Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Things are about to get worse for generative AI

garymarcus.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 769 posts

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#371

Post by RandomLensman »

tsumnia wrote: post #354
madamelic wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright should be the problem of the person using the works and not the problem of the AI generating it. Unless Nintendo plans on busting down the doors of every person who tries to draw Mario or preventing little Timmy from making a parody of Coca-Cola, making it where AI cannot generated copyrighted works is insane imo. Those brands should be proud to be such a big part of the cultural fabric that it is difficult…

When I cover generative AI in my Ethics in AI lecture, one of few soapbox opinions I give is that GenAI is doing essentially what people do - copy others. Picasso has a quote about "Good Artists copy, Great Artists steal", which doesn't mean try to pass Lario and Muigi off as your own, but rather that great artists are able to take aspects from other works (also called 'inspiration') without being caught. My personal…

Irrespective of the current legal situation, there is no reason to regulate machines the same way as humans (and it is generally not what happens).

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#372

Post by pixl97 »

jcgrillo wrote: post #239
samus wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wiretapping vast amounts of data on the internet is quite cool, but actually sifting through all that data is the really difficult part. Right now intelligence services are probably looking at lots of false positives and lots of dots they can't connect because the evidence is just too dispersed for a human or a current-generation system to make sense. LLMs could enable them to make the analysis more targeted and effe…

> LLMs could enable them to make the analysis more targeted and effective. How? I'm not trying to be combative, I genuinely am curious if you have an idea how these things could be usefully applied to that problem. In my experience working in the information security space, approximate techniques (neural nets, etc.) haven't gotten much traction. Deterministic detection rules are how we approach the problem of finding…

I guess my next question is how many needles do you find and how sharp are they? Detection rules would filter out most of the noise, then something like an LLM would do a post filter for intent analysis to rank relative risks for human intelligence to look at.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#373

Post by edgyquant »

block_dagger wrote: post #176
dingnuts wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

ChatGPT is not an intelligent entity? What’s been comprehending and rewriting all my crappy code for several months? An auto-complete? There’s obviously emergent behavior there that is actually defined by the maker and most users as “intelligence.” Edit: typo

It’s not a human and so the entire argument comparing it to one is moot. It’s a program on a machine and doesn’t have rights, this anti-human way of thinking is seriously fucking scary.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#374

Post by kenmacd »

WhiteNoiz3 wrote: post #281

As I understood it, the legal precedent for generative AI is the same one that allows google to scrape websites in order to index them for search for the common good. Google also can display cached versions of websites which is the original content of those sites. No one is going to say that google is copyright infringement just because it is showing content from other websites verbatim. So I think this is a weak arg…

> I think generative AI should be able to provide links to similar source material in the training data

Except these aren't databases, so that's generally not possible, in the same way that it's not possible for your provide links to the source material it took to write your reply. How much learning led to the weights on your neurons that allowed you to generate that? Where did you learn about using italics and it's effect on how the words would be interpreted? Where did you learn the tone that would be appropriate in this particular forum?

> People should be able to opt out of having their content used for training

Okay... but then, if I write a book should I be able to opt out of you being allowed to read it? What conditions should I be able to put on who can read my work? Religion? Skin colour? People that aren't good at memorizing?

Hopefully the idea of putting limits on who can acquire knowledge sounds absurd to you. Why are those same limits okay if they're on 'what' rather than 'who'?

> AI companies are just trying to avoid lawsuits by keeping it secret

Which has created a barrier to further research. Instead of me and Joe being able to collaborate on research and papers using the same datasets, we now hide our training data lest the luddites come to smash the machines because learning is only okay if not done too well.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#375

Post by mistermann »

Sheeplator wrote: post #210
mensetmanusman wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are clearly a type of lower level intelligence. Intelligence does not require consciousness.

The only thing that I would say is "clear" is that LLMs are big collections of statistical data on how we use language. That does not cross my threshold for "intelligence".

> That does not cross my threshold for "intelligence".

You have your own individual threshold for what "is" intelligence? Holy cow, imagine if each other agent had their own also, but spoke as if they had a common one...that sure wouldn't be a very intelligent way to run a simulation, imagine the unrealized confusion and delusion that could result if that became a cultural convention!

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#377

Post by gumballindie »

ultrablack wrote: post #376

We are all trained on copyrighted input. That is not a problem. What is a problem is if you reproduce it and try to claim copyright for that. If someone wants to create their own image of Mario in an AI, so what?

We are not machines. The argument that procedural text and image generators are similar to us is ridiculous. The issue is not whether people can generate images. The issue is ai companies stealing content and reselling it. That needs to stop.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#378

Post by croemer »

nonameiguess wrote: post #275
ben_w wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 your case it's (Navy) PR messaging which we will all agree is usually exaggerated. What was the consensus opinion?

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#379

Post by stale2002 »

schneems wrote: post #370
tsumnia wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I cover generative AI in my Ethics in AI lecture, one of few soapbox opinions I give is that GenAI is doing essentially what people do - copy others. Picasso has a quote about "Good Artists copy, Great Artists steal", which doesn't mean try to pass Lario and Muigi off as your own, but rather that great artists are able to take aspects from other works (also called 'inspiration') without being caught. My personal…

Rounding up a transaction and taking the leftovers wouldn’t be a crime worthy of the FBI for one transaction but it would be for a million or a billion. Scale matters and impact matters. If you’re making an ethical argument “it’s okay because it’s already happening to a lesser degree somewhere else” isn’t the flex you think it is. If you’re talking ethics, talk about impact. Who does it help the most who does it hurt…

> “it’s okay because it’s already happening to a lesser degree somewhere else” isn’t the flex you think it is.

It actually is.

It shows that we as a society are completely OK with this, and nobody is complaining about a very standard and common thing that all artists do.

It shows that the outrage is fake, and people don't actually care about the issue.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#380

Post by edgyquant »

ben_w wrote: post #229
SoftTalker wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would paraphrase one of Clarke's laws and say that "Any sufficiently advanced text generator is indistinguishable from an intelligent entity." Just because a computer program's output is remarkably good does not mean there is any emergent intelligence, any more than a technology we don't understand means there is magic.

The reverse can also be true, with John Keats' agreeing with Charles Lamb that Newton "had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia_(poem) If we should ever fully understand how our own minds work, will we hold machines in higher esteem, or ourselves in lower?

Any biology or physics that suggests humans are just a pattern recognizer will be discarded as us being a conscious being is the only thing every human knows to be 100% true.
Post reply on HN