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Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

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Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#81

Post by JoeAltmaier »

palata wrote: post #79
harshreality wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fair use" only applies to instances of copying / redistributing . The hint is in the name: copy -right. There's a notion, which seems to have taken off among creators who are paranoid about AI eating their livelihoods (which it might eat a chunk of) that copyright prevents people from doing anything with works they [legally] acquired other than personally read, listen, or watch it. That's not how copyright, as it ha…

Say I make a tool where you can enter the title of a book, and get the full text of the book without paying for it. I assume we all agree that would be illegal, right? Now say that instead of distributing that tool as an executable , I distributed it as a library . It would contain all the same books as the illegal executable above, but some developers would need to write an actual executable that would use the libra…

Curiously that is a pretty close description of a normal neighborhood library.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#82

Post by kiwih »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #59
LikelyABurner wrote: post #3

I’m with the artists on this one. Our obsession with converting everything into input for an algorithm that spits out an ill-defined number (what the hell is “vividness”?) needs to stop. We already tried this with human communication and gave birth to the dystopian nightmare that is social media, why keep repeating our mistakes?

We repeat the mistakes because in the short term, someone finds it profitable, hence a prisoner's dilemma type situation. If an AI tool was killed, I consider it a victory. That's because even if there are some small useful applications of AI, AI on the whole will certainly put most creatives out of business. Instead, I propose the following: anyone who is interested in preventing AI from taking over their craft shou…

Without trying to sound flippant - what do you define AI as? Things like autofocus in your video cameras or automatic gain control or noise cancellation in your audio pipeline could also be considered AI. Do you remove those too? What about the AI recommendation algorithm built into YouTube - how do you reconcile being AI free while still using that platform?

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#83

Post by croes »

LikelyABurner wrote: post #29
capableweb wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not everything can be meaningfully quantified. Not everything needs to be. Ok, so who decides what's OK to analyze or not? Is there some obvious moral line I fail to see, that everyone would immediately agree on? It seems the project was about analyzing books, not about producing new books. How is that hurting the authors?

What will hurt artists is, when in 10 years, all publishers are demanding that the vividness score (TM) be at least a 95% “because that’s what drives sales”. Which is what will happen if the authors don’t proactively stop it from happening. Look at how the music industry has evolved over time.

How his this different from all the vampire novels that hit the shelf after the success of Twilight? Publishers alway preferred the money makers, just the measure changed.

Nowadays writers can at least publish their books without the need of publishers and I think some like the help of the bad Silicon valley stuff that made writing, publishing and interacting with the readers easier.

I'm on your site if it's about automatic content creation and style copying but text analysis is not the real danger. Especially when the usefulness of such statistics isn't even given.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#84

Post by Planktonne »

Quite apart from any content/copywrite issues, this wasn't a useful tool.

It was a badly-made tool that didn't identify anything valid or worthwhile. The measurement of passive voice is a particularly clear example: that's not what passive voice is at all, and anyone who understands passive voice knows that it shouldn't be frowned upon [1].

"Just add tech" is not a recipe for usefulness.

[1] http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#85

Post by luma »

zinekeller wrote: post #8
jprete wrote: post #4

This is an incredibly biased article, hinging entirely on the assumption that AI training is fair use.

Unfortunately it seems majority of HN clings on "AI is fair use!" the same way GIFs (of movie and TV snippets) are "perceived to be fair use" (but is simply not fair use in most cases).

And the other half of HN loses their mind when AI is brought up, completely missing the point made quite clearly in the OP that _no_AI_was_involved_in_any _of_this_.

The AI hysteria on this site is ridiculous.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#86

Post by dontupvoteme »

harshreality wrote: post #51
jprete wrote: post #4

This is an incredibly biased article, hinging entirely on the assumption that AI training is fair use.

"Fair use" only applies to instances of copying / redistributing . The hint is in the name: copy -right. There's a notion, which seems to have taken off among creators who are paranoid about AI eating their livelihoods (which it might eat a chunk of) that copyright prevents people from doing anything with works they [legally] acquired other than personally read, listen, or watch it. That's not how copyright, as it ha…

There's also the much more complex part of other jurisdictions. Japan already has largely said everything is fair game in AI.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#87

Post by pikahumu »

LikelyABurner wrote: post #40
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's silly. Humans review books all the time, using very similar words. Where's the outrage over that? This is manufactured, stretched, overhyped objections. I believe it's all as the OP suggests, because the word AI is in there. Not because anything illegal or immoral is going on. In fact it's a terribly useful tool, and once the mob cools off it'll likely return.

You are exactly modeling the chauvinistic Silicon Valley attitude that is causing the outrage in the general population to begin with. “Our algorithms are pretty much the same as human art criticism, so put down the pitchforks you unenlightened scum” is up there with telling them to eat (a Stable Diffusion generated picture of) cake.

> You are exactly modeling the chauvinistic Silicon Valley attitude that is causing the outrage in the general population to begin with.

Just like the writers he talked to and got positive feedback? Everybody not agreeing with you represents "chauvinistic SV attitude"?

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#88

Post by palata »

keiferski wrote: post #38

For this particular example, the tool doesn't seem like it's a big deal. It just analyzes works for data. I'm not sure how this would be any different from a literary critic doing the same thing manually. In general, though, I think artists would be less hostile to technological innovations if the people imploring them to "figure out how to embrace the technology rather than fear it" weren't actively trying to destro…

I think it applies to many technologies other than generative AI. How many devs actually think about ethics nowadays? I think it's all lost in the big companies they work for, behind the excuse that "it is not their job to figure out how their work is being used".

Interestingly, I think most devs would think twice before being paid for designing a missile. But somehow they don't really seem to think about the impact of work that is not obviously a weapon. Social network, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, SpaceX... everything disruptive has the potential to be very bad (I see a lot more harmful use-cases for ChatGPT than legit ones, but maybe that's just me). But somehow engineers seem to believe that it is not their problem.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#89

Post by subroutine »

croes wrote: post #72
LikelyABurner wrote: post #3

I’m with the artists on this one. Our obsession with converting everything into input for an algorithm that spits out an ill-defined number (what the hell is “vividness”?) needs to stop. We already tried this with human communication and gave birth to the dystopian nightmare that is social media, why keep repeating our mistakes?

There is a difference between a statistical analysis of a text to categorize by certain words or word groups and training an AI model to generate texts on the data used for training. The later creates massive competition to human writers, the former is just an information for potential readers.

Both the former and latter are information for writers. Neither create massive competition for writers (not that there is any law against creating competition), just FUD and better tools for writers.

Re: Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

#90

Post by pikahumu »

Nullabillity wrote: post #14
LikelyABurner wrote: post #3

I’m with the artists on this one. Our obsession with converting everything into input for an algorithm that spits out an ill-defined number (what the hell is “vividness”?) needs to stop. We already tried this with human communication and gave birth to the dystopian nightmare that is social media, why keep repeating our mistakes?

Honestly, this is the really offensive part of the article. Who cares about whether or not it's legal, the idea that it's, in any way, shape, or form, useful is bafflingly laughable. Not everything can be meaningfully quantified. Not everything needs to be.

If you don't find it useful, don't use it. But why get outraged about something that others find useful? It's clearly a tool that other writers were positive and excited about. Why not let them have it? If you don't find those quantifications meaningful, so be it. You don't need to use it. Why force your opinion on others?
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