effingjoe

I’m pretty far away from an expert, but I’m pretty sure your example isn’t a “real” sentence. It implies the subject and the verb. (I, like).

A sentence needs a subject and a verb, if I remember grade school. Fun fact: “I’m.” is a sentence. There can be an implied “You” in there. Like “[You] Stop!” or “[You] Go!”

I think many of us are using reverse proxies, and opening port 443 (https) and maybe port 80 (http).

It’s not, but Bob bobs is.

I am in a similar boat (with Boox) but I set up my old Kindle Paperwhite for my kid just a few weeks ago and that’s when I learned that they finally gave up on mobi.

I don’t know if this is what you meant, but Amazon dropped support for mobi and switched to epub in late 2022, iirc. Not that this means you suddenly should start using Amazon or anything.

It’s a shot in the dark, but are you running a vpn on your phone? That might mess things up.

I do not disagree with anything you said.

You have taken a turn towards anger, if I’m reading the correct context, but I’m just a messenger. I also wasn’t expecting you to like it, and I guess you can complain all you’d like, but I was expecting to help you accept it. To be sure, whether or not you accept it won’t change whether it happens.

Anyway, thanks for the discussion.

You are trying to muddy the water, but I don’t see why.

We aren’t talking about location exif data on pictures, and people can and should strip that off (there are tools to do so) before posting online, but that has nothing to do with LLMs and their like. Privacy violations are certainly fair game for legislation-- but as you are finding out, you don’t get a say in how people consume your work. I could buy your work and burn it, or read it to my dog, or put it on a shelf, or study it daily to better learn how to make similar works. Once you make it available for public consumption, the public can consume it, even if that consumption eventually hurts you financially.

One of the many problems with IP laws is that it is so ingrained in our society that people who benefit from it directly forget that it’s not all encompassing, nor is it a law of nature. For instance, I am free to make a drawing of the main characters in Stranger Things, drawn in the style of The Simpsons. That violates no IP laws. If a computer learns a specific style of painting from a specific artist and can recreate that style on command, there is still no violation of IP laws, just as it would be if a human did it. And it’s plausible (though, unlikely) that someone could learn a specific style of animation (like, the simpsons) and then go on to replace the originator of that style in the show. Styles aren’t copyrightable.

Your job is very likely to be replaced and there very likely nothing you can do about it. That’s the bottom line. Mine may as well-- I am in the field of Software QA right now, for military robots. I feel like my time to be replaced isn’t quite here-- I can’t imagine it’s that far off. Acknowledging this is just prudent.

I caution you from repeating phrases you’ve read but don’t fully understand. “Scraping the internet and collecting everyone’s data” is just how the internet works. It’s certainly how every single search engine works. (even privacy focused ones, like duckduckgo). If you don’t want something to be read or viewed on the internet, you shouldn’t put it on the internet.

You still seem to have a very specific idea of what manual labor is. You may not think you’d find manual labor jobs fulfilling or expressive, but that doesn’t mean no one does.

Could it be that you care more about creative jobs because you have one, and if you had a manual labor job you’d be arguing the opposite?

Edit: what, specifically, does “justice” in the system look like to you?

Intent is a big deal in this one. Your Python book writer intended for people to read it to learn Python.

I really don’t see where intent falls into this, still-- but feel free to change the hypothetical to looking at other people’s python code to learn how to use python. It still doesn’t change the equation. Did I exploit the people who wrote the python code that I learned from? Does my source of learning matter when it comes to what I produce? Do you really believe that artists create new art in a total vacuum, without drawing inspiration from prior art?

Back-breaking jobs that hurt people’s health should be improved with technology. A migrant worker might lost his job to a mechanical fruitpicker but he’s likely bilingual and eligible for a translator job. Unless that job, which is better for health and longevity, and allows someone to stay in one place, is taken by an AI.

I am somewhat stunned by the obvious bias you seem to have against manual labor. You really think having an active job is less healthy than sitting in a chair, looking at a screen all day? (Please note: 90% of my job is sitting in a chair, staring at a screen all day.)

There was no “promise of automation”. Technology was always going to take everyone’s jobs-- the only change is the order it has taken it in. It was assumed that human creativity was some special thing that was so difficult to define in software that it would be towards the end when it came to getting replaced, but it turns out that we’re a lot more like computers than we believe, and you can train software-- with relative ease-- to figure out how to achieve an end result without explicitly defining how.

Large companies want to reduce overhead, increase productivity, and maximize profit. I assure you there’s no bias as to what kind of jobs get replaced when it comes to those goals. It just happens that creative jobs seem to be easily replaced.

Do you really, honestly, think that it’s even possible to hold back a technological advance using legislation? You can already host your own LLMs and train them on whatever material you desire, to better tailor their output. That’s today. Even if we assume, for sake of argument, that the law does decide that people have a “right” to control how their art is consumed. (again, very unlikely imo), that won’t even slow down the people spinning up their own instances, and even if they follow the rules, how much worse do you really think the models would be using only public domain and open source training materials?

You’re going to need to strictly define “exploited”, I think. I don’t know what you mean when you use that term.

If I read a book on Python and write a script to replace someone’s job, did I exploit the person who wrote the book? What about the people that created and/or maintain python?

Why don’t we want companies replacing creatives with AI? Should we roll back other technological advances that resulted in fewer humans being employed? No human routes phone calls anymore, but they used to. Should their jobs be protected, too? What about people that used to carve ice out of mountain lakes and deliver it to businesses? Should refrigeration technology be held back by the law to protect those jobs? If not, why artists? What makes them more deserving of being protected?

That’s not necessarily true. Certainly plausible, but just as plausible as it working out like “cage free” eggs, where a perceived value pushes the market into a direction that it wouldn’t go for purely financial reasons.

I don’t follow why calling it a tool matters. If a python script renders someone’s job redundant (hypothetically; this is unlikely in reality) does it matter if the script was written by a human or a LLM?

If you’re leaning on morality, then the comparison to humans becomes relevant again.

Lawyers taking a high profile case is not any indication to go by.

I could be off base here, but are you financially impacted if AI starts making commercial art? Like, is that how you make income, too?

You may very well be right on the money here, but I find it at least plausible that a market for “human-made” art becomes a thing if computer-made art becomes a thing.

That’s a right to make copies and distribute them for educational purposes. This is specifically not involving distribution of any kind. Arguably copyright law doesn’t even apply, but even under the broader term of “intellectual property”, it doesn’t hold up, even without trying to make a comparison between humans learning and AI training. (which is more of an analogy)

Edit: and to be fair, I’m not a lawyer either, but IP law (especially regarding how terrible it has become) is kind of a hobby of mine. But I can’t claim to be any type of authority on it.

There simply isn’t a right to control even training. That’s just not a thing. It would need a change to the law.