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AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

axelk.ee

361–370 of 783 posts

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#361

People need to cope with the fact that no thought is original. Even Newton and Leibniz were having the same thoughts at the same time. Get over it.

I've noticed that AI has caused this narrative to become more popular. "Nothing is original anyway, so why bother?" That's pure cope and you know it. A deep insecurity masked as bold truthtelling.

I think you're right, the ease in which AI can do task that we previously considered unique to human creativity does force us to further rethink and acknowledge how creativity is in a large part about "remixing" prior works, although of course we've had discourse about this for at least as early as Richard Simon's 1678 "Critical History of the Old Testament", which identified it as being a remix of earlier sources [0].

[0] https://archive.org/details/hisyo00simo/page/n1/mode/2up

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#362
post #46

Seriously how is this surprising? We all know AI companies stole troves of data to train their models, why do you think they'll stop? Have they faced consequences for the mass theft of copyrighted data? You can't steal or profit off of that data, but it's fine for them for whatever reason. I guess because they're a force for good in the world and are pushing humanity forward eh?

> why do you think they'll stop

Because the sources are now polluted with AI. That's at least one reason they stop scraping.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#363
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put what you recall on paper, turn it into a screenplay. Let me know how quickly you get sued.

One could argue most screenplays are derivative.

Hollywood has extraordinarily well-defined controls for keeping things legal and everyone in the chain compensated. Plus a separate Oscars category for it.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#364
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incredibly naive view of intellectual property. If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things. Do you think any of your favorite movies and TV shows ever get made without copyright protections? Of course not, because money needs to change hands for those things to be funded.

> If you cannot own things you create, there is little incentive to create and share those things How do you explain the creative works of writing, music, and art that existed in the millennia of human history between the Mesopotamians and the Enlightenment era?

Copying was prohibitively expensive.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#365
post #229
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did the last original thought happen then? Clearly thoughts must have been original at some point, or there wouldn't be any at all

Did those original thoughts not build upon all the original thoughts that came before them?

Sure they build upon them, you still need to add your 1% of original insight. There was a first person to realise that you could make fire by rubbing two sticks together.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#366
post #122

You guys have fun arguing. I'm gonna be building cool stuff.

Still waiting for this massive wave of cool stuff.

It's just hobby projects with larger scope.

I can see from a lot of replies the "cool" threshold is undefined, but here goes:

For myself it let me finish a project I started a year ago for measuring how much home energy efficiency upgrades will reduce my AC usage. I bought a pile of Raspberry Pi Picos and turned them mostly into temperature reading devices, but also one that can detect when my AC turns on.

So I can record how often my AC runs and I can record the temperature at various points around the house, which lets me compare like-for-like before-and-after.

The easy but unrealistic way to accomplish what I want is to use Python. It gives me access to a file system, a shell, and all sorts of other niceties. But I wanted to run these on two AA batteries and based upon my measurements they would last about 2 weeks. I tested using C instead and they should last 4 months. That's long enough for my use case. There's enough flash storage for that time period too.

However this means I need to write all the utilities for configuring the Picos myself. There's all sorts of annoying things such as having to set the clock (picos lose it anytime they lose power), having to write directly to flash memory (no operating system), having to write a utility for exporting that data from flash memory, and so on.

And AI coding let me burn through a pile of code I knew how to write but didn't care to spend my weekends doing so.

The pattern is the same for my friends who are software devs. And yeah, you're probably never going to see any of it, but that's not why they're making it, they don't want the maintenance burden.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#367
post #72
post #27

The broader problem of original sources not being given credit in a way that rewards them remains. Websites owners are paying to host their content so that spiders can come and crawl them and index it into the AI and then if they’re lucky, they might get a citation, but otherwise there’s very little reward for being a provider of content. And of course, this is something that’s getting worse and worse. Why look at a…

I’ve been thinking of a proof-of-work scheme for accessing content where you effectively need to mine some crypto for the author, but, this idea might not fly today

This is already a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis_(software)

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#368
post #171

if theres just one good thing coming out of ai its breaking copyright law forever. no one should be able to "own" ideas. royalties for commercial use is another thing and i support it but what we know as (non commercial) piracy and unlicensed fan art should be 100% legal

Can we do that for Medical field? Like if we know formulation of drug then drug (+ any smaller modification - through AI) could be new formulation. That will break current Medical patent system.

This is how the drug industry already works. I don’t think there’s any evidence “AI” (LLM) is capable of producing valid drug modifications.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this sentiment. But as a community, this is hated because it impacts people's wages. It's the negative short term outlook of something that may be positive long term

It's not hated because it impacts people's wages, although that perhaps factors into the hate. It's hated because AI is not a public good. The LLMS today are owned by megacorporations who harvested a public good for private gain. This is not some altruistic entity striving for the betterment of humankind. Practically nothing that comes out of the techbro culture is. This is pure and simple greed and the chances that…

Oh please! If everyone could keep their older jobs as is + allowed to use LLMs, everyone would be gushing about how beneficial it is, and how they are now free to pursue other things.

All the other reasons are rationalizations. The fact that it's hitting wages is what's causing the doomerism (and boosterism).

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#370
post #58
post #27

The broader problem of original sources not being given credit in a way that rewards them remains. Websites owners are paying to host their content so that spiders can come and crawl them and index it into the AI and then if they’re lucky, they might get a citation, but otherwise there’s very little reward for being a provider of content. And of course, this is something that’s getting worse and worse. Why look at a…

About a year ago OpenAI crawled and go DDOS level the company I work. Even despite the robots.txt not allowing it, and despite some recaptcha we could assemble in time. We found our data in the outputs of their models but who can do anything about it...

Why hasn't your company sued OpenAI and try to argue they're violating the computer abuse and fraud act? Would it really be impossible to argue this?

Unauthorized access, system damage, and maybe even extortion all apply here.

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