Even if you believe the concerns have merit, it's hard not to be cynical about people (e.g. Anthropic leadership) paying lip service to those concerns while so obviously leveraging their power and wealth (which depend, by the way, on accelerating the world toward those hypothetical "concerning" scenarios as fast as possible) to position themselves such that they will become unimaginably richer if things go their way, and will also come out on top pretty much no matter what happens.

It's like a prisoner's dilemma where one party is loudly lecturing the other about the obvious benefits of cooperation while also obviously working on defecting. They want to have their cake and eat it too. Maybe they really are the pure-of-heart Chosen Ones destined to lead us around the great filter, but I don't see why I should believe that's the case when their behavior is just as easily explained as maneuvering toward being the winner who takes it all.

> (which depend, by the way, on accelerating the world toward those hypothetical "concerning" scenarios as fast as possible)

Yes, this dynamic is exactly the one that anyone who's concerned about AI is concerned about. I don't know why you state this as if it's evidence against the concerns lol. Someone being concerned about the incentives of a situation doesn't de facto make them immune to those incentives, obviously.

The implication that someone who's concerned about an arms race dynamic could simply opt out of the system that produces that dynamic is simply confused about what arms race dynamics are. The entire point is that it's a trap, and it's a trap even if you know it's a trap, and even if you don't like that it's a trap. There's nothing dishonest or hypocritical about being in the trap: it is literally a trap –– that is what it does and why it is bad!

I'm confused by these comments that imply people believe Dario et al are "pure-of-heart Chosen Ones destined to lead us around the great filter." Who? I've never seen it. And any AI-doomer is probably of the opinion that the entire question of Dario's or anyone else's personal moral character is 99% irrelevant. Because, again, it's a trap. The dynamics at play are so much larger than whether someone irks people for their lecturing tone. I would much rather give my money to Dario, who seems like a generally good person, versus Sama, who seems like a complete snake, but I'm under no illusions that doing so changes the fundamental dynamics that are steering us to AI doom. I doubt anyone does.

And yes, obviously they are angling toward being the winner who takes it all. That is literally the trap. If you believe what they believe, yelling "let's cooperate!" while hurdling towards the finish line and tripping your competitors is the only reasonable thing to do. That is the problem.

> I don't know why you state this as if it's evidence against the concerns lol. Someone being concerned about the incentives of a situation doesn't de facto make them immune to those incentives, obviously.

I think you're reading some subtext into my comment that I didn't intend. Knowing myself, I assume the scare quotes there are just a bit of casual irony re: the insanely high stakes here. The word "concerns" as used by previous commenters doesn't seem equal to the context.

> The implication that someone who's concerned about an arms race dynamic could simply opt out of the system that produces that dynamic is simply confused about what arms race dynamics are.

You can, in fact, opt out. You can opt out and do your damndest to stop what's happening, throw every cent you have at it, bend any ear that will listen, make use of the fact that your voice (as Anthropic leadership) has some meaningful weight.

If you really believe that we are heading down a path that's likely to end poorly for most or all of humanity, and you are the kind of person who's inclined to favor saving billions of lives over saving your own skin when the stakes are still relatively distant, abstract, and generally unclear, opting out is obviously on the table as a grand gesture that burns your position in the race to show just how fucking serious you are. The sense of inevitability your comment shares with many others does not seem well founded---we have, for instance, not had a global nuclear war yet. Leaders in the 20th and 21st centuries have shown remarkable restraint.

If today's political and tech leaders are unable to think beyond this inevitability, for whatever reason, the worst outcomes essentially become a self-fulfilling prophecy to the extent that reality bears them out.

---

But yes, these people are acting the way they are for obvious reasons, obviously. My previous comment is reacting to the general disagreement over whether Anthropic actually believes what they say about safety, etc., or whether it's a marketing gimmick. The purpose of my comment is to explain that "it's hard not to be cynical" about actions taken by very rich and powerful people that are claimed to be in everybody's best interests but are indistinguishable from the actions they would take to maximize their future power and wealth. I think everyone ought to agree with that statement. It's not a value judgment; it's simply an observation of how it feels to be on a plane whose pilot appears to be robbing the passengers (including you) at gunpoint and is conspicuously wearing the only parachute on board.

It's not just America. The main secret is out of the bag. If it wasn't Anthropic, it would be another company/nation state. Sure they could obtain, and with not.money or leverage, complain about data centers at local rallies, or they can be in the game, and hopefully steer it. It's going to happen with or without any one company or country. The secret it out, and it's unstoppable without complete societal breakdown..So either you advocate for the end of civilization, or you hope that you can help steer the emergence of super intelligence into something not wholly terrible. Personally, I don't see much hope, even if there wasn't such a thing as AI. The power to destroy is always easier than the power to create, and as our power grows, the differential grows, until at some point, containment is no longer possible

> It's not just America.

I'll mention again the nuclear analogy. It is, believe it or not, possible for great powers, and even adversary great powers, to agree to limit the development and proliferation of dangerous technologies.

> The main secret is out of the bag.

This is not something you can do in a shed with a handful of GPUs just because you know "the main secret". To build something like Mythos you need tens of billions of dollars, massive amounts of power, enormous buildings filled with specialized bleeding edge computer chips that are made by (optimistically) a handful of companies with deep government ties. You need free access to all the intellectual property that humans have created and posted openly on the internet. You need all of this at each step, and to take each next step you (or somebody) needs to have taken the previous one.

For now, there are a million ways for a government to pump the brakes on this cycle.

Yeah, I think the nuclear analogy fails, honestly. The bomb does one thing: Destroy. AI can build, selectively infect, selectively manipulate. It is a vastly useful tool.

This is a very imprecise way to think about it.

What is the difference? It's easier to make money with the AI you get at each incremental step toward potentially destroying human civilization (though, of course, it's debatable whether these companies really are making money as such).

So what? You are implicitly arguing that human civilization will be unable to resist engaging in a large-scale, coordinated effort to destroy itself, just to make a few bucks along the way. Is this true? I don't know. The point of the nuclear analogy is that we have previously shown that we can, under certain conditions, put the eschaton back on the shelf for some period of time, despite very real pressure to take more incremental steps toward doom. "But AI can write code" is not a refutation of the possibility that we could take a more measured approach to AI development.

I never claimed to be precise, ha ha. But let's not lose sight that each of the great powers agreed to limits on the number of nukes only after making enough to collectively destroy each other several times over. They stopped exactly when building more did not gain them any more security or advantage over their adversaries. Not a moment before that.

There may or may not be such a point with AI: A point at which ever smarter machines provides no marginal benefit to security. If that happens, I do expect agreements, should any one of us still exist.

> It is, believe it or not, possible for great powers, and even adversary great powers, to agree to limit the development and proliferation of dangerous technologies.

You were literally just criticizing Anthropic as disingenuous for begging for this. Or is your position that people other than those near the front of the race can agree to limit development? And if so: provide evidence.

Note also a key ingredient that makes nuclear non-proliferation possible is that they're pretty much useless weapons. There is no smaller order nuke that's dramatically more useful than a large conventional weapon. That's not true of AI models, which appear to be monotonically useful as they become more powerful.

> You can, in fact, opt out. You can opt out and do your damndest to stop what's happening, throw every cent you have at it, bend any ear that will listen, make use of the fact that your voice (as Anthropic leadership) has some meaningful weight.

There are billions of people who have opted out of playing the game. Has the game stopped? Has any game stopped because the people not playing it decided that it ought to? Only with government intervention, which is exactly what you just criticized Anthropic for being disingenuous for requesting.

Is your position that they should just be smart bloggers asking for regulation, instead of the preeminent lab asking for regulation, and that would be either more ethical or more effective? If it's less effective, isn't it de facto less ethical?

What say you about the thousands of smart bloggers asking for regulation who are ignored every single day and have no tools besides their blogs to steer the outcome?

> burn your position in the race to show just how fucking serious you are.

This is incredibly naive. Literally no one who is unconvinced of AI doom would be convinced by this... because they already don't believe the premise. Such a gesture would be readily explained away as "you were losing the race," or "you got rich enough already." This is the attitude when any individual opts out of participation (see: Hinton) and it's ridiculous to assume it'd be different if an entire company did it.

Not to mention, that an entire company can't do it. These companies have boards of directors. They are accountable to shareholders. A CEO who wanted to do this would simply be fired and the company would carry on. This is one of the key components of the trap. Large companies are not under the control of people but of incentives. They are literally deliberately designed not to be under the control of individuals –– to be immune to exactly the type of behavior you think is possible.

And yes, nuclear weapons are analogous to AI in the arms race dynamic to create and proliferate them. They are probably not analogous in there exists a stable equilibrium in nuclear weapons due to "accidents" of their nature. There need not be a similar equilibrium among competitive AIs.

----

And yes, your comment lands in exactly the category I mentioned. You do not believe the AI doom fears, so the behavior looks one way. I do believe in the AI doom concerns, so the behavior looks another way. This applies equally to yesterday's actions, today's actions, and tomorrow's, including some hypothetical honorable self-immolation to slow progress: I would see that as concordant with AI doom concerns, you would not. You would find it "hard not to be cynical" about the fact they already earned a ton of money, maybe was losing a bit of ground in the race, so on and so forth. This is plainly obvious to anyone who has had to converse with no-doomers, who can only analyze other people's behaviors under their own belief system, so it won't happen.

The only variable of disagreement is around AI doom.

(I wrote a longer comment originally, but I think it would have fallen on deaf ears.)

> The only variable of disagreement is around AI doom.

The source of our disagreement seems to be your belief that somebody can either a) believe "AI doom" is inevitable, or b) not believe it's possible. This is an obvious false dichotomy that's stunting your ability to engage effectively with what I've written, and also stunting your ability to understand the broader landscape of the issue. You are projecting this dichotomy onto everybody involved and understanding their behavior in that way, which is leading you to make other reductive and honestly bizarre claims—like, for instance, the idea that a sudden change of course from Dario Amodei at this moment in time would be broadly perceived as somebody who was already losing the race cashing out his chips. If you really do believe that, I have to assume it's because you're modeling your hypothetical observers as falling into one of your two extreme mindsets and assuming Dario, being a smart guy who knows a lot, thinks the same way. I believe it is—yes, I'm ready for the dopamine hit—naive to assume all people or even most people fall into one of these two camps. Naive, at best. Yours is a self-limiting framework for thinking about this stuff.

I encourage you to broaden your thinking and engage in less projection and ad hominem stuff in discussions like this. I probably won't reply to whatever you post next unless you can do a better job writing a substantive reply to what I've written here.

Then surely you can articulate how specifically – in a way that doesn't require large numbers of people acting against their own incentives – that AI doom is possible but not guaranteed.

I actually already know how you'd perceive Dario's opting out of the race because I already know how you perceive Dario's requests for regulation, which is the milder version of the same logic, and is vulnerable to the same cynical allegations of self-serving, which you've already expressed.

This is an excellent comment, and I agree. I do think that there’s also evidence that Altman’s behavior can also be explained as a person who is naturally manipulative also being stuck in the trap and responding to incentives. But not necessarily a snake just in it for himself. The thing I keep coming back to about Altman: he doesn’t have any equity in OpenAI. And he definitely could have if he’d wanted. It’s hard for me to square that with the idea of him being greedy and self-interested.

Yeah man, it's the cyclists who are the problem, right? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39986875/

> ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections

This is not really meant to single you out, since there's a lot of this going around, but I really don't think this should be a matter of "of course". Why should it be the default to let a tool that doesn't have your context, or your voice, override your own usage of language?

He met the goal of conveying a lot of information. If he's only judged on what he said, and not how he said it, he did great. If I want to hear someone's voice, I'll watch YouTube.

> If I want to hear someone's voice, I'll watch YouTube.

I'm sure that in your head this is a witty rejoinder, but it really is quite a wild thing to say: that you place no value on the individual variations in how different human writers express themselves. It follows that you really don't care about voice on YouTube either, except in the most basic mechanical sense: you would be happy watching videos written by AI and narrated by the same monotone text-to-speech narrator, video after video, efficiently delivering that densely packed information you crave.

This is actually a thing, isn't it? Like those "shorts" with the AI narration and matching subtitles flashing by in the middle of the screen. I guess you must love those---somebody does, probably a lot of people, or they wouldn't exist.

I'm tempted to frame this as a new kind of illiteracy. People whose brains are so addled by the modern media landscape that to get them to pay attention to anything at all you have to resort to tricks like this; god forbid they ever encounter a writer or narrator who speaks differently, sounds differently, thinks differently, frames differently. Nobody should be surprised, I suppose, that the ability to parse different levels of meaning in Content that falls outside the AI cognitive monoculture is a dying skill.

If they were really worried, they probably would have diverted, yes. But ditching in the north Atlantic is something no pilot is going to do unless they are 100% sure there is a bomb that's going to go off, because people are probably going to die either way.

They are still never going to ditch as long as the plane can fly

Everybody's going to have their own experience, but I haven't found this to be true at all. I've played a lot of games on my Deck and only really had UI visibility issues with a handful of them. For the rest, it didn't even cross my mind.

I think a big part of this is that many (most?) modern games are designed to be played on big screens at a distance (e.g. TV <-> couch). The apparent size of the display in that scenario isn't much different from a Steam Deck held naturally.

I just wish the Deck had VRR. That and the general lack of power are my only real issues with it, and the power isn't that big a deal given the massive back catalog it supports.

I think they're squeezed between bigcorps offering consumers products in ecosystems they're already bought into, and independent-minded techies more willing to roll their own solutions.

I paid for Dropbox for a long time specifically because it was an independent option, but over time the feature bloat annoyed me more and more, and their dabbling in genai stuff was the last straw. Now I use syncthing over wireguard tunnels.

How have you found syncthing's scaling?

I've been trying to use it for a massive tree of ~250k files across ~500k folders, which only needs to live on one device at a time and sync to a backup in case it dies, and even if I tell it send-only/receive-only explicitly, it regularly seems to go cross-eyed at some change made in the folder structure and give up and rescan and hash everything, and if anything in the tree changes while that's happening, it gives up and just marks it a conflict to be manually resolved...or silently hangs until I restart it.

It's working well for me (as in totally hands off for months or even years at a time) at (I think, roughly) a few hundred thousand files but probably significantly fewer directories. Overall I'm really impressed and happy with it. But this is just personal file sync, nothing too demanding and unlikely to hit edge cases with concurrent edits etc.

On which operating system? That wouldn't surprise me on Android, a bit more on other platforms (and worth filing an issue).

I'm surprised by how many people mention Syncthing as an alternative to Dropbox or Google drive. It's not. Syncthing forces you to have a copy of your data on all your devices. With Dropbox or Google drive you can "stream" only the files you need. This is important when you want to share GB of data with devices that can't sync everything into local storage (like a phone)

I actively don't want this feature and its appearance in Dropbox is one of the major factors that drove me to look for an alternative. Needing to constantly stay abreast of feature churn to make sure I understand how and where my files are stored is not for me, nor is reliance on the weird hacks they use to implement it "transparently" across different platforms.

I separate my files in Syncthing into different shared folders that sync to different sets of machines, and put stuff that doesn't need syncing at all on my NAS. On paper this might sound more complicated but in practice for me it's a much lower mental burden.

That makes sense. But Dropbox was never designed like that. It has always been a client-server service. Syncthing is P2P so it's not a replacement.

I run Syncthing in a hub-and-spoke topology where the hub is a headless VM with a volume hosted on my NAS. This is half for my sanity wrt remembering what's peered with what, and half because it works much more consistently across network boundaries.

The way I use it, it's a 1:1 replacement for the way I used Dropbox: a directory of files that are continuously synced across different machines, with a durable central copy that gets regular snapshotted backups. I understand that Dropbox has more features now, but that's pretty much all it was when I started using it; and the fact that Syncthing supports other use cases than mine doesn't mean it isn't a perfect fit for mine. Out of all my experience self-hosting ~replacements for consumer cloud services, it's probably been the most successful by far.

> bound to the vendor data service for any connected functionality.

This is why I don't own a Freewrite. It should be such a simple device, but they found a way to make it complicated and lock it into their proprietary ecosystem. No thanks.

It would be a better device if I could install cfw and make it somewhat more versatile. But I haven't found anyone doing that, and haven't even found enough specs online to get started.

I ought to do a write up, but If you open it up the UART pads are available to get a U-Boot console. U-boot is in HAB mode, with a custom signed debian buster kernel. This was my first time dealing wit u-boot, but it was otherwise pretty open and was able to write to ENV and FS from the u-boot console, which let me stop the Freewrite app from starting, boot into root shell, turn on SSH, etc. So you can get into userspace and replace the UI and whole app. When I dropped this project I had it booting shell onto the e-ink, with a command to drop back into the Freewrite app if I wanted.

Then they released the new app, which looked like it was also just in userspace (not a kernel or fw update) so I wanted to start over with the update, but never got back to it.

The Pomera line of devices from the Japanese company "King Jim" (yeah, I don't know) are really nice from a features point of view: limited enough to stay out of your way when you're writing, functional enough to enable the basic workflows you'd expect e.g. basic file management, SD card/USB transfers (something that many/most/all Western boutique writing devices like the Freewrite somehow didn't support well or at all last time I checked). Somewhere I have a funky e-ink Pomera thing with a folding keyboard that I did a lot of writing on, and later I bought a DM250, which is not e-ink but works pretty much the same, and now has a US version. I recommend it.

The US version (the DM250US) is now $549, alas. I was looking at these briefly, but can’t justify the expense — might as well get a MacBook Neo if I were in the market.

Yeah I think that's substantially more than I paid for my JP market version.

I will say it is a really nice device, probably the all-around best of the dedicated writing devices I've owned and/or researched over the years. But on a typical value scale, it's not worth that.

> No conservative I know "hates immigrants." Consider what the policy intends to do rather than blanket-blaming it on hate.

If you look at the rhetoric from the Trump people over the years, they absolutely and clearly do hate immigrants, or are doing their best to seem that way. As an example, consider the following quote^[1] from Trump just a few years ago:

> They let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country [...] That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.

It's trivial to find more like that. Weird white supremacist-adjacent rhetoric. Equating immigrants with animals. Etc.

American conservatives may not hate immigrants, but they sure love a guy who fervently expresses his hatred and disdain for immigrants every chance he gets. They've voted him into our highest office twice, and immigration was a central pillar of his campaign both times. I fully understand that many people who voted for him did so for reasons besides immigration, but at this point if they aren't willing to disavow him after the catastrophic first year-and-change of his second term then I am done giving them the benefit of the doubt, because there must be some reason they still support him, and at this point it sure isn't his performance on inflation, general affordability, etc.

In fact, looking at the Silver Bulletin charts^[2] as of right now, immigration is the only macro issue they track where his approval isn't in free-fall.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-im... [2] https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil... (paywalled i think, unfortunately)

That quote you pulled is about illegal immigration. Conflating undocumented immigrants with “anti-immigration” is a false equivalence.

There are no doubt people against immigration entirely but the majority opinion I hear from conservative leaning people is that legal immigration is great and people that skip the system are the problem and the drag on social safety nets.

But the legal immigration system is broken and they did that on purpose. And how is your immigration status relevant to your contribution to taxes?

It is not a false equivalence. Both legal and undocumented immigrants are net positive for our economy, less likely to commit crimes, and part and parcel to the American experiment. This “we only disapprove of the illegal ones” continues to be a disingenuous and ignorant point of view.

It’s still a false equivalence and the concern isn’t paying something to taxes. The bottom 30-40% of all federal tax payers contribute less than they receive back. So even in a tax argument, adding additional low income earners is not a good thing for the system.

But taxes aren’t the point, we have a process for legal immigration that works for millions of people a year. This is just like every other country (with even less stringent requirements than many other countries). Why should undocumented immigrants be granted the privilege of ignoring the law? Do you argue that Japan, China, Singapore, Australia, and/or Norway should do the same?

It’s fine that many conservatives still feel this way, but they are not electing officials implementing fair, mature immigration policies. They’re electing immature people who aren’t willing to systematically think through immigration policy, and instead say whatever hateful blurb gets them the most attention.

It’s frankly despicable, and I don’t respect conservatives who continue voting for politicians who are obvious liars and at a minimum are not campaigning on bringing level-headed reasonable ideas to immigration policy — only on how much they hate immigrants. Which reflects very, very poorly on conservative voters.

There are some that try and they get roasted as “RINOs”. The problem with the two party system is that you either vote for a despicable person that implements your major beliefs or someone pleasant that wants to implement policies you think directly result in murder/famine/societal collapse.

Trump can get far worse before the calculus changes for someone who thinks abortion is murder to start voting for Elizabeth Warren.

Whatever man. Do you remember his comments last year about Ilhan Omar ("garbage") and Somalis?

> I don’t want them in our country. I’ll be honest with you, OK. Somebody will say, ‘Oh, that’s not politically correct.’ I don’t care. I don’t want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason,

> Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country,

> I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.

> We always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? [...] Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships.

> [Minnesota is] a hellhole right now. The Somalians should be out of here. They’ve destroyed our country. And all they do is complain, complain, complain,

Some other selections I found with zero effort:

> I’ve also announced a permanent pause on Third World migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries,

> Our country was going to hell. And we had a meeting, and I say, 'Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right?' Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let us have a few from Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Do you mind?'

> I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad. I think you are losing your culture. Look around. You go through certain areas that didn't exist ten or 15 years ago.

> And I think [Europe] better watch themselves because you are changing culture. You are changing a lot of things. You’re changing security. You’re changing — look at what’s happening. I mean, you take a look. I mean, look at what’s happening to different countries that never had difficulty, never had problems…. I do not think it’s good for Europe and I don’t think it’s good for our country.

What do you call this rhetoric if not anti-immigrant? None of this is specific to illegal immigration; he commonly targets legal immigrants with his denigratory, hateful rhetoric (see above), and his second term immigration policy has in several high-profile instances targeted legal immigrants for deportation, as well as making it more difficult to obtain residency/citizenship (see: the subject of this post).

I guess he's specifically calling out immigration from "shithole countries" (brown/black people) while he is explicitly (though apparently hypothetically) fine with white people ("people from Norway, Sweden, just a few") coming in. Maybe he's just openly racist? Is that better, easier for "conservative leaning people" to swallow? When they say "legal immigration is great", is "legal" just a wink-wink shorthand for "white"?

---

Edit: I alluded to this in a reply below, but thanks to everybody replying to this comment for demonstrating that the theoretical "conservative I know" and "conservative leaning people" are, apparently, not universally representative of conservatives.

I hope you will not be offended if I don't reply to you individually, but I'm just not interested in having a conversation about whether these attitudes are valid. It's off topic, for one thing—the fact that they exist, that they surface in this context, is the only relevant takeaway here.

Research the cultures of those places and it's clear there are huge differences which are going to make assimilation very, very difficult.

So it's not about illegal vs legal immigration after all, but about where the immigrants come from?

Where they come from also correlates with how likely they are to try entering illegally vs legally.

In my original comment in this thread, I said this:

> American conservatives may not hate immigrants, but they sure love a guy who fervently expresses his hatred and disdain for immigrants every chance he gets. They've voted him into our highest office twice, and immigration was a central pillar of his campaign both times. I fully understand that many people who voted for him did so for reasons besides immigration, but at this point if they aren't willing to disavow him after the catastrophic first year-and-change of his second term then I am done giving them the benefit of the doubt, because there must be some reason they still support him, and at this point it sure isn't his performance on inflation, general affordability, etc.

Thank you for demonstrating what this looks like, I guess?

What a complete non-sequitur.

Like what?

Like US culture perhaps.

In Australia it's not uncommon for Somali immigrants to get econ and business doctorates and spawn commercial enterprises: https://thewarsan.com/the-somali-australian-success-stories-...

By most accounts Somalia is a beautiful country. It’s currently at war, in part because of its colonial legacy. But if that stopped I would love to visit.

I wonder how many of the books I love would still have been written in a world where somebody could scoop them all up and post them on the internet for free (and run ads).

I wonder how many would be written if copyright was only 20 years instead of more than a century? To the point that most people will never be legally allowed to directly build off of the culture they grew up in.

Lord of the rings will be under copyright til roughly 2050. I think Tolkien's estate has gotten more than enough money from that book and it's time to let other use the word hobbit without the threat of a lawsuit.

> I wonder how many would be written if copyright was only 20 years instead of more than a century?

I expect it would not move the needle much. I support reduced copyright periods, though not in the specific way you do. But that's not what we're talking about here, is it? The comment I replied to seemed to be advocating for total abolition of copyright law, and my comment is written to be interpreted in that context.

> To the point that most people will never be legally allowed to directly build off of the culture they grew up in.

What specifically are you talking about? Every author borrows from what came before. Copyright law doesn't even enter the picture in the vast majority of cases, because you generally don't have to copy to "build off of the culture [you] grew up in".

For what it’s worth I think abolishing copyright wouldn’t have as big of an impact on art production as you do. Most artists (e.g. musicians or authors) aren’t struggling because their art is popular but copied by others (or lack of copyright). But because nobody listens to or reads their work.

Even before AI more people tried to be an author/musician than could ever hope to gain even financial success. I don’t think less copyright will dissuade them.

> every author borrows

Borrows yes. But that has changed drastically in the last 100 years because of what has become the copyright system.

I’ll be long dead and gone before people can make and publish their own LOTR, or Star Wars, or whatever franchise they grew up with. Disney would be impossible to start given the current regulations, all those tales would be locked up, and we would all be worse for it.

I guess you feel strongly that fan fiction and similar derivative works ought to be monetizable? I guess I really just don't care about that. It hasn't stopped huge numbers of amazing authors from doing their thing, and I don't think it's a good reason to [partially] abolish copyright except in a very specific and limited scope.

Yes I do, in part because the difference between fan fiction and fiction, is that one has the blessing of the copyright holder while the other doesn't.

Disney turning common folk tales (the culture of the day) into movies is not considered fan fiction because there was no monopoly on who could tell those stories, and how.

If lack of copyright for fan fiction and derivative work hasn't stopped good fan fiction authors from doing good work, then I don't think that we will lose much if the newest Marvel movie or franchise reboot also can't be copyrighted.

> I don't think it's a good reason to [partially] abolish copyright except in a very specific and limited scope.

I don't see a good reason for keeping it though. Copyright isn't why artists are being paid pennies for their work.

> Yes I do, in part because the difference between fan fiction and fiction, is that one has the blessing of the copyright holder while the other doesn't.

This is a really odd thing to say. You can just go write your own fiction, right now. You can invent your own original characters and setting and plot and go write it. You will automatically own the copyright to your own work; there is no other party who must "bless" your efforts.

I have nothing against fan fiction, but it's an edge case.

> If lack of copyright for fan fiction and derivative work hasn't stopped good fan fiction authors from doing good work, then I don't think that we will lose much if the newest Marvel movie or franchise reboot also can't be copyrighted.

I mean, I don't think we will lose much if the latter doesn't exist. I think I have made it clear that my specific concern is for individual artists who hold the rights to their work, not purveyors of commodity slop. But, since you mentioned it, what effect do you think abolishment of copyright will have on the production of films that are actually good? Who will finance them when it's impossible to directly monetize them? If anything I think commodity slop will be the only thing that gets funded anymore, since it probably synergizes best with massive distribution platforms and hundred million dollar multi-media marketing blitzes. Everyone else can go the Neil Breen route.

> I don't see a good reason for keeping it though. Copyright isn't why artists are being paid pennies for their work.

Yeah, you're right. No artists are relying on royalties and similar payments for their work. I'm sure none of them will complain if we take all that away.

> You can just go write your own fiction, right now. You can invent your own original characters and setting and plot and go write it. You will automatically own the copyright to your own work; there is no other party who must "bless" your efforts.

I keep going back to the old-school Disney example because it's easiest to see: Disney did not create Snow White, Bambi, Robin Hood, or Peter Pan. All of those movies are highly influential and core to Disney and the culture of people growing up with them. And they're all fan fiction, or would be considered as such, and be impossible to produce and monetize if Disney had to live with the same copyright restrictions they impose on the rest of us.

If I want to now go and recreate my own movie based on one of the original texts, I think it would be next to impossible since the threat of lawsuit (even if I use none of their IP and would eventually win) would make financing impossible.

Fan fiction has been turned into an edge case by the current copyright system. Putting your own spin on the stories you grew up with used to be the norm.

> my specific concern is for individual artists who hold the rights to their work

To a large degree individual artists do not hold copyright for their work, they often sign it away (especially musicians and authors) in exchange for signing, advances, and distribution.

> what effect do you think abolishment of copyright will have on the production of films that are actually good? Who will finance them when it's impossible to directly monetize them?

I think they will still be financed. Take books, I don't think bookstores will want to vertically integrate from book discovery through printing and retail stores. Consumers will still need ways to identify reputable book publishers to limit what they purchase next.

> I think commodity slop will be the only thing that gets funded anymore

One could argue that this is what has always dominated funding. Most revenue and shows have been for artistically devoid pieces of media (especially in movies).

> No artists are relying on royalties and similar payments for their work.

The 0.00001$ per stream for musicians? Or the 1$ residual checks for reruns?

> Disney did not create Snow White, Bambi, Robin Hood, or Peter Pan.

I believe I stated above that I support reducing copyright periods (to the lifetime of the original author would be appropriate IMO, if the copyright is held by an individual, and I would be open to a more aggressive schedule for corporate copyrights). AFAIK all of Disney's adaptations of these stories would be allowed under that rule; some of these original stories are centuries old. But no, I don't think Disney should be able to immediately adapt a book I've written and not give me a cent out of the billions they will make off the adaptation. I would sell more books that way, sure---except I actually wouldn't, because in that world I have also lost the ability to monetize my work. So it's more accurate to say that somebody else would sell more of my books, or that I would give away more of my books.

And yes, it's more appropriate to call these adaptations. Fan fiction is more in the vein of original stories using (somebody else's) established characters and settings.

> To a large degree individual artists do not hold copyright for their work, they often sign it away (especially musicians and authors) in exchange for signing, advances, and distribution.

"To a large degree" is obviously meaningless, but a good author's agent will retain your core copyright and other rights (e.g. film adaptation, publishing/distribution in other countries, etc.).

> I think they will still be financed. Take books, I don't think bookstores will want to vertically integrate from book discovery through printing and retail stores. Consumers will still need ways to identify reputable book publishers to limit what they purchase next.

You are conflating production and distribution. If there is no copyright, the second a single copy of a work becomes available it will be scraped and offered by every distribution platform in the business, who are all free to curate their "storefronts" however they please. The difference is that they don't have to pay a cent for production, royalties, or anything else.

As an example, say I publish a new short story on my Patreon, which I use to support my writing---the idea being that if people want to read my shorts they have to pay for access. In this new regime, that newly posted story is going to appear on Amazon and every other big platform within hours, for cheaper than my Patreon membership or even free. And if I am an established name, there is no reason Amazon can't put my book front and center in their KDP feeds, etc.

The same goes for any other publishing model. The author and publisher (if applicable) immediately lose all ability to get a return on their investment, except to the extent that they can organically attract people to the correct listing on the correct distribution platform, which will have to be price-competitive with other listings.

It's the same story for paper books, too. B&N can just print copies of my book and display it front and center in their stores, without even asking me, and certainly without paying me anything.

And the same goes for other types of media. Why wouldn't it? This is why I say the commodity slop is all that will be left---that kind of IP synergizes best with the massive marketing efforts and platform consolidation that will be required to recoup your investments in content. Not much might even change in that world.

> The 0.00001$ per stream for musicians? Or the 1$ residual checks for reruns?

There is always going to be a long tail, and there are always going to be great artists who go unrecognized and unrewarded. It's also true that monolithic modern platforms like Spotify are going to leverage their position as gatekeepers to squeeze artists as far as possible. But it's ignorant (or possibly disingenuous, and anyway categorically incorrect) to claim that the above means nobody is getting paid substantial amounts for their work via these mechanisms. I suggest you seek out the authors of some of your favorite recent novels (if you read) and ask them whether losing royalties would have a substantial impact on their finances and ability to keep writing.

Simple piraciy is not even the worst possible outcome.

Without copyright, nothing stops one from simply selling a book under their own name.

Big publishers could just reprint anything and get it into brick & mortar stores. No money for authors.

Advocating for absolutely no copyright is wild.

I feel not that many. Or at least many successful authors would struggle lot more if after launch of new book next week anyone could be selling poorly made cheaper copy in stores.

And most likely ones doing that would be your biggest companies say Amazon.

People have been pirating books online for 20 years and in that time the number of books published per year has increased 15-fold. A number of my favorites have been released in that time.

Piracy is illegal and most people don't do it.

In a world without copyright, I can stand up a slick 100% legal website (and apps, etc) and distribute electronic copies of every single book (or whatever) straight to normies' phones, and I am free to monetize this scheme however I want.

You're underestimating how easy and common piracy is. You can get books, movies, or music with just a search, for free, with no consequences. It's generally socially accepted. This report tracked 216 billion visits to piracy websites in 2024: https://www.muso.com/blog/what-216-billion-visits-to-piracy-...

Music piracy is down just because services like Spotify let you listen to any song (for free with ads or with a subscription) and it's more convenient than pirating.

> I wonder how many of the books I love would still have been written in a world where somebody could scoop them all up and post them on the internet for free (and run ads).

Legal or not, this is exactly what happened. The piracy sites run ads and/or ask for donations.

I don't know which of your favorite books would have still been written without copyright. But I can say with confidence that the massive increase in the number of books per year over the past two decades would have happened regardless of copyright. It's been driven by lowering the barrier to entry for self-publishing, and only a very small fraction of them earn a living.

A surprisingly large fraction of my favorite books from the past two decades were published for free online by the author (e.g. Andy Weir's book).

What percentage of books read by Americans in 2025 (or choose another relatively recent year) were pirated?

No one knows. You're asking about uncaught crimes with no victim who can report it.

What data makes you think it's low?

> What data makes you think it's low?

Observations of fellow readers, conversations with self- and traditionally-published authors, and some knowledge of the market?

But what is low, anyway? For the sake of argument I could believe 10, 20, even 30% of all the books people read are pirated. I would be surprised if it was higher, but let's just say hypothetically it's 50%. I think that's a reasonable conservative estimate. So, in this scenario, the remaining 50% of reads can in principle be monetized by their respective authors.

Abolition of copyright will drive that monetizable share essentially to 0%, for reasons I've outlined elsewhere in this thread.^[1]. I consider that meaningful, and I have personally had conversations with published authors who state that the royalties they receive are financially significant, which is why I'm here in this thread taking the position that I'm taking.

[1] https://hackernews.hn/item?id=48238503

> But what is low, anyway?

I think we're in the same ballpark here.

> Abolition of copyright will drive that monetizable share essentially to 0%

I'm in favour of copyright, though I think 70 years after the death of the author is so long it's silly. Even your grandchildren will have died of old age before your copyright ends.

I think copyrights held by individuals on intellectual property they created themselves should expire when they die, maybe with some minimum period of a decade or two to cover cases where royalties etc. could support next of kin. For copyrights held by corporations, or that have otherwise changed hands for money, I'd support a greatly reduced term, maybe on the order of 20 years?

It's strange to think of something like Star Wars being in the public domain, and the effects that might have on our cultural and media landscapes, but if you step back it feels even stranger that something intangible yet so culturally important can be continuously bought and sold and exploited by people who had nothing to do with its creation (almost 50 years ago).

In that sense I probably have a lot of common ground with the "abolish copyright" people, but I feel that most of them are champing at the bit to throw the baby out with the bathwater without having any skin in the game themselves. (sorry for the idiom overload there)

Star Wars almost feels a bit like it's public domain already. They've been pretty liberal with licensing their IP so we ended up with a huge number of Star Wars books, comics, games, LEGO sets, merchandise, etc. At the limit, there isn't much practical difference between a public domain work and an IP that will grant anyone a license for a very reasonable fee.

If Star Wars were public domain due to shorter copyright, the newer works and characters would still be protected. Another film studio could make a new movie based off the original trilogy, taking things in a different direction than the new movies. I'm not sure this is likely though, just like no one is rushing to make 3rd party Mickey Mouse cartoons since it entered the public domain. It probably changes things a lot less than copyright proponents worry about.

Even with books, which are much cheaper to produce than movies, the original author would probably capture most of the money from their works under shorter copyright (e.g. 25 year copyright). If you like a series from a particular author, you want new books from that author. You're not going to read A Game of Thrones and then continue with a sequel written by someone else. And as long as the author keeps writing, they're expanding the canonical world in their series with freshly copyrighted IP, and fans will primarily want new works that build on that.

And if an author writes a sequel so bad that fans abandon the series and someone else writes a better sequel that fans flock to... well, the world is better off. Even the original author may be better off if it improves the popularity of the series.

The worthwhile ones would still be written. Even if they are not enjoyable. The dissemination of ideas from an activist perspective is uninhibitable

> The worthwhile ones would still be written.

Citation needed, as well as your precise definition of "worthwhile".

> Even if they are not enjoyable.

Huh?

> The dissemination of ideas from an activist perspective is uninhabitable

Yes, I understand that anti-copyright activists want to abolish copyright.

Cool. Let me know when the government is willing to pay me to write full time---I would love to quit my job and do that instead. I think it's a great idea!

Farenheit 451 is a book with the same theme.

No, I don't really think it is.