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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

#161

Post by bogwog »

dingaling wrote: post #151
bogwog wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Quote from the OP:

> 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 absolutely do that because it’s transformative.

Relevant article: https://www.techdirt.com/2013/11/14/google-gets-total-victor...

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#163

Post by aredox »

torginus wrote: post #135
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 kind of don't understand the issue - IANAL, so I'm not going to delve on the legality of things, but I think making automated book recommendations better is absolutely fits the bill for 'transformative use' - as in book recommendations are in no way a substitute product for books themselves. And personally, I think book recommendations are an absolutely underserved market, if I liked a book, having the ability to f…

Stop with the "this is good, I want more" Skinner-box model of happiness. Try some serendipity instead of being led by a generic algorithm.

I discovered absolutely great books by moving slowly along the shelves of a library or a bookshop.

And you need to read bad books to understand the great ones.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#164

Post by harshreality »

subroutine wrote: post #154
palata wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A few sentences? For most books I've seen, it's a few pages. Google will block you from retrieving more pages from the same book eventually. Using a VPN and a different account may get around one limit, but I experimented with multiple VPNs and browsers once, and although I was able to get a majority of a book's pages, after that google stopped showing me full previews of any of the remaining pages no matter where the request came from.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#165

Post by PakG1 »

golemotron wrote: post #155
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]

Having now looked up what the word priapism means, I'm now trying to imagine what moral priapism would be, and I can't think of a definition that makes sense. What is it? Is there a simpler word you can use?

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#166

Post by b112 »

randallsquared wrote: post #80
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…

If he says he didn't do something, the pitchfork mob will simply tell each other that he is lying. They will do this in the most confused and twisted way possible, driven by lack of understanding of what was happening combined with a need to drive outrage and thereby advertise their work. If he says he didn't intend to do that thing, this is still compatible with a later update that he didn't do that thing, but immed…

The best response, for us all collectively, is to always ignore everyone's opinion online. There is zero value in anything on reddit, twitter, facebook, the media these days.

Just ignore it. All of it. Outrage or not.

I see downvotes, but I mean it. You know who you listen to? Your friends. Your neighbours. Your local community. You listen to PEOPLE, not sockpuppets. You listen to legitimate human beings, not AI generated blather, or curated news stories, or groups working together to generate hate, outrage, to stoke anger, upset.

You listen to actual, real PEOPLE.

You want to go to reddit? Twitter? Anything? Fine. But treat it as 100% fiction, pure entertainment, and never let it affect YOU.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#167

Post by nottorp »

Copyright issues aside.

My personal opinion is that these tools are mostly useful to suck the "soul" out of a book. They give you templates and stuff and useful statistics to help you go to the lowest common denominator.

The problem is more visible in the movie industry, where they have had script templates for a hundred years now (actual time interval pulled out of a*), but it's starting to show up in books too.

For those happy to "consume" Netflix series and Marvel movies that are indistinguishable from each other except maybe filmed with different actors, it should be fine.

If you want originality in your entertainment it's sad news.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#168

Post by mythhabit »

palata wrote: post #112
mythhabit wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I do not buy the premisses. Your example states that it can provide the full text of any book. An LLM cannot do that. They can produce something in the same style and setting. When an actual human author mimics other writers styles, it is not illegal, why exactly should it be illegal for an author to use an LLM to do it?

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#169

Post by jasonlotito »

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).

"This kind of thing" is factual information about the book, such as page or word count, ly-adverb count, etc. Small snippets, something permissible under copyright law today, that were heavily editorialized and commented on were displayed.

To suggest that counting words and pages is something that should not be allowed is silly.

> The article itself is clueless…

Says the person making stuff up to force a narrative.

The person doing this had the rights to do this, and was very clearly within his rights to do this under copyright law. Counting words is not a crime.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#170

Post by nottorp »

croes wrote: post #83
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 his this different from all the vampire novels that hit the shelf after the success of Twilight? Publishers alway preferred the money makers, just the measure changed. Nowadays writers can at least publish their books without the need of publishers and I think some like the help of the bad Silicon valley stuff that made writing, publishing and interacting with the readers easier. I'm on your site if it's about au…

> publish their books without the need of publishers

Except those are very likely to be metoo vampire novels. And lately LLM generated.

I'd move that on the contrary, the role of the publisher as a curator will only become more important in the future.

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