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Note that there is a large gap between the statement "models and the human brain are doing similar things" and the statement "machines can think". by analogy:

Note that there is a large gap between the statement "models and the human brain are doing similar things" and the statement "machines can think". by analogy: * It is a known background fact that a functioning human arm is alive. * I might make a claim "a robot arm can do similar things to a human arm". * It is unlikely that I have made the claim that a robot arm is alive. My claim is more likely to be about other properties of (robot) arms. [1] Now that this is understood, perhaps also consider re-evaluating statements by Dkidd and Filligree (and potentially others) in that light. Their statements appear to be rather orthogonal to what you previously imputed (the same as with me). And thanks for taking the time to talk. You seem a bit nicer now. :-) -- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. " .

freejazz 4y ago
That was never not understood. In this context, what's being analogized is the thought process. As I expressed earlier, what is being said is that the similar thing that is being done is the process of thought, which therefore does imply that machines can think, though it's not a conclusion necessary to make anyone's argument. I don't see it being advocated that the machines are doing some non-thought-like process where the end result is analogous to what would be produced by a thought-driven process. So I think my statement was fair and wasn't entirely orthogonal. I also still disagree with Filligree, as I do not think anything about what the LLMs do is akin to my own thought process. I guess I cannot question Filligree's own thought process, but I'm highly skeptical that their thought process is anything like what the LLMs employ and I similarly reject any characterization of the creative process as being like that which is employed by LLMs wherein people just wholly copy something (like a genre or style - and I think this characterization of the creative process is incredibly ignorant and naive) and then iterate away from it. IMO that's a characterization that is a loose fit at the most abstracted scale, and doesn't even come close to being a fair representation of what goes in the creative process (again IMO) in actuality. I still, as a copyright litigator, do not understand what Ekidd is getting at, and if anything, I think it reflects a misunderstanding of how copyright law is applied (and is also probably based in a false understanding of what LLMs do). There really isn't an issue with genre and style in copyright law (maybe the blurred lines case for the music context, but it's widely recognized as not following the jurisprudence on scene a faire doctrine). To whatever point he seems to be making, I think once again describing this as just copying style and genre is just a tautological end-run around the actual issue that doesn't make an inquisition into what is being done by the LLM to capture the "genre" or "style". As I've pointed out, I think this kind of perspective is reflective of a kind of naivety about how artists create that I often see expressed from technical individuals that do not partake in creative activities such as painting, authoring poetry, writing music, etc, let alone engaging with the centuries of human exploration on what the creative process entails. To your point, sure, the machine doesn't think. If that's the case, what it is doing cannot be thoughtful. What is happening in the human brain when art is made is thoughtful, imo. I reject the notion that human creativity and art is just some sort of formulaic application of everything that came before it. I see this argument a lot now because it makes sense from the perspective of LLMs and why what they do must be a fair use (because it's inherently not different from that which a human does, which isn't considered infringing). While typically, it is the burden of the claimant to prove copying, here, I think it's a perverse reality wherein LLMs get to say to everyone "show me where they copy" meanwhile, nobody, including the LLMs creators, actually seem to understand how the LLMs use "style" or "genre". As far as I'm concerned, the LLMs can't just hide the needle in the haystack and then say "well we aren't infringing so long as you don't find the needle". To be more clear, when a human goes to a museum and looks at art, or lets say, studies it in university, I don't think what happens in the brain is in any way analogous to what happens when these models are "trained".
- ekidd 4y ago
  If you're interested, I explained my argument in more detail in a sibling to this comment. > As far as I'm concerned, the LLMs can't just hide the needle in the haystack and then say "well we aren't infringing so long as you don't find the needle". I think that GPT 3.5 is capable of significantly more creativity than you're claiming here. Not consistently, and certainly not in the realm of legal writing. But it can compose cute little original stories in mostly grammatical Latin, stories that exist nowhere on the Internet. And the related model used by Copilot can write code using newly-created, unpublished APIs. > To be more clear, when a human goes to a museum and looks at art, or lets say, studies it in university, I don't think what happens in the brain is in any way analogous to what happens when these models are "trained". As I argue in the sibling comment, I strongly suspect that GPT models have stumbled across a weaker cousin of one of the major tricks underlying raw human creativity. Current LLMs can't "think", nor can they edit, introspect, persist, or have any non-trivial goals. They can't even grasp the difference between truth and confabulation. But I do think that they can create. And that the processes by which they do so are not entirely alien to what our brains do.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    I think you are being very generous with your use of the word creativity and what is meant by it, especially in the human context. Would we call it creativity if 1000 monkeys typed out Shakespeare? I don't think so, it'd be an amazing coincidence. I think these models are more akin to an amazing coincidence than they are creativity. Yes, it is true the thing was created by the model, but that's not what people mean when they say someone was creative. Here is a definition: "relating to or involving the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work" Your argument implicitly assumes that the model is doing anything like using imagination or creation of new ideas. It's my belief that when people refer to creativity, they mean more than just the act of manufacturing or producing a thing. This is my fundamental issue with these models and the proponents that say they are doing human things. I don't see any arguments to substantiate this belief, just the misuse of words and the misapplication (i.e. anthropomorphizing) of computer processes to the most conveniently analogous human process, but without any substance. I admit, I don't have a substantive basis for my argument, but I believe it should be on the proponents of this tech to prove that it is similar to humans in these senses, and shouldn't be my burden to disprove.
ekidd 4y ago
If I wanted to expand my bit of cynicism into an argument, it might be: - I strongly suspect that much of what I consider "me" physically exists inside my skull. That's a huge philosophical debate, but look at any Oliver Sacks book for cases of how physical brain damage can change a person's consciousness. - Human intelligence is a brand new evolutionary innovation. We share an ancestor with chimps 6 to 8 million years ago. That suggests that human intelligence evolved in less than 500,000 generations, with the bulk of what we recognize as culture in the last 25,000 to 50,000 generations. Therefore, there's an upper limit on how much new "complexity" evolution could create in order to make humans intelligent. To use a simplistic technical metaphor, updating from chimps to H sapiens is probably a small-but-clever patch, not a total rewrite. - Or to put it another way: most of what we do is probably clever applications of a few good tricks, applied to chimp-like ancestor. - Specifically, I suspect that biological equivalents to LLMs are one of the "good tricks" that distinguish us from chimps. And similar mechanism likely underlie much of human creativity. - Our biological LLMs are better than whatever Google and OpenAI are doing. I learned a foreign language to a respectable level as an adult with about 2-4 million words of input and some awkward practice. GPT and similar models, however, require vastly larger input to pull off their tricks. But I think they're on the correct path. It's immaterial to me whether GPT "thinks." It has no consciousness, no continuity, and barely anything resembling goals. I could argue that it occasionally understands things. And it can create well enough to write funny little stories in Latin, things which exist nowhere in its input. Hell, it can do a pretty fair pastische of Dumas. So my hypothesis is that GPT's creativity is a weaker than human creativity. But it's still probably doing something deeply similar to what we do. The final piece of my hypothesis is that copyright maximalism has been pushed very hard by media companies and some IP lawyers for decades now. I've spoken to lawyers who believed that intellual property was great and we should create many new kinds of IP. Many of the things these people wanted sounded like horrible dystopias to me. Since I believe that GPT is likely a close analogy to one of the major "tricks" underlying human creativity, and that certain influential IP maximalists will push for anything they can get, I fear that regulation of LLMs would open a potential path to eventually regulating human creativity in novel ways that I would consider terrible. Once an influential legal precedent exists, and there's enough money to be made, there will be strong incentives to apply that precedent in new ways. As I said, I'm being cynical.

freejazz 4y ago

That was never not understood. In this context, what's being analogized is the thought process. As I expressed earlier, what is being said is that the similar thing that is being done is the process of thought, which therefore does imply that machines can think, though it's not a conclusion necessary to make anyone's argument. I don't see it being advocated that the machines are doing some non-thought-like process where the end result is analogous to what would be produced by a thought-driven process. So I think my statement was fair and wasn't entirely orthogonal. I also still disagree with Filligree, as I do not think anything about what the LLMs do is akin to my own thought process. I guess I cannot question Filligree's own thought process, but I'm highly skeptical that their thought process is anything like what the LLMs employ and I similarly reject any characterization of the creative process as being like that which is employed by LLMs wherein people just wholly copy something (like a genre or style - and I think this characterization of the creative process is incredibly ignorant and naive) and then iterate away from it. IMO that's a characterization that is a loose fit at the most abstracted scale, and doesn't even come close to being a fair representation of what goes in the creative process (again IMO) in actuality. I still, as a copyright litigator, do not understand what Ekidd is getting at, and if anything, I think it reflects a misunderstanding of how copyright law is applied (and is also probably based in a false understanding of what LLMs do). There really isn't an issue with genre and style in copyright law (maybe the blurred lines case for the music context, but it's widely recognized as not following the jurisprudence on scene a faire doctrine). To whatever point he seems to be making, I think once again describing this as just copying style and genre is just a tautological end-run around the actual issue that doesn't make an inquisition into what is being done by the LLM to capture the "genre" or "style". As I've pointed out, I think this kind of perspective is reflective of a kind of naivety about how artists create that I often see expressed from technical individuals that do not partake in creative activities such as painting, authoring poetry, writing music, etc, let alone engaging with the centuries of human exploration on what the creative process entails. To your point, sure, the machine doesn't think. If that's the case, what it is doing cannot be thoughtful. What is happening in the human brain when art is made is thoughtful, imo. I reject the notion that human creativity and art is just some sort of formulaic application of everything that came before it. I see this argument a lot now because it makes sense from the perspective of LLMs and why what they do must be a fair use (because it's inherently not different from that which a human does, which isn't considered infringing). While typically, it is the burden of the claimant to prove copying, here, I think it's a perverse reality wherein LLMs get to say to everyone "show me where they copy" meanwhile, nobody, including the LLMs creators, actually seem to understand how the LLMs use "style" or "genre". As far as I'm concerned, the LLMs can't just hide the needle in the haystack and then say "well we aren't infringing so long as you don't find the needle". To be more clear, when a human goes to a museum and looks at art, or lets say, studies it in university, I don't think what happens in the brain is in any way analogous to what happens when these models are "trained".

ekidd 4y ago
If you're interested, I explained my argument in more detail in a sibling to this comment. > As far as I'm concerned, the LLMs can't just hide the needle in the haystack and then say "well we aren't infringing so long as you don't find the needle". I think that GPT 3.5 is capable of significantly more creativity than you're claiming here. Not consistently, and certainly not in the realm of legal writing. But it can compose cute little original stories in mostly grammatical Latin, stories that exist nowhere on the Internet. And the related model used by Copilot can write code using newly-created, unpublished APIs. > To be more clear, when a human goes to a museum and looks at art, or lets say, studies it in university, I don't think what happens in the brain is in any way analogous to what happens when these models are "trained". As I argue in the sibling comment, I strongly suspect that GPT models have stumbled across a weaker cousin of one of the major tricks underlying raw human creativity. Current LLMs can't "think", nor can they edit, introspect, persist, or have any non-trivial goals. They can't even grasp the difference between truth and confabulation. But I do think that they can create. And that the processes by which they do so are not entirely alien to what our brains do.
- freejazz 4y ago
  I think you are being very generous with your use of the word creativity and what is meant by it, especially in the human context. Would we call it creativity if 1000 monkeys typed out Shakespeare? I don't think so, it'd be an amazing coincidence. I think these models are more akin to an amazing coincidence than they are creativity. Yes, it is true the thing was created by the model, but that's not what people mean when they say someone was creative. Here is a definition: "relating to or involving the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work" Your argument implicitly assumes that the model is doing anything like using imagination or creation of new ideas. It's my belief that when people refer to creativity, they mean more than just the act of manufacturing or producing a thing. This is my fundamental issue with these models and the proponents that say they are doing human things. I don't see any arguments to substantiate this belief, just the misuse of words and the misapplication (i.e. anthropomorphizing) of computer processes to the most conveniently analogous human process, but without any substance. I admit, I don't have a substantive basis for my argument, but I believe it should be on the proponents of this tech to prove that it is similar to humans in these senses, and shouldn't be my burden to disprove.

ekidd 4y ago

If I wanted to expand my bit of cynicism into an argument, it might be: - I strongly suspect that much of what I consider "me" physically exists inside my skull. That's a huge philosophical debate, but look at any Oliver Sacks book for cases of how physical brain damage can change a person's consciousness. - Human intelligence is a brand new evolutionary innovation. We share an ancestor with chimps 6 to 8 million years ago. That suggests that human intelligence evolved in less than 500,000 generations, with the bulk of what we recognize as culture in the last 25,000 to 50,000 generations. Therefore, there's an upper limit on how much new "complexity" evolution could create in order to make humans intelligent. To use a simplistic technical metaphor, updating from chimps to H sapiens is probably a small-but-clever patch, not a total rewrite. - Or to put it another way: most of what we do is probably clever applications of a few good tricks, applied to chimp-like ancestor. - Specifically, I suspect that biological equivalents to LLMs are one of the "good tricks" that distinguish us from chimps. And similar mechanism likely underlie much of human creativity. - Our biological LLMs are better than whatever Google and OpenAI are doing. I learned a foreign language to a respectable level as an adult with about 2-4 million words of input and some awkward practice. GPT and similar models, however, require vastly larger input to pull off their tricks. But I think they're on the correct path. It's immaterial to me whether GPT "thinks." It has no consciousness, no continuity, and barely anything resembling goals. I could argue that it occasionally understands things. And it can create well enough to write funny little stories in Latin, things which exist nowhere in its input. Hell, it can do a pretty fair pastische of Dumas. So my hypothesis is that GPT's creativity is a weaker than human creativity. But it's still probably doing something deeply similar to what we do. The final piece of my hypothesis is that copyright maximalism has been pushed very hard by media companies and some IP lawyers for decades now. I've spoken to lawyers who believed that intellual property was great and we should create many new kinds of IP. Many of the things these people wanted sounded like horrible dystopias to me. Since I believe that GPT is likely a close analogy to one of the major "tricks" underlying human creativity, and that certain influential IP maximalists will push for anything they can get, I fear that regulation of LLMs would open a potential path to eventually regulating human creativity in novel ways that I would consider terrible. Once an influential legal precedent exists, and there's enough money to be made, there will be strong incentives to apply that precedent in new ways. As I said, I'm being cynical.