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Here are my thoughts: https://www.natemeyvis.com/ai-skepticism-in-philosophy/ In brief: 1. I’m sympathetic to Kaufman’s view of philosophical value. 2. But generative AI…
I am very pleased to have stumbled upon this site. I am Andrew & Lynne’s nephew, Peter. My mother was…
Modern Aesthetics and Democratic Life: The Struggle for Aesthetic Freedom by Jörg Schaub (permanently open-access) Description In this innovative open-access…
A couple of broader comments, having had a little time to reflect: 1) I agree that the “pile of truths”…
And the second paragraph?
I wonder if LLMs training on your work increases the chances of your work being falsely flagged by AI-detectors as…
These are the sort of systems that are currently used for “teaching” LLMs math and coding, as I understand it.…
Finally, I can read pirated philosophy while I listen to my pirated music!
As someone who hasn't yet published, let alone written a book, I'm obviously in a very different situation than all of you. But is this – bittorrent, not the eBay reseller – really so bad? Presumably we're in this business because we think philosophy is a good thing, and something we think is worth sharing with others in colleges and universities. And file sharing seems like a great way to get people interested in the field: let people (esp. undergrads) think they're stealing something they want when they're really just reading the coursework they think they don't want to read. In the past 11 days over 1,000 people have downloaded, or started downloading, the collection. That's up to 1,000 more people who have actually read philosophy! There may be pragmatic reasons for not explicitly endorsing piracy, but hopefully we all think well enough of our work that we'd rather have it read by more people for free than less people, probably substantially less people, for money (which you're probably still getting most of even if your work is pirated).
Yes, the E-bay post advertising a CD for sale that contains hundreds of philosophy papers is an obvious case of piracy, and you should file a complaint with E-bay if your work is included on this CD.
But, the files being shared on peer to peer networks seem like an entirely different matter. There's no profit here. Just internet users sharing a collection of philosophy papers and books with each other. Sure, this probably is a violation of copyright laws in several countries throughout the world, most obviously in the USA, but those are broken, bad copyright laws anyways. Is it really a huge problem that there are people willing to spend their time downloading and reading your papers/and or books? In all likelihood, you're not losing a sale of your book here, you're gaining a reader.
Is the free, easy access of information and the distribution of your ideas really that upsetting?
It's not obvious how you're getting 'facilitated plagiarism' out of easily accessible philosophical texts. Is the idea that a student might have an easier time stealing ideas from an author if they actually read their works? Or is it that professors will be unable to identify pieces of influential philosophy texts that have been lifted from these papers and handed in as the student's own? Actually, if that's what you mean, you might have a point.
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