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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

#181

Post by r053bud »

pikahumu wrote: post #90
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.

If you don't find it useful, don't use it. But why get outraged about something that others find useful? It's clearly a tool that other writers were positive and excited about. Why not let them have it? If you don't find those quantifications meaningful, so be it. You don't need to use it. Why force your opinion on others?

Simple. Just allow an opt-out for Authors or Publishers. Then only interested parties will comprise of and make use of the service, like you want.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#183

Post by giantrobot »

aredox wrote: post #163
torginus wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you seriously telling someone else how they should enjoy something?

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#184

Post by webnrrd2k »

aredox wrote: post #163
torginus wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The whole point of this site is for people to express their opinions, and torginus took the time to write a thoughtful comment anout LLMs and how they might help both authors and readers.

As for your point about serendipity, torginus never said that he didn't wander book stores and libraries looking for books he wouldn't have been previously exposed to.

Based on the post, I'm sure they understood the basics of reading a variety of books, both good and bad -- there is no need to get judgemental.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#185

Post by jmull »

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…

> Do you have a source for this? I didn't see that mentioned in the article.

The person who runs prosecraft says "I looked to the internet for more text that I could analyze, and I used web crawlers to find more books." [0]

I'm just inferring, but if they had, say, purchased each of these books, or borrowed them from the library, or only sourced from sites that ensure the copyright is satisfied, then they might have mentioned it.

(FWIW, the blog post says the other source for the 25K works was their personal library, so I'm assuming the bulk of the 25K come from the internet, though I know some people have prodigious personal libraries.)

[0] https://blog.shaxpir.com/taking-down-prosecraft-io-37e189797...

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#186

Post by nottorp »

yboris wrote: post #175
nottorp wrote: post #167

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…

I wonder about a parallel for paintings. What if there was an analysis stating exactly the brushes the painter used, the number of strokes, the exact pigments, etc? Would that, in your opinion, "suck the 'soul' out of a painting"? I could see this as a brilliant learning tool. A tool to provide deep insight into something that would be very challenging to quantify personally. I think all this would make future author…

> Would that, in your opinion, "suck the 'soul' out of a painting"?

Out of the analyzed painting, no.

> A tool to provide deep insight into something that would be very challenging to quantify personally.

Yeah, and will prevent the would be creator from developing a personal style. No matter what medium they create with.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#187

Post by subroutine »

croes wrote: post #179
subroutine wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLMs make the scams better just like they will make spam better. If it's gibberish you know you got scammed, LLM texts look convincing so you don't know for sure.

I agree LLMs can make better spam. But good spam isn't real competition. It's not like anyone is debating whether they should buy the latest book from their favorite author or the latest book from their favorite author's clone LLM (which is known to have written some solid books). Again, this is an issue that needs to be solved by vendors (it seems like all they need is a system where authors get a copyright to their name, and can curate the list of titles published under their name).

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#188

Post by fenomas »

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…

> However, the apology [0] says that the creator did not "intend" to participate in AI that can "create zero-effort impersonations of artists." I'm not sure if the wording is unintentionally vague, or if there is some way his project could be used in that way.

This seems FUDdy. "Intend" isn't in the apology at all, and the wording that is there says clearly that generative AI came after prosecraft, so there's no way the tool could be used for it.

> It's unclear whether he was planning to use the books he scraped

This also seems unwarranted. The tweet about fine-tuning an LLM came 5-6 years after the guy made prosecraft; why suggest they might involve the same dataset?

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#189

Post by skjoldr »

palata wrote: post #149
TimPC wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to be a pitchfork mob against generative AI at least understand whether AI is generative or not? Seems like a reasonably low bar. This was non-generative AI, it didn't produce content it output metrics and labelled some existing content.

What makes you think that I don't understand whether AI is generative or not? What I said was that for artists who are complaining about their copyright being abused , it does not matter. 10 years ago they were not complaining, because AIs looking like ChatGPT (to users who see it as a black box) did not exist (or were not remotely as powerful). And I understand that. It is not their job to learn how the black box wo…

> It is not their job to learn how the black box works

If you have not learned the basics of how something works, you have no right for your opinion on it to be considered valid. Period.

Invalid opinions do harm to democracy and endanger our way of life.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#190

Post by yboris »

nottorp wrote: post #186
yboris wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder about a parallel for paintings. What if there was an analysis stating exactly the brushes the painter used, the number of strokes, the exact pigments, etc? Would that, in your opinion, "suck the 'soul' out of a painting"? I could see this as a brilliant learning tool. A tool to provide deep insight into something that would be very challenging to quantify personally. I think all this would make future author…

> Would that, in your opinion, "suck the 'soul' out of a painting"? Out of the analyzed painting, no. > A tool to provide deep insight into something that would be very challenging to quantify personally. Yeah, and will prevent the would be creator from developing a personal style. No matter what medium they create with.

Does an artist not see thousands of artworks as they develop their style? Do artists not experiment with hundreds of styles as they hone in on something they want to be theirs? Is the internet, a tool that lets them see even more artworks, preventing creators from developing their personal style?

As I understand it, we've seen an explosion of different dancing styles as various apps let users share their craft with others - a quicker evolution of a greater variety of dancing. And I'm confident dancers use technology like playing videos at slower speeds to analyze others' movements.

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