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AI's Training Ground
00:11:17
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| Hi, everybody. | |
| This is Stefan Mollandu from Free Domain. | |
| So AI. | |
| Let's talk the philosophy and morality of artificial intelligence and its effects on your life to come. | |
| It's going to be a huge, huge effect. | |
| So let's look at the ethics of copyright. | |
| Now, copyright is a complicated topic as a whole, but let's just take the current existing legal framework. | |
| AI cannot function without violating copyright. | |
| AI cannot be trained on anything particularly useful without violating copyright. | |
| So for instance, AI has hoovered up my books. | |
| I mean, most of which are available for free, but I still haven't handed over with any particular permission use in that. | |
| Now, I want you to think about the difference between hiring a tutor and buying a book. | |
| So let's say that you want to make a meal. | |
| You've never made it before. | |
| So normally what you do is you would, back in the day, like prior to all of this sort of stuff, you would go and you would buy a cookbook. | |
| And then you would thumb through that cookbook. | |
| You'd say you want to make some Mediterranean dish. | |
| You would buy a Mediterranean cookbook and you'd pay 30 bucks or whatever. | |
| And then you would get a bunch of recipes and you would use those recipes. | |
| And that's how you would gain knowledge of that recipe. | |
| Now, if you think about hiring a chef to instruct you on the recipes, that's sort of a different matter, right? | |
| So what would you rather do? | |
| Would you rather buy a book where you have to do the work to look it up, to follow the steps and so on? | |
| Or would you rather hire someone to walk you through whatever recipe you wanted? | |
| Now, of course, if you buy a cookbook, often, not always, but most often, they will not have all of the list of ingredients and so on, right? | |
| And so an AI model, you can say, okay, so I want to make, I don't know, a Greek salad with feta and olives or whatever. | |
| Feta, as my wife always says, not feta, feta. | |
| So if you ask AI, AI will say, okay, well, here's what you need to do. | |
| You say, well, what do I need to buy? | |
| Oh, you need to buy this. | |
| Where's the best order to buy it? | |
| Okay, blah, And it may even at some point to be able to produce a list which you can just feed into some online grocery provider and order this, whatever you need, right? | |
| So that's more like a personal assistant. | |
| Would you rather buy a book on how to make, I don't know, what's a complicated lobster bisque, right? | |
| Or baked Alaska or something like that. | |
| Would you rather buy a book or would you rather have a coach, a tutor, to teach you step by step everything you needed to do to produce that meal, right? | |
| Now, if you look at AI, AI is like a coach. | |
| It's like a tutor. | |
| It's like a personal assistant. | |
| It's like an expert in your kitchen telling you everything you need to do to make that perfectly. | |
| Even to the point like the cookbook will not remind you of things, but the AI will remind you of things. | |
| Oh, I just put the baked Alaska in the oven. | |
| Remind me when it's got to come out to be best, whatever it is, right? | |
| And so you have a complete personal assistant, expert chef, tutor, and everything in AI. | |
| Would you rather buy a big book of exercise on exercising, or would you rather have AI, like you input your stats or whatever, and would you rather AI create, design, track, and monitor a complete exercise regime for you based upon your goals? | |
| Right? | |
| So one is a book. | |
| The other is a very detailed fitness coach. | |
| Can even give you encouragement, can even help you correct form if it's video. | |
| Now, the transformation of a recipe book or an exercise book into a very sophisticated personal coach gets passed or bypasses copyright laws under the aegis of it is transformative. | |
| If you transform the work enough, then it is not a copyright violation. | |
| And that's how they kind of get around this. | |
| It's one of the ways that they get around it. | |
| The other is that it's kind of impossible to pay every author for everything that you're hoovering up and so on. | |
| But the way that I look at it is something like this. | |
| If you have a cookbook, let's say our Mediterranean cookbook, right? | |
| And you're going to make Spani Copper or something like that, something, you know, kind of complicated. | |
| You got your Mediterranean cookbook in the bookstore, and then right in front of it, there's a guy saying, I mean, look, you can spend 30 bucks on this cookbook or forget the cookbook. | |
| I'll come to your house and show you step by step how to make the meal and remind you of everything and tell you everything you need to buy. | |
| And, you know, within a month, of course, of me doing this as often as you want, you'll be familiar with this. | |
| And you can look up any of the recipes and learn it all and all of that kind of stuff, right? | |
| And you don't have to buy a bunch of recipes that you don't want, right? | |
| Let's say you don't eat dessert. | |
| Well, in the Mediterranean cookbook, there's going to be a bunch of dessert recipes you don't want, right? | |
| You're buying singles, not albums, and so on, right? | |
| Now, this is competition, right? | |
| Because the AI people also say, look, our AIs don't harm book sales, which I would disagree with. | |
| I'm sure that there's data going both ways, but I would disagree with it in the same way that if you have a personal fitness book on sale for 30 bucks, but when someone goes to buy it, you know, someone puts his hand on your forearm if you go to buy the fitness book and says, no, no, no, listen, this fitness book is like 60 bucks. | |
| I will give you months of, you know, you can tell me your blood work, your weight, your body fat percentage, what it is that you want to achieve. | |
| And I will design for you a personal, exact, tailored fitness routine. | |
| I'll track your progress. | |
| I'll tell you how far you are from your goals. | |
| I'll make sure that, you know, and all of that. | |
| Or you could just buy some dead book that you have to do all the work and set it all up, right? | |
| Would a personal trainer for free relative, right? | |
| Because, you know, you can get a lot of free AIs. | |
| I know that there's some that cost some money or whatever, right? | |
| But you can get some free AIs. | |
| So would you rather have a dead book or a detailed, personalized life coach? | |
| Well, most people would rather have a detailed, personalized life coach. | |
| So to me, if you can get the value, right? | |
| If you can get the value of a book without having to read the book, right? | |
| So I've got these books on voluntarism, like practical anarchy, everyday anarchy. | |
| I've got the handbook of human ownership. | |
| I've got my novel, The Future, which goes into this in more detail. | |
| So let's say you have a question about voluntarism. | |
| And your question is, well, how would national defense work in the absence of a government? | |
| It's a pretty common question. | |
| Or how would roads function in the absence of a government? | |
| Well, you could, let's say my books were for sale. | |
| You could go and spend, you know, say 40 bucks or 50 bucks buying a bunch of my books. | |
| And then you would have to go to the index, hoping the index worked, and you'd have to say, okay, here's the kind of roads. | |
| I've got to go read that. | |
| And then you would get your answer. | |
| And it would cost you like 50 bucks. | |
| And you'd have a bunch of books that you'd have to sort of have in your house and manage. | |
| And 95% of the books would not be answering your question. | |
| So if you have a question, how would Rhodes function without a government? | |
| Then you want to answer it. | |
| Would you buy my books or would you just ask AI, knowing that AI was trained on my books? | |
| Would you rather read UPB? | |
| Or if you have a specific question about UPB, well, how does UPB handle abortion or how does UPB handle self-defense or whatever? | |
| You could grab my book and plow through it, hoping that the answer is somewhere in there and maybe have to skim it till you find it's very inefficient. | |
| Or you could just ask an AI who's trained in my books. | |
| Or if you wanted to learn UPB, universally preferable behavior, my rational proof of secular ethics, if you wanted to learn that, then you could either read the book and puzzle it through and ask questions of people who might know, or you could say to AI, you know, create a 10-course or a 10-lesson course in how to best understand UPB, assuming I have very limited training in philosophy. | |
| Break it down for me at, let's say, a grade 10 level. | |
| Then that's all personalized. | |
| If you ask me to do that, it would, you know, obviously if you hired me to do that, it would be expensive and so on, but you can get that for free from AI. | |
| So if you look at AI, I mean, the first question is, why does it exist at all? | |
| Now, you could say, well, AI would be trained on all books, you know, what is it, 75 years old or whatever. | |
| It's the life of the author plus 50 years or whatever it is, right? | |
| So you would have all books from a sort of early 20th century, maybe 1940s. | |
| You would train AI on those books, but that would not be particularly helpful because that's not what people want. | |
| They don't want answers to questions that were relevant 75 years ago, right? | |
| So the only reason that AI has particular value is that the AI companies are able to hoover up millions and millions and millions of books and transform them into personal coaches, trainers, consultants to specifically answer questions that people have. | |
| And they don't pay a penny for it. | |
| They don't pay a penny for it. | |
| So when I was a kid, we bought, and I used, of course, for many, many years, we bought a secondhand copy of the encyclopedia Britannica. | |
| In fact, I once dated a girl who was selling encyclopedias. | |
| She sold encyclopedias for a while, as did I, actually, briefly. | |
| So I had an old copy of this. | |
| It's one of the reasons why my beliefs are probably somewhat old-fashioned. | |
| This was an Encyclopædia Britannica, which we bought in the late 60s, which was like, I don't know, 20 years old or whatever, right? | |
| So it was like late 40s that the encyclopedia came out. | |
| And of course, when I had a question, I would go and look up things in the encyclopedia. | |
|
Writers and Their Dilemma
00:12:58
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| Now, of course, 99% of the encyclopedia or 95% or whatever it would be, I never used because I didn't want to look up those things or I didn't have any need to look up those things or I don't have any interest in those things. | |
| So they can hoover up that entire encyclopedia. | |
| And if I were to ask it, say, well, gee, what was the cause of the Great Depression, right? | |
| You can go and look it up in an encyclopedia, which gives you a bunch of information you have to parse out and won't answer any further questions. | |
| Or you can say to AI, right? | |
| Which is hoovered up the whole encyclopedia. | |
| What were the causes? | |
| And tell me more on cross-references, this and that, and the other, right? | |
| So it's the difference between if you have a word that you don't know the meaning of and your father wrote a dictionary, an entire dictionary, his name is Oxford, right? | |
| So your father wrote an entire dictionary. | |
| Would you go and buy a dictionary or would you just ask your father? | |
| No, I don't quite understand that meaning. | |
| Can you give it to me in another context? | |
| Like AI will do all of that. | |
| So AI exists because of violations of copyrights. | |
| You say, oh, well, but it's transformative. | |
| And it's like, yes, it's transformative in a way that makes the book much less valuable, makes the books much less valuable. | |
| You know, what are the top five lessons that Stéphane Molyneux has in his book, The Art of the Argument? | |
| Well, are you going to buy the whole book if that's all you want? | |
| Synthesize, compress. | |
| Oh, use the book, The Art of the Argument, to create a 10-course study program on how to improve my argumentation and combine it with the arguments put forward in the book Essential Philosophy. | |
| Well, are you going to buy the source material if you have the AI? | |
| If you have a personal coach who will teach you every step you need to do to make the recipe, including what ingredients to buy, when to thaw them, when to prepare them, and it's going to coach you along every step of the way, are you going to buy a cookbook? | |
| Well, no. | |
| So the cookbook transformation has reduced the value of the book by extracting, compressing, and individualizing the information that people want to get out of the book. | |
| Right? | |
| I mean, just look at it these days, right? | |
| If you don't know the meaning of a particular word, then you will not drive out and buy a dictionary or even go and look up a dictionary that you might have, but you instead will go and ask AI or go to the web and ask for that, right? | |
| So why does AI exist at all? | |
| Because AI gets to hoover up all of the millions of books of incredibly hard-earned work. | |
| Like to write a book can be brutal and is brutal on many people. | |
| It has taken all of that, extracted all of the knowledge and wisdom and can tailor it to every individual. | |
| And you can even say, you know, explain UPB to me as if you were Snoop Dogg or something like that, can make it funny and so on. | |
| So AI only exists because millions of books, right? | |
| I don't know what it is. | |
| Let's say 10 million books. | |
| Well, the average writer takes about two years to write a book in many cases. | |
| Depends on the kind of book and so on, right? | |
| So that's 2 million years of human labor that's taken without paying anyone a thing, without paying anyone a thing. | |
| So again, the question of intellectual property is interesting and different, but I won't sort of get into the anarcho-capitalist views of intellectual property. | |
| But the question is, would writers or are writers happy that people can get tailored lessons from all of their books and specific answers to specific questions without having to consume the whole book or buy the whole book through AI? | |
| Are writers happy about that? | |
| Well, I assume not. | |
| I assume not. | |
| And of course, AI is very, very aggressive. | |
| Most AI companies are very aggressive if other people use their AIs to train their AIs, which is the old Bill Gates and Steve Jobs thing. | |
| You know, like Steve Jobs said that Bill Gates was copying him and like, bro, we're both copying Xerox, right? | |
| AI exists because of violations of copyright law, or at least copyright morality, in that the writers were not consulted. | |
| The writers were not consulted. | |
| Now, if you write a book, then you expect that people are going to get the value of your book by buying the book. | |
| If they can get more tailored and specific value from your book by asking AI, that is not a transformation that any writer in the past would have reasonably expected to have occurred, right? | |
| You just don't expect that to happen. | |
| And because nobody expected that to happen in the past and they were not asked, right? | |
| You go to writers' organizations, you go to Penn, you go to other writers' unions, and you say you need to poll your writers on whether they are okay with their works being absorbed by AI. | |
| And I think most writers would say, well, no, I don't want other people profiting off my work, which they are. | |
| Let's be clear about that. | |
| The AI companies are profiting off millions of person years of incredibly difficult labor. | |
| You know, Alexander Solchenitsyn risked life and freedom to bring us the Gulag archipelago, and AI has just hoovered that up and reproduced it to whoever wants it. | |
| Now, not the original text, but arguably an even more important version of the text, which is summaries and specific questions and show me the contradictions and show me the responses and ask follow-up questions and all of that. | |
| You get to interrogate an intelligent expert about the contents of a book. | |
| You get a teacher of the material without having to purchase the material. | |
| Because if you become an expert in a particular writer's books, it is assumed that you have bought those writers' books. | |
| I'm an expert in Hemingway. | |
| Well, I assume you bought some Hemingway books. | |
| But this way, you get to consult an expert, and that expert never had to pay for any of the books. | |
| It's a kind of theft, in my view. | |
| Like morally, it's kind of theft. | |
| The way that copyright law works in a free society is that it's the commons license, right? | |
| You can choose to open source your book. | |
| You can choose to not enforce copyright. | |
| But if you want to enforce copyright, that's totally fine, right? | |
| You simply include something in the book which says, if you purchase this book, you agree not to, you know, resell it, blah, which, you know, that's not without precedent, of course, right? | |
| So you say, when you write the book, you say whether other people are allowed to use it without payment, whether they're allowed to transform it or whatever it is, right? | |
| And transformation of a book is not supposed to displace the value of that book. | |
| And the fact that writers have all of their work transformed into something which is profitable for others without them getting paid for that process is wretched. | |
| It's terrible. | |
| But of course, the courts think that they're in some kind of arms race and so on, right? | |
| So the question is, why does AI exist at all? | |
| Well, AI exists because the government has refused to enforce, in my view, again, I'm not a lawyer. | |
| This is just my particular view. | |
| And I would certainly make a case for it morally, that people cannot hoover up your work and use it for their own profit without paying you. | |
| That's wrong, unless you're fine with it. | |
| If you're fine with it, that's fine. | |
| I mean, but that's true of anything. | |
| Like if someone steals a car from your parking, from your parking driveway, someone steals a car and you want that car to be gone, then you don't press charges and it's fine. | |
| But if you do want that car to stay with you and somebody seals it, then you press charges and you're not fine. | |
| So of course it should be up to each individual writer. | |
| But of course, there should be a process in AI where as a writer, you say, even if you allow them to hoover up these books, you then inform the writer, right? | |
| And you send them an email and you say, we have absorbed your books. | |
| If you're not okay with this, if you're not okay with this, send us a message and we will either pay you or we will take your books out of our AI metric. | |
| Of course, it should not be opt-out. | |
| It should be opt-in, right? | |
| Your books have been selected to be absorbed into our AI. | |
| If you're okay with this, reply. | |
| If you want to be paid, here's the payment. | |
| If you don't accept any of those, we won't do it, right? | |
| That would be the rational process. | |
| Again, for stuff that's still under copyright law or whatever, right? | |
| Like under the current sort of legal system. | |
| So AI exists because of broad theft. | |
| And AI could not exist without that. | |
| It's sort of like COVID vaccines only existed because of immunity from liability. | |
| And nuclear power only exists because the government removed liability. | |
| So the first and most important question, and I get that this doesn't change how AI affects people over time, but the first and the most important question is, why is there even AI? | |
| It's because the government allowed AI companies to pillage millions of years of human knowledge without paying a penny. | |
| And there's no opt-out and there's no enforceability. | |
| I mean, Aaron Swartz was facing decades and decades in jail for just downloading stuff. | |
| There was no intent. | |
| He didn't seem to have any intent to profit from it. | |
| And of course, a lot of the AI companies said, well, there's an AI race. | |
| And if we don't win it, other countries are going to win it. | |
| And also, it's a nonprofit. | |
| This is some of the stuff with AI companies that they set up as nonprofits. | |
| And then they turn to a profit model and say, well, it's for the good of humanity and it's a scientific experiment. | |
| It's essential for human progress. | |
| And then they put ads on and start making money. | |
| All this kind of stuff, right? | |
| So it's all kind of shady as a whole. | |
| So that's the first thing to understand that the issue with AI only exists because of a violation of property rights. | |
| People expect somebody who's an expert on their books to at least bought some of their books, but AI companies don't have to do any of that. | |
| They can just go and hoover it all up. | |
| Now, again, for stuff outside of copyright, who cares? | |
| And if it's in the public domain, that's fine. | |
| If it's open source, fine. | |
| If it's Creative Commons, that's fine. | |
| Again, unless there are transformation issues, right? | |
| And so AI companies are very hypocritical, of course. | |
| Like the band U2, right? | |
| The band U2 got mad at people sampling their music. | |
| And then in the Akhtung Baby Tour, I mean, they sampled lots of people's stuff, right? | |
| So it's just this kind of hypocrisy that AI companies will hoover up millions of years of sweat and blood human labor without paying a penny. | |
| But the moment that somebody else tries to use their algorithms to train their own AI or use their data to train their own AI, they get really angry and say, well, that's stealing our intellectual property. | |
| Like, come on, bro. | |
| Oh, it's sad. | |
| It's sad. | |
| So I'll do another part to this. | |
| I just really wanted to talk about like AI is a government program. | |
| It is an artificially created pseudo-monopoly that is brought into being by the government refusing to protect the sweat equity of millions of years of human labor and allowing it to be hoovered up for free and turned into profit for others. | |
| It is really terrible in my view. | |
| Writing is a very hard and often very thankless job. | |
| And for AI companies to be making their billions off the sweat of writers and thus rendering the value of the writer's books much less valuable. | |
| I mean, it's less the case, of course, with things like fiction and so on, right? | |
| Because, you know, who wants to say, well, give me a summary of Catch-22 or something like that, unless it's sort of a book report thing. | |
| But with regards to facts, reason, arguments, evidence, and all of their textbooks, non-fiction works, and so on, it's brutal. | |
| And people will just stop writing books because why? | |
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Less Literacy Looms
00:00:31
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| Why would you? | |
| You're just going to get it hoovered up and people then don't have to buy your books to get the value. | |
| And it's going to enter a great age of less literacy. | |
| So let me know if this makes sense. | |
| I really do appreciate your time and attention. | |
| I'll keep going with the series. | |
| I assume it's going to be helpful. | |
| Let me know. | |
| You can always email me, hostedfreedomain.com and freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show, freedomain.call, to set up a call-in show with me, shop.freedomain.com for your merch and freedomain.com slash books for all of the tasty material. | |
| All right. | |
| Thank you, my darlings. | |
| Take care. | |
| Talk to you soon. | |