Live data from Hacker News

Things are about to get worse for generative AI

garymarcus.substack.com

151–160 of 769 posts

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#151
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious: Have you seen indications that major militaries and politicians believe AGI , rather than special purpose ML for military purposes, is important for national security? I'm really not sure whether this is true, or whether military and political leaders think it's true.

There is a difference between sharing the tech hype, and risk management. Why would our political and military leadership not be interested in this sort of tech in the modern world? If it doesn’t work out, then it doesn’t work out, but if it does, then they’ll want in on it. Aside from that there is the mass surveillance angle on it. We recently had a nice scandal of sorts here in Denmark where the chief of our secre…

I'm sure they're interested in it, but I'm uncertain that they view it as a promising and critical enough capability to push for a higher priority when weighed against other interests.

For instance, neither of your examples - surveillance or automated drones - has anything to do with AGI. They don't need LLMs to do mass digital surveillance; they already do that and were doing it for decades before LLMs were a twinkle in anyone's eye. Sure, they'll try to tap into the user data generated by chatgpt etc. (and likely succeed), but that's not a different capability than what they're already doing. And automating drones - which, by the way, this is not future technology as you seem to imply, it's here today - is a special purpose ML system, that maybe benefits from incorporating an LLM somewhere, but certainly isn't pinging the chatgpt api!

But sure, you're exactly right at the end, I have no idea whether they see other angles on this that are new and promising. That's why I asked the question, I'm very curious whether there are any real indications thus far that militaries think the big public LLM models will be useful enough to them that they'll want to put a thumb on the scale to favor the companies running them over the companies that make their bucks on copyrighted content.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to be hard to remove every single "shorthand descriptions of well-known entities" or other prompts that can be used to generate copyrighted or trademarked content. Sure, if you're not deliberately trying to generate infringing content, you can probably remove or discard those results, the trouble is the people who will try to trick the AI to generate this content, blocking those people is going to be impos…

I don't understand why some peoole thinks any infringing content can be singled out and removed. Aren't LLMs giant coefficient matrices like, a punched out croissant dough, made of all training data plyed over? How can you say you can remove one specific ply out of dough and declare that ever potential effect that the offending ply had created is now completely removed?

I’m no LLM expert but I think there is a distinction to be made between the LLM dataset and the output it gives to the user. What you’re suggesting is that it’s difficult to remove something from the dataset, which may be the case. But that doesn’t mean the user will necessarily be able to access it.

My guess is that this is much easier to attack from the user end.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#153

Am I the only one believing that copyright has long outlived its usefulness? After all, copyright is not some natural law or mathematical consequence, but rather a social convention that made sense in the era of the printing press.

Copyright in its current form yes.

But the concept and closer to the original (creators lifetime + x years or some such) seems still very valuable.

Copyright is still the bedrock of how many tech software business actually can make money.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If a child is instructed to read a copyrighted work at school, which later becomes a factor in his own derivative works, he won't be in breach of copyright. Why should other intelligent entities be prevented from reading copyrighted works and gaining whatever there is to gain from those works the way any human might?

thats irrelevant since an LLM is not an intelligent entity. Whatever you're arguing about is fiction.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#155
post #124

These don't seem all that difficult to fix to me. Most of the examples are not really generic, but are shorthand descriptions of well-known entities. "Video game plumber" is practically synonymous with "Mario" and anyone that has the slightest familiarity with the character knows this. Likewise, how difficult is it to just use descriptive tools to describe Mario-like images [1] and then remove these results from anyo…

It seems like a somewhat dystopian thing to fix. Imagine a scenario where Photoshop would scan images you uploaded for copyright material and then refuse to work if it determined image contained any copyrighted material or characters (even if it was just a fan drawing you did). This reminds me of the early days of the internet where people wanted to remove free fanfiction for violations of copyright laws. Trying to a…

It is dystopian, and it already exists, e.g. printers refusing to print anything that looks sufficiently like money.

Like many things, I suspect this will end up getting worse before there's a chance for it to get better.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#156
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah, I forgot artists are spiritual creatures who don't have to eat. It certainly isn't the only reason to create but a necessary condition to actually be a professional artist, no ?

Reread my comment again. If your __only__ motivation is money, you will have a problem. I agree it’s necessary to pay artists - but we don’t need copyright for that! There are many tried and proven alternatives.

>There are many tried and proven alternatives.

Other than patronage, what is there?

Also, patronage is garbage, in my opinion. It ensures artists are exclusively either already wealthy, or well connected. It also helps ensure that the wealthy are most often represented in the art created; for some reason this seems like a bad idea to me.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#157
post #148

I feel like the outcome is obvious, there will be a finite list of IPs who's owners have enough money to actually sue, which will get filtered out of the output of publicly available models. They will just slap a detector model on the end of the generator to filter them out. Private models will not care, nor will things change for IP owners with lesser power.

Many small owners together can bring a class action though

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#158

If any of those results would be deemed infringing we can bid farewell to all fanart ever. Likewise, to all fanfiction. Or any original work that was merely heavily inspired by previous works. Like a lot of modern fantasy is basically Tolkien fan fiction. Or is Gandalf close enough to Merlin to claim prior art that is in public domain?

It's fair use, whereas generative AI doesn't satisfy the same criteria. From https://www.ogcsolutions.com/is-fan-art-copyright-infringeme... :

For fan art to fall under the fair use exception, it must meet all four of the following criteria:

It must be transformative, meaning it adds something new and different to the original work.

It can’t be used for commercial purposes.

It must not negatively impact the market for the original work.

And finally, it must be created for a limited and non-exclusive audience.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If a child is instructed to read a copyrighted work at school, which later becomes a factor in his own derivative works, he won't be in breach of copyright. Why should other intelligent entities be prevented from reading copyrighted works and gaining whatever there is to gain from those works the way any human might?

A child isn't a computer program, and no amount of anthropomorphizing will ever make them so.

Especially ChatGPT and other LLMs, they're not even close to being AGI or an "intelligent entity" as you put it, despite what all the AI-bro hype and marketing would like everyone else to believe.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#160
post #148

I feel like the outcome is obvious, there will be a finite list of IPs who's owners have enough money to actually sue, which will get filtered out of the output of publicly available models. They will just slap a detector model on the end of the generator to filter them out. Private models will not care, nor will things change for IP owners with lesser power.

That seems unlikely, unless they settle out of court. And why would the NYT settle like that without receiving a billion?

Courts are likely to make generally binding decisions.

Post reply on HN