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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

#201
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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?

GPT4 sez: "This sentence uses figurative language, so it doesn't refer to literal meanings. "Fear" is a stressful emotion induced by perceived danger or threat. "Acute" suggests a sudden onset or intensity. "Moral priapism," a more abstract concept, suggests an abnormally extended or excessive fixated morality, much like the medical condition priapism refers to an unwanted, enduring erection.

Overall, the sentence means that fear can lead to an exaggerated or obsessive moral response. This implies that when someone is afraid, they might stick rigidly to their moral code or make moral judgments more extremely or rigidly than they would in a state of calmness."

seems fair

Edit: My gloss of the summary: "Fear creates a hardon for scapegoats among the pitchfork wielders."

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#202

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.

If I read a book and learn something from that I have updated a neural network in my brain. You don't get paid for that (I am not, as an example, sharing any of my income with the people who wrote my college books).

If I write a non-fiction kids book about a boy who finds out that he is a wizard and goes to a secret wizard school, I don't owe JK any copyright money.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#203
post #149
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…

I would disagree. Just because you don't quite understand something, doesn't mean your concerns are not worth consideration - consider the recent zoom TOS issue. I doubt that many of us have a deep understanding of how that data's being used, or the internal guidelines that zoom follows for its data use, and most people aren't lawyers specializing in IP law to know exactly how the law would treat zoom if they were to accidentally (or "accidentally") leak IP. We just see that they are putting in a clause in their TOS to allow themselves to do so, remember our own heuristics of how LLM have behaved in the past, and understandably start raising questions. For all we know, zoom's AI might be something constrained to a framework which doesn't allow for such data leaks to occur, or it's generative capabilities might be constrained in some other way. They're just demanding legal permission to do so, but that still rubs a lot of us the wrong way. Our concerns are still justified, even if Zoom never actually touches AI. Artists lack as concrete heuristics as the technical crowd. But they still have concerns that need addressing, and those concerns about the effects of AI still should be considered and respected. If the details of the situation don't match their concerns, care should be taken to explain how they don't match to the people in question, in a way that isn't looking down on them (admittedly, trying to be the calm voice is often a waste of time on the internet) That said, if you were to make an informational video which succintly summarizes the technical details that are relevant to artists, it might become sufficiently popular to influence debate.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#204
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

You're right, but there's a large difference between your brain doing the analysis and a template or computer wizard telling you what to "create". [Link picked at random] https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/three-act-structure/ Do you really think this did wonders for movie originality?

I've heard the phrase "you have to know the rules to break them" (or something similar). The next generation of creators may look at that and choose to change their story telling on purpose, or exaggerate the curves, or something else ... that's what creativity is about - trying variations.

Just because Hollywood is pumping out movies you find unpleasant doesn't mean art is dead.

You and I probably agree more than this conversation suggests. You're right that people can and likely will stick to patterns that are successful, and that will mean there may be more copy-cat cookie-cutter stuff out there. But I strongly suspect that it will allow other creators to rocket past old mistakes or common tropes towards something novel.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#205
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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?

Permanently aroused to look for any injustice.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#206
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I really did not mean that specifically for Prosecraft. But the article questions why authors are attacking Prosecraft "because it does no harm". My answer is that authors don't (and can't, really) make the difference in a per-case basis. At this point what they see is that LLMs trained on their copyrighted material are able to generate similar material thanks to their copyrighted material that was used in the…

Why didn't you just say that, instead of posing a hypothetical about software that may itself contain full book text which can be used to display (in this case fair-use) passages to end users? lol I think the disconnect between your point of view and mine is that I see "training an LLM on copyrighted text" the same as a person reading copyrighted text, which is perfectly legal. And I see violating copyright as a pers…

> Why didn't you just say that, instead of

Because I answered to a post that was talking about drawing the line for fair use. I just shared my view of how I see it. To me, OpenAI should be responsible for not giving copyrighted material to users if they are not allowed to do it. This means that they should be sued every single time someone manages to extract what is considered as copyrighted material from their software. Because the authors never gave them that right.

You Google Books example is different: the most obvious difference between that Google Books does not pretend that it is their content: they clearly say "here is a passage of this book".

> I see "training an LLM on copyrighted text" the same as a person reading copyrighted text

Yes, I think that is the main discussion point around LLMs. My point is that machines are not humans, and therefore they should not be blindly treated like humans. We should think about the consequence of the machines doing what they do, and decide whether that is legal or not in our society. Otherwise we would give machines the right to vote ("humans can vote, I don't see why machines couldn't").

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#207
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would disagree. Just because you don't quite understand something, doesn't mean your concerns are not worth consideration - consider the recent zoom TOS issue. I doubt that many of us have a deep understanding of how that data's being used, or the internal guidelines that zoom follows for its data use, and most people aren't lawyers specializing in IP law to know exactly how the law would treat zoom if they were to…

(to clarify, this is a response to skjoldr's comment)

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#208
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

You're right, but there's a large difference between your brain doing the analysis and a template or computer wizard telling you what to "create". [Link picked at random] https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/three-act-structure/ Do you really think this did wonders for movie originality?

[dead]

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#210
post #200

Summary: prosecraft.io counted word occurrences and presented statistics about them. I don't think you even need fair use for this, because this is something you obviously are allowed to do, without any permissions. This is not generative AI, this is old school statistics. And then it sometimes presented a page worth of quoted text from a book. Which should fall under fair use. https://blog.shaxpir.com/taking-down-pr…

> counted word occurrences and presented statistics about them. I don't think you even need fair use for this, because this is something you obviously are allowed to do, without any permissions

You're pretty much describing exactly what an LLM "learns" about text. I agree that it should obviously fall under fair use, but as the author of this article found out, there are quite a few who (very vocally) disagree.

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