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Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI

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Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI

#41
post #17

Big media companies go fuck yourself. That nightmare scenario, for Levin, would turn a Food & Wine review into a simple text recommendation of a bottle of Malbec. If there is just one wine review on the web which recommends Malbec, AI will not start recommending it. If there are many such reviews, then yes, AI will tell you "Many reviews recommend Malbec.". Just like a human can tell you about what they learned, our…

AI is not my “brother” nor is it a human. This is a predictive model controlled by a for profit business and yea, they should be paying out if they are training on data owned by someone.

You don't own data. You can copyright data, maybe.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/science_technology/public...

Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is not my “brother” nor is it a human. This is a predictive model controlled by a for profit business and yea, they should be paying out if they are training on data owned by someone.

>they should be paying out if they are training on data owned by someone Virtually everything you "know" is because of current and past humans. Have you been paying everyone for all of that? If you want to be a great author and you read books by great writers.. then become a successful writer, are you paying all those authors for training you? I realize there is a difference with being able to absorb bulk data and al…

uh yes? Did you pay for textbooks in school?

Do you regularly copy protected software and claim it as your own creation?

I’ve seen this argument every time someone states that these for profit ai companies should not have complete access to a all of human knowledge and I just don’t see how we’re living in the same world.

Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI

#43

I am reminded somewhat of the ride & delivery apps here. While they did use tech to enable some cool things like demand pricing and efficient route planning, a big part of their innovation really came from using that tech to shovel most of the risk and cost of providing the service onto independent contractors. LLMs are a genuinely exciting technology, but I am worried that a part of what they enable will turn out to…

Acknowledging these LLMs are not human, but isn’t this kinda what humans do? Take in lots of different examples and produce something similar but distinctly different and not paying royalties or being considered plagiarism.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. I think most people want credit for the original ideas and effort they put in, even for something like fanfiction. And fanfic is already legally very gray! Street artists in NYC selling copies of copyrighted work aren’t there to be creative, of course. But they’re also definitely breaking copyright law.

Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI

#45
post #40
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a human but it is a fellow intelligent system. Mankind had this discussion before. When Darwin published his theory about evolution. He faced a lot of hatred because it made humans less special. Now we go through the same dance again. This time, intelligence in silicon makes humans less special.

It is not intelligent, any more than découpé [1] means scissors and paste are intelligent. I understand that people like to anthropomorphize things. That's harmless fun when people are imagining tree spirits or thunder gods or whatever. But just because fancy autocomplete produces semi-intelligible text does not mean there is an intelligence behind it. I believe we will eventually be able to create synthetic minds. B…

What makes your reply different from a reply ChatGPT would have written?

If nothing - where is that intelligence you are talking about? That intelligence that only humans have?

Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is not my “brother” nor is it a human. This is a predictive model controlled by a for profit business and yea, they should be paying out if they are training on data owned by someone.

>they should be paying out if they are training on data owned by someone Virtually everything you "know" is because of current and past humans. Have you been paying everyone for all of that? If you want to be a great author and you read books by great writers.. then become a successful writer, are you paying all those authors for training you? I realize there is a difference with being able to absorb bulk data and al…

It is not the same.

One way to tell is that we think protecting human creators is so important that the US Constitution says Congress has the power to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".

So yes, we absolutely try to pay all those authors. And we also have a variety of cultural mechanisms to reward them in other ways, from honorary doctorates to literary prizes to genius grants to homages. Not to mention a widespread hatred of plagiarism that goes well beyond what copyright covers.

None of that is respected by the current crop of text generators. They chose to release these things knowing of these lacks. And that lack of respect is being richly returned, as it should be.

Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI

#47
post #15

I am reminded somewhat of the ride & delivery apps here. While they did use tech to enable some cool things like demand pricing and efficient route planning, a big part of their innovation really came from using that tech to shovel most of the risk and cost of providing the service onto independent contractors. LLMs are a genuinely exciting technology, but I am worried that a part of what they enable will turn out to…

> If you train your AI on a bunch of someone elses work, you can make it produce something very simiilar As a blogger of 10+ years this has been very interesting to realize. I can use ChatGPT to write really good first drafts because “in the style of Swizec Teller” works as a prompt. The results are way better than the usual generic corporate drone style of output. BUT! And this is an important but. The insights it p…

I think one of the flaws is: nobody seems to want to agree that editing is far more expensive than writing (the to point where editing is routinely skipped). I think it is well established in software engineering debugging is far more expensive then specification, writing, or testing- so one does not leave the big jobs for debugging. I personally believe the same is true for writing.

Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI

#48

I am out of sympathy for big publishers. They have been greedy and predatory for decades, at the expense of their own content.

"Publishers want billions (for themselves)" is a headline we could have published at nearly any point in post-Gutenberg history.

> “Search was designed to find the best of the internet”

Says a publisher who clearly hasn't used search in the past 10 years.

Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI

#49
post #45
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not intelligent, any more than découpé [1] means scissors and paste are intelligent. I understand that people like to anthropomorphize things. That's harmless fun when people are imagining tree spirits or thunder gods or whatever. But just because fancy autocomplete produces semi-intelligible text does not mean there is an intelligence behind it. I believe we will eventually be able to create synthetic minds. B…

What makes your reply different from a reply ChatGPT would have written? If nothing - where is that intelligence you are talking about? That intelligence that only humans have?

If you can't tell the difference, I think that says more about you than it does about the text. And I'm definitely not going to try to bring you up to date on centuries of the humanities, or even the decades of cognitive science research. If you'd like to know, perhaps start with a book or two? "The Mind's I", "Kinds of Minds", and "Architects of Intelligence" are accessible places to start.

Re: Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI

#50
Capitalism needs growth. Growth needs constant new demand.

Generating overpriced intangible goods, the only value of which is novelty is almost necessary in capitalism to keep some form of constant demand. The alternative is continuously. burning something, like we do with oil.

I wonder how we are going to keep all that money in circulation, once we do not need a trillion dollar industry of entertainment anymore.

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