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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

#191

Post by palata »

mythhabit wrote: post #168
palata wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either you completely missed my point, or you genuinely believe that my first executable is legal. Which one is it?

I do not buy the premisses. Your example states that it can provide the full text of any book. An LLM cannot do that. They can produce something in the same style and setting. When an actual human author mimics other writers styles, it is not illegal, why exactly should it be illegal for an author to use an LLM to do it?

> When an actual human author mimics other writers styles, it is not illegal, why exactly should it be illegal for an author to use an LLM to do it?

There is a fundamental difference of scale. Say I write a blog post about some technical thing I know. You read it, learn from it (and other sources), and then you write your own blog post with your understanding. You may link to my post (if you believe it is heavily inspired from there), or not. But reading my post, understanding the material to the point where you can write about it took time. If you are so fast that you can produce more posts than I do, and your posts are the same quality, then suddenly you become a better blogger than me.

An LLM can automate that. With an LLM, you as a blogger don't have to learn from my post, you can just have it generate the post (you don't even need to read it). In that case, you have put absolutely zero effort learning about the topic, you just had some algorithm copy-paste-and-modify my post. Don't you think that if you publish a blog post that you haven't even read yourself, probably it comes from material written by somebody else at some point?

In any case it is very different. Once a human does it, the other time a machine does it. I don't understand why engineers think we can just transfer concepts between both. You as a human have rights (maybe you can vote), but your LLM cannot. Why couldn't an LLM vote if humans vote? Precisely because it is different, and it creates new problems.

The fact that LLMs can automatically (and at scale) launder copyrighted material is a new problem. Therefore we need to think about that, and to think about whether or not this should be legal.

The day people stop reading my blog and instead use ChatGPT (which is trained using, among the ton of other copyrighted material, my blog), and as a result nobody reads my blog directly anymore, I can assure you that I will stop writing. If 99% of books are written by ChatGPT instead of actual authors, but based on books from actual authors, in such a way that the readers don't really make a difference and therefore go with ChatGPT (because it's cheaper), what do you think writers will do? If they can't live from writing books (because ChatGPT does not buy their books, and people now pay ChatGPT instead of buying the books), then they will just stop writing.

It is a risk that needs to be considered. And it's certainly not an engineering question.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#192

Post by palata »

subroutine wrote: post #174
harshreality wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few sentences? For most books I've seen, it's a few pages. Google will block you from retrieving more pages from the same book eventually. Using a VPN and a different account may get around one limit, but I experimented with multiple VPNs and browsers once, and although I was able to get a majority of a book's pages, after that google stopped showing me full previews of any of the remaining pages no matter where th…

It shows you a few pages if you are previewing the book (i.e. "look inside"). But if you are using search, it will show you where your search query shows up in the book, no matter what page the search query is found. This means you could theoretically search a book sentence by sentence, and it will eventually have shown you the entire book. I'm not claiming this is an efficient or practical way to game the system and…

Sure. I really did not mean that specifically for Prosecraft. But the article questions why authors are attacking Prosecraft "because it does no harm". My answer is that authors don't (and can't, really) make the difference in a per-case basis.

At this point what they see is that LLMs trained on their copyrighted material are able to generate similar material thanks to their copyrighted material that was used in the training (that is important!), and they see that they won't get paid for that. Of course they are scared, and they should be. And of course they will now start attacking everything that looks like it is using their copyrighted material as training data.

I really don't get why the engineering world does not get this: LLMs have the potential to ruin people's jobs, it is not clear at all that this is legit (IMO LLMs could not do it without the copyrighted material they used for training, therefore they are derivatives of the original work), and those people are rightfully scared.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#194

Post by palata »

skjoldr wrote: post #189
palata wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that I don't understand whether AI is generative or not? What I said was that for artists who are complaining about their copyright being abused , it does not matter. 10 years ago they were not complaining, because AIs looking like ChatGPT (to users who see it as a black box) did not exist (or were not remotely as powerful). And I understand that. It is not their job to learn how the black box wo…

> It is not their job to learn how the black box works If you have not learned the basics of how something works, you have no right for your opinion on it to be considered valid. Period. Invalid opinions do harm to democracy and endanger our way of life.

> you have no right for your opinion on it to be considered valid. Period.

That is so wrong it is actually dangerous. Do I need to understand how a nuclear bomb works for my opinion on it to be considered valid? Obviously not. I only need to understand the consequences of it. It does not matter at all how it works, if I am against the fact that it will kill a whole lot of people.

> Invalid opinions do harm to democracy and endanger our way of life.

And engineers have done much, much more to endanger most living animals (including humans) than authors and artists: technology is the reason for the mass extinction we are currently living, and the problems that are coming with climate change. Maybe it's important to start thinking about the consequences of what you do, not only the technicalities of how you do it. And maybe it's high time you start listening to people who are able to think about the consequences of what you do (maybe they understand that better than you do, ever thought of that?), even if they don't know how to do it.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#195

Post by wokwokwok »

paulluuk wrote: post #128
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…

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 violate any laws...

...why would you do it? Why would you post about doing it?

Come on, that's literally being a selfish dick; spitting in people's faces and waving a 'too bad, you can't sue me' flag.

There are so many things, so many mannnny things that you could work on, why would you choose to pick something that you knew would upset people and you knew you wouldn't get permission to do if you asked?

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#196

Post by subroutine »

palata wrote: post #192
subroutine wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shows you a few pages if you are previewing the book (i.e. "look inside"). But if you are using search, it will show you where your search query shows up in the book, no matter what page the search query is found. This means you could theoretically search a book sentence by sentence, and it will eventually have shown you the entire book. I'm not claiming this is an efficient or practical way to game the system and…

Sure. I really did not mean that specifically for Prosecraft. But the article questions why authors are attacking Prosecraft "because it does no harm". My answer is that authors don't (and can't, really) make the difference in a per-case basis. At this point what they see is that LLMs trained on their copyrighted material are able to generate similar material thanks to their copyrighted material that was used in the…

Why didn't you just say that, instead of posing a hypothetical about software that may itself contain full book text which can be used to display (in this case fair-use) passages to end users? lol

I think the disconnect between your point of view and mine is that I see "training an LLM on copyrighted text" the same as a person reading copyrighted text, which is perfectly legal. And I see violating copyright as a person or LLM reproducing copyrighted work (illegal). But using other works as inspiration for something novel shouldn't be considered illegal, whether a person or LLM produced the work. I would even be fine with literature being treated more like music, where reproducing the essence of a piece of work (i.e. doesn't have to be a word for word reproduction) is considered a violation. But if the LLM creates something completely new, how is that a derivative work / infringement?

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#197

Post by nottorp »

yboris wrote: post #190
nottorp wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would that, in your opinion, "suck the 'soul' out of a painting"? Out of the analyzed painting, no. > A tool to provide deep insight into something that would be very challenging to quantify personally. Yeah, and will prevent the would be creator from developing a personal style. No matter what medium they create with.

Does an artist not see thousands of artworks as they develop their style? Do artists not experiment with hundreds of styles as they hone in on something they want to be theirs? Is the internet, a tool that lets them see even more artworks, preventing creators from developing their personal style? As I understand it, we've seen an explosion of different dancing styles as various apps let users share their craft with o…

You're right, but there's a large difference between your brain doing the analysis and a template or computer wizard telling you what to "create".

[Link picked at random] https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/three-act-structure/

Do you really think this did wonders for movie originality?

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#198

Post by andybak »

Nullabillity wrote: post #14
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?

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.

> Honestly, this is the really offensive part of the article.

I would argue that "Offensive" is either hyperbolic or you've used the wrong word.

> the idea that it's, in any way, shape, or form, useful is bafflingly laughable.

I don't know if it's useful because I never tried it. I might harbour my doubts but I'd like to find out. This is how I approach new things.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#200

Post by sampo »

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-prosecraft-io-37e189797...

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