planish

I have indeed made a list of ridiculous and heretofore unobserved things somebody could be. I'm trying to gesture at a principle here.

If you can't make your own hormones, store bought should be fine. If you are bad at writing, you should be allowed to use a computer to make you good at writing now. If you don't have legs, you should get to roll, and people should stop expecting you to have legs. None of these differences between people, or in the ways that people choose to do things, should really be important.

Is there a word for that idea? Is it just what happens to your brain when you try to read the Office of Consensus Maintenance Analog Simulation System?

But for text to be a derivative work of other text, you need to be able to know by looking at the two texts and comparing them.

Training an AI on a copyrighted work might necessarily involve making copies of the work that would be illegal to make without a license. But the output of the AI model is only going to be a for-copyright-purposes derivative work of any of the training inputs when it actually looks like one.

Did the AI regurgitate your book? Derivative work.

Did the AI spit out text that isn't particularly similar to any existing book? Which, if written by a human, would have qualified as original? Then it can't be a derivative work. It might not itself be a copyrightable product of authorship, having no real author, but it can't be secretly a derivative work in a way not detectable from the text itself.

Otherwise we open ourselves up to all sorts of claims along the lines of "That book looks original, but actually it is a derivative work of my book because I say the author actually used an AI model trained on my book to make it! Now I need to subpoena everything they ever did to try and find evidence of this having happened!"

In the future, some people might not be human. Or some people might be mostly human, but use computers to do things like fill in for pieces of their brain that got damaged.

Some people can't regognize faces, for example, but computers are great at that now and Apple has that thing that is Google Glass but better. But a law against doing facial recognition with a computer, and allowing it to only be done with a brain, would prevent that solution from working.

And currently there are a lot of people running around trying to legislate exactly how people's human bodies are allowed to work inside, over those people's objections.

I think we should write laws on the principle that anybody could be a human, or a robot, or a river, or a sentient collection of bees in a trench coat, that is 100% their own business.

unnecessarily pedantic/argumentative

That's what we're here for!

They love to publish drivers that worked with like 1 release of X 5 years ago when the card came out and never update them.

Except when they update them and it breaks X.

Why, though?

Is it because we can't explain the causal relationships between the words in the text and the human's output or actions?

If a very good neuroscientist traced out the engineer's brain and could prove that, actually, if it wasn't for the comma on page 73 they wouldn't have used exactly this kind of bolt in the bridge, now is the human's output derivative of the text?

Any rule we make here should treat people who are animals and people who are computers the same.

And even regardless of that principle, surely a set of AI weights is either not copyrightable or else a sufficiently transformative use of almost anything that could go into it? If it decides to regurgitate what it read, that output could be infringing, same as for a human. But a mere but-for causal connection between one work and another can't make text that would be non-infringing if written by a human suddenly infringing because it was generated automatically.

You kind of can though? The bigger models aren't really more complicated, just bigger. If you can cram enough ram or swap into a laptop, lamma.cpp will get there eventually.

This comment is excellent. You now have ten trillion LemBux.

I don't think this is true.

The models (or maybe the characters in the conversations simulated by the models) can be spectacularly bad at basic reasoning, and misunderstand basic concepts on a regular basis. They are of course completely insane; the way they think is barely recognizable.

But they also, when asked, are often able to manipulate concepts or do reasoning and get right answers. Ask it to explain the water cycle like a pirate, and you get that. You can find the weights that make the Eifel Tower be in Paris and move it to Rome, and then ask for a train itinerary to get there, and it will tell you to take the train to Rome.

I don't know what "understanding" something is other than to be able to get right answers when asked to think about it. There's some understanding of the water cycle in there, and some of pirates, and some of European geography. Maybe not a lot. Maybe it's not robust. Maybe it's superficial. Maybe there are still several differences in kind between whatever's there and the understanding a human can get with a brain that isn't 100% the stream of consciousness generator. But not literally zero.

I think you might have to contact all the instances yourself, depending on what the relationship between the instances is. Neither instance is really contracting with the other for data processing; it's more like one instance publishes something and the other instances download and republish it, and everyone agrees that that is what they are supposed to do. So if you and your affiliates have to delete someone's data from a GDPR demand, it can't really apply to just other people who copied it?

I am, of course, three European lawyers in a trench coat, and this is impeccable legal advice that physically cannot be wrong.

Call your lawyer and sue the shit out of those raccoons. I hear they're rich.