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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

#131

Post by danielbln »

palata wrote: post #79
harshreality wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fair use" only applies to instances of copying / redistributing . The hint is in the name: copy -right. There's a notion, which seems to have taken off among creators who are paranoid about AI eating their livelihoods (which it might eat a chunk of) that copyright prevents people from doing anything with works they [legally] acquired other than personally read, listen, or watch it. That's not how copyright, as it ha…

Say I make a tool where you can enter the title of a book, and get the full text of the book without paying for it. I assume we all agree that would be illegal, right? Now say that instead of distributing that tool as an executable , I distributed it as a library . It would contain all the same books as the illegal executable above, but some developers would need to write an actual executable that would use the libra…

One can use Photoshop to create heinous things which would be highly illegal to sell, or even show. Should we ban Photoshop? I think we agree, that no, that would be silly.

Let's assume I train a model on public domain texts only, zero copyrighted material has gone into it. Yet, technically and also practically, the model would have the ability to create illegal, copyright infringing content, given the right input. Should distribution of such a model be illegal? I think not.

Also, let's keep in mind that these models are not archives, that contain the original data verbatim. They are effectively lossy compression algorithms, that capture the essence. Some models are a few tens of GB in size, yet have been trained on TB worth of data, so clearly a significant data loss has occurred, so it's a bad analogy to your "keep a bunch of books as in a library" example.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#132

Post by avgcorrection »

LikelyABurner wrote: post #40
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's silly. Humans review books all the time, using very similar words. Where's the outrage over that? This is manufactured, stretched, overhyped objections. I believe it's all as the OP suggests, because the word AI is in there. Not because anything illegal or immoral is going on. In fact it's a terribly useful tool, and once the mob cools off it'll likely return.

You are exactly modeling the chauvinistic Silicon Valley attitude that is causing the outrage in the general population to begin with. “Our algorithms are pretty much the same as human art criticism, so put down the pitchforks you unenlightened scum” is up there with telling them to eat (a Stable Diffusion generated picture of) cake.

Or AI-generated Soylent.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#133

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#134

Post by TimPC »

palata wrote: post #121
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the accusation, and it was misplaced here. So we agree, this is a smear campaign in this case, not a sensible reaction to a reasonable application of machine algorithms. The idea that counting adverbs is steal their work to the point they won't want to publish anymore is clearly FUD. As my remark made clear.

> The idea that counting adverbs is steal their work to the point they won't want to publish anymore is clearly FUD. I did not mean that, I am genuinely not sure if you rephrased my point to make it sound wrong or if you missed it. My point was that, IMO, it does not matter to the other whether counting adverbs is stealing their work or not. Probably if you counted them manually they would be fine (and most likely th…

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.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#135

Post by torginus »

LikelyABurner wrote: post #3

I’m with the artists on this one. Our obsession with converting everything into input for an algorithm that spits out an ill-defined number (what the hell is “vividness”?) needs to stop. We already tried this with human communication and gave birth to the dystopian nightmare that is social media, why keep repeating our mistakes?

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 find more like it would be an absolute godsend for connecting authors with people who would be interested in their works, resulting in much more potential sales for them.

I can't count how many times have I discovered an absolutely great book on Amazon with like 50 reviews accidentally, as well as other, objectively less recommendable books that have nevertheless made an impression on me.

Discovering these books is sort of a hobby of mine, and is the exact kind of activity an LLM would be a great help with.

Going further, if there was an LLM that could be asked for book recommendations for your particular tastes, it could also identify markets for books not yet written, and would give a hint to authors on what sort of books to write to find an audience.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#136

Post by mardifoufs »

LikelyABurner wrote: post #40
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's silly. Humans review books all the time, using very similar words. Where's the outrage over that? This is manufactured, stretched, overhyped objections. I believe it's all as the OP suggests, because the word AI is in there. Not because anything illegal or immoral is going on. In fact it's a terribly useful tool, and once the mob cools off it'll likely return.

You are exactly modeling the chauvinistic Silicon Valley attitude that is causing the outrage in the general population to begin with. “Our algorithms are pretty much the same as human art criticism, so put down the pitchforks you unenlightened scum” is up there with telling them to eat (a Stable Diffusion generated picture of) cake.

There's no outrage in the general population. Just of a minority that is just as small as silicon valley.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#137

Post by vouaobrasil »

danielbln wrote: post #125
vouaobrasil wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you are right, and I advocate the following: a detailed look at each of these technologies. However, for practical purposes, a direct definition that encompasses every situation is not necessary, but can evolve. For now, I think we do not need a precise definition and we can start with the following: AI such as ChatGPT, LLMs, image generation tools like DALL-E and ohters, should be restricted. As for YouTube's a…

Banning automation technology because it could put workers out of business.. isn't that the textbook definition of a luddite? Also, are you saying no creative people are using these technologies? It's not all "enter 1 prompt, get image, call it a day", they are tools that can be and often are part of complex chain. Creatives that don't want to use these tools are probably going to be superseded by creatives who do. W…

I am a luddite. What's wrong with that? I don't believe that all technology is bad, but that AI has reached a stage sufficient so that the order of magnitude of the changes it can affect are too damaging for humanity. I do believe that AI has become advanced enough to pose such a risk to us.

Some creative people are using these technologies, and while it is quite human guided NOW, at some point, the guidance that humans put into it will lessen. That's not to say that AI will ever produce a work like Dostoevsky --- maybe it won't, but it WILL be enough to eliminate most creative jobs, and reduce them to being at most being supervised by people who don't have much of a passion for creative works. And that's a shame, because it will remove the passion of creativity from society.

Generative fill: I don't use it, and that's part of my personal ban. It goes too far. I only use traditionl editing techniques in my photography that works with basically what is there.

Yes, you can say that photography has always been about manipulation, but basically, I have a personal line that I believe I can define sufficiently well, that is far behind the line of AI.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#138

Post by subroutine »

palata wrote: post #79
harshreality wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fair use" only applies to instances of copying / redistributing . The hint is in the name: copy -right. There's a notion, which seems to have taken off among creators who are paranoid about AI eating their livelihoods (which it might eat a chunk of) that copyright prevents people from doing anything with works they [legally] acquired other than personally read, listen, or watch it. That's not how copyright, as it ha…

Say I make a tool where you can enter the title of a book, and get the full text of the book without paying for it. I assume we all agree that would be illegal, right? Now say that instead of distributing that tool as an executable , I distributed it as a library . It would contain all the same books as the illegal executable above, but some developers would need to write an actual executable that would use the libra…

Google Books already does exactly this. It has a library of the full text of millions of books. Users can search for a passage of text and google will display the paragraph where the passage is found.

https://books.google.com

example:

https://i.ibb.co/DCxJpHN/IMG-3143.jpg

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#139

Post by [deleted] »

macNchz wrote: post #93
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…

> The article itself is clueless… it doesn’t engage authors’ concerns at all, and just portrays authors as stoopid AI-fearful luddites. Going off of some of the tweets about this that initially whipped up the outrage about this…it’s not like they were making a nuanced case about their concerns, they were basically just stomping their feet and shouting.

[deleted]

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#140

Post by jmull »

macNchz wrote: post #93
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…

> The article itself is clueless… it doesn’t engage authors’ concerns at all, and just portrays authors as stoopid AI-fearful luddites. Going off of some of the tweets about this that initially whipped up the outrage about this…it’s not like they were making a nuanced case about their concerns, they were basically just stomping their feet and shouting.

That's twitter generally.

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

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