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Things are about to get worse for generative AI

garymarcus.substack.com

481–490 of 769 posts

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and we can definitely feed them. Plenty of resources lying around.

We don't feed or house tons of people right now, despite those resources.

We can, we (as in society) doesn't, because the powers that be benefit from it.

Somehow Finland can manage, but US can't? Please.

The roofless exist to send a message, "stay in your lane, be a cog in the machine, don't disrupt the system and you won't end up like THEM".

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#483
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess, at some point, and after you move beyond the opening, is creation. People didn't stop painting because photography exists, they created new forms of photography. People didn't stop writing music or using new / unique instruments when synths and programs came along. I genuinely believe that people will keep creating, it's in our nature, and we also like things made by other humans, because we can relate to them…

Imho your argument is faulty at its base. The objective of chess competition isn't to produce a reasonably good game for the lowest possible cost (blunders and comebacks are actually pretty valuable parts of the spectacle). It also isn't the reason why chess players get paid. Yes, running still was a thing even after the invention of bicycle. This is just invalid logic in my opinion.

Chess hustlers in central park don't play for money, or for a competition, they play for the fun of it, for the sake of chess itself, for the sake of exploring the game, the thrill of finding a solution.

It has nothing to do with whatever "value" the capitalist system assigns to the act as a side-effect.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#484
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

creation should happen for its own sake. You don't see GMs stopping chess because bots are that much better.

> creation should happen for its own sake Creation should happen for whatever reason its creator becomes inspired with. The only absolute I can think of is no one should actually categorize worthy and unworthy motifs.

I can categorize them easily.

The only invalid reason is because you need to feed yourself, and the fact that we need to do that, we need to pay artists and everyone else just to survive, shows our failure as broader society.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not stealing and they're not reselling anything. That's why it's called Generative AI

By that logic I can torrent movies and distribute them all I'd like as long as I call it "Generative Watching" or something like that. And OpenAI quite literally sells access to their models, and if those models are pushing out verbatim copyrighted works as has been alleged by the NYT, then they are by definition reselling copyrighted works without permission.

I think you misunderstand something here. Torrenting movies and generative AI don't really have anything in common, I'm not sure why you bring that up.

If you sold the output of a true random number generator, eventually you'd also by definition be reselling copyrighted works without permission. The courts wouldn't mindlessly say "no more random numbers", and I doubt that they'll do the same for GenAI, especially given the recent decisions that are headed that way.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#486
post #12

Or... things are about to get worse for copyright holders. I don't see any developped country pressing the brake on AGI in the near future to protect a few copyright holders from getting "stolen" in hypothetic scenarios.

> a few copyright holders By which you mean every copyright holder. > AGI in the near future Something that is purely speculative, undefined, and has been promised in the near future for 50+ years. I don't see copyright holders lying down for someone else's benefit and I don't see governments gutting copyright, contract law, and several other avenues of protection that copyright holders can deploy in the name of some…

Thank you for this. The greed-fueled magical thinking around AI is absolutely out of control at the moment.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#487
post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I cover generative AI in my Ethics in AI lecture, one of few soapbox opinions I give is that GenAI is doing essentially what people do - copy others. Picasso has a quote about "Good Artists copy, Great Artists steal", which doesn't mean try to pass Lario and Muigi off as your own, but rather that great artists are able to take aspects from other works (also called 'inspiration') without being caught. My personal…

Timmy did not need to ingest the whole sum of human knowledge as a training set before he could draw a crayon copy of a cartoon character.

What’s the FPS of human eyesight? How long did Timmy spend looking at Mario, more generally other cartoons and even more generally human forms? Do the math and you’ll find he’s got a pretty big training set as well, maybe not quite the same size but nothing to sneeze at.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#488

I am beginning to think that in these discussions these models are functioning more like an obscuring factor than anything else and the discussion is getting bogged down in that, and not the crux of the argument. They’re giving people plausible deniability in the “chain of responsibility”, and I think if we took away “LLM” and replaced it with “fairground sideshow magic box” the argument that LLM’s are somehow specia…

I agree, and I would prefer to see concrete examples of LLMs being used productively and profitably in the industry in a "disruptive" manner--putting people out of work, etc--before we conclude they're somehow the next big thing. Basically, before claiming LLMs (or generative techniques, more generally) mean that we're on the doorstep of "general" intelligence, show me door!

The outline of that door might look like industrial adoption of these things for solving some actual problem other than the entertainment value of typing things into the box and seeing what comes out the other side. But so far, as far as I can tell, nobody's actually doing this?

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#489
I am constantly suprised by the amount of apologizing for generative AI infringement here. The fact that it's already being done and is a technical breakthrough is irrelevant to existing copyright law. "We are big and innovative" may hold weight with legislators, but it won't with the courts.

Remember when everyone and their dog discovered sampling in the late 80's and they all thought they could get away with it because it didn't seem like infringement to the samplers? The courts had no qualms about slapping record labels for putting out records with unlicensed samples in them. Albums even got pulled off shelves while licenses were sorted out.

These companies are charging for a service that returns copyrighted content, full stop. You can't do that whether you are AI or someone drawing Mario and selling the pictures on iStock, or putting out records that sample someone else's work without permission. It took a while in the case of sampling, but it sure as hell happened.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#490
post #55

To me that’s the wrong question. Everyone knew it was trained on copyrighted material and capable of eerily similar outputs. But it’s already done. At scale. Large corps committing fully. There is no chance of that toothpaste going back in the tube. It’s a bit like when big tech built on aggressive user data harvesting. Whether it’s right, ethical or even legal is academic at this stage. They just did it - effectivel…

> There is no chance of that toothpaste going back in the tube.

I disagree - we've been here before. The same could be said of many technologies, like cheap music recording/manufacture. You can record an artist once and make records at scale. However no one would think you could record Taylor Swift once and make unlimited copies without paying her.

You should read up on the musicians strike of 1942. [0]

[0[ https://jacobin.com/2022/03/1940s-musicians-strike-american-...

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