alt Hacker NewsIntellectual property laws never totally made sense to me in the first place, but they make even less sense in the age of AI.
Who's "intellectual property" are we protecting, exactly, when a machine generates the knowledge?
I hope we can update before it's too late to matter.
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andai • today at 4:47 PM
See also: Monkey selfie copyright dispute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
I suppose it's worth distinguishing the type of machine though.
If a genetic algorithm comes up with a unique design and I patent it, that's okay, right?
I think the main issue with LLMs is what went into them. Like we saw recently with Anthropic's revolutionary source control breakthroughs, which turned out to already be in the training data:
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Intellectual property laws - like most laws - favor those with a lot of money and that's why you see this asymmetry between say artists, consumers and labels/record companies. The latter simply have far more money and besides they get to optimize their efforts because they are essentially immortal.
AI and AI companies have a similar pathway open to them where they will take a lot of information already out there and then gatekeep the synthesis based on that information (obtained without compensation in most cases) as well as to harvest all of the latent knowledge underneath. This is a bad development in my opinion but I'm sure that their shareholders believe it is great.