this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

“data dignity”,

Apparently, this is about creating a new kind of intellectual property; a generalized and hypercharged version of copyright that applies to all sorts of data.

Maybe, this is a touchy subject, but to me this seems like an extremely right wing approach. Turn anything into property and the magic market will turn everything into rainbows and unicorns. Maybe you feel different about this?

Regardless of classification, such a policy is obviously devastating to society. Of course, your argument does not consider society but only the feelings of some individuals. Feelings are valid but one has to consider the effect of such a policy, too. Not every impulse should be given power. This is especially true where such feelings are strongly influenced by culture and circumstance. For example, people in the US and the UK have -on the whole - rather different feelings on being ruled by a king. I don't feel that I should be able to control what other people do with data, maybe because I'm a bit older and was socialized into that whole information-wants-to-be-free culture. I don't even remember having a libertarian phase.

How would you pitch this to me?

[–] mm_maybe@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm not proposing anything new, and I'm not here to "pitch" anything to you--read Jaron Lanier's writings e.g. "Who Owns the Future", or watch a talk/interview given by him, if you're interested in a sales pitch for why data dignity is a problem worth addressing. I admire him greatly and agree with many of his observations but am not sure about his proposed solution (mainly a system of micro-payments to creators of the data used by tech companies)--I'm just here to point out that copyright infringement isn't in fact, the main nor the only thing that is bothering so many people about generative AI, so settling copyright disputes isn't going to stop all those people from being upset about it.

As to your comments about "feelings", I would turn it around to you and ask why it is important to society that we prioritize the feelings (mainly greed) of the few tech executives and engineers who think that they will profit from such practices over the many, many people who object to them?

[–] General_Effort@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And have you stopped beating your wife yet?

Asking loaded questions isn't the big brain move you think. It's just dishonest.

[–] japipes@zirk.us 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

@General_Effort @mm_maybe
Maybe this will finally be the push we, as a society, need to realize that "intellectual property" is a legal fiction that we are all better off without?

[–] mm_maybe@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

Yeah, I would agree that there's something really off about the framework that just doesn't fit most people's feelings of justice or injustice. A synth YouTuber, of all people, made a video about this that I liked, though his proposed solution is about as workable as Jaron Lanier's: https://youtu.be/PJSTFzhs1O4?si=ZvY9yfOuIJI7CVUk

Again, I don't have a proposal of my own, I've just decided for myself that if I'm going to do anything money-making with LLMs in my practice as a professional data scientist, I'll rely on StarCoder as my base model instead of the others, particularly because a lot of my clients are in the public sector and face public scrutiny.