Maybe you are correct that there is no such thing. But that is a different argument. In the U.S., from a practical and business standpoint, IP theft does exist because there are laws that are passed to prevent it and enforce consequences.
Disney is not just selling tickets to movies to make their money. They are selling licenses that provide the rights to watch, store, and use those movies (or aspects of them) in certain ways. One thing that that Anthropic didn't do is pay the publishers and authors for the right to train their models on the intellectual property. And that's why they have no place pointing fingers at Alibaba saying that they stole their IP.
Because it proves that even the greatest prompt-engineers in the world are unable to vibe code their way out of a simple bug. The fact that this example is a small, annoying, random bug that is relatively harmless does not mean that the next bug won't be as harmless or even as apparent.
When you review everything, do you understand every line of code before approving? Do you make it rewrite code that is too abstract or unclear for future humans to understand? Does AI write the tests and do you review those with the same diligence?
I don't disagree that it's revolutionary in many ways, but I am seeing lots of companies make very costly mistakes by relying too heavily on AI without fully understanding the code it writes and without fact checking its outputs by a human.
Um, yeah. They stole the IP and then they stored the pirated IP. It was literally stolen and stored on their servers. That proves that IP theft exists. It's not complicated.
I think that the point of your post, which is that our morals and ethics are often illogical and don't stand up to scrutiny, is getting lost in the debate over your example.
You're right it's not _just_ property rights, but it's mostly property rights and their relationship to capitalism.
Outside of some endangered species laws those limits on fishing are to support commerce around fishing.
My kids grew up with rats as pets, and in many ways rats are proven to be more intelligent than dogs. But rats and cockroaches are notorious for upsetting commerce. Would you go back to a restaurant you saw had cockroaches? Consequentially, they are less protected because they are seen as a nuisance.
And if you have ever seen an industrial scale pig or chicken farm, those animals are most definitely tortured -- all legally. Why? To support commerce and big industry.
It's complex because government contorts ethics to accommodate capital and industry. Morality also changes over time. These days many people who eat pork would not want to kill a pig unless it was absolutely necessary to their survival.
If you're talking about the quote being a giveaway that the article is PR, I'm not following you. The point of the last paragraph is a warning that outsourcing ethical decisions to an AI is likely to result in decisions that one might not actually make and find morally dubious.
And prioritizing Consequentialism in AI, especially with weapons, is a dangerous bargain. "How do you make decisions when the consequences are unclear?" Since when are the full consequences _ever_ clear?
In the U.S., animal "rights" are superseded by property rights. There are many places in the U.S. where you can legally shoot a dog if it is chasing your chickens, cat, dog, or other domestic animals as long as you don't shoot it on its owner's property. Many people consider Kristi Noem to be cruel for shooting her puppy (on her own property) for killing someone else's chickens, but it's not illegal. What is tragic is that her dog was being trained to hunt fowl, and it was then killed for doing what it was taught.
The same priority on property rights applies to trees. I can't cut down a tree on your property, but I can cut down a tree on my property. The town in the article made a assertion that is no weirder than corporations being considered "persons" with "rights", yet that is widely accepted in our society.
In fact, corporate "personhood" is even weirder: This town did not make a law to enforce trees rights. However, applying "personhood" status to corporations is written into law all over the place even though corporations are a human construct, not sentient beings. So, again, the only way the current laws are logical is to see that they are all about enforcing property rights, not out of concern for trees, animals, and -- at one time -- humans.
If I hear you correctly, the lack of reparations toward Black people in America is more to blame for the discrepancy than systemic racism? Perhaps it could be both?
I am getting downvoted because it's hard to admit that AI only reinforces the culture that it is trained on. It is the perfect technology to keep systemic racism in place, all while being the perfect scapegoat for lack of personal or corporate accountability.
Unless you believe that Black people are racially inferior, I think this is simply evidence of racial discrimination at a systemic level, from education through employment. AI merely reenforces the systems built to favor white people.
I agree with you. Maybe AI can generate designs that look moderately good and aesthetically pleasing for UIs that solve known problems in a prototypical way.[0] That is useful, especially for simple utilities, internal tools, or hobby projects. However, I have yet to see AI solve new design problems, improve on old problems, and create a unique design style that defines a brand and separates it from competition.
It took most Black folks 400 years to mobilize upwards from slavery under capitalism in America. And many of the civil rights that were hard won in the mid-century have been eroded practically overnight. Racism has always been a cornerstone of capitalism, and still is, condoning exploitation of people by casting them as less than human. Upward mobility is measurably harder if you're brown. I agree, we must do better.
Thanks for being a good sport about my joke! And also thanks for answering a gazillion questions here on HN with care, patience, and curiosity.
I have to say, to your first point, that exploitation (of humans, labor, resources, consumers, etc.) has always been the primary driver of accumulating large wealth under capitalism. Sure, "innovation" sometimes has a role in softening the blow, but let's be real.
That was true in our grandparents' time... and their grandparents' time... and their grandparents' time. While their economies looked very different, the same structural incentives were in place and certainly did not curb unethical behavior one bit.
It has taken a long time for the piper to come for his full payment, but we can all see now that the world is burning, poisoned, and suffering as a result. We can no longer eat freshwater fish due to the massive amounts of PFAS in our lakes and rivers. The billionaires are trying to pretend they can escape the disaster by building their bunkers on remote islands or trying to colonize Mars.
I want to have some optimism in the newer generations to create positive change here, but I can't help but look at what happened to the idealism of the 1960s. The counter culture was right about the societal benefits of renewable energy, organic food, vegetarian diets, ecology, egalitarianism, civil rights, and more. But somewhere around Reagan many in that generation sold out and those great ideas were simply appropriated and fed back into the profit-machine that rewards exploitation. Today we have "certified organic" labels on food products, but that term has been watered down to almost nothing by the marketing departments, politicians, and lobbyists.
Anyhow, I obviously need to keep my pessimism at bay. LOL You have convinced me to give it a read!
I meant both. AI did it's job, albeit with some faults, as one would suspect and need to review. The devs did their job in discovering and reporting the holes in the code. Management did not do its job if the problem code was allowed to be shipped.
I fear you might be mostly right about global political outcomes favored by big capital. However, both example countries you cited have much stronger social safety nets than the United States. The research shows there is a spectrum, but that multi-party systems generally do create greater citizen representation.
Martin Gilens and Benjamin page published an article that uses data to come to this conclusion about the public's influence on American policy:
"The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."
Iskander De Bruycker and Marcel Hanegraaff authored a recent study, focusing on the EU, in which they "demonstrate that interest groups with more economic resources are generally more influential, but only if their policy positions are congruent with a public majority." Sorry this one is paywalled. Such is the state of academic publishing. :(
Disney is not just selling tickets to movies to make their money. They are selling licenses that provide the rights to watch, store, and use those movies (or aspects of them) in certain ways. One thing that that Anthropic didn't do is pay the publishers and authors for the right to train their models on the intellectual property. And that's why they have no place pointing fingers at Alibaba saying that they stole their IP.