News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by jkestner on Monday December 05, 2022 @09:58AM (#33866442)
Maybe AI content is just a way to launder copyright.
Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by sarahlwalks on Monday December 05, 2022 @10:34AM (#33866930)
You can only say that if you also say that the creativity of human beings themselves is just a way to launder copyright.
Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by ducktective on Monday December 05, 2022 @10:42AM (#33867046)
"Good artists copy; great artists steal"

-Pablo Picasso

Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by TeMPOraL on Monday December 05, 2022 @11:31AM (#33867753)
There's this magic phrase that makes all the difference: at scale.
Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by visarga on Monday December 05, 2022 @11:34AM (#33867799)
People scale. There's billions of us. And we compete.
Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by TeMPOraL on Monday December 05, 2022 @11:36AM (#33867820)
AIs scale faster. Just one instance can do the work of billions of people, and have its owner profit off it.
Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by visarga on Monday December 05, 2022 @04:07PM (#33871945)
How can the owner profit off something that is "free" to make for anyone? Mass spamming is hard to achieve with current day social networks.
Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by TeMPOraL on Monday December 05, 2022 @04:16PM (#33872041)
Mass spamming is the very raison d'etre for social network companies. It goes by different names though - "sponsored content", "fanpages", "influencers", etc.

The spam did not disappear with people moving away from e-mail. On the contrary, it's just been given legitimacy by the platform owners - who all happen to make money from spam.

Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by sarahlwalks on Monday December 05, 2022 @11:17PM (#33875852)
That seems like saying a steam shovel is bad because it moves dirt at scale. Machines do increase the reach of people, that is exactly what they are for.
Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by throwaway290 on Monday December 05, 2022 @12:00PM (#33868210)
This false equivalency just keeps being made.

Yeah absolutely, acceptable in case of humans and not acceptable in case of GPT.

GPT is not human. It is employed by a human to get around having to benefit other humans with attention and money.

Meanwhile human world is structured around fate, happiness of humans -- such things guide our considerations as to what to consider legal and what not.

There are other differences that make it OK for humans and not GPT (like we can attribute and credit what we learned from, whose ideas we used in work and what inspired us) but they are less significant than above principle

Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by sarahlwalks on Monday December 05, 2022 @11:19PM (#33875868)
Machines -- at least today -- are extensions of human beings, and pretty democratic, really, compared to history. You can't really talk about limiting machines without also limiting humans. GPT is a tool. Almost anyone can use tools much like it. So what are we trying to protect against?
Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by throwaway290 on Tuesday December 06, 2022 @12:37AM (#33876309)
Yes. Machines including GPT are not the ones doing things, they can't be compared to humans. And humans may desire to do things with machines that should not be considered acceptable because of how they affect human society, and humans may or should be limited (as they already are in all aspects of life that involve other humans).
Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by rvbissell on Monday December 05, 2022 @12:12PM (#33868392)
He writeth best who stealeth best, all things both great and small.

For greater minds that wrote them first, from nature stole them all.

-- Totally me.

Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by sarahlwalks on Monday December 05, 2022 @11:21PM (#33875876)
I like that phrase! I'm probably going to steal it :-)
Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by rvbissell on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @11:05AM (#33970695)
Now that joke time is over, I'll disclose that it seems to be attributed to one Robert E. D. Cattley, in here: http://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/20/science/homer-s-sea-wine-d...
Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by john-radio on Monday December 05, 2022 @10:26AM (#33866815)
That's certainly what my impoverished artist friends have taken away from it.
Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by paulmd on Monday December 05, 2022 @11:39AM (#33867877)
Well, the uncomfortable truth is that our copyright regime doesn't really make sense. An AI is sort of the equivalent of a junior coder or an art student - it can look at existing work and mash it up and produce something in the same style that's novel (inspired by a prompt - which is like your teacher giving you an assignment). That's copyrightable when it's a human being doing it, and there is no inherent protection for art style, I can make all the Picasso-style artwork I want even if I'm blatantly ripping off his style, and I would own the copyright on the resulting works. Like, if I do a painting in the style of Picasso, should Picasso get the resulting copyright? Why?

And programmers are not without sin either - how many people here run to stackoverflow and copy some answer, or mash it up and produce something similar-but-cleaned-up? That's going to get a lot more powerful in not too many years too... and the thing is, is your little DTO file with blocks of fields and setters and getters really novel and worthy of a government license to cultural exclusivity, or is it a relatively obvious implementation of an API? Which (per Oracle v. Google) are also not really copyrightable...

Humanity hasn't squared the reality of most content being low-value generative trash already (despite being human-generated!) with the reality of a system that is designed to produce up to ~150 years of exclusivity (lifetime of the author +75 years). Like, that's the long and short of it. A lot of what we do as humans is just building up a squishy water-filled neural net ("how to make a painting in the style of Picasso") and running random prompts and goal-seeking through it and cleaning up the generative output. Now AIs have gotten to the level of "average college student" and it turns out that's not actually all that difficult or interesting anymore, but we're still working in this model where that's supposed to be worth ~150 years of cultural exclusivity and protection.

Re:Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are f... by emporas on Monday December 05, 2022 @02:21PM (#33870484)
Are answers to Stack Overflow not supposed to be copy pasted, just right away? It seems hard to believe, i thought that was the whole purpose of the site!

Well, copyright suffers from the same problem communism suffers. For communism to work, everyone should be on board. For copyright and patents to work as expected, every country on earth, every town and every city's laws should be almost the same regarding to that. As soon as even just one municipality anywhere on the planet, is free of patent laws, the exact same moment a factory will pop up and produce an expensive patented pharmaceutical product which it will sell for half the price, or 1/10 of the price.

Capitalism on the other hand, works even almost everyone else doesn't like it, and 2 people agree on a peaceful exchange of commodities, following a price the market sets, or it is discovered right away.

As a rule of thumb, anything that requires everyone to implement rules and follow them, for it to work, will fail sooner than later. When a product in some part of the world is selling 100x of the normal price because of some patent, counter incentives are detonated in some other part to produce it and sell it for 50x the price. This huge profit margin creates a chain reaction of other economic actors producing it as well, and selling it for 25x the price.

Additionaly the eating problem can be solved by capitalism, not communism. Exchange of art for electronic money, a marketplace of information is what we need. Bitcoin (not BTC) will play an instrumental role in that.

A.I generated images of picasso, are awesome. I created many of them, one series of them are "Darth Vader riding a red tricycle, in the style of picasso". They are so good you're gonna fall of the chair.