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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

#151

Post by dingaling »

bogwog wrote: post #123
jmull wrote: post #67

If you want to do this kind of thing, let authors opt-in (or publishers). Yes, it will take effort and probably go slow, but if the tool is really useful and amazing, it should be doable. I suspect the authors are put-off by a couple things: - the text of the works scanned seems like it may be from pirated sources. That poisons the project, no matter what it does with the scans, for many authors. - the use of these s…

> If you want to do this kind of thing, let authors opt-in (or publishers). If it's fair use, why should you have to do that? The same copyright law protecting author's ownership rights over their art also provide "fair use" to other people. Someone may disagree with current fair use laws (and I suspect many outraged here do not), but that's a broader issue not related to this particular tool. It just 100% seems like…

> also provide "fair use" to other people

"How much of someone else's work can I use without getting permission?

Under the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute, it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports."

https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html

Limited portions, not the entire work.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#152

Post by subroutine »

croes wrote: post #110
subroutine wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both the former and latter are information for writers. Neither create massive competition for writers (not that there is any law against creating competition), just FUD and better tools for writers.

Things like GPT already create competition for authors even using their names. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37042561 Pure text statistics won't do the same.

Wrt. your link, the same thing could have happen to this author if these spam books contained complete gibberish (and someone listed it on Amazon/goodreads using the authors name). This isn't legitimate competition (i.e. books written by LLMs that rival the quality and style of the actual author). This is a failure of the selling platform to QC the books they are selling.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#153

Post by morkalork »

jprete wrote: post #42
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.

Software people are intensely susceptible to the McNamara Fallacy: “But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fourth step is to say that what can't be…

Is there a counter fallacy along the lines of "if we can't measure everything, we shouldn't measure anything"? It can still be an interesting, fun and informative exercise while keeping in mind that it may be limited.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#154

Post by subroutine »

palata wrote: post #150
subroutine wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Books already does exactly this. It has a library of the full text of millions of books. Users can search for a passage of text and google will display the paragraph where the passage is found. https://books.google.com example: https://i.ibb.co/DCxJpHN/IMG-3143.jpg

Google does not provide the full book, does it? Exactly like they could provide a few seconds of a song, but not the song in its entirety.

No, they don't provide the full book, just a few sentences before and after your search prompt (same as Prosecraft).

In both cases, however, if you had the patience, you could search the last few words of the text returned from your prior query and slowly work your way through the entire book.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#155

Post by golemotron »

Palmik wrote: post #119

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 provi…

[flagged]

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#156

Post by morkalork »

TheChaplain wrote: post #36

I believe that if you are using my book as data/model/whatever for something that makes money, then I want a piece of the action. If it's just a paragraph, fine go ahead. But the whole book? Give me money.

Feels like a nightmare. What about a book club passing around a copy of your book. Want to charge them licensing fees? Story time at a library for children. Licensing fees for them too? Review in a pay-walled newspaper. Fees, again? NYT derives value from all those reviews you know.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#157

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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?

"It's a mistake." OK, you could be right.

"Needs to stop." OK, you could be right on that one too. I don't think you are, but that's not the point.

Neither of those adds up to "it's currently illegal". (Whether it's actually illegal probably depends on the details of how he did what he did.)

Further, neither of those things adds up to "the howling mob should attack him until he stops". (Even if the "attacks" are purely online.) I am against "attack him with outrage dialed all the way up to 11 without actually understanding what his tool is and does". I am also against giving in to the outrage - it just shows the mob that baseless outrage attacks work.

You think it needs to stop? Fine. Persuade him that it needs to stop, and therefore that he should stop. Convince him - not with a mob screaming in outrage, but with reason.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#158

Post by aredox »

dfxm12 wrote: post #142
jmull wrote: post #67

If you want to do this kind of thing, let authors opt-in (or publishers). Yes, it will take effort and probably go slow, but if the tool is really useful and amazing, it should be doable. I suspect the authors are put-off by a couple things: - the text of the works scanned seems like it may be from pirated sources. That poisons the project, no matter what it does with the scans, for many authors. - the use of these s…

Yeah, the article represents the voice of the authors in two tweets, from authors not apparently notable enough to have a wikipedia page. One I couldn't even find on Goodreads. It's obvious there's more to this than just the tweets presented. The article is unhelpful in this regard.

Jeff VanderMeer is not notable enough?

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#159

Post by sobellian »

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?

I agree that it's probably not that useful, but to actually take offense? The outrage seems to misunderstand the law and the technology. If you think the numbers offer no meaning, then just ignore them. People produce bad tools every day and the world still turns.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#160

Post by ahstilde »

h11h wrote: post #54

> The Gizmodo article has a ridiculously wrong “fair use” analysis, saying “Fair Use does not, by any stretch of the imagination, allow you to use an author’s entire copyrighted work without permission as a part of a data training program that feeds into your own ‘AI algorithm.’” Except… it almost certainly does? Again, we’ve gone through this with the Google Book scanning case, and the courts said that you can absol…

You are wrong.
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