Everyone with a dissenting viewpoint from your own is not some secret right-wing troll smuggling in the “wrong” viewpoints. You are not helping anyone with this mindset.

I live in a pretty red area. I talk to a lot of people who have a lot of these right wing beliefs. Im not going to pretend these aren’t dogshit takes, they fucking suck. But like this guy is trying to tell you, these views and talking points are very prevalent. We can’t treat these people like right-wing sleeper cell trolls that just want to attack us, they are people who have been misled.

I’ll give you an example. I was talking to someone who was a little upset we were sending billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine. Is this a shit take? Yeah it is, but he didn’t have it because hes some russian fascist who wants to see putin recreate the USSR, he’s just living in the COL crisis like everyone else. When I pointed out it was a shit move to let ukraine burn and made him think about it, he changed his mind. Theres other shit we spend way more money on, like our military, and we should defend a country that is being annexed by another world power.

He’s not a bad dude. He just hadn’t stopped to think about it. If i had just attacked him for it he would have just doubled down, because im being an asshole, and why would he adopt the assholes position? Thats how most people are. It sucks but it takes a lot of energy to really sift through all the bullshit, and surviving in todays world is stressful enough as it is for people. Its hard to look at the bigger picture when your smaller, immediate one is so turbulent.

This guy is clearly not deflecting he is genuinely questioning things he’s not sure on. He’s actively saying he’s not very informed and maybe he is wrong but he’s not sure.

Your points are correct but your comments come off like you are being attacked. Just relax man. Its not deflection, he’s asking questions about things he has heard and is unsure on. He is right, republicans are better at messaging and thats why he has heard this shit before.

So now the output of both programs is “illegimate” in your eyes, despite one of them never even getting direct access to the original text.

Now lets say one of them just writes a story in the style of Twain, still plagiarism? Because I don’t know if you can copyright a style.

The first painter painted on cave walls with his fingers. Was the brush a parrot tool? A utility to plagiarize? You could use it for plagiarism, yes, and by your logic, it shouldn’t be used. And any work created using it is not “legitimate”.

Sure, AI is not doing anything creative, but neither is my pen, its the tool im using to be creative. Lets think about this more with some scenarios:

Lets say software developer “A” comes along, and they’re pretty fucking smart. They sit down, read through all of Mark Twains novels, and over the course of the next 5 years, create a piece of software that generates works in Twain’s style. Its so good that people begin using it to write real books. It doesn’t copy anything specifically from Twain, it just mimics his writing style.

We also have developer “B”. While Dev A is working on his project, Dev B is working on a very similar project, but with one difference: Dev B writes an LLM to read the books for him, and develop a writing style similar to Twain’s based off of that. The final product is more or less the same as Dev A’s product, but he saves himself the time of needing to read through every work on his own, he just reads a couple to get an idea of what the output might look like.

Is the work from Dev A’s software legitimate? Why or why not?

Is the work from Dev B’s software legitimate? Why or why not?

Assume both of these developers own copies of the works they used as training data, what is honestly the difference here? This is what I am struggling with so much.

Sure, but what I’m asking is: what do you think is a reasonable rate?

We are talking data sets that have millions of written works in them. If it costs hundreds or thousands per work, this venture almost doesn’t make sense anymore. If its $1 per work, or cents per work, then is it even worth it for each individual contributor to get $1 when it adds millions in operating costs?

In my opinion, this needs to be handled a lot more carefully than what is being proposed. We are potentially going to make AI datasets wayyyy too expensive for anyone to use aside from the largest companies in the market, and even then this will cause huge delays to that progress.

If AI is just blatantly copy and pasting what it read, then yes, I see that as a huge issue. But reading and learning from what it reads, no matter how rudimentary that “learning” may be, is much different than just copying works.

Okay, given that AI models need to look over hundreds of thousands if not millions of documents to get to a decent level of usefulness, how much should the author of each individual work get paid out?

Even if we say we are going to pay out a measly dollar for every work it looks over, you’re immediately talking millions of dollars in operating costs. Doesn’t this just box out anyone who can’t afford to spend tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars on AI development? Maybe good if you’ve always wanted big companies like Google and Microsoft to be the only ones able to develop these world-altering tools.

Another issue, who decides which works are more valuable, or how? Is a Shel Silverstein book worth less than a Mark Twain novel because it contains less words? If I self publish a book, is it worth as much as Mark Twains? Sure his is more popular but maybe mine is longer and contains more content, whats my payout in this scenario?

I can’t just go home and create an AI that can create art either, clearly i was simplifying things for my example.

Okay, I can understand that. But why is that being turned into “the creator of any work an AI looks at needs to be compensated” instead of holding AI companies accountable for plagiarized works?

I totally understand fining an AI company that produces a copy of Starry Night. But if it makes a painting similar in style to Starry Night that wouldn’t normally be considered a plagiarized work if a human did it, do we still consider that an issue?

I never understand this argument. If I go to an art museum, look at all the works, and create an art piece inspired by what i saw, no problem. If I go to an art museum, look at the works, and create a computer program that can create an art piece based on what I saw, that is somehow different? Because of the single step of abstraction that was taken by making some software to do it?

They might be bots, but I think there’s a good chunk of people who just don’t think about it, so they don’t care. Writing them off as bots won’t change that, but maybe we can help them look a few steps ahead and change some of their minds.

What is more likely? An army of bots has been deployed to astroturf Lemmy already, or people are just ignorant to some of these issues? Probably a mixture of both. But more of Column B I would guess.

The craziest thing to me is that people seem to be lining up to make excuses for Meta. We learned the first week of this migration that defederating can get messy, we saw it right away with Beehaw.

Had Beehaw defederated from the larger instances sooner, then there would have been no outrage in the community over it. But while Lemmy was seeing a lot of growth, a lot of the big communities were being made on beehaw. All of the sudden, people were unable to access these communities properly and they were PISSED.

Guys, look around! Threads has what, 10 million users already? We have like, a hundred thousand, maybe a few hundred thousand at best? They will no doubt have huge communities formed by the time they decide they want to start federating. The ratio of Lemmy/Kbin users to threads users will be 100:1.

If we federate with Meta we basically have no choice but to use the communities they host. People only want to use 1 community (the issue of duplicate communities is brought up daily), so they will flock to the largest one. When Meta decides they don’t want to play nice with us anymore (and they will, it is never profitable to let people access all your content completely free, and shareholders will come knocking), defederation is going to decimate whats left here. Personally I think the place would implode, and many would migrate to where the content is.

Right, I get what you’re saying and if they aren’t federated to begin with then I don’t think there’s any issue. The issue comes when you federate, get everyone used to being able to interact with that user base and that content, and then defederate. The end result might be the same amount of users on lemmy in either case, but i’d wager the reception at that point is totally different.

In the first scenario, there is only slow and steady growth.

In the second, there is slow and steady growth, followed by huge, rapid growth, followed by a sudden decline that would make user interaction drop off a cliff, while the content and interaction is still available, just on another platform. I’d bet most people won’t be interested in continuing to use a “dead” platform.

Its not about when people don’t want to federate with meta, its when meta no longer wants to federate with you.

Let me put it this way. If I surveyed every person in my social circles right now, the only person who is using the “Fediverse” as we call it is myself. The others who know about it only know of it because I won’t shut up about it.

But lets say Threads.net takes off, and becomes a new mainstream social media. Maybe its easier to sign up and start using, maybe the UI is a little better, or maybe its just advertised well to current Instagram and Facebook users. Suddenly, 20-30% of the people in my circles might be using the “Fediverse” through Threads.

“This sounds awesome!” I hear you saying. Well there’s a catch. New users to the fediverse tend to just join the biggest instance. We’ve seen this already with Lemmy.world, I personally chose it because it was a lesser populated instance, but it quickly became #1 and is now the fastest growing. Well this means new users would all sign up on Threads, right? Suddenly, the fediverse is 100x larger than it once was, but 80-90% of all the content comes from Threads users.

And then, one day, now with a stranglehold of almost all content coming into the fediverse, Meta is free to defederate from the rest of the platform. Maybe they throw up ads, start selling user data, whatever. Now you and I are left here, with almost all of the traffic gone. Many users switch to threads, because thats where the content is.

Sure, the fediverse is kind of in that final position right now, but the context is much different; everyone here is excited to make this a community. In this scenario, we’d be trying to rebuild the platform. Imagine trying to get everyone to migrate back to MySpace right now, you’d be laughed at whether it was actually a better platform or not.

If it feels like I’m reaching here, look up what happened with XMPP and Google. We have been on this ride before.

Sure, its a symbiotic relationship for the people who “aren’t super worried” about it, until metas platform becomes big enough to defederate with the rest of the fediverse, taking all of its users and content with it, and leaving you on an empty network because everyone you know “just uses the meta instance”…

Don’t you also need to worry about your sample population being biased? You’d only be sampling people who sought out a dislike plugin, these people might be much more likely to dislike a video. Is there any way to account for that?

Seeing this has made me curious, are there any cases like this where a hacker/hacker group has demanded millions of dollars to not leak info, and the company being blackmailed has actually paid out?

I feel like every once and a while you see a headline about hackers “demanding” x amount of money, and it never seems its going to work, but it must have worked at some point for so many people to try it, right?