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

GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

ybrikman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 138 posts

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#61

Post by mapontosevenths »

discreteevent wrote: post #50
mapontosevenths wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's being downvoted because it's a ridiculous premise. "The Elites" are human too. This attitude is nonsensical and child-like. Nobody is out here trying to round up the hippies and force them to live in some kind of pods to be harvested for their nutrients or whatever. This technology, like every prior technology, will cause some people to lose their jobs and some new jobs to be created. This will annoy people who…

Henry Ford didn't make his cars out of buggy whips. He made a new industry. He didn't cannibalize an existing one. You cannot make an LLM without digesting the source material.

Digesting is a weird way to say "learning from." By that logic I've been digesting news, books, movies, songs, and comic books since I was born. My brain is great big 'ole copyright violation.

What matters here is not the source material, it's the output. Possessing or consuming copyrighted material is not illegal, distributing it is. So what matters here is: Can we say that the output is transformative, and does it work to progress the arts and sciences (the stated purpose of copyright in the US constitution)?

I would say yes to both things, except in rare cases of bugs or intentional copyright violations. None of the major AI vendors WANT these things to infringe copyright, they just do it from time to time by accident or through the omission of some guardrail that nobody had yet considered. Those issues are generally fixed fairly promptly (a few major screw ups notwithstanding).

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#62

Post by shagie »

georgefrowny wrote: post #59
worik wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel no nostalgia for Stackoverflow. I always found it very frustrating that for a person at the start of the learning curve it was "read only" Actually asking a naive question there was to get horribly flamed on the site. It, and the people using it, were very keen to explain how stupid you were being LLMs on the other hand are sweet and welcoming (to a fault) of the naive newbie I have been learning to use Shell…

It was very strange to me how StackOverflow consistently, every time it was mentioned everyone had exactly the same complaints and nothing changed. They can't have been unaware of the reputation or the sinking activity rates.

There are multiple groups on Stack Overflow with different (and sometimes conflicting) goals and desires.

Corporate measured "engagement" and has been trying things to make that number go up.

The curators of the site... if they could have tools to measure would be measuring the median quality of the questions being asked and the answers being given.

People asking questions on the site have changed from the "building a library goal" with the question as a prompt to "help me with this problem" - but rarely not sticking around.

---

The sinking activity rates have had alarms going for many years... but remember that engagement was being measured and while that's sinking, comments were engagement so the numbers (ad impressions) at corporate level were getting measured differently.

The reputation has been something, but there's a disconnect between what "hostile" means and what "toxic" means between the people making the claims and how it's being interpreted.

That reputation was interpreted (by corporate and to an extent, diamond moderators) as "people are mean in comments" - and that isn't the case. People are not mean in comments. However, the structure of the site being focused on Q&A rather than discussion for someone who wants discussion with the people who are there to provide answers to questions will find the environment innately hostile.

Without changing the site from a Q&A (and basically starting over - which corporate has tried, but the people who are providing quality answers aren't going there because they don't want discussions - if they wanted discussions they would be commenting on HN or Reddit), that change can't really be done. The attempts to try to change how people are approaching the site run into a "this would reduce 'engagement'" and people asking questions to get help for their problem not accepting the original premise of building a library. ... And that's resulted in conflict and decreasing curation (which are often the people who were the ones providing the expert answers).

----

So while they have been aware, (I believe) corporate has been trying to solve the wrong problems at odds with both the people asking questions ("help me now") and the remaining curators.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#63

Post by mikestorrent »

> he took a PDF of my book Terraform: Up & Running, uploaded it into a GenAI tool, and asked the tool to follow the guidance in the book to generate Terraform code

This is ridiculous - AI doesn't need to be fed a PDF of a Terraform book to know how to Terraform. Blowing out context with hundreds of OCR'd pages of generic text on how to terraform isn't going to help anything.

The model that is broken is really ultimately going to be "content for hire". That's the industry that is going to be destroyed here because it's simply redundant now. Actual artwork, actual literature, actual music... these things are all safe as long as people actually want to experience the creations of others. Corporate artwork, simple documentation, elevator music.... these things are done; I'm sorry if you made a living making them but you were ultimately performing an artisinal task in a mostly soulless way.

I'm not talking about video game artists, mind you, I'm talking about the people who produced Corporate Memphis and Flat Design here. We'll all be better off if these people find a new calling in life.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#64

Post by aeon_ai »

bitwize wrote: post #48
aeon_ai wrote: post #27

GenAI changes the dynamics of information systems so fundamentally that our entire notion of intellectual property is being upended. Copyright was predicated on the notion that ideas and styles can not be protected , but that explicit expressive works can. For example, a recipe can't be protected, but the story you wrap around it that tells how your grandma used to make it would be. LLMs are particularly challenging…

No. The idea-expression dichotomy is a common myth about copyright law, right up there with "if I already own the physical cartridge, downloading this game ROM is OK". The ONLY things that matter when determining whether copyright was infringed are "access" and "substantial similarity". The first refers to whether the alleged infringer did, or had a reasonable opportunity to, view the copyrighted work. The second is…

This is one of those fun "achsully" responses I get the privilege to refute.

It's a foundational principle of copyright law, codified in 17 U.S.C. § 102(b): "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery"

Now, we can quibble over what qualifies there, but the dichotomy itself is pretty clear.

This goes back to Baker v. Selden (1879) and remains bedrock copyright doctrine.

The Tetris case is overstated. Tetris v. Xio did not establish that The Tetris Company "owns the idea of falling-tetromino puzzle video games." The court explicitly applied the idea-expression dichotomy and found Xio copied specific expressive choices (exact dimensions, specific visual style, particular piece colors). Many Tetris-like games exist legally, and it is the specific expressive elements that were considered in the Xio case.

K.C. Munchkin is old and criticized. That 1982 ruling predates major developments like Computer Associates v. Altai, which established more rigorous methods for filtering out unprotectable elements. The Munchkin decision continues to be debated.

"Substantial similarity" analysis itself incorporates idea-expression filtering. Courts use tests specifically designed to separate protectable expression from unprotectable ideas, especially when considering the four factors of fair use (when applied as a defense.)

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#65

Post by randomNumber7 »

cthalupa wrote: post #33

This is an article that I agreed with more reading the headline than I did when I finished reading the article itself. Stack Overflow peaked in 2014 before beginning it's downward decline. How is that at all related to GenAI? GPT4 is when we really started seeing these things get used to replace SO, etc., and that would be early 2023 - and indeed the drop gets worse there - but after the COVID era spike, SO was alrea…

Regardles of the graphs, if there would be no LLMs junior devs would still use stackoverflow at least sometimes.

Before the LLM time there was actually the problem that google often showed SEO spam sites that harvested content from stackoverflow.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#66

Post by randomNumber7 »

aogaili wrote: post #53

Companies will provide incentives for people to generate authentic content. Example X giving $1M reward for the top Articles. Because they can use it for training. In fact, this might be overall good thing, because finally original content will be highly on demand since those companies now use to train their models. But we are probably just in a transition phase. The other thing is that new sources of input will come…

How do you evaluate if content is authentic?

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#68

Post by randomNumber7 »

aogaili wrote: post #54
znsksjjs wrote: post #3

We’ve seen decades of growing wage gaps and erosion of labors strength. The current elites don’t really care to enrich the people. Why would they care to do anything about this problem? They likely don’t see it as a problem at all. If they did actually stumble on AGI (assuming it didn’t eat them too) it would be used by a select few to enslave or remove the rest of us.

People should vote for more socialist governments pushing for UBI and automation tax on the companies..but which this comment get downvoted because of the capitalism religion.

Imo socialism isn't the solution, but we probably can all agree that capitalism looks dangerous at the moment.

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#69

Post by randomNumber7 »

discreteevent wrote: post #50
mapontosevenths wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's being downvoted because it's a ridiculous premise. "The Elites" are human too. This attitude is nonsensical and child-like. Nobody is out here trying to round up the hippies and force them to live in some kind of pods to be harvested for their nutrients or whatever. This technology, like every prior technology, will cause some people to lose their jobs and some new jobs to be created. This will annoy people who…

Henry Ford didn't make his cars out of buggy whips. He made a new industry. He didn't cannibalize an existing one. You cannot make an LLM without digesting the source material.

So we have monkeys writing the same code over and over again, until the end of time. Because of "rules".

Re: GenAI, the snake eating its own tail

#70

Post by randomNumber7 »

worik wrote: post #49

The old model of selling eyeballs to advertisers was horrible I do not know what will replace it, but I will not miss websites trying to monetise my attention

It was easier to install adblock than to lobotomize a LLM (for which you likely don't even have the weights), so I don't know about that one.
Post reply on HN