I mean we definitely can stop it. Laws are a pretty strong deterrent.

You can slow this, you can't stop it whatsoever. It's about as ultimately futile as an effort as trying to stop piracy. People are ALREADY running salesforce codegen and stable diffusion at home, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, what we'll have 20 years from now is going to make critics of these tools have nightmares.

If you try to outlaw it, the day before the laws come into effect, I'm going to download the very best models out there and run it on my home computer. I'll start organising with other scofflaws and building our own AI projects in the fashion of leelachesszero with donated compute time.

You can shut down the commercial versions of these tools. You can scare large corporations from banning the use of these tools by corporations. You can pull an uno reverse card and use modified versions of the tools to CHECK for copyright infringement and sue people under existing laws AND you'll probably even be able to statistically prove somebody is an AI user. But STOPPING the use of these tools? Go ahead and try, won't happen.

> You can slow this, you can't stop it whatsoever. It's about as ultimately futile as an effort as trying to stop piracy. ... But STOPPING the use of these tools? Go ahead and try, won't happen.

So? No one needs to stop it totally. The world isn't black and white, pushing it to the fringes is almost certainly a sufficient success.

Outlawing murder hasn't stopped murder, but no one's given up on enforcing those laws because of the futility of perfect success.

> If you try to outlaw it, the day before the laws come into effect, I'm going to download the very best models out there and run it on my home computer. I'll start organising with other scofflaws and building our own AI projects in the fashion of leelachesszero with donated compute time.

That sounds like a cyberpunk fantasy.

You'll never be able to push it to the fringes because there will never be a legal universal agreement even from country to country on where to draw the line.

And as computers get more powerful and the models get more efficient it'll become easier and easier to self host and run them on your own dime. There are already one click installers for generative models such as stable diffusion that run on modest hardware from a few years back.

> You'll never be able to push it to the fringes because there will never be a legal universal agreement even from country to country on where to draw the line.

Huh? "Legal universal agreement" has never been required to push something to the fringes in a particular country.

If (in the US) these models were declared to be copyright infringement, or the users were required to pay license feeds to the creators of the data that was used to build the models, they will vanish from the public sphere. GitHub/Microsoft's legal department will pull Copilot down immediately, and development will effectively cease. No US company will sponsor development, and no company will allow in-house use. It will be dead.

Some dude might still run the model in his bedroom in his spare time on his own hardware, but that's what irrelevance looks like.

> And as computers get more powerful and the models get more efficient it'll become easier and easier to self host and run them on your own dime. There are already one click installers for generative models such as stable diffusion that run on modest hardware from a few years back.

If that's the only way you can run something, because it's illegal, you're describing a fringe technology right there.

Cyberpunk sure, but fantasy? Not at all.

> Cyberpunk sure, but fantasy? Not at all.

The fantasy is the idea that doing what you describe will matter.

"We" maybe can't stop it. But if there were the political will to kneecap many uses of machine learning, it's not obvious there's any reason it couldn't be done even if not 100% effective. Whether that would be a good thing is a different question.

What would the law do? Forbid automatic data collection and/or indexing and further use without explicit copyright holder agreement? That would essentially ban the whole internet as we know it, not saying that would be bad, but this is never going to happen, too much accumulated momentum in the opposite direction.

To your point, the law can do a lot of things. The issue here is the clarity and ability to enforce the law.

Laws in which nation and enforced by which juries?