We are approaching the "UBI or Guillotine" fork simply because rules and regulations work selectively. Just like with the "If we pay for copyright or business becomes impossible" defense, this is yet another wast unfairness against those who had to transfer their resources to learn a skill. Awful lot of people had hard life or got into debt for things that big tech is immune from.
Or maybe we will come into the conclusion that all this works only if there's no such thing as IP, reset the playing field for everyone and if anyone wants to make money will have to actually work for it every single time. IIRC that's what's happening in China and its how they surpassed US in innovation.
Technically, that's a deregulation - just not the kind of deregulation the big tech is pushing for. Maybe the next time there's a graph showing how regulations made EU lag behind, add the graph of China too to spice things up.
With so many technical people out of work and promises of make the employed ones obsolete too, it can be a good idea to let people build thing instead of unfairly concentrating even more power onto kleptocratic entities.
Even in the 18th century, the French aristocracy mostly cruised through the Revolution from afar, surviving with fortunes largely intact to this day [1]. If the fork is UBI or guillotine, the selfish move by the private-jetting billionaire class—personally and financially more mobile and global than the French aristocracy ever was—is the latter.
> if there's no such thing as IP, reset the playing field for everyone
Your thesis is letting Altman, Zuckerberg and Musk have free rein would decrease inequality?
> other way to look at it though is that revolution won't solve your problems, and Americans are far too confident that it will
Americans are largely not for a revolution because most of us aren’t idiots. There is idle chatter of a civil war, but that’s again (a) bluster (not that this can’t take on a life of its own) and (b) about consolidating control versus wholesale rebuilding the American class structure.
FWIW there is a difference between revolution and civil war. I see a decent number of people advocate for the first but basically no one advocate for the second. In either case the numbers aren’t a majority.
> Where internal power structures were preserved (or where the society was restructured under occupation), yes.
No. See for example Spain's or Portugal's transition from autocracy to democracy. The latter involved a military coup and exile of it's former dictator.
I’m no advocate for revolution but the American problem is that our revolution actually worked. Americans freed themselves from a prior group of elites unlike the grandparent comment is claiming of the French elites.
> Americans freed themselves from a prior group of elites unlike the grandparent comment is claiming of the French elites
The American Revolution was one of American elites overthrowing their overseers. It worked and was not super disruptive because power (and class) structures were preserved. From the states through to the system of law and the people in power. (We also didn’t do any mass or political executions.)
unlike then, today global mobility is within the means of most the western world. A French Revolution today could very well extend globally to identify and re patriot.
> French Revolution today could very well extend globally to identify and re patriot
We have zero historical or contemporary precedent for this, and strong incentives for everyone else in the world to not play along. (As they did in sheltering the French aristocracy.)
In a hypothetical American revolution, foreign powers would be looking for their slice of the pie. To think through this dispassionately, imagine civil war breaking out in Russia or China. A second American revolution à la the first would put today’s billionaires and political elite in a room to draft a new constitution to their liking.
The "U" in UBI is for "Universal". There is no means-testing. Everyone gets it regardless of assets or income, which means there is no need to spend any effort on checking whether someone is "poor enough".
Though the state would have to make sure the person receiving the benefit actually exists, is still alive, etc.
I understand what UBI means but it's the effect is what I think people do not understand. Based on the Cantillon effect, UBI will just accelerate the separation between the rich and the poor.
I'm not sure that Cantillon effect is majorly at play.
The very nature of Cantillon is unequally obtained new money, whereas UBI is universal. Any effect it has would be related to the poorest/neediest spenders now purchasing the sort of goods they do (and, realistically, no increase in spending by the richest). You might see increased consumption in neighborhoods/regions with high concentrations of poor, too.
The better fit for "UBI creates an economic problem" seems to be pricing stickiness. The above commenter focused on controlling general inflation through monetary/fiscal policy (keeping money supply stable, using tax mechanisms), but didn't actually address the concern about producers simply raising prices to absorb the UBI.
No, you can do a UBI that keeps the money supply the same, and use it as a way to stabilize the economy.
With a $2000/mo UBI, 50% flat tax on other income, 25% VAT, phase it in by doing 10% of that the first year (and 90% of your current taxes, 90% of current support payments), second year 20% and 80%, so the impact isn't too disruptive.
Adjust the flat tax rate as the Federal budget changed (a spending bill is automatically a tax bill as well). Adjust the VAT to control inflation.
You've got to be kidding. As a regular middle class citizen my taxes are high enough already. There's no way I'll vote for UBI so that some slackers can sit around getting high and playing Xbox.
Based on your comments you are in US. Your taxes are very low among Western countries.
That slacker is already getting high and playing on Xbox. With UBI they will have less worries about staying alive and the opportunity to try things to get more money. UBI is a great insentive for people to try new things without there being a financial risk of you losing your income. Just check the trials and their results - people are more productive and happy in general.
Even assuming this scaremongering scenario, the world would be in a far better place if society assured everyone would be guaranteed a certain income.
Also, the scenario that supports the hypothesis of higher inflation is that more people in society are suddenly able to afford goods and services that were out of their reach without UBI. Can anyone actually put to words why that is undesirable?
I think one criticism is that prices would change to capture the UBI.I think I read the idea in "Progress and Poverty," although I've certainly seen it elsewhere since:
- If everyone suddenly has more money (say $2 more per day)
- And milk is a basic necessity
- The milk seller knows everyone needs milk and now has $2 more to spend
- They can gradually raise the price of milk by close to $2
- Consumers must still buy milk at the higher price
- The intended benefit of the extra $2 is effectively captured by the milk seller
The increases in general purchasing power can be absorbed by suppliers of essential goods. If you have just excess discretionary income in the general case, then non-essential goods can bump in price, too.
The milk seller doesn’t even need to consciously increase prices to match the raise in household income. It will happen organically.
For the sake of argument, imagine UBI provides everyone with a million dollars a year. That doesn’t make everyone a millionaire. It just makes everyone’s money less valuable.
It's gonna be complex and messy.
On the one hand yes, many people receiving UBI = inflation. On the other hand many highly paid software devs (And soon after - accountants, lawyers, marketers, sales people etc etc) are losing their incomes = very deflationary.
UBI has less friction as far as implementation since we don't need qualify anyone. With AI, we can afford to have that extra step (nuance) and be able to make sure its a needs based approach. The future requires various combinations of changes. Fix the tax system and then UBI (in this specific order) OR !UBI (needs based distribution).
Implement UBI as part of fixing taxes. A UBI combined with a flat tax plus a national sales tax, and including universal healthcare, can continue to be a progressive tax while eliminating a lot of the overhead of keeping track of it all.
Look at the effective tax rates with a 50% flat tax, 25% sales tax, and $2000 per month UBI with UHC.
Has there been experiments/testing at city/state scale. UBI is country scale and it's way more complex than testing it on a small town of people who I assume are selected for their needs.
I think you'll find rising rents are more correlated with rising interest rates than Covid cheques, but given one of the key grievances perceived by UBI advocates is class inequality and lack of social mobility, if UBI became politically possible then so would rent controls and controls on prices of key essential commodities while waiting for it to "settle in".
Good point about the interest rates. However, in the UK landlords adjusted their rents accordingly when the Govt introduced Housing Benefits (years before interest rates began to rise). A lot of govt MPs are landlords.
I'm not against the idea of UBI, I just see the landlords eating it up like they do with peoples wages.
Training on copyrighted works licensed for such use is inarguably conforming.
Acquiring and using works without such license is just piracy. Whatever your stand on piracy is, most individuals and businesses are not free to incorporate it into their projects. Normal people have faced significant penalties for piracy, and concientious business operators avoid it.
Sure would be disappointing to all those people if there were suddenly a ruling that said "well, but it's okay that these guys did it because they're filthy rich and went real hard with it"
Llama 3.1 70B is around 45GB is size, despite being trained on likely hundreds of petabytes of data. And before you say it, they are not fancy compression algo's either, the loss is so high they would be useless.
Your argument is essentially: “I have downloaded and watched this movie, but because I cannot recreate the images, there was no copyright infringement involved”.
I would say it's more, I checked out a book from the library, read it, and learned some things about writing style and storytelling that I'm now going to apply to my own original works.
Libraries obey copyright, loaning out books for which they've acquired some right to lend to members. When I borrow a library book and read it that way, everything that happens is respecting the rights of the copyright's owner.
That has nothing to do with how LLM's were trained. They were trained on countless works for which Meta, etc had acquired no legitimate right for use at all.
My point is "the legal owner of the book has to allow you to read it" is not true
I will accept the argument they got the source material in a way where someone broke American law. I really do not think they've broken any laws whatsoever in terms of using it for LLM training
> they got the source material in a way where someone broke American law
Isn't inducing or offering someone incentives to break laws illegal by itself? I'll admit that isn't specifically an IP law violation, but it can't possibly be kosher.
For example if a buyer of goods can reasonably be expected to know the goods were stolen, they can also be charged. Isn't this the same thing?
I would go a step further, even, and say it's akin to borrowing a book and formally registering every little detail about it but the actual text itself, with extreme breadth and precision: grammar, style, lexicon (potential morpheme combinations, basically), wider discourse structure, use of special characters and formatting, etc., and then discarding the book.
Most, if not all, pirated books are copies of books that had been legally obtained, so this is not how they are distinguished from books borrowed from a library. The only thing that makes them pirated is that the price paid for the original book is considered to not have covered the right of also distributing copies of the book.
Nowadays the surviving public libraries might pay special prices for the right of lending books, but that was not true in the past, when they just bought the books from the market like anyone else, at the same price.
I am pretty sure that the public libraries that I frequented as a child, many decades ago, did not pay anything for a book above the price that I would have paid myself, but nonetheless at that time nobody would have thought that they do not have the right to lend the books to whomever they pleased.
The point in the Article is that Meta used LibGen to train, not legally obtained books from their local library.
The problem is that if you and I made use of LibGen and some of the “right holders” (more likely some IP specialized law firms) realized that, we would be prosecuted.
Giving Meta exclusive access to those copies is the problem (which is effectively what we are doing if they are not prosecuted, or, alternatively, if we accepted that LibGen is fair use for everyone).
Was this replied to the wrong comment? I'm not sure what it has to do with what I wrote.
But here's another way to think about what I'm saying, in case you missed it:
Personally, I'd love to download a complete archive of JSTOR. I'd train myself, and maybe even I could even use it as input into some product I mean to launch soon. JSTOR doesn't offer a license for that, at least not to me, but I'm sure I can scrape their site or find an archive elsewhere and make it happen anyway.
Do you think I should do that? What do you think might happen if I tried?
How can it possibly be the case that it's ok for meta to download and ingest the entire contents of libgen but it is not ok for an individual human to selectively download a single work and read it?
Whatever legal contortions used to justify this are, quite frankly, bullshit. This isn't how anything should work even if these companies can buy themselves a regulatory regime where it does.
The idea that abolishing IP protections and letting AI companies run rampant is an offramp for wealth inequality is such a wild take to me?
Realistically billionaires are using racist and homophobic populism as a way to direct working class energy away from wealth inequality. Making people think "woke" is the reason why the earth is on fire and they can't have health insurance.
I think OP is coming from the "temporarily embarassed billionaire" perspective where if only we had a libertarian hellscape without pesky laws they would be a funeral baron who runs Bartertown.
How can you get the definition of fairness so backwards? Giant corporations provide literally everything you take for granted and they should be punished because you are envious? I don't get it.
There is a reason everyone with over 130 IQ wants to work for them rather than starting their own companies.
They shouldn’t be punished because people are envious, they should be punished because they’re not respecting other people's intellectual property without an agreement in place.
We can’t protect IPs only when that benefits big corps. We should protect them always or accept that the world is better if we go in another direction, changing the rules for everybody.
Training on copyrighted data should be legally allowed
- of course exact reproduction of protected content is a no-no
- but learning is ok, as long as it is transformative. User prompts and responses are pushing the model outside its training distribution anyway
- users add their own intent, making usage transformative
- when LLMs synthesize from multiple sources, the result is transformative
- if you try to protect expression it is meaningless now, but if you protect abstract ideas it kneecaps creativity
- the problems of copyright started with the apparition of internet, not with AI
- revenues from royalty are almost zero today, as each new content competes against an unbounded list of other works that have been accumulating for decades online
- because royalties are shit, creatives now focus on ads, and this leads to enshittification, attention grabbing junk everywhere, attention is scarce content is post-scarcity
- we actually like interactive participation more than passive consumption; we now edit Wikipedia, contribute to open source, have papers published for free on arXiv, use social networks where our comments are shared with the world, play games instead of reading books - it is another age, the interactive age
- AI is actually more than an infringement tool, it is useful for many legit purposes
- and AI is the worst possible infringement tool, it can hallucinate details, get thins wrong; By comparison copying is free and easy and precise to the letter
So the idea that training is infringement is pretty abusive, it tries to make copyright be about abstractions which is wrong. We can't return to 1990s, so we have to live with its demise. It's been dying for 3 decades already.
LLMs are allowed to "learn" from all this content because humans are allowed to. Most humans have to access the content legally to learn. But training LLMs it's basically "Copyright lol, yolo".
Is there a reason a human can't torrent movies and say "But I'm just learning from them"?
It's been reduced to zero for 3 decades. When you publish your work, there are a million other works competing for attention. That is the real issue. When you search for an image, you get thousands of images instantly, faster than diffusion models. Content doesn't matter anymore, attention matters, curation matters too.
Even if you forbid AI from training on copyrighted works, people are going to comment about them online, and the model will pick up the ideas. There is no way to protect ideas from spreading and reaching AIs.
How can you get the definition of fairness so backwards? The King provides literally everything you take for granted and he should be punished because you are envious? I don't get it.
There's a reason why every vassal with a sizeable estate wants to be in the King's court rather than starting their own country.
Or maybe we will come into the conclusion that all this works only if there's no such thing as IP, reset the playing field for everyone and if anyone wants to make money will have to actually work for it every single time. IIRC that's what's happening in China and its how they surpassed US in innovation.
Technically, that's a deregulation - just not the kind of deregulation the big tech is pushing for. Maybe the next time there's a graph showing how regulations made EU lag behind, add the graph of China too to spice things up.
With so many technical people out of work and promises of make the employed ones obsolete too, it can be a good idea to let people build thing instead of unfairly concentrating even more power onto kleptocratic entities.