> Nobody would say a human reading a book and learning from it is stealing. I'm not saying that a machine doing the same is equivalent, but the only think I am sure of is that I am not sure we can call it "stealing".

It is stealing. A human paid for the book, compensated the author and learnt from it. The machine DID NOT pay for the book, DID NOT compensate the author and still learnt from it anyways.

We need to define machine in terms of "human-power"... much the same as how we already define automobiles via "horse-power". A single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 chip, for example, delivers roughly 35.58 teraflops of standard computing power (via 10,496 CUDA cores). That means 35.58 trillion calculations every second. In comparison, a mathematically trained human being, taking their time to solve a complex, multi-digit decimal division problem by hand takes roughly 100 to 120 seconds. That gives the human 0.01 flops. To match RTX 3090, you would need 3.56 quadrillion people working/learning in perfect sync. We can use a calculation similar to this to derive metrics on how much is being stolen for "learning/training" these models. The loot can be quantified.

EDIT: The reason I am comparing chip computation to human-power is because the authors of those digital works intended their works to only be read by humans. Not by some alien species (even if it be made of silicon) that incorporated their work into producing models.

So naturally the price should be determined based on this new species capabilities. I would not sell my software license for the same price to an Enterprise the size of Google that I would sell to a fellow developer. I price my product appropriately. With this entry of a new alien specie authors would need to have different tiers for them. Since these chips can train on petabytes of data and create models in a matter of days/weeks/months, it is obviously not comparable to a human being who has the capacity to ingest maybe 1-5 books a month at most. So the payout has to be different too.

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TeMPOraL 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> EDIT: The reason I am comparing chip computation to human-power is because the authors of those digital works intended their works to only be read by humans. Not by some alien species (even if it be made of silicon) that incorporated their work into producing models.

News to me. That would be incredibly xenophobic of them if they did, and deserves to be called out.

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kshri24 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> News to me. That would be incredibly xenophobic of them if they did, and deserves to be called out.

What do you mean? Xenophobia does not mean what you think it means, especially so in this context. Also, every creator/producer of content has rights on who/what has access to his/her produced work. It is not xenophobia. And it is definitely not xenophobic to call out stealing of copyrighted works.

EDIT: Let me clarify this further. A recent court ruling (in US) established that ONLY humans can be authors of copyrightable works. As a consequence of that assertion, it can be safely concluded that consumers of the copyrightable work MUST ONLY be humans as well. Else it would be, using your own words, "xenophobic" against humans to have their copyrightable works be consumed by any species (other than humans) while the reverse is not recognized by Law.

https://www.reinhartlaw.com/news-insights/only-humans-can-be...

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TeMPOraL 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> A recent court ruling (in US) established that ONLY humans can be authors of copyrightable works. As a consequence of that assertion, it can be safely concluded that consumers of the copyrightable work MUST ONLY be humans as well.

That does not follow in any reasonable way.

	▲	kshri24 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> That does not follow in any reasonable way. "United States copyright law protects only works of human creation". That means the source of creation of any work has to be from a human being for it to be copyrightable. Machine-generated output is not copyrightable and is public domain by default. If you, for example, use Claude to generate code for you, for any project (be it private or public), it is automatically public domain and you have no way to claim copyright over that generated work. It can be used by anyone (including the AI provider) to further train models or heck duplicate your work with zero consequences. So it is a violation of primary producer of copyright work (which was used in training models) as neither was he/she compensated for use of the work, but subsequent derivations (generated work) even strip of his/her legal protections as guaranteed by Constitution of various countries (in US copyright law applies only to human beings). So naturally it follows that copyrightable work can only be consumed by humans. Machine-generated code is not on the same footing. It is violating copyright law.

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echoangle 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The multiplication comparison makes no sense because humans don’t learn by multiplying numbers to change weights. It’s like comparing the lubrication oil consumption of a car to the cooking oil consumption of a human to compare the carrying capacity. That’s an implementation detail inside the GPU and doesn’t let you compare how much they learn. Otherwise, a human would learn much less in their whole life than a GPU does in one second.

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kshri24 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> That’s an implementation detail inside the GPU and doesn’t let you compare how much they learn.

The same applies to "horse-power". Yet we have no issue making the comparison anyways and HP has become an industry standard. I don't understand why we have to bend-over backwards when it comes to humans being exploited by AI companies.

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echoangle 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> The same applies to "horse-power". Yet we have no issue making the comparison anyways and HP has become an industry standard.

Yeah, which is why it's only used to compare cars etc. among each other. Nobody would calculate the equivalence of a car to a horse using their HP rating because a horse doesn't even have 1 HP. They have more or less depending on the task you're doing. It was a marketing thing at the time to make steam engines look good.

In france, cars are taxed by their engine power. Do you think pedestrians walking on the sidewalk should be taxed according to their power on an ergometer too?

Do you not see that different things need to be handled differently before the law and just taking an arbitrary measure that you can technically apply to both doesn't capture the situation?

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kshri24 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> It was a marketing thing at the time to make steam engines look good.

Except it is actually taxed based on HP in various countries. Austria, Belgium, Spain, Italy use engine horsepower to levy annual car taxes.

> In france, cars are taxed by their engine power. Do you think pedestrians walking on the sidewalk should be taxed according to their power on an ergometer too?

Citizens are paying taxes for betterment of roads irrespective of whether they own vehicles or not. In India, betterment charges are collected for construction/maintenance of roads if you own land. Property tax collected every year has a certain allocation for maintenance/upkeep of roads. Apart from that, money from direct and indirect tax collections are allocated for roads upkeep as well. It just is done indirectly rather than a direct road tax if you have vehicles (road tax is actually an extra tax you pay APART from taxes you already pay for upkeep/maintenance of roads).

> Do you not see that different things need to be handled differently before the law and just taking an arbitrary measure that you can technically apply to both doesn't capture the situation?

Except in your own examples it can easily be shown that it is not handled differently. Some countries use HP while others use CC. But end of the day, they use some measurement to determine taxes to be paid. It is not free.

EDIT: Do you not see that different things need to be handled differently before the law and just taking an arbitrary measure that you can technically apply to both doesn't capture the situation?

To answer this in more detail: HP/CC and all other measurements were created to equalize with human specific metrics. Bridges, for example, have safety measured based on how much weight it can sustain at any given time (called load limit). Weight, in this specific case, is an equalizing measurement (it can be in tonnes, kN, PSF, Pa etc). A bridge can hold ten thousand humans or thousand trucks. You can argue that a "human" may not weigh 100 kgs or a truck may not weigh exactly 1 ton. That's fine. It is a rough approximate to equalize unequal entities.

	▲	echoangle 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Except in your own examples it can easily be shown that it is not handled differently. I was talking about humans vs. cars as an analogy to you comparing GPUs and cars. Nobody is taxing humans the way cars are taxed, so why should the computing speed of a GPU be compared to that of a human? > A bridge can hold ten thousand humans or thousand trucks. You can argue that a "human" may not weigh 100 kgs or a truck may not weigh exactly 1 ton. That's fine. It is a rough approximate to equalize unequal entities. And you do not think that comparing weights to measure bridge load makes a lot more sense than comparing FLOPS to determine learning of GPUs vs humans? EDIT: Maybe let's just go back to the original point > We need to define machine in terms of "human-power"... much the same as how we already define automobiles via "horse-power". A single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 chip, for example, delivers roughly 35.58 teraflops of standard computing power (via 10,496 CUDA cores). That means 35.58 trillion calculations every second. In comparison, a mathematically trained human being, taking their time to solve a complex, multi-digit decimal division problem by hand takes roughly 100 to 120 seconds. That gives the human 0.01 flops. To match RTX 3090, you would need 3.56 quadrillion people working/learning in perfect sync. We can use a calculation similar to this to derive metrics on how much is being stolen for "learning/training" these models. The loot can be quantified. So you want to compare the learning rate of a GPU to that of a human by comparing their respective FLOPS. Why would FLOPS be a valid proxy for learning ability in humans just because that works out in GPUs, if the way they learn is fundamentally different? Is the effect of someone reading a copyrighted book dependent on how fast they are at doing math in their head?

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b3lvedere 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"It is stealing. A human paid for the book, compensated the author and learnt from it."

I went to the library. Didn't pay a cent.

Now what?

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kshri24 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Library paid the authors.

> Didn't pay a cent.

Taxpayers did pay on your behalf by funding the Library via the Government (if Library is public).

Nothing is free. Except ofcourse stealing, which is free.

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echoangle 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Do you not think that stealing requires the original owner to lose access?

If I sneak into your home, take apart the coffee machine, measure everything, put it back together and go home and build a copy to have my own, did I steal your coffee machine?

Can we not just stick to calling it copyright infringement?

	▲	kshri24 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Do you not think that stealing requires the original owner to lose access? No. > If I sneak into your home, take apart the coffee machine, measure everything, put it back together and go home and build a copy to have my own, did I steal your coffee machine? Not mine. But the company that made the coffee machine. It is stealing IP. > Can we not just stick to calling it copyright infringement? It is just a fancy way of saying you stole someone's IP. You can call it infringement if it makes you feel good. But the act is the same end of the day.

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b3lvedere 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sunshine, air, wind, gravity, radioactivity, public domain, knowledge passed on

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kshri24 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I would not classify sunshine and air as "free". Sunshine requires the Sun to undergo continuous fusion. It is invaluable as opposed to "free". Air is invaluable asset too. Without both we would be dead. The price of both is literally price of my being alive every second of my existence.

Public domain on the other hand is legally only possible if/when copyright has expired. That means the owner has enjoyed proceeds from copyright protection for more than his own lifetime. That is fair. It is still not comparable.

EDIT: since you tacked on more like "wind, gravity, radioactivity" etc, I would still not classify them as "free". They are invaluable to very existence of life.

"Knowledge passed on" is also after someone (in ancestry) has paid for it through blood, sweat and tears. It isn't "free". "Public domain" is legally recognized form of "knowledge passed on".

	▲	b3lvedere an hour ago \| parent [-]
		They all have “some price”, because of universal laws, but i doubt you would be friends with a corporate entity claiming the ip of them.