Opinion | The Internet Is About to Get Much Worse
www.nytimes.com
Why the development of artificial intelligence might result in greater pollution of our digital public spaces.

This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons, where a common resource is harmed by the profit interests of individuals. The traditional example of this is a public field that cattle can graze upon. Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody.

We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay.

But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.

  • @hypna
    20•1 year ago

    A truly poor analogy. LLMs don’t remove anything from anywhere. They consume no shared resource.

    It’s been wild watching people flail about searching for arguments for why LLMs should be stopped. I’m not even saying they shouldn’t, just that I haven’t seen a solid argument for it.

    • Spzi
      13•1 year ago

      As per the article, it goes like this:

      1. AI is trained on publicly available data
      2. AI does not credit or compensate original authors
      3. People don’t like their work being used without
      4. People share less publicly
      5. Public spaces desert

      And simultaneously, AI content of poor quality drowns what is left.

      In terms of arguments, have you heard about control / alignment problem or x-risk?

      • @ByeEnglish
        9•1 year ago

        Isn’t that true with people too? If I read a bunch of books and then use what I learned to write a new book, I’m not crediting the original authors. If I learn painting techniques from Van Gogh and el Greco, I’m not crediting them either.

        • Madison_rogue
          3•1 year ago

          You’re equating sentience with non-sentience. a LLM is a non-sentient program, created by humans to learn language. You are a sentient person who is influenced by the painting techniques of Van Gogh and el Greco. While you don’t need to credit them, they have influenced your work. That is entirely acceptable practice.

          This is a huge difference in the realm of copyright.

          EDIT

          Also the works of the artists you mention are in public domain in most countries. They can be used by LLM without incident. Works of artists not in the public domain should be subject to copyright law for LLM.