Tom Scott
1 HN recommender · recommended in 7 months, 2021–2025
6:16 · 2M views · Dec 6, 2018
A speculative-fiction video by Tom Scott, framed as coming from a future, about an AI called Earworm that enforces copyright so aggressively that humanity ends up forgetting a century of pop culture. It is animated and narrated as part of his series of videos from a future.
HN points to it in discussions of AI copyright enforcement and badly specified AI goals, and recommends it alongside his other fiction.
8 comments from Hacker News
I'd like to also recommend his other work of speculative fiction: The Artificial Intelligence That Deleted A Century this video It is a great intersection of copyright maximalism and the dangers of making general purpose AIs without proper care in developing their goal function.
You remind me to all the shitty times in literature class where I had to rote memorize countless works from a given author (poet), think 40, then take a test identifying which poem each of the given quotes was from. The little WinForms app I wrote to practice for these tests was one of the first programs I've ever written. I guess in that sense it's also a fond memory. I miss WinForms. Good thing they were public (?) works, wouldn't wanna get sued [0] for possibly being a two legged copyright infringement. Or should I say having been, since naturally I immediately erased all of these works from my mind just days after these tests, even without any legal impetus. Edit: thinking about it a bit more, you also remind me to our midterm tests from the same class. We had to produce multiple page long essays on the spot, analyzing a select work... from memory. Bonus points for being able to quote from it, of course. Needless to say, not many original thoughts were featured in those essays, not in mine, not in others' - the explicit expectation was that you'd peruse the current and older textbooks to "learn (memorize) the analysis" from, and then you'd "write about it in your own words", but still using technical terms. They were pretty much just tests in jargon use, composition, and memorization, which is definitely a choice of all time for a class on literature. But I think it draws an interesting perspective. At no point did we ever have to actually demonstrate a capability in lite
I think if you're going to judge the tech, it's important to understand what it is. Basically, in both cases, you are bringing in the context to those questions. You know what those questions "mean" in the collective brain-space, and why they are sensitive. You did not neutrally pick those questions; you know those questions are already loaded. Unsurprisingly, when you bring those pre-loaded questions to an AI whose job it is to continue the text in the way that was the most likely way to see it continued in the training text, you get exactly that. Prompt the bare, unfiltered AI with antisemitic text, get antisemitic continuations. That's unfortunate, but in terms of what was promised and what was delivered, not surprising. You asked for it. You got it. What I've never seen ChatGPT or any other GPT technology do is suddenly veer off into an antisemitic rant, unprompted . (At least, any technology that I know was GPT based. I'm not sure about Tay. Training the chat bot on its own input turns out to be a bad idea.) You can ask it to write a STTNG script where Picard discovers he has a son he never knew, but you won't see it suddenly spin off into an anti-Jewish rant. You didn't bring it. You didn't ask for it. So you didn't get it. An AI that spontaneously dropped racism and antisemitism and all that sort of thing into a significant portion of the responses could be a problem. But an AI that simply gives you what you want is something different, in my opinion. Worries about wha
I think the problem is that from our human scale, mass-killings is the "best" method to eliminate the possibility of another organism causing harm for us. Hypothetically, if there was a more optimal (i.e less costly) method like just introducing some cheap catch-all combined vaccination/antiviral into their feed, we would just do that. We don't have things like that, but that could easily be a consequence of man's limited research capacity, something that an ASI would not necessarily be throttled by. From an ASI's perspective, there might be many methods that are both less brutal and more optimal to fix the "humans creating a competitor" problem. Not that they would be aligned (Think halting human AI research by rewiring our brains to just not be interested in it [0]), but at least not deadly. [0] this video
Here you see the results of trying to filter a very advanced model with a much simpler one. It can't work, the filter model is too crude. Of course the real goal isn't to prevent copyright infringement but to prevent copyright infringement lawsuits , which is at least a good start. You really need an AI-level model to prevent the infringement... although that can pose it's own risks... this video