[cattown]

I believe that laundering licensed or copyrighted content for reuse that fails to recognize the original authors or usage restrictions is likely to be one of the biggest commercial applications of generative machine learning algorithms.

I also believe this is where a lot of the hype about "rogue AIs" and singularity type bullshit comes from. The makers of these models and products will talk about those non-problems to cover for the fact that they're vacuuming up the work of individuals then monetizing it for the profit of big industry players.

[ToValueFunfetti]

I don't think this theory holds up. Singularity concerns long predate LLMs and are mostly expressed by people who want OpenAI to stop what they're doing right now. Sam Altman has publically disagreed with AI doomers. If you're willing to believe that OpenAI is pretending not to be concerned but is quietly hyping the concerns up, I have to wonder what standard of evidence is letting you simultaneously write off the concerns as bullshit.

[krainboltgreene]

For me personally it's that everyone who is expressing these concerns has clearly done less critical thinking about the subject than your average extremely high teenager. When you ask them about details they get defensive, resort to even stranger ground like "Well a human is nothing more than an autocomplete" (clearly not true).

[quasarsunnix]

I think cattown might be referring to statements such as this: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/17/openai-sa...

Not sure if I'd say there's a conspiracy per se, but I do think generative AI players are going to be careful about the optics of the technology and how it works. Anecdotally from speaking to non-technical family members there's very little understanding for how the technology actually works, and it seems there's not a great deal of effort to emphasize the importance of training data, or the intellectual property considerations in these companies marketing materials.

[gumballindie]

> what standard of evidence is letting you simultaneously write off the concerns as bullshit.

Negative marketing is good marketing. Look at all of us debating this scale theft promoting the brand of this non product.

[pms]

Ok, so Sam Altman disagreed with AI doomers, great, but the point is still generally valid, for a couple of reasons:

1. What about Elon Musk and hundreds of other AI investors? It's in their interest to overhype AI, while temporarily slowing down competition by spreading singularity fears.

2. OpenAI released the GPT4 report where they claim better performance of their model than it's in reality [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/cHHillee/status/1635790330854526981

[gumballindie]

> The makers of these models and products will talk about those non-problems to cover for the fact that they're vacuuming up the work of individuals then monetizing it for the profit of big industry players.

Also why they claim these are "black boxes" and that they "don't understand how they work". They are prepping the markets for the grand theft that's unfolding.

[stingraycharles]

I think you underestimate just how careful “real” businesses are when it comes to violating the (copyright) law. Any legal advisor at any corp will strongly advice against using code that’s generated like this, until there is clear legal precedent that it’s OK to do this.

[hnfong]

Does that involve a ban of stackoverflow use as well?

https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

I don't think I've heard anyone warn people not to copy code snippets from stackoverflow due to licensing issues, although "real" businesses should be rightfully concerned.

[serial_dev]

I think you underestimate how easy it is for developers to disregard what the Corp lawyer said about AI code gen tools.

Manager: "we asked, legal says you can't use copilot", dev: "okay, so from now on, I'll not discuss how I use copilot and will remember to disable it when someone sees me working, gotcha".

I'm not saying everyone will do this, I'm saying some people will know that the corp doesn't always have a way to verify how the code was written, and they will think that a lawsuit cannot really happen to them.

[formerly_proven]

Doesn't Microsoft already use Copilot internally?

[sroussey]

True, and that will cause a departure between companies large enough to worry, and all the startups that don’t.

[codexb]

AI will just make non-permissive open source licenses more pointless than they already are. The GPL and similar licenses have been on a slow death march for over a decade. AI isn't doing anything that Human Intelligence isn't already doing. Every single developer has looked at non-permissive open source code for inspiration.

[ChatGTP]

The reason people can use code for inspiration is because of GPL and similar, do you see the problem with the logic you provided?

If all software starting being non-permissive and closed source, there would be no training data and no new innovation and even if there was, it would probably suck like it did before GPL and similar licensing was mainstream.

[teaearlgraycold]

Yup. gg, gpl

[circuit10]

"those non-problems"

Why is that a non-problem? It's a really important concern that we need to take more seriously

I pasted this from another comment I wrote but:

The concerns about AI taking over the world are valid and important; even if they sound silly at first, there is some very solid reasoning behind it.

See https://youtu.be/tcdVC4e6EV4 for a really interesting video on why a theoretical superintelligent AI would be dangerous, and when you factor in that these models could self-improve and approach that level of intelligence it gets worrying…

[JohnFen]

I don't think the reasoning is solid at all. I mean yes, a theoretical superintelligent AI would be very dangerous, but I see exactly no reason to think that current models could get there.

[patch_cable]

I watched the video.

> has preferences over world states

I think that part is a leap. I don't think is given that a super intelligent AI will "want" things.

> presumably a machine could be much more selfish

This feels like we're projecting aspects of humanity that evolution specifically selected for in our species with something that is coming about though a completely different process.

> It's a mistake to think about it as a person.

I agree, but I feel like that's what these concerns about AI are doing, because that's what people do.

> (The whole stamp collector thing)

It also seems to me there is a huge gap between a super intelligent AI and the ability to have a perfect model of reality along with the ability to evaluate within that model the effect of every possible sequence of packets sent out to the internet.

[visarga]

> then monetizing it for the profit of big industry players

Looks like LLMs are universally useful for individual people and companies, monetisation of LLMs is only incipient, and free models are starting to pop up. So you don't need to use paid APIs except for more difficult tasks.

[bioemerl]

It was already more than possible to just copy stuff, a court is not going to recognize a very convoluted way to copy stuff I don't believe.

The same thing is preventing intentional use of AI tools if you copy as is preventing regular copying, the willingness of the owner to sue.

[lhl]

It seems to me, from a copyright perspective, all commercial use of generative AI depends on whether the output is transformative fair use (vs derived work). While the courts will have its say, ultimately whether new rules are carved out or not is going to be again (as all copyright law is) based on commercial interests - I have the feeling that the potential productivity upside across all industries (and in terms of national interests) is going to be big enough that it'll work itself out largely in the favor of generative AI.

That being said, IMO, that's completely separate from the safety issues (that exist now and won't go away even if somehow, all commercial use is banned):

Urbina, Fabio, Filippa Lentzos, Cédric Invernizzi, and Sean Ekins. “Dual Use of Artificial-Intelligence-Powered Drug Discovery.” Nature Machine Intelligence 4, no. 3 (March 2022): 189–91. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00465-9.

Bilika, Domna, Nikoletta Michopoulou, Efthimios Alepis, and Constantinos Patsakis. “Hello Me, Meet the Real Me: Audio Deepfake Attacks on Voice Assistants.” arXiv, February 20, 2023. http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10328

Mirsky, Yisroel, Ambra Demontis, Jaidip Kotak, Ram Shankar, Deng Gelei, Liu Yang, Xiangyu Zhang, Wenke Lee, Yuval Elovici, and Battista Biggio. “The Threat of Offensive AI to Organizations.” arXiv, June 29, 2021. http://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15764.

I don't think most people have thought through all the ways perfect text, image, voice, and soon video generation/replication will upend society, or all the ways that the LLMs will be abused...

As for AGI xrisk. I've done some reading, and since we don't know the limits of the current AI paradigm, and we don't know how to actually align an AGI, I think now is a perfectly cromulent time to be thinking about it. Based on my reading, I think the people ringing alarm bells are right to be worried. I don't think anyone giving this serious thought is being mendacious.

Bowman, Samuel R. "Eight Things to Know about Large Language Models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.00612 (2023). https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00612.

Ngo, Richard, Lawrence Chan, and Sören Mindermann. “The Alignment Problem from a Deep Learning Perspective.” arXiv, February 22, 2023. http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00626.

Carlsmith, Joseph. “Is Power-Seeking AI an Existential Risk?” arXiv, June 16, 2022. http://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13353.

I think Ian Hogarth's recent FT article https://archive.is/NdrNo is the best summary of where we are why we might be in trouble, for those that don't care for arXiv papers.