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Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

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Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#21

Post by runj__ »

Nullabillity wrote: post #14
LikelyABurner wrote: post #3

I’m with the artists on this one. Our obsession with converting everything into input for an algorithm that spits out an ill-defined number (what the hell is “vividness”?) needs to stop. We already tried this with human communication and gave birth to the dystopian nightmare that is social media, why keep repeating our mistakes?

Honestly, this is the really offensive part of the article. Who cares about whether or not it's legal, the idea that it's, in any way, shape, or form, useful is bafflingly laughable. Not everything can be meaningfully quantified. Not everything needs to be.

Certainly something interesting is bound to come out of quantifying things? "Hm, this three act structure thing seems to work, I wonder why." "Children doesn't seem to understand texts which include these words, I wonder why."

Patterns rarely show themselves before we investigate.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#23

Post by LikelyABurner »

thendrill wrote: post #13
LikelyABurner wrote: post #3

I’m with the artists on this one. Our obsession with converting everything into input for an algorithm that spits out an ill-defined number (what the hell is “vividness”?) needs to stop. We already tried this with human communication and gave birth to the dystopian nightmare that is social media, why keep repeating our mistakes?

Well... We still can not agree if... Technology has to be protected from dumb people, or is it worth protecting dumb people from technology....

If anything, it’s the smart people that need to be protected from technology, because Silicon Valley is obsessed with pulling them down into a Harrison Bergeron nightmare where they’re absorbed into the same modeled probability distribution as the rest of the population to better sell them ads (outliers are bad for profits.)

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#25

Post by jprete »

pmarreck wrote: post #10
jprete wrote: post #4

This is an incredibly biased article, hinging entirely on the assumption that AI training is fair use.

There is no “AI” in the project. It literally just seems to do Bayesian sentiment analysis of books. It does NOT then mine that data to score OTHER books. Please actually read the article next time before commenting

I did in fact read the article. The author isn’t concerned about the book project. The author wants to use it as a springboard for complaining about AI fear, and his argument fundamentally hinges on the claim that AI training is fair use. He’s claiming the book project is comparable to AI training.

I think the book project has a better claim to fair use than AI training does, although excerpting entire pages is maybe too far (but the word highlighting does feel like commentary).

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#26

Post by 542458 »

mycologos wrote: post #20
542458 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article cites the Google vs Authors Guild case ( https://www.techdirt.com/2013/11/14/google-gets-total-victor... ) which was a total victory for Google. This seems fairly conclusive that the textual analysis here is fair use to me. > Similarly, Google Books is also transformative in the sense that it has transformed book text into data for purposes of substantive research, including data mining and text mining in…

I think Google Books is cool, but "the frequency of words and trends in their usage provid[ing] substantive information" pre-dates Google Books by a long time. For example, there's a collection of word frequencies in the complete works of John Keats from 1917 [1]. Manually tabulated, too! [1] https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001023999

Sure, but the Google Books case is a massive and well-funded court case that was a pretty resounding victory for Google and textual analysis of copyrighted works in general, so anybody arguing that this is obviously copyright violation needs to explain why the Google Books case isn’t relevant.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#27

Post by s1mplicissimus »

jprete wrote: post #18
thendrill wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... We still can not agree if... Technology has to be protected from dumb people, or is it worth protecting dumb people from technology....

What do you even mean by this comment? Have you considered the possibility that people are smart in ways that you are not considering, rather than just labeling it “dumb”?

Have you considered ... in ways that you are not considering...?

I am pretty confident they haven't. Sounds like you've set yourself up for a reverse "true scotsman" here ;)

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#28

Post by bonzini »

Nullabillity wrote: post #16
js8 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why it wouldn't be? Indexing is fair use. I think where it gets murky with fair use would be if AI could actually plagiarize the book, but other than that, it should be fair use.

Indexing doesn't replace the book, it's just a different way to read it. The index is useless without the book itself.

Neither does knowing which parts of the book are darker or happier.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#29

Post by LikelyABurner »

capableweb wrote: post #19
Nullabillity wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, this is the really offensive part of the article. Who cares about whether or not it's legal, the idea that it's, in any way, shape, or form, useful is bafflingly laughable. Not everything can be meaningfully quantified. Not everything needs to be.

> Not everything can be meaningfully quantified. Not everything needs to be. Ok, so who decides what's OK to analyze or not? Is there some obvious moral line I fail to see, that everyone would immediately agree on? It seems the project was about analyzing books, not about producing new books. How is that hurting the authors?

What will hurt artists is, when in 10 years, all publishers are demanding that the vividness score (TM) be at least a 95% “because that’s what drives sales”.

Which is what will happen if the authors don’t proactively stop it from happening. Look at how the music industry has evolved over time.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#30

Post by JoeAltmaier »

LikelyABurner wrote: post #3

I’m with the artists on this one. Our obsession with converting everything into input for an algorithm that spits out an ill-defined number (what the hell is “vividness”?) needs to stop. We already tried this with human communication and gave birth to the dystopian nightmare that is social media, why keep repeating our mistakes?

That's silly. Humans review books all the time, using very similar words. Where's the outrage over that?

This is manufactured, stretched, overhyped objections. I believe it's all as the OP suggests, because the word AI is in there. Not because anything illegal or immoral is going on. In fact it's a terribly useful tool, and once the mob cools off it'll likely return.

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