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Things are about to get worse for generative AI

garymarcus.substack.com

41–50 of 769 posts

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#41
post #24

Aren't some of the examples basically asking for that content? Ask someone about two Italian brothers in a video game with a red and green hat that have M and L on them. What do you think you would get? If I describe "imagine a comic book duck that swims in a sea of gold in his vault" you would immediately think of Scrooge McDuck, no?

Exactly: the prompts incite the same recall as humans have when seeing that prompt; it is just better than most people are drawing it.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#42

This for me does not make sense as a copyright violation. It’s like saying that Adobe is in trouble because you drew something infringing in Photoshop. If you prompt the model with the intention of creating something infringing by mentioning the name of the characters and the work, and you get something infringing out, then it’s you who have infringed the copyright, not the maker of the tool.

The user didn't create it, the cloud-hosted machine owned by OpenAI, that charges for access, did.

When prompted with 'futuristic robot' and 'italian plumbers'.

So the argument is that if openAI had not used copyrighted and trademarked source material, this wouldn't be happening. It's not transformative as it's reproducing these copyrighted materials and trademarks verbatim.

That's how it makes sense.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#44

> My guess is that none of this can easily be fixed. Systems like DALL-E and ChatGPT are essentially black boxes. GenAI systems don’t give attribution to source materials because at least as constituted now, they can’t. Is it necessary to fix in the model itself? It seems a gate in the post processing pipeline that checks for copyright infringement could work, provided they can create another model that identifies co…

I don't even think they want to fix it. They just want to see money. Some form of "tax" per prompt or other ridiculous "models".

This is such a nice, profitable opportunity. Much better than pay per view or subscription models for humans.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#45
post #24

Aren't some of the examples basically asking for that content? Ask someone about two Italian brothers in a video game with a red and green hat that have M and L on them. What do you think you would get? If I describe "imagine a comic book duck that swims in a sea of gold in his vault" you would immediately think of Scrooge McDuck, no?

What do you think you would get?

What I might think is irrelevant. It is the content that the LLM produces that is relevant.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#46
post #24

Aren't some of the examples basically asking for that content? Ask someone about two Italian brothers in a video game with a red and green hat that have M and L on them. What do you think you would get? If I describe "imagine a comic book duck that swims in a sea of gold in his vault" you would immediately think of Scrooge McDuck, no?

disclaimer: I work on GenAI at google, but views are my own

The question is, how did the model create Mario&Luigi or Scrooge McDuck without training on copyrighted data? It can't just crawl Wikipedia because Fair Use in Wikipedia doesn't constitute Fair use for a commercial AI model.

One possible outcome is more transparency on what datasets were used to train the models.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#47
There are good arguments for the copyright infringement belonging to the user, not the model maker, in this thread.

One issue with that is that there is not a reliable way to determine if copyright is being infringed.

Even if models could be used responsibly, there might not be a reasonable expectation that most people will. If infringement is so easy and avoiding it relatively hard.

I'm not sure what legal prescriptions should be made on this basis, but it's an interesting thought.

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#48
post #12

Or... things are about to get worse for copyright holders. I don't see any developped country pressing the brake on AGI in the near future to protect a few copyright holders from getting "stolen" in hypothetic scenarios.

It’s one way of getting China to close the gap as they don’t care.

Eh? With a gun to my head I'd say the CCP cares more about censorship than the NYT does about plagiarism, but it's not an easy call. The problems are the same ("training set contains lots of stuff I don't want the LLM to say").

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#49
post #13

If I prompt "golden droid from classic sci-fi movie", what else am I asking for if not Star Wars?

Or another „copyrighted“ droid for that matter, after all it’s a classic.

Same with robot cop, what the hell did you expect to get…

Or Italian plumber with red hat with M on it, that’s just a description of Mario

Re: Things are about to get worse for generative AI

#50
post #12

Or... things are about to get worse for copyright holders. I don't see any developped country pressing the brake on AGI in the near future to protect a few copyright holders from getting "stolen" in hypothetic scenarios.

I can easily see it happening. "Content" is at least as big business as "tech", and the people in it are politically better connected.

Apple could buy most of the NYT, RIAA and MPAA companies combined with petty cash. The big ones are Disney and Sony with a combined market cap about 250b. Microsoft alone is worth over 10 times that.
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