People need to cope with the fact that no thought is original. Even Newton and Leibniz were having the same thoughts at the same time. Get over it.
People need to cope with the fact that no thought is original. Even Newton and Leibniz were having the same thoughts at the same time. Get over it.
I submit most of the replies to my original reply as proof that there are no original thoughts.
When did the last original thought happen then? Clearly thoughts must have been original at some point, or there wouldn't be any at all
When did the first homo sapiens exist? Ideas like species evolve. Saying there are no original ideas seems to me an attempt to glibly capture something quite fundamental.
Hi dmoose, your handle looks familiar to me. The non-glib answer is that we should giver some very serious consideration to the possibility that language either functions like, or possibly is the same as, Jung's collective unconscious: the organically created repository of all of humankind's cognition and reason, accumulated over vasts periods of time, deposited by billions of humans.
My way of "giving this serious attention" is through pre-registered, falsifiable, repeatable, experimentation, which anyone can look up on osf.io because I use my real name. I'll bet you that non of the randos in this thread do as much.
To all of the randos: unless you have data... it is just an opinion.
I don't disagree with your premise, but I'd argue that saying "there are no original ideas" in the context of a discussion of plagiarism is needlessly reductive. Even though I think I mostly agree with the author here, I think there are legitimate counterarguments that can be made; equating all of the ways someone can cite or build upon an idea with copying something word-for-word and claiming it's your own is not one of them though.
Did those original thoughts not build upon all the original thoughts that came before them?
Sure they build upon them, you still need to add your 1% of original insight. There was a first person to realise that you could make fire by rubbing two sticks together.
Is my house a copy of the dirt it's on top of? Did the people who built my house build the dirt? There's a difference between "building upon" an idea and trying to claim you built the idea itself
Technically one of {Newton, Leibniz} was first, but you're missing GP's point
No, I think I just find it reductive. The fact that some ideas are independently thought by multiple people does not feel like a compelling argument for normalizing copying someone else's work verbatim and trying to pass it off as your own.
OK, and the AI labs are open sourcing their frontier models since those are not original either. Right? RIGHT?
I've noticed that AI has caused this narrative to become more popular. "Nothing is original anyway, so why bother?" That's pure cope and you know it. A deep insecurity masked as bold truthtelling.
I think you're right, the ease in which AI can do task that we previously considered unique to human creativity does force us to further rethink and acknowledge how creativity is in a large part about "remixing" prior works, although of course we've had discourse about this for at least as early as Richard Simon's 1678 "Critical History of the Old Testament", which identified it as being a remix of earlier sources [0].
[0] https://archive.org/details/hisyo00simo/page/n1/mode/2up
Having an original thought is in no way related to breaking copyright laws.
I don't think we should "get over" the fact that modern SOTA models couldn't exist without being trained on protected works.
I'm trained on protected works. Do I need to pay royalties?
If you produce them verbatim or in significant enough portions, yes.
> I'm trained on protected works.
That someone, at some point, paid for.
I'd like to understand why I can't use a song in one of my videos without permission/payment, but an AI company can train models using that song without having either.
I'm not anti-AI. I'd just like to see companies play by the rules everyone else has to follow.
> I'd like to understand why I can't use a song in one of my videos without permission/payment, but an AI company can train models using that song without having either.
Because training isn't redistribution.
You can also listen to the song and make a new one that sounds similar, just like the AI can.
To do that training, you must first obtain the item with the content you require. Did OpenAI purchase a copy of every book they trained their models on?
Answer: They did not. That is literally why there are dozens of ongoing lawsuits in progress.
For songs, it's not that hard to legally get access to it, I think. I'm not sure if Spotify can legally prevent you from using songs for AI training for example.
> I'd like to understand why I can't use a song in one of my videos without permission/payment, but an AI company can train models using that song without having either.
Because when you say you are “using” the song, what you mean is that you are distributing copies of the song, which is protected by copyright.
When AI companies train on the song, the model is learning from it. Outside of the rare cases of memorisation, this is not distributing copies and so copyright doesn’t have any say in the matter.
Learning isn’t copying, so copyright doesn’t get involved at all.
I appreciate your comment, but you answered as if this question had been answered legally. It has not.
The New York Times is suing both OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The Authors Guild is suing OpenAI. Getty Images is suing Stability AI. Disney is suing Midjourney. Universal Music Group and Sony have filed suits against multiple AI companies.
> so copyright doesn’t get involved at all.
The dozens of ongoing cases that discredit that statement.
Which statement of mine do you think is not settled law? Which law do you think is being broken and how?
Your objection doesn’t make sense. In the event that an AI company loses a lawsuit for copyright infringement based on simply training on copyrighted works, the answer to you saying you’d like to understand why they can do it and you can’t is simply “your premise is wrong; neither of you can”.
> Which statement of mine do you think is not settled law?
I object to your statement that "copyright doesn’t get involved at all" when that is objectively untrue. If that was true, many of the world's largest companies wouldn't be spending tens of millions of dollars to have that question answered in court. Go to any law-focused forum, and you will find attorneys arguing over these questions.
To train a model using a book, you must first obtain a copy of that book. Did OpenAI purchase a copy of every book not already in the public domain used during training? They did not.
Some of the suits I mentioned claim that OpenAI literally stole copies of books to train its models.
My point is that the copyright question has not been answered. If the NYT, et. al. win, it will be a watershed moment for how AI companies pay for training data moving forward.
I'd like to understand why I can't use a song in one of my videos without permission/payment, but an AI company can train models using that song without having either.
You're right, it's an unjust situation. And you may note that no one else besides the AI companies has made any progress at all towards changing it.
Copyright will soon die, having outlived its usefulness to society. Whether the knife is held by someone named Stallman or someone named Altman is of little consequence.
Why post comments then?
For funsies
same reason we do anything else - sweet, sweet dopamine
Why post comments then?
Because some thoughts can, actually, be original ? Or relatively original enough ? Or simply, pertinent and timely ?
reiteration is still important
to bring attention to certain ideas
Nono, actually there are no thoughts. Every utterance is just a copy of a previous utterance plus a slight random mutation. (somewhat /s)