Fear of AI just killed a useful tool • Hacker News Board

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#241

Post by b112 » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 5:01 PM UTC

slg wrote: post #218

b112 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gene…

I'm genuinely curious, why do you post here if you have this mindset?

This is not twitter, with its tiny little snippets of text, which are useless for meaningful communication, and its culture which incites groupthink. This is not Reddit, with its hostile, hate filled voting system, with its peer pressure laden culture. This is not Facebook, literally designed to drive hate, and anger, and upset, to increase engagement.

This is Hackernews. It's not perfect, but it's far more palatable. And it's certainly not like any of the above.

Lastly, my advice still applies. When I detect hate here, I ignore it. When I detect peer pressure, I don't care.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#242

Post by make3 » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 5:04 PM UTC

warning26 wrote: post #210

sampo wrote: 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.

generation of related text vs analysis of human understandable facts is very different in the mind of most people.

I think that using an LLM to get insights on the text should be ok, it's the generation part that scares them. probably rightly so.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#243

Post by ineedasername » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 5:05 PM UTC

wokwokwok wrote: post #195

paulluuk wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I would agree in theory that a project like this would be best with opt-in, in reality that would just not work. Publishers would never opt-in to it, if they even respond to your requests at all.

Then don't do it? Or, if you do it, do it privately and don't share it on the internet? I'm not sure why this is a difficult idea; if asking for something and getting permission to do it is so difficult that 'would just not work. Publishers would never opt-in to it' ...then, it seems really obvious that even if you want to do it, technically can do it and you could maybe make a legal argument to doing it doesn't viol…

Why ask permission to do something that doesn’t require permission? I see no more reason why an author should be upset about someone counting the words in their book & assigning sentiment than a builder should get upset about someone counting the # of bricks in a building and assigning subtle color shade differences to them. Neither the author nor the builder has lost anything by it.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#244

Post by fullspectrumdev » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

aredox wrote: post #158

dfxm12 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Personally, I have no idea who he is except some loud prick on twitter.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#245

Post by rockemsockem » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 5:21 PM UTC

One thing that stuck out to me after reading the initial vitriolic Twitter thread from the author saying "How dare you!" is that the author is a lawyer by day, which I find interesting, since they seem to be very uninformed about copyright and fair use.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#246

Post by fullspectrumdev » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

dmurray wrote: post #31

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.

The analysis is cool. The problematic thing is what would have happened next, if this tool turned out to be any good. Publishers rejecting manuscripts because "this years trend shows customers are looking for vividness in the 70+ percentile, your book is only at 55". Everything becoming the same style. If you thought Hemingway, Joyce or Nabokov had it bad with rejections, there'd be zero chance for actual innovative…

Joyce should have had more rejections, but that’s just my personal opinion

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#247

Post by rockemsockem » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

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…

If you read through the angry Twitter thread it's clear that almost everyone thinks that either a) the site is a pirate site that lets you download books or b) that the site lets you generate works in the style of an author. Neither of which is true of course.

There are a handful (like I think it's clear though that most of the outrage would still be there even if the author had purchased each and every book.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#248

Post by jmull » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 5:31 PM UTC

dnissley wrote: post #223

jmull wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's twitter generally. If your engagement only reaches the level of twitter, you aren't really engaging at all.

So as long as that's all the engagement there is, we're free to ignore it and carry on, correct?

I think you're fishing for a way to dismiss the concerns of the authors without understanding or addressing them, which is pointless.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#249

Post by al_be_back » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 5:32 PM UTC

I think it's wise to take the concerns of the creative community seriously - after all their "labor of love" [1] matters immensely, without it LLMs are useless.

matters not how much the coder "loved" the project, or did yoga, or that they've not made money for years, after all most book authors aren't exactly raking in the money either.

also like many thinks in life, some tools/projects/startups etc just stop being needed/used and new ones/competitors take over. there's nothing to say that since tool X is using A.I. therefore it has to be adopted by one and all; smiles all around.

google has 'right to be forgotten', also looking into 'machine unlearning' and it's common for platforms to honor user's request to remove their data / close their account.

[1] From OP: destroying what had been a clear labor of love and a useful project

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#250

Post by rockemsockem » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 5:33 PM UTC

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…

Statistical analysis is only useful if you have enough data to analyse, so there is in fact a threshold of number of books to cross before the tool can even really exist. If you read his post, the initial goal was to get stats about typical word count, typical amount of passive speech, etc. Requiring opt-in for these broad statistics, through outrage only since this project is CLEARLY legal in the United States, means that tools like this will never exist. Which seems net bad to me.

If you are saying it should be opt-in only for the pages analyzing specific books, like the instigator of this outrage screen-shotted, well that seems to fall squarely into the critical analysis bucket, so that is also quite ridiculous.

I understand some folks being unhappy that a portion of the works were pirated, but it seems like most of the outraged would be outraged even if he personally purchased each and every ebook.

Also, if you read through the Twitter thread a lot of the authors (not 100%, but a LOT) are doing a really great job portraying themselves as "stoopid AI-fearful luddites". Many of them think the site is somehow like ChatGPT and they don't bother to dig any deeper, or really at all.