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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • But personally I’ll continue to advocate for technology which empowers people and culture, and not the other way around.

    You won’t achieve this goal by aiding the gatekeepers. Stop helping them by trying to misapply copyright.

    Any experienced programmer knows that GPL code is still subject to copyright […]

    GPL is a clever hack of a bad system. It would be better if copyright didn’t exist, and I say that as someone that writes AGPL code.

    I think you misunderstood what I meant. We should drop copyright, and pass a new law where if you use a model, or contribute to one, or a model is used against you, that model must be made available to you. Similar in spirit to the GPL, but not a reliant on an outdated system.

    This would catch so many more use cases than trying to cram copyright where it doesn’t apply. No more:

    • Handful of already-rich companies building an AI moat that keeps newcomers out
    • Credit agencies assigning you a black box score that affects your entire life
    • Minorities being denied bail because of a black box model
    • Being put on a no-fly list with no way to know that you’re on it or why
    • Facebook experimenting on you to see if they can make you sad without your knowledge

  • Why should they? Copyright is an artificial restriction in the first place, that exists “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (in the US, but that’s where most companies are based). Why should we allow further legal restrictions that might strangle the progress of science and the useful arts?

    What many people here want is for AI to help as many people as possible instead of just making some rich fucks richer. If we try to jam copyright into this, the rich fucks will just use it to build a moat and keep out the competition. What you should be advocating for instead is something like a mandatory GPL-style license, where anybody who uses the model or contributed training data to it has the right to a copy of it that they can run themselves. That would ensure that generative AI is democratizing. It also works for many different issues, such as biased models keeping minorities in jail longer.

    tl;dr: Advocate for open models, not copyright