One can quickly get philosophical here ("what is ownership?"), but IMO IP theft is as real as theft of a possession, insofar as both have value that the original owner has now been deprived of.
News sites et al. provide content. Evidently that content, despite being intangible, has value to the people who consume it. The value LLMs are able to provide comes directly from the data they scrape, which they can now monetize.
I basically don't see how this is different from taking an apple from someone and selling it to someone else.
Even if one believes that piracy on an individual level isn't the big deal that has been made of it, a large business doing it on a massive scale with the goal of destroying others' ability to continue to meaningfully subsist and produce new things is a completely different matter.
There's a world of difference between someone downloading a book and a company basically burning down the entire publishing industry and making writing as a profession increasingly non-viable. The latter should be approached in the context of antitrust (leveraging a dominant position to knock over unrelated markets) and racketeering.
There's deprivation of future value and deprivation of present value. The owner can continue to sell a digital apple, but it's not clear to me that "theft" inherently deprives the owner of future value. For example, I could steal your car for a night of joyriding and return it unharmed the next day. You might reasonably say that a theft occurred even though you retain the car afterwards. Note that I'm aware this example isn't perfectly analogous to digital goods.
You grow an apple. You plant the seeds and scare off pests for like 12 years and then harvest your first apple.
Apples are scarce resources. You are very much entitled to compensation when selling the apple.
However, despite all the labor, if you could magically copy the apple, feeding the entire human race an infinite amount of apples forever, you would be pretty much morally obligated to do it. Like you wouldnt be faulted for pursuing the value of your labor once, but the idea that you would restrict the flow of apples, arbitrarily, just to try and get the value of your labor for each of an infinite amount of apples is absurd. To further imply that someone was stealing if they stole a copied apple is laughable. Really, any of your infinite apples that rots away in storage rather than finding its way to a hungry person is stealing from the hungry person.
What matters, is scarcity. Non scarce resources really shouldnt follow the same rules as scarce ones.
To add to this in some other direction, I have often thought that the people who have been "stolen" from... should just "get even" by making use of the LLM for their own profit in some way
They helped build an incredible tool that they should benefit from, so go ahead and reap the benefits, right?
IP protections are a critical foundation that ensures the software engineering profession is a profitable one. I prefer to live in a world in which I can use my skills to feed my family, thanks.
Regarding "fuel", I've often wondered about a granular estimation of the cost of creating something, like "this small app costs $5 of tokens or electricity and consumes a liter of water", etc. such that you would have some idea of specifically how much it costs to take certain actions
> When the machines can do everything else, our relationships will be what’s left.
I think I saw this posted already and I still didn't read all of it, but this was not really what I thought of when there's no external work needed
There's still a lot of things that can't be outsourced to machines, like exercise, or building one's mental capabilities
I'd also think this would enable more people to spend a lot more of their day in prayer like literal Christian monks as prayer is another thing than the machines cannot do
"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe." - Douglas Adams
This is a no-no for some of us, who like to keep books as"mint" as possible; it was even a struggle to get in to bending spines on paperbacks to read them
Nevertheless I could see doing this with old books where the pages are aleady coming out
Also I might enjoy the digital version of this, breaking up a PDF into smaller bite-sized chapters into a folder
I think I prefer maybe the simplicity of 4 way (or even 2 way) stops
There are some funny intersection videos from idk what country that have no stop signs or lights or roundabouts and somehow lots of people still manage to get through them
The big difference is that when you have a collision at a 4-way or 2-way stop, it is almost always a "T-Bone" collision, where all the energy hits at a right angle. These collisions kill, especially at speed.
A similar collision on a roundabout is almost always a "glancing" blow, at an angle, and rarely causes injury or death.
Roundabouts force you to slow down when approaching. Stop signs can be ignored. Roundabouts can't.
These are extremely uncommon events, and when they do occur, the driver’s consumption of alcohol and/or methamphetamine is often a contributing factor.
Not surprising, but calling it "theft" only makes sense within the IP paradigm (we might do better without IP)
reply