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Things are about to get worse for generative AI

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#271

Post by numpad0 »

pointlessone wrote: post #73

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?

Fanfictions are controlled by unspoken common sense rules and protected by copyright laws. It's almost weird to hear fan content world being seen as a wild west, it feels like listening to a caveman description of an Apple Store. No they're not living there, they're - have you ever used currency? The round medals that people keep in pockets and trays?

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#272

Post by FridgeSeal »

2716057 wrote: post #244
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the child / author then regurgitates entire paragraphs or sections verbatim in his own works and someone notices, you bet there will be a plagiarism lawsuit coming his way.

Especially true if that child or its mother has a huge market capitalization, large profit margins, highly-paid employees and shareholders eager to reap some more $$. If the public starts to see LLMs as highly sophisticated copyright laundromats it would most likely hamper further investment & development in that field.

> Especially true if that child or its mother has a huge market capitalization, large profit margins, highly-paid employees and shareholders eager to reap some more $$.

This is the bit I don’t get from the “feed everything to machine” LLM-maximalists. Do they think courts don’t take context into account, do they think all actions happen in a vacuum and that they can just skip along and ignore laws at their pleasure because “tee hee it’s totally definitely fair use bro, I’m totally an academic researcher-pinky promise”.

LLM bros ought to stop and have a think before they poison their own well, assuming they haven’t already done so.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#273

Post by andy99 »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #167
squidbeak wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If the child / author then regurgitates entire paragraphs or sections verbatim in his own works and someone notices, you bet there will be a plagiarism lawsuit coming his way.

Sure. But if the child has that capability, it doesn't automatically make them a walking copyright violation. "Intelligence", even the current version of AI, entails knowing about stuff, including being able to recite. That doesn't mean intelligence's existence violates copyright. If a person used AI to make a copyright violating work, that's a different story, just like if they used their own innate intelligence to do so.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#274

Post by lewhoo »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #90
rco8786 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

creation competition. I agree with your premise but the chess analogy falls flat. We might, legitimately, see an enormous dropoff in people creating original works of literary, musical, and visual art (without AI).

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.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#275

Post by nonameiguess »

ben_w wrote: post #166
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #111

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…

> Something that is purely speculative, undefined, and has been promised in the near future for 50+ years. "Undefined", although not literally, in practice definitely: each letter of that initialism means a different thing to different people. To that extent, I'll even grant "speculative" despite many of those meanings being demonstrably met by us humans. But as someone who (unfortunately) has just turned 40: who was…

> But as someone who (unfortunately) has just turned 40: who was it that was promising AGI "in the near future" for more than my entire lifetime? Including the second AI winter? Because even the biggest timeline-optimists I can remember (Kurzweil and Yudkowsky), who very few cared to listen to, put things more than 20 years ahead of when they were writing. (And yes, Yudkowsky was definitely wrong about a singularity in 2021, though as you say AGI is undefined I think if someone in 1996 had seen ChatGPT they'd have said "yes, this is AGI" despite its flaws).

You won't be able to read this without a subscription and I can't figure out how to find an archive link to something published in 1958: https://www.nytimes.com/1958/07/08/archives/new-navy-device-.... The important quote, however, is:

> The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence. Later perceptrons will be able to recognize people and call out their names and instantly translate speech in one language to speech and writing in another language, it was predicted.

They were talking about the very first perceptron, a hardware implementation funded by the Navy and built by a team led by Frank Rosenblatt, one of the earlier evangelists of neural nets, in 1957. The terminology "AGI" hadn't come into use yet that I'm aware of, as "AI" in itself meant the same thing back then, but in order to be able to call inferior, more limited software capabilities "AI" for marketing purposes, we had to invent "AGI" as the stronger concept. I'm guessing they expected it to happen sooner than 75 years later, though.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#276

Post by FridgeSeal »

Havoc wrote: 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…

You’re right, we should all just give up at the first hurdle, because “they’ve” already gotten away with it, hell, let’s just feed our children to the machine and elect openAI as the rulers of the world, after all, they’ve already succeeded, so we should just give up entirely. Definitely a good attitude to take.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#277

Post by marckrn »

mypastself wrote: post #169
marckrn wrote: post #77

I might be a bit idealistic, but I've always believed that the core purpose of art and publishing should be to influence culture and society, not just to make a heap of money. That's why I feel original work needs its protection, but it should enter the public domain much sooner to fuel creativity and inspiration. We should be thinking in terms of a few years for this transition, not decades.

The claim that art’s core purpose is societal impact seems to be a common refrain in today’s media, and I completely disagree. Its principal purpose is provoking emotion in the individual. This idea of art teaching you a lesson is likely why there’s so much ham-fisted “activist” fiction anowadays.

I agree, but by extension of provoking emotion it CAN change society, but it doesn't have to - wether on purpose or not.

The point I was trying to make was that occupying mindspace, providing inspiration, being culturally influencal etc. are idealistic, non-monitary rewards that should be part of the equation when discussing alleged IP-theft, remixing, attribution and so on.

I'm not saying their shouldn't be any rules. All I'm saying is that there should be a discussion of how we want to handle these things going forward. This train ain't stopping.

Maybe your avg DeviantArt painter needs more IP-protection and -rights than Damien Hurst? Maybe an unknown, independent blogger doing important original research should be attributed more prominently than an article by The Times? Idk.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#278

Post by asylteltine »

clbrmbr wrote: post #147

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.

And how are you supposed to make money from something you invent? Let’s say you make a hit video game. Without copyright people can pirate your game, steal the art, make unauthorized derivative works, etc. it’s just theft.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#280

Post by ponorin »

this is exactly what i predicted: the current generative ai is basically rewarded based on how much it convinces people to be a real thing. it very much has the ability to copy verbatim unlike how most human memories work. without fundamental shift in the methodology of machine learning the fault can only be hidden, not solved. a cat and mouse game where one cat has to fight tens of thousands of mouse. it's also very telling how the discussion quickly turns into "maybe society needs to adapt" when so called technological innovation is involved. copyright problem should be solved for artists, not for datacentres. for now it's a handful of famous IPs, but what's stopping from generative ai to snatch some random indie artist's property and copying it ad infinitum?
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