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AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

axelk.ee

381–390 of 783 posts

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#381
post #169

This is really not so clear cut as "fair use" might cover 99% of all data scrapping; you are not reproducing the originals just use them to estimate probabilistic distribution of tokens in pre-training. You are never going to get the exact book word-for-word using LLMs.

> You are never going to get the exact book word-for-word using LLMs

You could say the same about MP3 encoders but I don't think that would convince any judge

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#382
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in school, writing "in my own words" was never an excuse to not cite a source. It was actually something that took me a little while to understand, it's the source of the information that needs to be cited, and that's not limited to literal quotations of someone else's writing.

That's more an argument for why you can't just use LLMs as a source of truth. Conveniently, LLMs like ChatGPT do often cite their sources, especially if you prompt them to.

Maybe a nit: LLMs do not and cannot cite their sources (at least scraped sources for the purpose of training)

It’s kind of the harness that is doing the citing (or providing the context for the model to).

But an LLM sans search can reproduce some copyrighted work with minor variations and there’s no way to know exactly where it came from.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worthwhile ones would still be written. Even if they are not enjoyable. The dissemination of ideas from an activist perspective is uninhibitable

> The worthwhile ones would still be written. Citation needed, as well as your precise definition of "worthwhile". > Even if they are not enjoyable. Huh? > The dissemination of ideas from an activist perspective is uninhabitable Yes, I understand that anti-copyright activists want to abolish copyright.

Farenheit 451 is a book with the same theme.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#384
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Those of us who create for creation's sake need no other reason. I create because I want to, not because I want to use it to gain capital. How do you create without capital? To make a film you need a camera crew, a sound crew, set designers, caterers, a director, scriptwriters. A world without professional creatives is so much poorer than the world we already have. Why would you give it up just for some vague notion…

You absolutely do not need a camera crew, a sound crew, set designers, and caterers to make a film. You need a director and scriptwriters, but those can be the same person. Do many film sets have all those? Absolutely. But one can still make a film without them. Some of the best films ever created were mostly the product of one person with a budget less than half that of the average car. Would you be able to create b…

I suppose you are okay with all animated films being impossible to create then.

>I obviously like some of those too, but who's to say that the larger budget made them better?

If you legitimately believe something like 2001: A Space Odyssey would be as good with a budget of $10,000 then that just seems delusional.

The world you want is one in which the only people who can create things are people who are wealthy by other means, there is no pathway for a talented but poor kid to go from making home movies to working on films without IP laws. They must abandon their dreams and go work in the coal mines or whatever. It is dystopian.

I want the most amount of people possible to be able to work as professional creatives because it enriches my life and the lives of everyone in the country I live in.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#385
Use of the word "plagiarism" is plagiarism itself. Culture and thought are deeply shared phenomena. Using a common language, such as English, to communicate is equally an act of plagiarism. You didn't invent these words -- you use them without attribution and without payment. To decry and malign the collective training of all available digitally represented thought and discourse by large language models as simple binary plagiarism is deeply ironic -- where did you pay for your own thoughts? I don't want to live in your pay-per-thought society. I want to live with the ethos "information wants to be free". En garde!

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#386
post #171

if theres just one good thing coming out of ai its breaking copyright law forever. no one should be able to "own" ideas. royalties for commercial use is another thing and i support it but what we know as (non commercial) piracy and unlicensed fan art should be 100% legal

I wonder how many of the books I love would still have been written in a world where somebody could scoop them all up and post them on the internet for free (and run ads).

Simple piraciy is not even the worst possible outcome.

Without copyright, nothing stops one from simply selling a book under their own name.

Big publishers could just reprint anything and get it into brick & mortar stores. No money for authors.

Advocating for absolutely no copyright is wild.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#387
People keep saying open source is an example of how copyright doesn't quite matter. However, many of the biggest open source projects are contributed to by massive corporations. Linux has lots of contributions from all the FAANGs, Red Hat, etc. Yes, it's not protected by copyrighted, but also the way it's produced is wholly different from how an artistic work is produced. Contributing to Linux is nothing on the balance sheet of Google for example, whereas producing art for an independent person or a whole company who's purpose is to create art can be very expensive.

Artists are taking risks and need legal protection if they want to make art for a living. If artists were making FAANG engineer compensations or all worked at institutions like universities (with all their protections) then maybe they wouldn't care about copyright, but that isn't the living situation for every artist.

You could say an artist shouldn't rely on making art for a living, but that's actually a different discussion.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#388

I do just want to highlight that this is also what humans do. We read a bunch of content online and then use it in our work product. The vast majority of the value that I provide comes from copyrighted information that I have ingested - either directly with a payment to the creator (bought and read the book, paid for and attended the seminar) or indirectly via third party blog posts or summaries where I did not then…

I think what gets most people is the double standard.

IP should either exist for everyone (which would cripple LLM providers) or no one, in which case the Pirate Bay and shadow libraries should be fully open.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#389
post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

robots.txt is a way of leaving the door unlocked but kindly asking bots to stay outside.

You might be interested to know that entering an unlocked door into a space you do not have permission to be in is still illegal.

You might be interested to know that the “illegality” depends on the intent. If I rest on your unlocked door handle, it opens, I enter, it’s an accident.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#390

Let this sink in: I wanted to open source a package at work at needed approval from legal and other teams to make sure I wasn't leaking anything proprietary. The same executives that worried about proprietary, copyrighted code being leaked 10 years ago are now mandating using the plagiarism machine. The whole AI bubble is The Emperor's New Clothes, and it feels liek more people are finally admitting it.

If anything, I would argue that the whole Intellectual Property bubble is The Emperor's New Clothes. It never made real sense to me to treat ideas as property, and I for one would absolutely prefer to live in a future society where it's possible to just copy a car.
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