I think that term is way better at describing what’s happening.
… before we start talking about “Soul-sucking 12 hour shifts”.
Funny horse-butt-creature notwithstanding, Dotcorows AI takes have been rather mid. Quoting from Guardian…
In this book, at least, he isn’t animated by the headline-grabbing concerns, whether existential risk or AI psychosis, deepfake porn or election disinformation, because those are unintended consequences. His target is the revenue model and the bubble it has created: “To be an effective AI critic, you need to strike at the source of AI’s power, which is the investment capital it attracts.”
He isn’t falling for AI doom and he is aware of the bubble, which puts him near the better end of the spectrum. But he’s also unwilling to fully criticize community damage resulting from LLM use. That may be because he’s fond of LLMs himself for his text editing and is repping the “it’s just another tool” defense. So he isn’t willing to go all the way when it comes to criticizing the global theft of labour that continues to power this industry. Information wants to be free, dontcha know?
I don’t always agree with Doctorow, but at least he’s not as naive as you make him sound, and he’s not a coward.
He’s a bit of a traditional socialist in his way of thinking, putting most of his attention on the underlying material and economic mechanisms of a phenomenon, rather that the ideological and cultural aspects of it.
For instance, he thinks that many of the harms are side effects of the hype. To him, for instance, putting illustrators out of work is not a business model and can’t justify the money that’s spent on this. It’s just an ad to attract more investment. If the bubble pops, then this will be significantly reduced.
If you expected Doctorow to get very upset over copyright, you clearly have no idea who he is. But he also literally has a book titled “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free”.
He thinks model training is most likely fair use (probably true) even if the way the data are obtained violates copyright, and that giving more copyright to the authors will do nothing to mitigate this (near certainly true).
And since the output of LLMs is not copyrightable except for the part of human labor that goes into improving and editing it, relying heavily on LLMs is a dead end for publishers, because then everyone can steal their work (not totally sold on this one).
And finally, if we reject the hype, I find it hard to not consider LLMs to be a technology like any other. How can you buy in the exceptionalism and reject the hype?
But he also literally has a book titled “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free”.
That sure sounds like a zinger, but going off Wikipedia he does argue in that book for a loosening of copyright, which is pretty much what I meant. I don’t hate those positions though I’ll note they’re more libertarian than socialist. He has a whole personal freedom + monopoly control shtick, which works great for me in a lot of scenarios, but doesn’t quite work on GenAI tech.
You can call me exceptionalist, but I think LLMs stand out because the adoption of the tech basically requires very capital-intensive and thus centralized operations for model training. This makes whoever runs them (likely capital or a state) a powerful arbiter of information space, maybe best comparable with algorithmic feeds in monopolistic social media.
I think it is necessary to say: “Hey, we as a society shouldn’t run things like that. There are better ways of distributing information that work just fine.” A tech-neutral attitude can’t achieve that.
There are many things that are capital intensive, and we don’t hold their product to be particularly special (cars, drugs)
That being said, it’s true that we consider information to be a special case.
But what you say is a problem for the “deep research” use of chatbots, or the “AI summaries” of search engines.
But the same could well be said about search engines themselves. That still didn’t get the level of hysteria that LLMs get. AI summaries on search should go away though, they destroy the viability of the websites they source information from.
I would like a truly open (incl. open training) model, that could be produced through public funding by a large collaboration of academics and private parties.
I also believe that once we give up on this “machine god” nonsense, there is a lot to be gained in highly optimized, sector specific, lightweight models, which will be less capital intensive to produce. If I need help writing python code, I don’t a model that can translate Japanese into Hungarian.
I don’t think it’s impossible that the underlying tech of LLMs will be evolved into something undeniably useful. But I don’t think “helping with Python” will be that.
I think on !fuck_ai I can suggest, you could also just learn the relevant bits of Python? Learning to express your thoughts in code and understanding the tools you use feels way more empowering than relying on blackbox-extruded code.
I do know the relevant bits of Python. Learning basic Python is just marginally harder than shouting at the screen, and adding numpy and some pyqt on top of that was also not impossible.
It was simply an example of a field where LLMs are having a lot of success, all the more reasons that this should be done as efficiently as possible rather than using the same 10 trillion parameters model that is used for everything else.
Secondly, I have heard positive things from people using LLM for instance to review their code, and they found it very very helpful, without the soul sucking effects of having it write all their code.
That I would happily try on my own code, but not in Dario’s cloud. And the price to get a local rig right now is way too high.
I don’t hate those positions though I’ll note they’re more libertarian than socialist.
Weakening the private property rights associated with intellectual property is more socialist than strengthening them so that the owner has power over how others use that property.
It’s ultimately a type of property, and libertarians tend to favor property rights that favor the owner, while socialists tend to seek to weaken property rights in favor of the public.
In my book socialism is about workers controlling the means of production, and historical socialists did not agree how that would work in detail.
Libertarianism on the other hand is primarily about the rejection of personal restrictions, stuff like: “I should be allowed to freely copy and share media I have legally acquired.” or “I shouldn’t be forced to pay taxes.” This individualist thinking makes it usually unable to adress structural inequality.
That’s a little simplistic. From a legal perspective copyright is a state enforced monopoly. Perfectly reasonable for a libertarian to reject it.
In the same way, someone on the left could view it similar to the English enclosures. Taking for a private something that should be in common.
Ideologically speaking it can be perfectly plausible to reject the current overdone copyright regime from either perspective.
And by the way Doctorow talks about collective bargaining and unionizing like the whole time.
I can also recommend you a great book by a Chicago economist that argues against copyright on lassez faire grounds, closer to the libertarian position, but really well supported with a trove of historical case studies.
Libertarianism on the other hand is primarily about the rejection of personal restrictions
Libertarianism is closely aligned with strong property rights, and the right to exclude others from your property, the right to enter contracts, even oppressive contracts, that you’ve agreed to. In other words, the freedom to bind oneself and exclude others. Libertarians don’t believe in granting the public freedom to walk onto private land and pick fruit from its trees (or the right to harvest lumber on someone else’s land).
Strong copyright is therefore fairly associated with libertarian ideals.
Intellectual property is not a property, it’s a state-enforced monopoly over the production of a certain good i.e. the copies of a work.
It’s perfectly reasonable for a libertarian to reject that (Not all libertarians do, but some do).
is not a property, it’s a state-enforced monopoly
Isn’t that what property means? A state enforced monopoly over the subject of that monopoly?
Ownership of farmland, a factory, a house, a checking account, a stack of cash, a car, etc., boils down to a state enforced monopoly to control who may use or possess that thing.
There is a significant distinction. If I have an apple in my hand, I can eat it. If I eat it you don’t. I can’t make it two apples to give you one. We can’t all be eating the same apple. The physical good is finite. Whether there is or isn’t the state, that’s a fact.
In this sense, some people call property a natural right, even though anyone who starts with that usually gets way too far way too quickly.
Intellectual property is different. With intellectual property you have a right over every copy of a work, that exists or will exist, made by you or anyone else. And you can sell a book away, without a EULA or strings attached, and retain rights over it. None of these exists without a law, and without a state.
But it weren’t for copyright, we could make copies of a book, and give them to people who’ll make more copies, and so exponentially until we all have a copy.
Copyright also covers derivative works. Can you imagine somebody asserting rights over the cider you made with the apples he sold you?
As far as I can tell property has existed in all complex societies I’m aware of. Intellectual property is a recent invention.
I’m not at my sharpest, but I hope you see that there is a very fundamental difference between physical property, and intellectual property. In general, this is not controversial.
Everything you’re saying also applies to non-tangible property rights generally, which includes property rights to land (and the accompanying rights to airspace above that land or mineral rights in the ground), and rights like:
- A first round draft pick in the 2031 NBA draft
- A noncompete agreement where your CEO agrees not to work for a competitor for 12 months after working for you
- The right to a window view of the ocean, to restrict your neighbors from building something too tall
- A ticket to enter a music festival and sit in first come, first serve seats in the grassy area
- The right to kick out a person from your restaurant that is otherwise open to the public
Each of these are enforced by some kind of adjudicatory body (which we can call a law and a state if you’d prefer). But that would be true of anything like a copyright or a trademark or the right to one’s image/name.
And so we’re still basically talking about how strong the right to property or the right to contract is, and what types of rules/rights will not be enforced by the courts, and which will. Some types of contract terms are unenforceable, and some property rights are limited.
Can you imagine somebody asserting rights over the cider you made with the apples he sold you?
What about someone asserting rights to the apples you grow on the land they’ve leased to you? Or asserting rights to the water that flows across the land they sold to you? That kind of stuff happens all the time.
The fact is, libertarian doctrine is generally in favor of a strong rights to property and contract, and that’s why many libertarians are strongly in favor of strong IP rights.
Yep, much like the EFF, he’s both niche and mediocre, missing the big picture.
I remember when his takes were the absolute top shelf, earlier this century when we all loved tech so much and thought the internet would be the final nail in the coffin of old world ignorance and grudges. Sad to see this is where it’s led him to.
I think that he still has a point about the whole IP theft of it all: statistical inference itself is fine and if it helps radiologists find tumors, then I’d say: let the radiologists decide what tools they want to use.
Relying on copyright law is a recipe for regulatory capture of big corporations. It’s fine to call LLMs “plagiarism machines”. But basing policies on that argument in a capitalist system is a certified foot-gun.
Centaur is also underused. Not a lot of centaurs around.
Doctorow is stuck in his own techno world, and it’s difficult to relate to the masses. I’ve been “in IT” for a long time too and have never heard the “centaur metaphor” before.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me.
Where’s this from? (:
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me
Warhammer 40k, specifically the game Mehanicus
Should’ve known ;)
It’s from the game’s memorable intro video, if you were curious.
Bit of a tangent, but I think they aibro on about the radiology example purely because he has just gone through cancer, which feels pretty gross, even if it’s devil’s advocate
Who does what about the radiology example?
They are specifically bullish on the radiology example
Who is “they”? What do yousmean with “bullish”?
Every time I try to use this term I have to explain what a centaur is.
I don’t think most people can easily recall obscure mythological creatures.
It kind of feels like explaining the joke.
For real? I thought that centaurs weren’t really that obscure.
Sure, they’re more obscure than dragons and dwarves, but they still appear in Harry Potter, so at least millenials should be familiar.
And the mythological creature isn’t really the point, IMHO. I like the metaphor because it helps to distinguish helpful automation (human-directed interaction - centaur) from unhelpful automation (machine-directed interaction - reverse centaur).
Tho I will add that, there are pretty cool obscure-mythological-creatures we can use.
Reverse Deccan Buraq. The entire body is made up of humans living together to form a coherent, functional system, but the head is that of a violent animal.
It can only go to hell. Allegory for capitalism.
Does the average person not know what a centaur is?
He is really good as expressing the problems we are all seeing. Reverse Centaur is really poignant
