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ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft

americamagazine.org

71–80 of 168 posts

Re: ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft

#71
post #29

It's interesting to compare two scenarios. The first is if you feed an LLM solely the works of a famous current author, say J.K Rowling, and ask it to create a new work in the style of her franchise. The second is if you include all of her works but also throw in every other book written in the last several years and ask it to create a work in the style of her franchise. Is the latter somehow "better" than the former…

While technologically unavailable (and maybe intractable) I've an impulse to say that in theory we could do something a little like Differential Privacy, where we look at the likelihood you got your output with the model you have vs the version of your model trained with (say) Rowling's work excluded.

Re: ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft

#72
post #30

I have no idea how the courts will end up resolving this legally. In the meantime I've been thinking a lot about the morality of this alleged theft. Most of us would agree that duplicating and selling someone's book is immoral. Similarly I think we'd all agree that reading multiple books to learn about a topic and then writing your own is perfectly fine. So where does an LLM trained on millions of books fall? Persona…

Instead of debating about the moral and legal aspects, it could be more productive to focus on the technical aspects that can help making more informed decisions about the moral and legal problems.

On some levels of abstraction, LLMs seem to be unknowable black boxes. On other levels, they are simply approximate solutions to established problems, such as estimating the probability distribution for a token following a context.

Genome assembly is kind of like complementary problem to text generation. You can't read the genome directly, but you can duplicate it, break it into fragments, read the fragments, and try to assemble them. The methods vary, but you generally try to find overlaps between the fragments and build a graph based on the overlaps. If you start from a context that occurs only once in the genome, there is often one overwhelmingly likely path in the graph that corresponds to a substantial part of the genome. On the other hand, if the context is too short or it occurs in a repetitive region of the genome, any path you traverse is likely to be chimeric and not correspond to any part of the underlying sequence.

Using similar heuristics, an LLM could estimate whether it's following a long overwhelmingly likely path, replicating substantial parts of the training data, or making choices between substantially different paths, generalizing from the data. And because the training data is usually not that big, it could query the data when it believes it could be replicating the data.

Re: ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft

#73
post #30

I have no idea how the courts will end up resolving this legally. In the meantime I've been thinking a lot about the morality of this alleged theft. Most of us would agree that duplicating and selling someone's book is immoral. Similarly I think we'd all agree that reading multiple books to learn about a topic and then writing your own is perfectly fine. So where does an LLM trained on millions of books fall? Persona…

Its similar to many other dilemmas with new tech. When you are out in public, you don't have an expectation of privacy. People can see you, they can take photos of you. The worker at the cafe will probably remember you and your order. This is fine. But when tech does the exact same thing but with scale where everywhere you go, everything you buy, etc is tracked and analyzed, it's now questionably immoral despite lega…

The timescales matter as well.

You or I could perhaps, if we dedicated a few years to it, make a convincing fake video of an acquaintance of ours doing or saying something. By the end of those few years it'd likely be out of date or maybe just irrelevant. And they'd have to have really, really upset us in order for us to put that much effort in. It would literally cost us tens, hundreds of thousands or more in opportunity cost.

Contrast that with some sort of tool that's not too far advanced from current image/video generators that can just do the same in a minute by typing "A video of my next door neighbour accepting cash in a briefcase from a man in a suit".

Re: ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft

#75
post #30

I have no idea how the courts will end up resolving this legally. In the meantime I've been thinking a lot about the morality of this alleged theft. Most of us would agree that duplicating and selling someone's book is immoral. Similarly I think we'd all agree that reading multiple books to learn about a topic and then writing your own is perfectly fine. So where does an LLM trained on millions of books fall? Persona…

Its similar to many other dilemmas with new tech. When you are out in public, you don't have an expectation of privacy. People can see you, they can take photos of you. The worker at the cafe will probably remember you and your order. This is fine. But when tech does the exact same thing but with scale where everywhere you go, everything you buy, etc is tracked and analyzed, it's now questionably immoral despite lega…

I like this example and I'd agree that tracking people at scale can be immoral depending on the circumstances. But to me it feels that way because something is being taken from you. You've lost your agency to be anonymous or to leave your past behind.

But I don't see how an LLM training on your works deprives you of something you had before.

Re: ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft

#76
We are once again at the limits of the illusion of ownership. We take for granted that ownership is real. But it is not real. It is an illusion. A profoundly helpful illusion if we believe the mainstream narrative about Western culture. But an illusion nonetheless. And it is only natural that we will encounter the intrusion of reality into that illusion. The question is whether we will extend the metaphor to encompass this new deviation or whether we will not. The American system can usually be counted upon to do what is in the interests of business. But this conflict puts business against itself so it is not clear how things will turn out.

Re: ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft

#78

The author is just regurgitating a widely circulating criticism of chat AI; it is not his original thought. Thus, by his own standard, his article is not a work of intelligence, but theft.

Exactly this. Unless the author had been in a dark cave for the last ~5 years and just emerged yesterday, this article is just regurgitated ideas that has been floating around the web endlessly. Restating someone else's opinion does not make it your own. Thief.

Re: ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft

#80

These kinds of arguments don’t convince me at all. Show me how it is completely different from what humans do. We regularly put everything we know through the blender to come up with new “creative” artifacts.

Well a big difference is you cannot have a single human consume and remember everything ever written. Another big difference is that that human cannot be scaled so that it can chat with millions of people at the same time.

Concentrating all knowledge into a single entity controlled by a for profit corporation using opaque methods will have consequences. Doesn't really matter if it's a biological or digital entity.

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