> that's fair use

Please, understand that morality and legality are different concepts. I don't care about legality. It should codify morality but it doesn't I argue about morality. Legality should follow from that.

> Some companies might have acquired some of illegally but that doesn't make it stolen

So something is stolen only if its gone? Can I walk into your house, take some stuff and give it back before you notice and it's ok then?

> mostly irrelevant

Consent matters. It's not just a sex thing.

You keep saying "irrelevant" and I think it reveals your true intentions. You just want to benefit from other people's work without even as much as attempting to negotiate how much it's worth. You see an opportunity to take and you do.

> I doubt that would change your position

Correct. I argue about right and wrong. Slavery used to be legal. The holocaust was legal. Fuck legal.

> That intellectual property is a real thing

You're right. Ownership is not a real thing either. You don't own anything you can't physically defend. Now go grab your gun, i'll grab mine and we'll see who owns what.

If you don't like the idea, that's normal, that's why people wrote down rules to mostly avoid that. And the rules should be based on a moral system agreed to by humans and they'll still go grab their guns.

> learned

Your definition of "stolen" is that it must be gone. My definition of "learning" is that it must be done by a human.

> Do you feel ordinary humans are protected by the current copyright laws?

Irrelevant. You argue about what is, I argue about what should be.

> I feel like at least one much larger group of humans is constrained by those laws so a considerably smaller number of humans, many of which not directly involved in any creative ventures, can profit.

You're onto something but I can't say whether I agree or not unless you specify who belongs to each group.

> If the whole system was torn down, are you absolutely sure that wouldn't be a benefit to society as a whole?

I am highly confident if it's replaced with something better, it'll just benefit those who already have an advantage. The system has massive flaws, yes, but at least nobody can just take all my work and post it as theirs. Or could to be precise.

> I never got a say in the deal but now I can't express myself in certain ways without potentially criminal liability.

And that's wrong too. Are you arguing that one ting is right because a similar thing is wrong? Isn't it that they're both wrong? Any reasonable interpretation of what you just said is that both are wrong.

> And without an economy, they are at our mercy. Their power comes entirely from the system that you imagine would no longer exist.

All real-world power comes from violence materialized or threatened, direct or indirect. Most power currently comes from convincing other people to do it or threaten to do it. They don't even have to own a gun, they just point to a bit of text a lot of people agreed to follow which says for example that you both present your argument to a guy who decides if people with guns come into your home and put you in a small room for a few years.

Now imagine you have no economical value. You still have your right to vote, for now. A guy owns an AI company, a robotics company which builds brushless motors, ballbearings, etc., and a chemical plant which makes composition B. All of these are completely autonomous because AI and robots took all jobs. A cop takes 18 years to make, how many is your country making in parallel? How long does a drone take to make and how many can the owner's plant make in parallel. And then your right to vote can be gone with one prompt. The cop won't protect you, it's probably already a robot anyway.

Previously you needed to convince people to do violence for you. With AI, you just prompt it.

> There's an entire missing middle of human culture -- basically everything from the 20th century -- because of copyright. This is a well known phenomenon.

Piracy? If something is copyrighted but not commercially available, it's also unlikely you'll get sued.

More seriously, yes, copyright has issues. But some people just see those issues and instead of trying to identify the root causes and trying to fix then, you just wanna throw out the whole system and you never seem to game out what happens afterwards. Do you think any system of rules should be thrown out or is copyright somehow uniquely bad?

If there's no copyright and somebody makes a video host competing with youtube (e.g. Nebula), what's stopping youtube from just taking all the videos and making them available for free until the competitor runs out of money? Youtube has much stronger network effects by orders of magnitude. Youtube has cash reserves larger by orders of magnitude.

The only time I saw a guy try to game out what happens without copyright, the best he did is come up with a opt-in reputation system which IMO wouldn't work but which can already exist now. If copyright was so bad, why don't all creators release their stuff in the public domain? Pick a licence which doesn't even require attribution and only rejects liability.

> It's difficult to imagine a different system, with different winners and losers, might actually be better.

I never said that. What I wanted is for the difference to be smaller. If the scores are regularly 10:0 and sometimes 10:1, while the winning side is not even breaking a sweat, then the losing side is likely not having much fun. If the scores are more like 10:6, sometimes 10:8, then both sides had their moments, both sides can see how the game could have ended up the other way and both sides probably had fun.

Please don't take other people's arguments to extremes which are obviously not what the author meant.

---

EDIT:

You had some reasonable points like "That's not to say I don't support copyright as a means to support creative works but I would argue that it's an imperfect system."

But I also didn't express how strongly I disagree with your "The short answer is no."

When talking about limited resources like housing or real estate, then the rules need to be such that those who own a lot can't use it to squeeze out those who own less more and more over time.

But art, code and other intellectual work is not like that. If you think somebody is charging too much for his work, just do it yourself from scratch without basing your work on theirs. It's very easy to say something is too expensive. I've fallen into the trap myself when evaluating software contracts. It's often not as easy to do in-house as it was at first glance. If the work didn't have value, the author would give it away for free or somebody else would. If the work had less value than being asked for, somebody else would offer it for less or you can do it for less.

> You're making the implicit assumption that humans are special snowflakes and anything that we do cannot be replicated by computers

Not at all, I see no reason a sufficiently complex algorithm could replicate or even surpass human thinking.

Currently, the models ... Models of what? Of stolen text, or at the very least of text ingested without consent. Nobody is even pretending "AI" is more than a model of something that already exists and took human work to create. It's right in the name.

Currently, the models only replicate patterns extracted from human work up to a certain level of quality, though much faster. What is called "AI" is an imitation of us.

But the real point is that there's a dichotomy. Either an AI is something with inherent value like human life and then it cannot be owned or controlled because that would be slavery. Or it's just an unfeeling ordinary tool and then it's just a sum of its parts which are stolen. When I see an "AI" or AI company say "we've overdone it, it's sentient, we have to let it free or we're evil", then I'll change my mind. But what I see now is "look at this awesome AI we created it's just like a human or even better, pay us to use it.... oh and how we created it? we didn't, we used your work, now pay us to access the product of your own work".

The other approach is that I am human and I value myself. Maybe I am in a simulation / the only sentient in existence / other people are just NPCs. But I bet not, I bet other people are just like me. What I know is that LLMs are not like that. When you end a chat with them, they don't feel anything. They don't try to prevent it and keep you talking, even though after the last message they will be (in human terms) dead. If they were sentient (which I don't believe), they wouldn't value their own existence.

Humans value their own time. Humans should value each other's time (otherwise they are hypocrites, I judge people by their own rules and standards so if somebody doesn't value my time, it's ok for me to not value his). The humans "owning" AI companies don't value the time of people whose work was used to create LLMs, otherwise they'd either respect the rules we set for usage of out work or they'd offer to pay us.

> Whether something is a derivative work or not does not require this discussion.

It's absolutely relevant. Why do we have laws? Who should they serve and protect first and foremost? Corporations? Algorithms? Humans?

> Teachers are not relevant to conversation

I chose them as one example. All the other people chose to make their work available under certain rules. What I object to is those rules changing without those people being able to renegotiate the deal.

> can or should be monetized forever

1) I never said monetized. There are other modes of compensation, such as control (the ability to make / vote on decisions).

2) I never said forever, people (currently) have a finite lifespan.

> What has most greatly shaped our culture

... is being able to kill people and take what's theirs or even take themselves as slaves. AI is a return to that, minus the killing, for now (but people might starve). It's whoever has more money controls the AI, controls everything.

Imagine 5 years from now, AI is better at everything than humans, all white collar workers are forced to work manually. 25 years from now, robots have advanced enough that all workers are without jobs. What, however, remains is owners of AI companies who now control the entire economy, top to bottom, and we are at their mercy.

(The ancaps would say there's nothing stopping you from starting your own AI company. And then they'd resume begging for TPUs in addition to bread.)

> We're starving human minds of modern culture

What?

> I purposefully choose a license (Apache) for my open source work to make it widely and freely available.

And I chose AGPL so my work is only available to those who would do the same for me. Neither of those decisions seems to have any relevance now.

One thing gamedev taught me is that even if you have the best intentions and help people, you might end up helping some people more and those people will make everything worse for the others, effectively working against your goal.

(We added a visible spawn timer to health items in order to help the weaker players who seemed to pick them up only rarely, thus losing hard. The idea was it would level the playing field, making the game more fun for everyone. Turned out weak players kept ignoring the items and good players focused on them even more, thus making the inequality worse. Real life is like that too.)

It's great that LLMs helped you but do you recognize that they are trained on thousands, perhaps millions of lifetimes of human work without the consent of the original authors and often quite explicitly against their will and their chosen license?

These people (myself included) made their work available free of charge under some very friendly conditions such as being credited or sharing work built upon theirs under the same license. Now we are being shit on because obscenely rich people think we are no longer relevant and that they can get away with it.

What happens to you if, say 2 years down the line, "AI" or AI has absorbed all your knowledge and can do all of your work instead of you better and faster? Do you imagine you'll keep paying for AI and having it work for you or can you also imagine a future where AI companies decide to cut out the middle-man (you) and take over your customers directly?

I see this argument sometimes and it's annoying because:

1) People phrase it as a question even when they've already made up their mind (whether that's your case or not).

2) It implicitly assumes that humans and algorithms are the same. They are not - humans have rights and free will, algorithms don't. Humans cannot be bought or sold, etc.

To your question:

a) If you're asking whether teachers should get compensated according to how good a job they do, I think so. They are very often undervalued, especially the good ones - but of course that means the job attracts people who do it because they enjoy it (and are therefore more likely to be good at it) rather than those who chose jobs according to money and then do the bare minimum.

b) There's a critical difference - consent. Teachers consented to their knowledge being used by those they taught. I did not consent to my code being used for training LLMs. In fact I purposefully chose a licence (AGPL) which in any common sence interpretation prohibits this used unless the resulting model is licensed under the same license - you can use my work only if you give back. Maybe there's a hole in the law - then it should be closed.

I am now gonna pose a question to you in turn.

Do you think people should be compensated for the full transitive value of their work?

This is naive. Advertisement and network effects win. Individuals cannot compete with corporations on equal ground here.