FaceDeer

But when you die and an AI company contacts all your grieving friends and family to offer them access to an AI based on you (for a low, low fee!)

You can stop right there, you’re just imagining a scenario that suits your prejudices. Of all the applications for AI that I can imagine that would be better served by a model that is entirely under my control this would be the top of the list.

With that out of the way the rest of your rhetorical questions are moot.

Even with that, being absolutist about this sort of thing is wrong. People undergoing surgery have spent time on heart/lung machines that breathe for them. People sometimes fast for good reasons, or get IV fluids or nutrients provided to them. You don’t see protestors outside of hospitals decrying how humans aren’t meant to be kept alive with such things, though, at least not in most cases (as always there are exceptions, the Terri Schiavo case for example).

If I want to create an AI substitute for myself it is not anyone’s right to tell me I can’t because they don’t think I was meant to do that.

I don’t believe humans are “meant” to do anything. We are a result of evolution, not intentional design. So I believe humans should do whatever they personally want to do in a situation like this.

If you have a loved one who does this and you don’t feel comfortable interacting with their AI version, then don’t interact with their AI version. That’s on you. But don’t belittle them for having preferences different from your own. Different people want different things and deal with death in different ways.

If you don’t want to do it then don’t do it. Can we stop trying to tell everyone else they have to have the same values as you?

If their goal is to prevent AI trainers from scraping their art then an open federated platform is the opposite of what they want.

It also has an expensive back end and no plans for any kind of monetization, so it’s dead in the water from that side too. The moment they’re successful they’re broke.

If they feel less need to add proper alt-text because peoples’ browsers are doing a better job anyway, I don’t see why that’s a problem. The end result is better alt text.

I would expect it’d be not too hard to expand the context fed into the AI from just the pixels to including adjacent text as well. Multimodal AIs can accept both kinds of input. Might as well start with the basics though.

The Fediverse doesn’t have any defenses against AI impersonators though, aside from irrelevance. If it gets big the same incentives will come into play.

The state of the art for small models is improving quite dramatically quite quickly. Microsoft just released the phi-3 model family under the MIT license, I haven’t played with them myself yet but the comments are very positive.

Alternately, just turn that feature off.

You don’t think LLMs are being trained off of this content too? Nobody needs to bother “announcing a deal” for it, it’s being freely broadcast.

Bitcoin’s base protocol is never going to change, it’s become a fundamentalist faith.

But you’re claiming that there’s already no ladder. Your previous paragraph was about how nobody but the big players can actually start from scratch.

Adding cost only makes the threshold higher. The opposite of the way things should be going.

All this aside from the conceptual flaws of such legislation. You’d be effectively outlawing people from analyzing data that’s publicly available

How? This is a copyright suit.

Yes, and I’m saying that it shouldn’t be. Analyzing data isn’t covered by copyright, only copying data is covered by copyright. Training an AI on data isn’t copying it. Copyright should have no hold here.

Like I said in my last comment, the gathering of the data isn’t in contention. That’s still perfectly legal and anyone can do it. The suit is about the use of that data in a paid product.

That’s the opposite of what copyright is for, though. Copyright is all about who can copy the data. One could try to sue some of these training operations for having made unauthorized copies of stuff, such as the situation with BookCorpus (a collection of ebooks that many LLMs have trained on that is basically pirated). But even in that case the thing that is a copyright violation is not the training of the LLM itself, it’s the distribution of BookCorpus. And one detail of piracy that the big copyright holders don’t like to talk about is that generally speaking downloading pirated material isn’t the illegal part, it’s uploading it, so even there an LLM trainer might be able to use BookCorpus. It’s whoever it is that gave them the copy of BookCorpus that’s in trouble.

Once you have a copy of some data, even if it’s copyrighted, there’s no further restriction on what you can do with that data in the privacy of your own home. You can read it. You can mulch it up and make paper mache sculptures out of it. You can search-and-replace the main character’s name with your own, and insert paragraphs with creepy stuff. Copyright is only concerned with you distributing copies of it. LLM training is not doing that.

If you want to expand copyright in such a way that rights-holders can tell you what analysis you can and cannot subject their works to, that’s a completely new thing and it’s going down a really weird and dark path for IP.

They’re the ones training “base” models. There are a lot of smaller base models floating around these days with open weights that individuals can fine-tune, but they can’t start from scratch.

What legislation like this would do is essentially let the biggest players pull the ladders up behind them - they’ve got their big models trained already, but nobody else will be able to afford to follow in their footsteps. The big established players will be locked in at the top by legal fiat.

All this aside from the conceptual flaws of such legislation. You’d be effectively outlawing people from analyzing data that’s publicly available to anyone with eyes. There’s no basic difference between training an LLM off of a website and indexing it for a search engine, for example. Both of them look at public data and build up a model based on an analysis of it. Neither makes a copy of the data itself, so existing copyright laws don’t prohibit it. People arguing for outlawing LLM training are arguing to dramatically expand the concept of copyright in a dangerous new direction it’s never covered before.

I don’t think you’re familiar with the sort of resources necessary to train a useful LLM up from scratch. Individuals won’t have access to that for personal use.

You realize that if cases like this are won then only the “giant fucking corporations” are going to be able to afford the datasets to train AI with?

Me, a programmer facing replacement by LLMs:

Over the past month I feel like all I’ve been doing is writing tech design documents for systems I don’t actually know anything about because I haven’t had the opportunity to go in and do anything with them.

Fortunately I’ve finally managed to reach the point where everyone agrees that we should just start implementing the basics and see how that goes rather than try to plan it all out ahead of time since we’re surely going to have to throw out the later plans once we see what we’re actually dealing with.

Ah, we’re doing one of those full circle things. I actually remember the time when AOL was “the internet.”

Bing Chat has become my go-to search engine for situations where I’m not looking for a specific website or other such resource, and instead want some kind of information or knowledge. I’d recommend giving it a shot. It does a websearch in the background, puts the results into its hidden context, and then builds an answer for you based on the information it dredged up, complete with links. You can then clarify your question or ask for further details and get a back-and-forth going, it’s really handy. I’d recommend giving it a shot, I believe it works without needing an account now.

Oh, I should note: don’t use it like an old-school search engine where you just type a couple of keywords in. Be conversational and give context to your search. Say for example “I’m planting a garden in Witchita, Kansas. What climate zone is it, and what sorts of flowers grow well there?” And then perhaps follow that with “Are any of those attractive to hummingbirds?” Or whatever. That should help it figure out what information to look for and how to distill what you want to know from it.