Also true. It’s scraping.

In the words of Cory Doctorow:

Web-scraping is good, actually.

Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.

Scraping when the scrapee suffers as a result of your scraping is good, actually.

Scraping to train machine-learning models is good, actually.

Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.

Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.

We absolutely can have the benefits of scraping without letting AI companies destroy our jobs and our privacy. We just have to stop letting them define the debate.

If an LLM consumes the same copyrighted content and learns how to copy its various characteristics, how is it meaningfully different from me doing it and becoming a successful writer?

That is the trillion-dollar question, isn’t it?

I’ve got two thoughts to frame the question, but I won’t give an answer.

1. Laws are just social constructs, to help people get along with each other. They’re not supposed to be grand universal moral frameworks, or coherent/consistent philosophies. They’re always full of contradictions. So… does it even matter if it’s “meaningfully” different or not, if it’s socially useful to treat it as different (or not)?
2. We’ve seen with digital locks, gig work, algorithmic market manipulation, and playing either side of Section 230 when convenient… that the ethos of big tech is pretty much “define what’s illegal, so I can colonize the precise border of illegality, to a fractal level of granularity”. I’m not super stoked to come with an objective quantitative framework for them to follow, cuz I know they’ll just flow around it like water and continue to find ways to do antisocial shit in ways that technically follow the rules.

What OpenAI is doing is not piracy.

I’ve been using Orion on iOS for a while. It’s not bad.

On the contrary. I want people to have their own opinions, and to buy the things that suit their tastes even if they seem silly to me.

And I want those things to have fair, consumer-friendly regulations applied to them.

And when companies try to abuse their consumers, and I want us to criticize the company rather than the consumer.

When you blame consumers for allowing antisocial tech into their lives, you’re doing free work for the tech barons.

As it was with standardized testing, so shall it be with personal behavior: the goal is not to inform the student why, but to enforce compliance.

Crash reporting, probably.

To libertarians, yes.

Dude gave up his entire life to send a warning to as many people as possible. You think he’s gonna not post further warnings on Twitter?

Sounds like they are preparing to “pull an Apple” with more than just pricing there.

Part of the benefit of Apple’s M series is the unified memory model. They’re able to convert that into increased GPU performance because you no longer have to transfer data in and out of VRAM.

But Apple can only pull that off because they control the CPU, GPU, and the OS (specifically the graphics SDK). Writing graphics code in a unified model is quite a bit different from the conventional x86 model.

Intel would need their own equivalent to Metal if they wanted to do a similar move.

I don’t know enough about Vulkan to say if it’s compatible with this kind of approach, but if not then is Intel really up to starting from scratch?

If they got Unreal and Unity on board, I guess that would give them a good chunk of the market right off the bat for new titles, but what about legacy ones?

If I could predict what happens to the tech market when XYZ policy is enacted, I wouldn’t be posting on Lemmy during my tea breaks. Whatever policies end up sticking around, success is gonna require a lot of us having ideas, trying them out, and recombining them.

But I’ll claim this about my personal metric of “success”: If the future of open source looks like copying the extractive data-mining model of big tech and hoping we can shove the entire history of human thought into a blender faster than them, I think we’ve failed.

I don’t see why those are the only two options.

We could update GPL, CC, etc. licensing so that it specifies whether the author intends to allow their work to be used for LLM training. And you could still put a non-commercial or share-alike constraint on it.

Hooray, open source is saved while greedy grubby hands are thwarted.