As more and more of our physical world looks the same

The Tyranny of the Algorithm: Why Every Coffee Shop Looks the Same

asking if they subscribe to other myth based beliefs, religions, etc

What you actually said:

Out of interest are you religious or subject to some other form of mythical belief system? I ask because clearly you lack motivation for the truth, preferring hearsay and urban legend that I must assume supports a wider world view. by @Hackerman_uwu

My thought: this kind of behaviour is one of things that made Reddit fucking awful and I’d hate to see it flourish here in the fediverse.

So, it’s basically 4chans all the way down.

Nominally, you’d need to go through some request process to request federation with other large instances. Then they’d vet your configuration before adding you.

An online cafe dedicated to harvesting baby seal fur SEEMED like a good idea…

The famous example you’re thinking of is Jimmy Snyder, aka Jimmy the Greek, a sports commentator and sports betting expert who used to work for CBS sports. He was interviewed as part of a series about civil rights in the US, and the interviewer was sort of expecting him to say something pleasant about black folks’ success in athletics opening doors for education and leadership, etc.

Instead he made some pretty astonishing claims that were intensely racist.

California, actually. Although that’s probably worse.

I would proudly stink of back-bacon and maple syrup, if given the opportunity.

What would “discrimination” look like in a reddit-like link sharing service?

I’m not even sure what that word would imply in a discussion forum. It usually applies to things like wages, job opportnities, access, etc.

Something something Stallman was right (about this specific thing, anyway).

How do you prove the results are directly derived

Mathematically? It’s a computer algorithm. Its output is deterministic, and both reproducible and traceable.

Give the AI two copies of its training dataset, one with the copyrighted work, one without it. Now give it the same prompt and compare the outputs.

The difference is the contribution of the copyrighted work.

You mention Harry Potter. In Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. v. RDR Books, Warner Brothers lawyers argued that a reference encyclopedia for the Harry Potter literary universe was a derivative work. The court disagreed, on the argument that the human authors of the reference book had to perform significant creative work in extracting, summarizing, indexing and organizing the information from JK Rowling’s original works.

I wonder if the court would use the same reasoning to defend the work of an AI?

understanding where consciousness comes from

Again, to be clear, I don’t think this is a fundamentally scientific question.

If you show a philosopher how a rose activates the retina and sends signals to the brain, you’ll get a response like, “sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose”…

If you show a philosopher the retinal signals activate the optical processing capabilities of the brain, you’ll get “sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose”…

If you show a philosopher how the appearance of a rose consistently activates certain clusters of neurons and glial cells that are always activated when someone sees a rose, you’ll get a response “sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose”…

Show the philosopher that the same region of the brain is excited when the person smells a rose or reads the word “rose”, and they’ll say, “sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose”…

To the philosopher, they have posed a question about “what it’s like to experience a rose”, and I suggest that NO answer will satisfy them, because they’re not really asking a scientific question. They’re looking for, as the SEP puts it, an “intuitively satisfying way how phenomenal or ‘what it’s like’ consciousness might arise from physical or neural processes in the brain”. But, science isn’t under any obligation to provide an inituitive, easy-to-understand answer. The assemblage of brain & nerve functions that are fired when a living being experiences a phenomenon are the answer.

But there are absolutely rules on whether Google – or anything else – can use that search index to create a product that competes with the original content creators.

For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.

Google indexing of copyrighted works was considered “fair use” only because they only offered a few preview pages associated with each work. Google’s web page excerpts and image thumbnails are widely believed to pass fair use under the same concept.

Now, let’s say Google wants to integrate the content of multiple copyrighted works into an AI, and then give away or sell access to that AI which can spit out the content (paraphrased, in some capacity) of any copyrighted work it’s ever seen. You’ll even be able to ask it questions, like “What did Jeff Guin say about David Koresh’s religious beliefs in his 2023 book, Waco?” and in all likelihood it will cough up a summary of Mr. Guinn’s uniquely discovered research and journalism.

I don’t think the legal questions there are settled at all.

Well, it’s a “problem” for philosophers. I don’t think it’s a “problem” for neurology or hard science, that’s the only point I was trying to make.

Copyright and fair use are laws written for humans, to protect human creators and insure them the ability to profit from their creativity for a limited time, and to grant immunity to other humans for generally accepted uses of that work without compensation.

I agree that sentience is irrelevant, but whether the actors involved are human or not is absolutely relevant.

Right now our understanding of derivative works is mostly subjective. We look at the famous Obama “HOPE” image, and the connection to the original news photograph from which it was derived seems quite clear. We know it’s derivative because it looks derivative. And we know it’s a violation because the person who took the news photograph says that they never cleared the photo for re-use by the artist (and indeed, demanded and won compensation for that reason).

Should AI training be required to work from legally acquired data, and what level of abstraction from the source data constitutes freedom from derivative work? Is it purely a matter of the output being “different enough” from the input, or do we need to draw a line in the training data, or…?

All good questions.

And yeah all the extra data that we humans fundamentally aquire in life does change everything we make.

I’d argue that it’s the crucial difference. People on this thread are arguing like humans never make original observations, or observe anything new, or draw new conclusions or interpretations of new phenomena, so everything humans make must be derived from past creations.

Not only is that clearly wrong, but it also fails the test of infinite regress. If humans can only create from the work of other humans, how was anything ever created? It’s a risible suggestion.

But we make the laws, and have the privilege of making them pro-human. It may be important in the larger philosophical sense to meditate on the difference between AIs and human intelligence, but in the immediate term we have the problem that some people want AIs to be able to freely ingest and repeat what humans spent a lot of time collecting and authoring in copyrighted books. Often, without even paying for a copy of the book that was used to train the AI.

As humans, we can write the law to be pro-human and facilitate human creativity.

Well, that’s the question at hand. Who? Definitely not, people have an innate right to think about what they observe, whether that thing was made by someone else, or not.

What? I’d argue that’s a much different question.

Let’s take an extreme case. Entertainment industry producers tried to write language into the SAG-AFTRA contract that said that, if an extra is hired for a production, they can use that extra’s image – including 3D spatial body scans – in perpetuity, for any purpose, and that privilege of eternal image storage and re-use was included in the price of hiring an extra for 1 day of work.

The producers would make precisely the same argument you are – how dare you tell them how they can use the images that they captured, even if it’s to use and re-use a person’s image and shape in visual media, forever. The actors argue that their physiognomy is part of their brand and copyright, and using their image without their express permission (and, should they require it, compensation) is a violation of their rights.

Or, I could just take pictures of somebody in public places without their consent and feed them into an AI to create pictures of the subject flashing children. They were my pictures, taken by me, and how dare anybody get to make rules about who or what experiences them, right?

The fact is, we have rules about the capture and re-use of created works that have applied to society for a very long time. I don’t think we should give copyright holders eternal locks on their work, but neither is it clear that a 100% free use policy on created work is the right answer. It is reasonable to propose something in between.

To be clear, I don’t think the fundamental issue is whether humans have a training dataset. We do. And it includes copyrighted work. It also includes our unique sensory perceptions and lots of stuff that is definitely NOT the result of someone else’s work. I don’t think anyone would dispute that copyrighted text, pictures, sounds are integrated into human consciousness.

The question is whether it is ethical, and should it be legal, to feed copyrighted works into an AI training dataset and use that AI to produce material that replaces, displaces, or competes with the copyrighted work used to train it. Should it be legal to distribute or publish that AI-produced material at all if the copyright holder objects to the use of their work in an AI training dataset? (I concede that these may be two separate, but closely related, questions.)

I hesitate to call it a problem because, by the way it’s defined, subjective experience is innately personal.

I’ve gotten into this question with others, and when I began to propose thought problems (like, what if we could replicate sensory inputs? If you saw/heard/felt everything the same as someone else, would you have the same subjective conscious experience?), I’d get pushback: “that’s not subjective experience, subjective experience is part of the MIND, you can’t create it or observe it or measure it…”.

When push comes to shove, people define consciousness or subjective experience as that aspect of experience that CANNOT be shown or demonstrated to others. It’s baked into the definition. As soon as you venture into what can be shown or demonstrated, you’re out of bounds.

So it’s not a “problem”, as such. It’s a limitation of our ability to self-observe the operating state of our own minds. An interesting question, perhaps, but not a problem. Just a feature of the system.