The ambiguous "use"
I keep seeing people make this error, especially in social media discourse. Somebody wants to “use” something. Except obviously, it’s not theirs, and so it’s absurd for them to make that demand, right?
Quick examples§
I’m not trying to pick on this person at all: they’re not a twitter main character, they’re not expressing an unusual opinion here, they seem completely nice and cool. But I think this cartoon they drew does a good job of capturing this sort of argument-interaction, which I’ve seen a lot:
Sun Sep 22 22:20:02 +0000 2024???
I’ve also seen the exact inverse of this: people getting upset at artists because once the work is “out there” anyone should be able to “use” it. (But I don’t have a cartoon of this.)
There is an extremely specific error being made in both cases here, and if you can learn to spot it, you can save yourself some grief. What misuse is being objected to? What are the rights to “certain things” being claimed?
The problem is that “use” is an extremely ambiguous word that can mean anything from “study” to “pirate” to “copy and resell”. It can also cover particularly sensitive cases, like creating pornography or editing it to make a political argument.
But everything people do is “using” something. By itself, “use” is not a meaningful category or designation. Say you buy a song — listening to it, sampling it, sharing it, performing it, discussing it, and using it in a video are all “uses”, but the conversations about whether each is appropriate or not are extremely distinct. If you have an objection, it matters a lot what specific use you’re talking about.
But if you’re not specific, there are unlimited combinations of “uses” you could be talking about, and you could mean any of them. And when people respond, they could be responding to any of those interpretations. There’s no coherent argument in any sweeping statement about “use”; the only things being communicated are frustration and a team-sports-style siding with either âartistsâ or âconsumersâ (which is a terrible distinction to make!).
Formal logic§
This is not a new problem. This is the Fallacy of Equivocation, which is a subcategory of Fallacies of Ambiguity. This is when a word (in this case, “use”) has more than one meaning, and an argument uses the word in such a way that the entire position and its validity hinge on which definition the reader assumes.
The example of this that always comes to my mind first is “respect”, because this one tumblr post from 2015 said it so well:
flyingpurplepizzaeater Sometimes people use ârespectâ to mean âtreating someone like a personâ and sometimes they use ârespectâ to mean âtreating someone like an authorityâ
and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say âif you wonât respect me I wonât respect youâ and they mean âif you wonât treat me like an authority I wonât treat you like a personâ
and they think theyâre being fair but they arenât, and itâs not okay.
See, here the “argument” relies on implying a false symmetry between two clauses that use the same word but with totally different meanings. And, in disambiguating the word, the problem becomes obvious.
Short-form social media really exacerbates the equivocation problem by encouraging people to be concise, which leads to accidental ambiguity. But social media also encourages people to take offense at someone else being wrong as the beginning of a âconversationâ, which encourages people to use whatever definition of other people’s words makes them the wrongest.
Copyright examples§
Since I’m already aware that copyright is a special interest of mine, I try to avoid falling into the trap of modeling everything in terms of copyright by default, Boss Baby style. But this is literally the case of a debate over who has the “right” to various “uses” of things that are usually intangible ideas, so I think it’s unavoidably copyright time again.
95% of the time when people complain about a “use” being inappropriate, or complain about people feeling “entitled” to a “use”, they’re talking about a specific kind of use that has its own field of study under the broad category of “intellectual property”.
When people categorically object to “use” of their work, this can mean one of two things. One is that they subscribe to the extremely juvenile idea that authors have an unlimited, perpetual, inalienable right to control all publication, derivation, and interpretation of work “they created”, for some definition of “create”. This is wrong. The question of “what rights do people have over information they produce” is an incredibly complex topic, and the answer isn’t “all of them, stupid”.
The other case — and this is usually the case — is that they mean something much more specific by the word “use”, and have simply failed to explain it. Maybe they specifically mean redistribution, or plagiarism, or a more nebulous idea of “ripping off”, or some combination of those things. Maybe you agree with this, or maybe you don’t, you don’t even know. You can’t possibly talk about it until they define what their assertion is!
This means in arguments about rights to “use” work which refuse to specify the exact rights they mean, the “sides” are effectively talking past each other. In good faith, this can just be a mistake, but in bad faith can be deliberate outrage farming. Unfortunately, this turns out to be a very effective sleight of hand when used deliberately.
It is very easy for someone to “feel” wronged when someone else is “using” “their” “thing”. But, if they haven’t actually been wronged, they’ll find it dificult to articulate why there’s a legitimate grievance, because they don’t have one. When this happens, instead of reconsidering their own emotions, people often cover up their own error by pretending they don’t need to articulate their grievance at all, and keep all their complaints convincingly ambiguous.
This happened with the Internet Archive lawsuit, an ugly saga I’ve discussed in detail. The rhetorical argument against the archive was this wiggly little “use”: “they’re using our books without paying us!” When in reality, the way the Internet Archive’s library was “using” them was lending out books they owned legally. But “we’re demanding libraries stop lending our books” makes you sound obviously evil, whereas “you have to pay us when you use our IP” doesn’t.
A person who believes “artists should be paid when you use their work” might also agree that “the builder doesn’t get paid every time the house sells” and “artists should study books on technique”. But the second two statements both conflict with the first one! How can they all make sense at once? Because the first statement uses a wiggly “use” that folds itself down to be as reasonable as you want it to be.
AI “use”§
I have another piece I’m writing about the very complicated relationship LLM AI has with “using” work. I’ll talk about this much more in-depth then, but here are some early thoughts to chew on. People really like using the ambiguous “use” with regards to AI, and I think one of the reasons is to create an outrage that’s amplified by the ambiguous metaphor.
Take the article1 OpenAI Pleads That It Can’t Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials For Free. Only in the body of the piece does it explain that the actual conflict is the unsettled question of whether or not AI training — an act that is mechanically very different from copying — is considered to be a violation of copyright that needs specific licensing.
This is a pretty detailed and technical question, actually, and one I have an upcoming major essay dedicated to. It’s also an important question! It deserves to be considered carefully and given a thoughtful, specific answer. Simplifying it down to “use” isn’t just inaccurate, it’s intellectually lazy.
An accurate summary would be “OpenAI argues Training on Copyrighted Materials Is Non-Infringing Use”, which is the thing that happened. But “OpenAI can’t make money without using copyrighted materials for free” bakes the outrage directly into the headline, and creates an easily-digestible narrative for people: OpenAI is profiting by exploiting a resource it should be paying for. But that all hinges on the ambiguous “use” in the title.
Same thing with News Corp sues Perplexity for ripping off WSJ and New York Post by Emma Roth2, where the imprecise phrase “ripping off” lets the reader immediately stop thinking about the problem. What does “ripping off” mean? It sure sounds bad when you don’t explain what happened. Was it plagiarism? Direct copy-paste? Why does News Corp think it was wronged?
In reality, Perplexity made a website that told people what another website said. Some people will agree with News Corp that telling users what another website says is an offensive misappropriation, but other people will argue that describing the content of other sites should be allowed speech. Both positions are interesting! But by using the vague phrase “ripping off” instead of describing the situation to people, this headline is actively obfuscating the question at hand and instead focusing on the “feeling” of offense. Framing the story as “News Corp feels offended” instead of describing the event in question turns the conversation into the team sports “who do you like more” contest, which is worthless.
Conclusion§
Don’t talk past each other!
Encourage an understanding of the topics you care about!
Don’t reduce complex questions down to team sports!
Precision of language!
Related Reading§
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this is another xerox-of-a-xerox article; it’s mostly just an unnecessary summary of actual reporting by The Telegraph. ↩
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Hey, look at that byline, she’s another crypto skeptic who naturally pivoted to AI skepticism. We just talked about that! ↩
Is AI eating all the energy? Part 2/2
Monorail!
maybe the textgen content apocalypse is great
