Oh, so mass theft is okay as long as American companies are doing it

copyright infringement is not theft, even if right holders often claim it is.

part of the definition of theft is that the original owner is deprived of it, which does not apply to copyright infringement.

You can only argue with damages from the perspective of potential profits, still not theft though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft

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hungryhobbit 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

So having tons of AIs quoting various literary works and reproducing knock-offs of them has a positive effect on those books' sales?

I think you're wrong: there is absolutely damage to the authors and publishers from what the AI companies have done.

	▲	ffsm8 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		? I literally said that, how am I wrong? > You can only argue with damages from the perspective of potential profits, still not theft though. Damages are not deprival of ownership. They're conceptually related but orthogonal Also there was no moral judgement from my end, I just pointed out that an incorrect word is being applied. It's just not theft - by definition. But language is a fluid concept and definitions change over time. As people keep misusing it, it will eventually lose its original meaning. Which may have already happened for you, but this change hasn't been settled yet as can be seen from looking at the official definitions of the term, which as of today still mention the criteria

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evanelias 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you steal an unpopular product from a store, the damage is also only to "potential profits", so how does that differ? It's entirely possible no one would have purchased the product and it would have eventually been discarded/destroyed.

Or with services, if a barber cuts your hair and then you run away without paying them, do you not consider that theft, even though there's no change in ownership occurring?

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BlackFingolfin 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is almost funny to me, because in many jurisdictions, software companies sure invested a lot of effort into painting people copying software as thieves. In Germany, they (the software producer lobby, and later politicians influence by the former) even coined and spread the term "Raubkopie", which you could roughly translate as "robbed copy", i.e., that's one step worse than "theft", as a robbery in Germany legally means " theft accomplished by force or intimidation". So, yeah: like putting a knife to the throat of someone while you copy the software.

So, after literally decades of investing into advertising campaigns, lobbying to politicians to pass harsher and harsher laws against software "thieves and robbers", now that big tech are doing it, suddenly we are supposed to consider it with more nuance?

Ahhh... no thank you sir. I really enjoy them drinking their own kool-aid.

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SubiculumCode 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Moreover, reading a copyrighted book and learning from it is not theft.

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bigfishrunning 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Generating a set of weights is not learning.

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jayGlow 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

would you say that airplanes don't fly because they don't flap their wings? it's possible to achieve the same things with different approaches.

	▲	bigfishrunning 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I would say airplanes fly, but I wouldn't say that submarines swim. Things have a bit more nuance, and the field of "learning" isn't as well understood as the ML proponents claim it is.

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SubiculumCode 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That is a strong statement. I guess you are telling Machine Learning to go fuck itself.

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bigfishrunning 3 days ago | parent [-]

No, Machine Learning is an unfortunate name for a well documented process for creating black-box classifiers. The process is good, the name is not.

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SubiculumCode 3 days ago | parent [-]

And what, to your mind, would classify something as learning? I assume that your position is not the hard "only humans/living creatures can learn"

	▲	bigfishrunning 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Honestly, I'm not sure. But I do know that there is an entire field of cognitive science dedicated to understanding learning, and quite frankly it's in its infancy. Evidence of this is that every elementary school introduces new teaching techniques from time to time, and very rarely do they result in any benefit to the people who are doing the learning (more often they benefit consultants...). However, the current process of "Machine Learning" (which is a semi-random parameter descent/evolutionary replacement process) is unlikely to be equivalent to the way people learn, because we aren't copying/competing/replacing our brain constantly. People are actually very good at learning, but our brain material replaces itself partially and relatively slowly (when compared to how a neural network is trained).

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trollbridge 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Great! Neither is distillation then.

	▲	SubiculumCode 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Never said it was. Still, understanding to what extent the ability of Chinese labs to keep up to western models with much less compute needs to be understood.

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Espressosaurus 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Machines are not humans.

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linkregister 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Reread my comment and look for a value judgement on my part. The final sentence is probably a good clue as to my opinion.