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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

#111

Post by melagonster »

LikelyABurner wrote: post #40
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are exactly modeling the chauvinistic Silicon Valley attitude that is causing the outrage in the general population to begin with. “Our algorithms are pretty much the same as human art criticism, so put down the pitchforks you unenlightened scum” is up there with telling them to eat (a Stable Diffusion generated picture of) cake.

or talking about human "just another matrix", so how dare them don't want to offer their artwork for new models.

this even didn't contain how developers decided to let people lose job. people is angry because they worried about losing job.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#112

Post by palata »

mythhabit wrote: post #92
palata wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say I make a tool where you can enter the title of a book, and get the full text of the book without paying for it. I assume we all agree that would be illegal, right? Now say that instead of distributing that tool as an executable , I distributed it as a library . It would contain all the same books as the illegal executable above, but some developers would need to write an actual executable that would use the libra…

A car has the potential to be used for illegal activities. In fact happens every second, but that does not mean we go out of our ways to make them illegal. That said, it is still an open question if the content generated by LLM is illegal. It only generates content that is inspired by some authors work, it is not recreating their work, only their style. Humans copy each other all the time in writing, music, art, you…

Either you completely missed my point, or you genuinely believe that my first executable is legal.

Which one is it?

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#113

Post by capableweb »

Nullabillity wrote: post #33
capableweb wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Again, I don't particularly care about whether this is allowed to exist, I'm just here to laugh at the mindset that lead to it being created. But sure, I can see this being used in harmful ways. > It seems the project was about analyzing books, not about producing new books. How is that hurting the authors? "Vivid books are really in this year, we're gonna have to ask that you aim for a Vividness(tm) of 85 or above."…

So if I understand you correctly, you're saying that we should not create "metrics" for anything because said metrics could be misused by clueless people?

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#114

Post by Palmik »

palata wrote: post #98
runj__ wrote: post #15

I honestly don't understand how people can refuse the idea of that some parts most certainly can be reviewed with the help of a computer. There wasn't a "how good is this book" score because a computer might not be able to tell that yet, I don't understand the issue in looking at the number of adverbs in a book with the help of a computer.

> I don't understand the issue in looking at the number of adverbs in a book with the help of a computer. I think that authors see an issue with their IP being fed to an algorithmic black box that will certainly make a lot of money, but authors won't see any of it, and for which engineers say "don't worry, it is not stealing your IP, just let us make money the way we want and shut up". What if OpenAI could prove that…

How was the tool in question, the tool the book authors were outraged about, "stealing their IP"? It's also unclear how it would make any money at all -- indeed, the tool's author even said it made no money.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#115

Post by palata »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #81
palata wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say I make a tool where you can enter the title of a book, and get the full text of the book without paying for it. I assume we all agree that would be illegal, right? Now say that instead of distributing that tool as an executable , I distributed it as a library . It would contain all the same books as the illegal executable above, but some developers would need to write an actual executable that would use the libra…

Curiously that is a pretty close description of a normal neighborhood library.

Pretty close, and yet so different.

Don't you agree that I am allowed to buy a physical book and then resell it, but that I am not allowed to buy a physical book, make copies of it, and sell those copies?

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#116

Post by h11h »

actuallyalys wrote: post #58

I found this article frustratingly vague on how prosecraft.io actually worked. As far as I can tell, the author scraped the web for books, including in-copyright books. Then he analyzed it with techniques based on "classical" natural language processing techniques, rather than transformers or deep learning. He appears to have retained the books he scraped for future analysis. The site itself seems to use only snippet…

Even Facebook's Llama was trained on books3, a dump of pirated books.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#117

Post by wink »

LikelyABurner wrote: post #40
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are exactly modeling the chauvinistic Silicon Valley attitude that is causing the outrage in the general population to begin with. “Our algorithms are pretty much the same as human art criticism, so put down the pitchforks you unenlightened scum” is up there with telling them to eat (a Stable Diffusion generated picture of) cake.

Counting the ratio of nouns to verbs in a novel is an algorithm and I think it's like one of the most basic examples of what the thing in the article does, if I understood it correctly.

But I guess there would also be people up in arms about this.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#118

Post by em-bee »

robertlagrant wrote: post #37
LikelyABurner wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is this different to the current process, other than feedback is slower (if forthcoming at all) and less specific?

the difference is that an machine analysis is necessarily limited and can't account for all the factors that make a text interesting. so it is possible that this analysis rejects texts that would not be rejected by a human.

it is objective but potentially biased. and it could even be discriminating if the input for this tool isn't diverse enough. but these are the issues that can go wrong with any use of technology, and we have seen many examples of that happening. however i don't think that is problematic if writers use it to analyse their own texts in comparison. it is however a serious issue if publishers use it to decide what to accept

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#119

Post by Palmik »

I am a bit confused about what's so outrageous about this tool. It seems that both the book authors, and some of the people in the discussion here, conflate rudimentary statistics about a book (number of words of certain kind) with the latest wave of generative AI. They are very different in both what value they provide, and what risk they pose to book authors.

The tool that book authors got outraged about only provides basic metrics, not dissimilar from other metrics such as "page count", and can't be used to produce new content which could deprive the book authors from revenue.

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