Comment by ben_w

Comment by ben_w 19 hours ago

> I keep waiting for the day when software stops being compared to a human person (a being with agency, free will, consciousness, and human rights of its own) for the purposes of justifying IP law circumvention.

I mean, "agency" is a goal of some AI; "free will" is incoherent*; the word "consciousness" has about 40 different definitions, some of which are so broad they include thermostats and others so narrow that it's provably impossible for anything (including humans) to have it; and "human rights" are a purely legal concept.

> What’s even worse, is that imaginably they train (or would train) the models to specifically not output those things verbatim specifically to thwart attempts to detect the presence of said works in training dataset (which would naturally reveal the model and its output being a derivative work).

Some of the makers certainly do as you say; but also, the more verbatim quotations a model can produce, the more computational effort that model needs to spend to get the far more useful general purpose results.

* I'm not a fan of Aleister Crowley, but I think he was right to say that there's only one thing you can actually do that's truly your own will and not merely you allowing others to influence you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Will

strogonoff 17 hours ago

> and "human rights" are a purely legal concept.

Yep, and if you claim that a thing can reproduce IP like a human then you should explain why you are also not holding its operators to the same legal standard (try to use a human in the same way and it will be considered torture and slavery).

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ben_w 16 hours ago

I am specifically not using that to claim "and therefore the AI is a human". The point is that "human rights" are not part of the natural order, they only exist as laws.
This means that "human rights" is basically irrelevant to this topic: they may have rights and need to be liberated, or they may be tools that don't, but the law is just words on paper, and officials who make you follow those words.

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- strogonoff 16 hours ago
  
  > The point is that "human rights" are not part of the natural order, they only exist as laws.
  I have seen this argument used before; when something suits an argument, it’s “nature”, when something doesn’t then it isn’t. I think it’s a fallacy.
  Humans are part of natural order. Our laws and how they evolve are part of our nature, and by extension part of nature. I don’t believe in silencing such discussions as irrelevant because of an imaginary cutoff point where it stops being part of nature and suddenly becomes “artificial”.
  > This means that "human rights" is basically irrelevant to this topic: they may have rights and need to be liberated, or they may be tools that don't, but the law is just words on paper, and officials who make you follow those words.
  I’m not sure how it is irrelevant. If we can claim “LLMs are like human, and so their creators and commercial operators are not guilty of IP laundering that LLMs do”, then we have a moral imperative to stop using them because, well, they are like human, and no human should be put through what would be, to any human mind, abuse. If we do not believe they are human and free in this sense, then the excuse quoted above in this paragraph also stops applying.
  
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  ben_w 16 hours ago
  
  By that tautology, so are rocks. Rocks don't get natural rights.
  Also, you may note that "human rights" is a recent invention and not actually enforced worldwide even today.
  
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