Capitalism is still very alive, and will continue to be. It's in conflict with the general welfare of the people...
Something will have to change.
I mean sure, maybe humans aren't "just" doing sophisticated pattern matching, but there are good reasons to suspect this is some part of what we are doing. (Even if its not implemented with back-prop).
e.g) consider the work of people like Anil Seth, who propose that our brain is basically a generative model of the world, which aims to minimize the likelihood of perceptual data. (see also: Karl Friston's free energy principle). What's up for debate is how it is structured, what priors are built in, what is the learning algorithm etc.
Anyway, for all their limitations, it seems clear that current artificial generative models can: 1. learn hierarchies of abstractions, which 2. explain the observed data in the fewest possible number of bits, and 3. generate new, novel data based on the patterns that have been learned
If you want to describe this as "just sophisticated pattern matching".. then sure I guess? But I think there's a clear qualitative difference between this and searching for code in a discrete database (which imo would not be okay).
The paper suggests that transformer work on a set of select, aggregate and element-wise operations. Which seems pretty close to the SQL statements i write from day to day.
> It seems clear enough to me that training AIs on copyrighted works is typically or commonly a fair use under existing law, because the AIs can and commonly do learn non-copyrightable elements and aspects of those works. It's very obvious from enormous numbers of examples that current AI systems are capable of learning much more abstract features of human culture (grammar, concepts, facts, cultural tropes, and many others).
I said it already in a previous discussion, I would be very careful with comparing ML with how humans learn. To me there are still a lot of examples that show that AIs don't understand prompts (see e.g. the discussions around the "horse riding astronaut" prompts för stable diffusion et al.) and it seems like they really are just doing sophisticated pattern matching. If that is what they do aren't they themselves covered by the licenses/ restrictions placed on the "patterns" they "choose" from?