moot because they completely biased the outputs towards receiving what they want to receive. If you ask for just a plumber, for which it does have many, many results. It will make more generalizations and become less specific. Because there are more than 2 examples of plumbers in other types of situations. Humans do this exact same thing in the same task, yet somehow the AI must be infallible to this despite being artificial versions of the biological thing. And that is why analysis is protected, because humans simply cannot stop doing it and everyone is tainted by their knowledge of Mario, even though for whatever reason we might need to use one of the ideas Mario is built upon. And this is why AIs use this same defense. I can say this regardless of the jurisdiction because unless you live in some kind of dictatorship this is generally true.

Sadly, this kind of deceptive framing of AI output is common, particularly among those that are biased against AI. Sometimes it’s unintentional, but frequently specific parameters are used that will just generate specific bad results, ignoring that this may not even represent 0.001% of what the model can generate in normal situations.

This is contradictory to how you present it as “taking ideas”.

It is not. You can use the idea of Mario, you cannot use the totality of Mario. For the AI to be able to use the idea of Mario, it will also ‘learn’ the totality of Mario in the process, as Mario is a collection of ideas that are extracted. But those ideas are stored separately so they can be individually prompted for. You can prompt it to make Mario, because like literally almost every person in society, they know what ideas make up Mario better than I can put to words here. If I hire a human artist to make me a “video game Italian plumber”, their first question to me would be “Oh, something like Mario?” and their second response will be “Oh I can’t do that, and you should not want to, because you don’t own Mario.”. Humans use AI, so they need to be the ones to give that second response.

Just like a kitchen knife can be used to stab someone, doesn’t mean we produce kitchen knives for stabbing people. Just because an AI can be used to infringe, does not mean that they are produced to infringe. Which is evidence by the vast majority of other ways that it can be used that don’t infringe, which is self evident after just tinkering around with it for a little while.

You’re mixing up different things. I’m saying that the image contains infringing material, which is hopefully not something you have to be convinced about. The production of an obviously infringing image, without the infringing elements having been provided in the prompt, is used to show how this information is encoded inside the model in some form. Whether this copyright-protected material exists in some form inside the model is not an equivalent question to whether this is copyright infringement. You are right that the courts have not decided on the latter, but we have been talking about the former. I repeat your position which I was directly responding to before:

If it’s anything like the examples before, then the AI has definitely been prompted by the user to make infringing elements.

But anyways, to the question, you just don’t seem to grasp that collections of ideas can communicate copyright infringing material without being infringing on their own. It’s like arguing that if Paint or Photoshop knows about the color red that this is copyright infringing because it’s the same red that Mario uses. None of the ideas that make up Mario are infringing, and cannot be copyrighted. They are what the AI is designed to extract, not Mario as a totality.

You can definitely use AI to make an infringement machine by making it less likely to make leaps in ideas and just only combine the ideas it’s been taught on, which we as humans can do as well in the form of plagiarism and forgery. But if you’re going to be unethical why use an AI when you might as well just take the easy route directly with print screen or a photo. Two other technologies we didn’t ban for having this ability to capture copyrighted material, even if they far more blatantly copy the material.

This is where good AI usage deviates, because it instead tries to MAXIMIZE the amount of leaps and connections the AI makes for as little possibility to make something infringing. Even honest people trying to make new creative works sometimes have to change things because they might be too close to being infringing.

That was your implied argument regardless of intent.

I decide what my argument is, thank you very much. Your interpretation of it is outside of my control, and while I might try to avoid it from going astray, I cannot stop it from doing so, that’s on you.

Completely wrong, which invalidates the point you want to make. “Analysis” and “as is” have no place in the definition of copyright infringement. A derivative work can be very different from the original material, and how you created the derivative work, including whether you performed whatever you think “analysis” means, is generally irrelevant.

I wasn’t giving a definition of copyright infringement, since that depends on the jurisdiction, and since you and I aren’t in the same one most likely, that’s nothing I would argue for to begin with. In the most basic form of plagiarism, people do so to avoid doing the effort of transformation. More complex forms of plagiarism might involve some transformation, but still try to capture the expression of the original, instead of the ideas. Analysis is definitely relevant, since to create a work that does not infringe on copyright, you generally can take ideas from a copyrighted work, but not the expression of those ideas. If a new work is based on just those ideas (and preferably mixes it with new ideas), it generally doesn’t infringe on copyright. It’s why there are so many copycat products of everything you can think of, that aren’t copyright infringing.

No it detects patterns. You already said it correctly above. And the problem is that some patterns can be copyrighted. That’s exactly the problem highlighted here and here. For copyright law, it doesn’t matter if, for example, that particular image of Mario is copied verbatim from the training data.

While depending on your definition Mario could be a sufficiently complex pattern, that’s not the definition I’m using. Mario isn’t a pattern, it’s an expression of multiple patterns. Patterns like “an italian man”, “a big moustache”, “a red rounded hat with the letter ‘M’ in a white circle”, “overalls”. You can use any of those patterns in a new non-infringing work, Nintendo has no copyright on any of those patterns. But bring them all together in one place again without adding new patterns, and you will have infringed on the expression of Mario. If you give many images of Mario to the AI it might be able to understand that those patterns together are some sort of “Mario-ness” pattern, but it can still separate them from each other since you aren’t just showing it Mario, but also other images that have these same patterns in different expressions.

Mario’s likeness isn’t in the model, but it’s patterns are. And if an unethical user of the AI wants to prompt it for those specific patterns to be surprised they get Mario, or something close enough to be substantially similar, that’s on them, and it will be infringing just like drawing and selling a copy of Mario without Nintendo’s approval is now.

The character likeness, which is encoded in the model because it is in fact a discernible pattern, is an infringement.

You have absolutely no legal basis to claim they are infringement, as these things simply have not been settled in court. You can be of the opinion that they are infringement, but your opinion isn’t the same as law. The articles you showed are also simply reporting and speculating on the lawsuits that are pending.

No, not what I said at all. If you’re trying to say I’m making this argument I’d urge you (ironically) to actually analyze what I said rather than putting words in my mouth ;) (Or just, you know, ask me to clarify)

Copyright infringement (or plagiarism) in it’s simplest form, as in just taking the material as is, is devoid of any analysis. The point is to avoid having to do that analysis and just get right to the end result that has value.

But that’s not what AI technology does. None of the material used to train it ends up in the model. It looks at the training data and extracts patterns. For text, that is the sentence structure, the likelihood of words being followed by another, the paragraph/line length, the relationship between words when used together, and more. It can do all of this without even ‘knowing’ what these things are, because they are simply patterns that show up in large amounts of data, and machine learning as a technology is made to be able to detect and extract those patterns. That detection is synonymous with how humans do analysis. What it detects are empirical, factual observations about the material it is shown, which cannot be copyrighted.

The resulting data when fed back to the AI can be used to have it extrapolate on incomplete data, which it could not do without such analysis. You can see this quite easily by asking an AI to refer to you by a specific name, or talk in a specific manner, such as a pirate. It ‘understands’ that certain words are placeholders for names, and that text can be ‘pirateitfied’ by adding filler words or pre/suffixing other words. It could not do so without analysis, unless that exact text was already in the data to begin with, which is doubtful.

They are not “analyzing” the data. They are feeding it into a regurgitating mechanism. There’s a big difference. Their defense is only “good” because AI is being misrepresented and misunderstood.

I really kind of hope you’re kidding here. Because this has got to be the most roundabout way of saying they’re analyzing the information. Just because you think it does so to regurgitate (which I have yet to see any good evidence for, at least for the larger models), does not change the definition of analyzing. And by doing so you are misrepresenting it and showing you might just have misunderstood it, which is ironic. And doing so does not help the cause of anyone who wishes to reduce the harm from AI, as you are literally giving ammo to people to point to and say you are being irrational about it.

Although I’m a firm believer that most AI models should be public domain or open source by default, the premise of “illegally trained LLMs” is flawed. Because there really is no assurance that LLMs currently in use are illegally trained to begin with. These things are still being argued in court, but the AI companies have a pretty good defense in the fact analyzing publicly viewable information is a pretty deep rooted freedom that provides a lot of positives to the world.

The idea of… well, ideas, being copyrightable, should shake the boots of anyone in this discussion. Especially since when the laws on the book around these kinds of things become active topic of change, they rarely shift in the direction of more freedom for the exact people we want to give it to. See: Copyright and Disney.

The underlying technology simply has more than enough good uses that banning it would simply cause it to flourish elsewhere that does not ban it, which means as usual that everyone but the multinational companies lose out. The same would happen with more strict copyright, as only the big companies have the means to build their own models with their own data. The general public is set up for a lose-lose to these companies as it currently stands. By requiring the models to be made available to the public do we ensure that the playing field doesn’t tip further into their favor to the point AI technology only exists to benefit them.

If the model is built on the corpus of humanity, then humanity should benefit.

People differentiate AI (the technology) from AI (the product being peddled by big corporations) without making clear that nuance (Or they mean just LLMs, or they aren’t even aware the technology has a grassroots adoption outside of those big corporations). It will take time, and the bubble bursting might very well be a good thing for the technology into the future. If something is only know for it’s capitalistic exploits it’ll continue to be seen unfavorably even when it’s proven it’s value to those who care to look at it with an open mind. I read it mostly as those people rejoicing over those big corporations getting shafted for their greedy practices.

This kind of AI approaches art in a way that finally kinda makes sense for my brain, so it’s frustrating seeing it shot down by people who don’t actually understand it. Stop using this stuff for tasks it wasn’t meant for (unless it’s a novelty “because we could” kind of way) and it becomes a lot more palatable.

Preach! I’m surprised to hear it works for people with aphantasia too, and that’s awesome. I personally have a very vivid mind’s eye and I can often already imagine what I want something to look like, but could never put it to paper in a satisfying way that didn’t cost excruciating amount of time. GenAI allows me to do that with still a decent amount of touch up work, but in a much more reasonable timeframe. I’m making more creative work than I’ve ever been because of it.

It’s crazy to me that some people at times completely refuse to even acknowledge such positives about the technology, refuse to interact with it in a way that would reveal those positives, refuse to look at more nuanced opinions of people that did interact with it, refuse even simple facts about how we learn and interact with other art and material, refusing legal realities like the freedom to analyze that allow this technology to exist (sometimes even actively fighting to restrict those legal freedoms, which would hurt more artists and creatives than it would help, and give even more more power to corporations and those with enough capital to self sustain AI model creation).

It’s tiring, but luckily it seems to be mostly an issue on the internet. Talking to people (including artists) in real life about it shows that it’s a very tiny fraction that holds that opinion. Keep creating 👍

You don’t solve a dystopia by adding more dystopian elements. Yes, some companies are scum and they should be rightfully targeted and taken down. But the way you do that is by targeting those scummy companies specifically, and creatives aren’t the only industry suffering from them. There are broad spectrum legislatures to do so, such as income based equality (proportional taxing and fining), or further regulations. But you don’t do that by changing fundamental rights every artists so far has enjoyed to learn their craft, but also made society what it is today. Your idea would KILL any scientific progress because all of it depends on either for profit businesses (Not per se the scummy ones) and the freedom to analyze works without a license (Something you seem to want to get rid of), in which the vast majority is computer driven. You are arguing in favor of taking a shot to the foot if it means “owning the libs big companies” when there are clearly better solutions, and guess what, we already have pretty bad luck getting those things passed as is.

And you think most artists and creatives don’t see this? Most of us are honest about the fact of how we got to where we are, because we’ve learned how to create and grow our skill set this same way. By consuming (and so, analyzing) a lot of media, and looking a whole lot at other people making things. There’s a reason “good artists copy, great artists steal” is such a known line, and I’d argue against it because I feel it frames even something like taking inspiration as theft, but it’s the same argument people are making in reverse for AI.

But this whole conversation shouldn’t be about the big companies, but about the small ones. If you’re not in the industry you might just not know that AI is everywhere in small companies too. And they’re not using the big companies if they can help it. There’s open source AI that’s free to download and use, that holds true to open information that everyone can benefit from. By pretending they don’t exist and proposing an unreasonable ban on the means, denies those without the capital and ability to build their own (licensed) datasets in the future, while those with the means have no problem and can even leverage their own licenses far more efficiently than any small company or individuals could. And if AI does get too good to ignore, there will be the artists that learned how to use AI, forced to work for corporations, and the ones that don’t and can’t compete. So far it’s only been optional since using AI well is actually quite hard, and only dumb CEOs would put any trust in it replacing a human. But it will speed up your workflow, and make certain tasks faster, but it doesn’t replace it in large pieces unless you’re really just making the most generic stuff ever for a living, like marketing material.

Never heard of Cara. I don’t doubt it exists somewhere, but I’m wholly uninterested in it or putting any work I make there. I will fight tooth and nail for what I made to be mine and allowing me to profit off it, but I’m not going to argue and promote for taking away the freedom that allowed me to become who I am from others, and the freedom of people to make art in any way they like. The freedom of expression is sacred to me. I will support other more broad appealing and far more likely to succeed alternatives that will put these companies in their place, and anything sensible that doesn’t also cause casualties elsewhere. But I’m not going to be in favor of being the “freedom of expression police” against my colleagues, and friends, or anyone for that matter, on what tools they can or cannot not use to funnel their creativity into. This is a downright insidious mentality in my eyes, and so far most people I’ve had a good talk about AI with have shared that distaste, while agreeing to it being abused by big companies.

Again, they can use whatever they want, but Nightshade (And Glaze) are not proven to be effective, in case you didn’t know. They rely on misunderstandings, and hypothetically only work under extremely favorable situations, and assume the people collecting the dataset are really, really dumb. That’s why I call it snake oil. It’s not just me saying exactly this.

If you think I’m being optimistic about UBI, I can only question how optimistic you are about your own position receiving wide spread support. So far not even most artists stand behind anti AI standpoints, just a very vocal minority and their supporters who even threaten and bully other artists that don’t support their views.

It’s not about “analysis” but about for-profit use. Public domain still falls under Fair Use.

I really don’t know what you’re trying to say here. Public domain is free of any copyright, so you don’t need a fair use exemption to use it at all. And for-profit use is not a factor for whether analysis is allowed or not. And if it was, again, it would stagnate the ability for society to invent and advance, since most frequent use is for profit. But even if it wasn’t, one company can produce the dataset or the model as a non-profit, and the other company could use that for profit. It doesn’t hold up.

As it stands, artists are already forming their own walled off communities to isolate their work from being publicly available

If you want to avoid being trained on by AI, that’s a pretty good way to do it yes. It can also be combined with payment. So if that helps artists, I’m all for it. But I have yet to hear any of that from the artists I know, nor seen a single practical example of it that wasn’t already explicitly private (eg. commissions or a patreon). Most artists make their work to be seen, and that has always meant accepting that someone might take your work and be inspired by it. My ideas have been stolen blatantly, and I cannot do a thing about it. That is the compromise we make between creative freedom and ownership, since the alternative would be disastrous. Even if people pay for access, once they’ve done so they can still analyze and learn from it. But yes, if you don’t want your ideas to be copied, never sharing it is a sure way to do that, but that is antithetical to why most people make art to begin with.

creating software to poison LLMs.

These tools are horribly ineffective though. They waste artists time and/or degrade the artwork to the point humans don’t enjoy it either. It’s an artists right to use it though, but it’s essentially snake oil that plays on these artists fears of AI. But that’s a whole other discussion.

So either art becomes largely inaccessible to the public, or some form of horrible copyright action is taken because those are the only options available to artists.

I really think you are being unrealistic and hyperbolic here. Neither of these have happened nor have much of chance of happening. There are billions of people producing works that could be considered art and with making art comes the desire to share it. Sure there might only be millions that make great art, but if they would mobilize together that would be world news, if a workers strike in Hollywood can do that for a significantly smaller amount of artists.

Ultimately, I’d like a licensing system put in place Academics have to cite their sources for research That way, if they’ve used stuff that they legally shouldn’t, it can be proven.

The reason we have sources in research is not for licensing purposes. It is to support legitimacy, to build upon the work of the other. I wouldn’t be against sourcing, but it is a moot point because companies that make AI models don’t typically throw their dataset out there. So these datasets might very well be sourced. One well known public dataset LAION 5b, does source URLs. But again, because analysis can be performed freely, this is not a requirement.

Creating a requirement to license data for analysis is what you are arguing here for. I can already hear every large corporation salivating in the back at the idea of that. Every creator in existence would have to pay license to some big company because they interacted with their works at some point in their life and something they made looked somewhat similar. And copyright is already far more of a tool for big corporations, not small creators. This is a dystopian future to desire.

I think you are making the mistake of assuming disagreement with your stance means someone would say no to these questions. Simply put - it’s a strawman.

Most (yes, even corporations, albeit much less so for the larger ones), would say “Yes” to this question on it’s face value, because they would want the same for their own “sweat of the brow”. But certain uses after the work is created no longer have a definitive “Yes” to their answer, which is why your ‘simple question’ is not an accurate representation, as it forms no distinctions between that. You cannot stop your publicly posted work from being analyzed, by human or computer. This is firmly established. As others have put in this thread, reducing protections over analysis will be detrimental to both artists as well as everyone else. It would quite literally cause society’s ability to advance to slow down if not halt completely as most research requires analysis of existing data, and most of that is computer assisted.

Artists have always been undervalued, I will give you that. But to mitigate that, we should provide artists better protections that don’t rely on breaking down other freedoms. For example, UBI. And I wish people that were against AI would focus on that, since that is actually something you could get agreement on with most of society and actually help artists with. Fighting against technology that besides it negatives also provides great positives is a losing battle.

You’re confusing LLMs with other AI models, as LLMs are magnitudes more energy demanding than other AI. It’s easy to see why if you’ve ever looked at self hosting AI, you need a cluster of top line business GPUs to run modern LLMs while an image generator can be run on most consumer 3000, 4000 series Nvidia GPUs at home. Generating images is about as costly as playing a modern video game, and only when it’s generating.

Ironically voting for parties like AfD is probably the most illusioned vote you could make. The other parties are full of shit too but there it’s the byproduct not the main feature.