Aigars Mahinovs <aigar...@gmail.com> writes: > This was in response to Russ articulating that: "I don't work on free > software because I want to make something easier for Google's LLM. I > work on free software because I want to give freedom and control to > human beings."
> The false assumption here being that making "something easier for LLMs" > will only benefit Google (who are nowhere near top in terms of AI > development, btw) and not "human beings", which quite obviously fails to > take in account any freedom and control that a LLMs *does* in fact give > its users, who are also human beings. Aigars, it would be a lot easier to have this conversation with you if you pay somewhat closer attention to what other people are really arguing. first you launched into extended tours of current legal thinking about this for people who could not possibly care less what the law says because their arguments were ethical and moral and law is not a reliable guide to either, and now you're trying to pick a fight with me over the message where I was *actively agreeing* with your motives. This is not the point of our disagreement. We are on the same side of this: we are both wanting to make ethical choices that benefit humans and that help human flourishing. I was arguing against the concern that we might have to avoid something like biological exceptionalism, meaning that we have to consider treating some future LLMs as agents with moral rights of their own. I never said you agreed with this; I don't think you *do* agree with this. Our disagreement is not about motives, at least in that sense. Our disagreement is over consent, and your willingness to break the social contract with artists and override their consent in order to get the supposed benefits of LLMs. This is not an anti-human-being position; it's a sort of populism that sacrifices the economic model that artists currently rely on to survive in the name of empowering the masses. You went so far as to start talking about LLMs as magic copyright-washing machines that would let you destroy the basis of copyright and use other people's works for whatever you want. This is where we disagree. I'm sure that what you *think* you're doing is democratizing art. People who hold this position always think that. I think you have been duped into a politics of art without the artist, a belief that one can decouple the creation of meaningful art from artist control of their work by turning artistic work into a sort of factory work-for-hire regime, and that this is somehow a good thing for the world. I don't think that *you personally* would classify your position that way; I suspect you just think of it as expanding the commons and giving artists better tools. But in our current society this is, to me, the very obvious and predictable outcome of your political position. I'm not particularly interested in arguing about this with you either, which is why I've not responded to your last few messages. I've heard all the arguments here before and I find them very tedious. But now you've apparently decided to pick a fight with me over things I'm not even saying, so I guess I have to clarify. We are indeed vigorously opposed on this topic, but it's not because I think your position is anti-human. It's because I think you are naive about how the creation of art happens in human society, and that the implications of your position stand a good chance of cheapening and undermining whole fields of human endeavor and seriously hurting the lives of people who have made things that have given me a great deal of joy. I don't want to see Debian participate in this. Debian will not in any way be pivotal to this fight, so I guess in some sense it doesn't really matter what we do, but still, I feel some obligation to try to argue for an ethical position in the places where I may have some influence. But I certainly don't think your position is anti-human! Quite the contrary: I think it's techno-populist in all of the worst senses of populism, the sort of populism that is being used as an unwitting tool by the richest people on the planet who resent that art currently (unevenly, imperfectly) favors labor over capital, and whose goal is to ensure capital reigns surpreme in all areas of society. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
