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AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

axelk.ee

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Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#741

Post by customguy »

Meph504 wrote: post #739
customguy wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a total non-sequitur. You think you found flaw in one of the examples, instead of seeing if you can come up with better ones, you say it so it can't be this, therefore it's a completely different thing that makes zero sense. Machines aren't "doing" anything, they're being wielded by humans. And they're doing it at scale, to other humans, via the force multiplication of machines.

Why would I attempt to come up with a "better" example of a premise I reject? Your vague response doesn't seem to have anything to do with the the base subject this whole thing revolves around. Plagiarism be it small scale or large isn't acceptable, and the idea that humans doing things that are wrong is ok, but AI doing the same thing at large scale is not ok?

> Your vague response doesn't seem to have anything to do with the the base subject this whole thing revolves around.

No, I instead refuted your reply.

> but AI doing the same thing at large scale is not ok?

No, humans doing things can be okay or not so okay depending on the scale they do them at. "AI" isn't "doing" anything by itself, at all, so that doesn't enter into it at all. You cannot separate "scale" and "thing". Rubbing your hands to make them warmer is fine, igniting a nuke is not, both aren't "basically the same thing, raising temperature, just at different scales". You didn't reject the premise, you didn't understand it in the first place, and knocked down your own straw man instead. Which I pointed out, that's all.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#742

Post by Meph504 »

customguy wrote: post #741
Meph504 wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I attempt to come up with a "better" example of a premise I reject? Your vague response doesn't seem to have anything to do with the the base subject this whole thing revolves around. Plagiarism be it small scale or large isn't acceptable, and the idea that humans doing things that are wrong is ok, but AI doing the same thing at large scale is not ok?

> Your vague response doesn't seem to have anything to do with the the base subject this whole thing revolves around. No, I instead refuted your reply. > but AI doing the same thing at large scale is not ok? No, humans doing things can be okay or not so okay depending on the scale they do them at. "AI" isn't "doing" anything by itself, at all, so that doesn't enter into it at all. You cannot separate "scale" and "thi…

Ha, I'm sorry do you think you've made a logical point by comparing rubbing your hands together, and "igniting a nuke."

Again, this isn't a "this at small scale is ok, but at large scale it isn't" argument. Small scale plagiarism isn't acceptable, neither is large scale.

You are refuting my reply seemingly without the context of the article, and larger issue at hand.

Don't be condescending when you aren't even accurately a following the original premise or purpose.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#743

Post by inanutshellus »

the_af wrote: post #651
inanutshellus wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's "uncharitable"? Seems perfectly reasonable to not like a remake. He says: > ... this corporate remake is a worse creative "theft" than ... Context is that "this" is the 1999 film. A sibling comment makes a separate point that even the 1992 film is not original content but nowhere in falcor84's comment does he refer to the franchise as a whole being "theft". Regardless, it's clear from the post that…

> Seems perfectly reasonable to not like a remake That's not the uncharitable part of your comment. > [...] but he wants it to be because he doesn't like the 1999 film This is the uncharitable part.

Nothing charitable or uncharitable in the sentiment. Just interpretation.

Keeping context confined to the 1999 and 1992 films... What meaning do you infer?

I still can't find an alternative.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#744

Post by scantron4 »

20k wrote: post #540
lbrito wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You are never going to get the exact book word-for-word using LLM. This is pretty much the exact claim of a NYT lawsuit against OpenAI. "One example: Bing Chat copied all but two of the first 396 words of its 2023 article “The Secrets Hamas knew about Israel’s Military.” An exhibit showed 100 other situations in which OpenAI’s GPT was trained on and memorized articles from The Times, with word-for-word copying in re…

Yes, LLMs fundamentally operate as a lossy compression scheme for their training data. There's been countless examples of them reproducing their training data with very high accuracy People claim that the data isn't stored, but clearly a representation of it is encoded and reproducible. I saw chatgpt word for word plagiarise a stack overflow comment just two days ago

Ah but can it reply snarkily and close your ticket as a duplicate that is NOT A DUPLICATE? If not it will never recreate the real stack overflow experience.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#745

Post by rhubarbtree »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #737
danorama wrote: post #414

There’s a fallacy that gets used a whole lot to justify things like this (not just with LLMs), and I see it in many of the comments here: If it’s OK (or at least negligible on a small scale), then it must be OK on a large scale. It usually goes something like: If I can make money by learning something from a web page, why does a computer making money by learning everything from everyone upset people so? It’s the same…

But it’s not the same though. If I look at a webpage, it’s still there for other people to enjoy. That’s not the same as a flower being picked. Reasoning by analogy doesn’t work if your analogy isn’t well matched.

Let me double down on my downvote.

The analogy proposed here is correct rewritten as:

If one person uses an AI trained across copyrighted data, then that’s ok.

But if everyone uses that AI, it’s not ok.

Which is a bit of an irrelevant point.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#746

Post by [deleted] »

Ekaros wrote: post #721
underlipton wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair use was built around human limitations. The mass scraping campaigns done by the AI giants were clearly an overreach in spirit, if not letter. Most people's intuition is that these massive operations that are valued in the trillions can't have been drawn from some untapped common resource, and they're correct. Someone, somewhere is not being properly compensated. I have no problem with taxing AI companies so that…

Fair use is the balance between creators and those that in someway use the content. Somehow it has become excuse not to compensate the creators in anyway. To me AI training part really looks something that should be treated separate and thus give the creators compensation when their works are used. Now how much and should it be based on revenue from output is open discussion. And it might also be that there is no fai…

[deleted]

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#747

Post by MontyCarloHall »

phoronixrly wrote: post #173
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #111

Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It's a Seductive Mirage. [0] [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

Just so long as it's just a seductive mirage to the Oracles, Microsofts, Metas, and Googles as well as your friendly neighbourhood unpaid overworked open-source developer. Open weight model trained with no attribution on all of Oracle's internal repos. It's only fair.

Or that the notion of "Imaginary Property" was a seductive mirage to copyleft folks, many of whom have since realized that they do, in fact, value intellectual property rights in the wake of AI companies' free (as in freedom) use of other people's IP.

I stand somewhere in the middle: while our IP laws are far too restrictive, the folly of abolishing IP altogether has been effectively laid bare by AI companies.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#748

Post by crabsand »

danorama wrote: post #414

There’s a fallacy that gets used a whole lot to justify things like this (not just with LLMs), and I see it in many of the comments here: If it’s OK (or at least negligible on a small scale), then it must be OK on a large scale. It usually goes something like: If I can make money by learning something from a web page, why does a computer making money by learning everything from everyone upset people so? It’s the same…

In other words, size matters.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#749

Post by saghm »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #701
saghm wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But ChatGPT does nothing to scale copying somebody else's website. What are we talking about here, exactly? "Make me a website that has the same content as that other one so I can get views instead" is not something you could could do generically and quickly with a free service a few years ago, but it is today. I'd argue that it's not beneficial to people who create original content or society at large that this is…

Of the set of people who have the idea to do this, who think to ask an LLM for help, and who can pay for the hosting, how many do you think would have been stopped by googling wordpress tutorials? Even if you do think that was a high barrier to entry, a dozen people could plagiarize the whole internet. Plagiarism had already fully saturated scaling 15 years ago. Nobody in 2010 would think "my content was stolen and t…

> Of the set of people who have the idea to do this, who think to ask an LLM for help, and who can pay for the hosting, how many do you think would have been stopped by googling wordpress tutorials?

In the past six months I've organically come across at least a dozen instances of projects from people who had never coded before LLMs producing non-trivial projects that they could have learned enough to do themselves beforehand but they obviously never did. I feel like you're woefully underestimating how much faster these technologies have lowered the amount of initial investment needed in learning how to produce software for people who have never touched a line of code in their life before, and while that can be a boon when people who have good intentions but not enough free time to sink into up-front learning with no immediate payoff, it's also lowered the barrier for people who just want to make a quick buck off someone else's work; the type of person who would never bother with spending a month learning Python or how to customize a Wordpress instance just to be able to try to rip off some website for a couple hundred dollars of ad revenue can pretty easily start doing that if they want.

> Even if you do think that was a high barrier to entry, a dozen people could plagiarize the whole internet. Plagiarism had already fully saturated scaling 15 years ago. Nobody in 2010 would think "my content was stolen and their SEO outranks me on google" was a line out of sci-fi; it was status quo. It sucked but nothing changed, it just still sucks. The price we pay for an open web.

There clearly are people making original content on the internet and making money from it today. I'd argue that if you think it's logically impossible for further dilution to occur if new technology scales the ability to copy content more efficiently than it scales the ability to produce original content, more elaboration on why you're convinced that we're literally at rock bottom would be helpful. If you think that this could happen but this technology isn't it, I've laid out my reasons for why I think you're wrong, and I haven't yet been able to figure out what the basis is for your disagreement.

> This article adds nothing to the discussion and seems to be here just because of a provocative title. These same arguments happen under every other AI article, they don't need to happen here. Nobody reads the articles anyway, or else one of the myriad coherent, well-written, and/or insightful AI-critical articles of the month would be here instead.

Speak for yourself; I read this one, and I've read a number of articles posted here this week. If you don't, I'm not sure why you even care what articles get posted in the first place.

Re: AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

#750

Post by jayd16 »

peteforde wrote: post #682
jayd16 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that extrapolating the last 2 to 3 years as a sign of things to come is as enticing an argument as you seem to think it is . If you exclude AI for ai's sake, the feature lists of the last 2 years have been incredibly anemic. If you include AI companies bootstrapping themselves with AI, the cash flow has been a nice change but I can't say it's felt fully baked, or flooded with stable software and well-cra…

I don't know how to argue with this without making the same kind of sweeping generalizations that you are. I don't know that you or I are qualified to set the goalposts or come up with any kind of objective measure for the progress of all recent software and all recent hardware that is convenient to analyze or debate in this text box. While there's a loud minority who love to debate the topic, LLM use has become stat…

So we've abandoned the idea that coolness is even perceivable. Even if the argument was about pure productivity, or any hard measurement, the numbers don't seem to add up.

Can we point to any hard metric that has improved in the industry in the last 2-3 years? It explains why work hours are short, everything is cheaper and non-AI companies are experiencing cost reductions. Services are more reliable. Except, where is all that?

You could argue that it's yet to come but to argue that it's already here... how do you justify that?

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