Comment by bakugo

Comment by bakugo a day ago

> Have you ever repeated a line from your favorite movie or TV show? Memorized a poem? Guess the rights holders better sue you for stealing their content by encoding it in your wetware neural network.

I see this absolute non-argument regurgitated ad infinitum in every single discussion on this topic, and at this point I can't help but wonder: doesn't it say more about the person who says it than anything else?

Do you really consider your own human speech no different than that of a computer algorithm doing a bunch of matrix operations and outputting numbers that then get turned into text? Do you truly believe ChatGPT deserves the same rights to freedom of speech as you do?

imgabe a day ago

Who said anything about freedom of speech? Nobody is claiming the LLM has free speech rights, which don't even apply to infringing copyright anyway. Freedom of speech doesn't give me the right to make copies of copyrighted works.

The question is whether the model weights constitute of copy of the work. I contend that they do not, or they did, than so do the analogous weights (reinforced neural pathways) in your brain, which is clearly absurd and is intended to demonstrate the absurdity of considering a probabilistic weighting that produces similar text to be a copy.

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bakugo a day ago

> Freedom of speech doesn't give me the right to make copies of copyrighted works.
No, but it gives you the right to quote a line from a movie or TV show without being charged with copyright infringement. You argued that an LLM deserves that same right, even if you didn't realize it.
> than so do the analogous weights (reinforced neural pathways) in your brain
Did your brain consume millions of copyrighted books in order to develop into what it is today? Would your brain be unable to exist in its current form if it had not consumed those millions of books?

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- imgabe a day ago
  
  Millions? No, but my brain certainly consumed thousands of books, movies, TV shows, pieces of music, artworks, and other copyrighted material. Where is the cutoff? Can I only consume 999,999 copyrighted works before I'm not longer allowed to remember something without infringing copyright? My brain definitely would not exist in its current form without consuming that material. It would exist in some form, but it would without a doubt be different than it is having consumed the material.
  An LLM is not a person and does not deserve any rights. People have rights, including the right to use tools like LLMs without having to grease the palm of every grubby rights holder (or their great-great-grandchild) just because it turns out their work was so trite and predictable it could be reproduced by simply guessing the next most likely token.
  
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  em-bee a day ago
  
  i can remember and i can quote, but if i quote to much i violate the copyright.
  this is literally why i don't like to work on proprietary code. because when i need to create a similar solution for someone else i have to go out of my way to make sure i do it differently. people have been sued over this.
  
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  bakugo a day ago
  
  > just because it turns out their work was so trite and predictable it could be reproduced by simply guessing the next most likely token.
  Well, if you have no idea how LLMs work, you could've just said so.
  
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lern_too_spel a day ago

Making personal copies is generally permitted. If I were to distribute the neural pathways in my brain enabling others to reproduce copyrighted works verbatim, the owners of the copyrighted works would have a case against me.

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