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My favorite anti depression book is Feeling Good by Dr. Burns. I especially like the "if that were true, it would mean that..." exercise in the book, where you

My favorite anti depression book is Feeling Good by Dr. Burns. I especially like the "if that were true, it would mean that..." exercise in the book, where you drill down to the root cause of your negative thoughts. So I asked chatgpt about the book, and the exercise, and how to do it, and examples of the 9 cognitive distortions you're supposed to label your responses with. It was very helpful and knew the material well. It made me wonder this exact point. If you wrote a book on a very rare subject that you were basically the only popular source of detailed info on... And now these models just answer questions for people without having to buy the book.. is that really fair? Edit: I guess this isn't really that different than the fact I read the book and have described it to many friends and even done the exercise with them.

mindcrime 3y ago
If you wrote a book on a very rare subject that you were basically the only popular source of detailed info on... And now these models just answer questions for people without having to buy the book.. is that really fair? What if a person bought a copy of the book, read it and learned the material, and then provided advice to people based on the material. I think most people would say that that is fair. So why is it less fair for the AI to do what is effectively the same thing? Is it simply a matter of scale? Or is there something more fundamental at work?
- nicenewtemp84 3y ago
  That was basically my edit, we may have missed each other. The only point I can see making is that for some reason I doubt openai actually paid the author for the contents of the book, but maybe they did. Maybe they borrowed ebooks one by one from some digital library and ingested them that way for free.
  - arthurcolle 3y ago
    Somehow I feel like they just scraped libgen and sci hub Much more "scalable" i.e. easy to get raw training dataset. Move fast and break things
- mywittyname 3y ago
  I'd argue ChatGPT is closer to restating copyrighted materials in a different way. And that is legally questionable. Whether that actually matters depends on how much money is at stake and how much each party cares to spend to enforce or protect their viewpoint. Allowing these systems to utilize copyrighted materials without compensating the copyright holder is a legal loophole the size of the sun. Then it becomes a perfectly legal defense to write "an AI" that slurps up copyrighted material and produces results that are "based on" that material. My issue is that the copyrighted work is fundamentally integrated into the algorithm. Say you wrote a program that would input a copyrighted work, then prints out the contents, but with some words replaced with synonyms. Would the output of that be okay? What about if phrases were replaced? How about if entire sections are added, rearranged, and/or removed? At some point, the results become so mangled as to not be recognizable, but the fact that a copyrighted work serves as an input to the program is still an issue, IMHO. A major difference between humans and computers is that a human can't (generally) recall hundreds of pages of text and regurgitate it on demand. So a human who has read a book only retains a fraction of the contents, and even then, generally they don't retain all of the information accurately.
  - mindcrime 3y ago
    I get what you're saying, but I'm still not convinced that introducing the notion of "a computer program" vs "a human" changes anything in the equation. That is to say, IF you - as a human - had a "photographic memory" and after reading a copyrighted work began to spit out big chunks of it verbatim in response to a query, then you would already be guilty of copyright infringement, no? Likewise, if a computer program reads 10 books on, I dunno, let's say Quantum Physics, and then - in response to a query - emits a technically correct answer that isn't obviously cribbed from any one book... has it violated copyright? My point is not to say that contemporary "AI" systems never emit things that are arguably copyright infringement. It's more just to say that there's nothing about being an AI that makes it necessary that its output be copyright infringing.
  - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    As far as I can tell, restating materials in a different way does not infringe copyright.
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago
  I do wonder if it will disincentivise the author from writing the book in the first place. What’s the point if an AI is going to regurgitate the material to every Tom, Dick and Harry thereby killing the demand for the book.
- exabrial 3y ago
  Answer is pretty obvious: One is a computer program, literally designed to pilfer copyrighted works, the other is a human being.
  - function_seven 3y ago
    If you smuggle "pilfer" into the description of AI, then in that case it's "obvious". But the comparison could just as easily be written, "One is a computer program, literally designed to learn from copyrighted works, the other is a human being that learns from copyrighted works" If ChatGPT is parroting entire paragraphs of copyrighted work in its answers, then "pilfer" is probably the right word. Or maybe "plagiarize". But if it's training on the information gleaned from the work, and using that training to synthesize the answers, isn't that a lot more like how a learned person applies their knowledge? I haven't yet made up my mind completely on how IP should interact with AI. I see good arguments for and against. But the answer is far from obvious!
  - mindcrime 3y ago
    Why is it "pilfering" when the computer program does it, but "learning" when a human does it?
    - exabrial 3y ago
      Because those two things are not even equivalent. A human can reason, make decisions, act in best interest, judge context of a situation, apply it to new scenarios, judge emotion, and create a new derivative work. The computer program is literally taking someones work and adding fancy way to search through the other person's work, without adding any value. We need to stop fantasizing these fancy toys are actually any sort of intelligence.
      - mindcrime 3y ago
        We need to stop fantasizing these fancy toys are actually any sort of intelligence. That strikes me as a rather extraordinary claim. It seems obvious to me that contemporary AI's are "some" sort of intelligence, albeit with open questions around "what kind of intelligence?" and "how intelligent are they?".
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  What if one person bought the book, copied it, and distributed it for negligible cost to anyone with a passing interest in the contents? Sounds pretty similar to copyright infringement.
bombcar 3y ago
> It made me wonder this exact point. If you wrote a book on a very rare subject that you were basically the only popular source of detailed info on... And now these models just answer questions for people without having to buy the book.. is that really fair? Dr Burns seems to have done well, so in his case I'd think he was at least adequately compensated for his life's work. You can't answer "fairness" on copyright in all cases just by that, but this particular case I feel there's little or no harm done. If people start selling these GPT things because they let you avoid fair recompense, that's another thing we'll have to work out as a society.
torstenvl 3y ago
> answer questions for people without having to buy the book.. is that really fair? Yes. It's fair because that happens all the time with non-AI intelligences (i.e., people). No author has the right to prevent me from discussing a book with someone. If I were a clinician and incorporated that exercise into my practice, as long as I wasn't copying any content (e.g., worksheets, scoring tables, etc.), then I owe nothing to the author. It's also a fundamental principle of copyright law, at least in the United States. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/499/340/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/499/340/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....
- whateveracct 3y ago
  AI and humans aren't the same thing. Even if we do anthropomorphize AI.
- blibble 3y ago
  > No author has the right to prevent me from discussing a book with someone. a lossy compression function is not "someone"
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - torstenvl 3y ago
    Oh? And what section of title 17 does that ostensible distinction implicate?
- nicenewtemp84 3y ago
  At what point is it discussing a subject, vs basically verbatim listing things, methods, reasoning from a book?
  - torstenvl 3y ago
    Reproduction of the precise form of expression is the only thing covered by copyright. Facts are not protected by any IP law in the United States. Ideas may be protected by patent law, if the idea constitutes a novel, non-obvious invention.
nicenewtemp84 3y ago
As a side note, how would we all feel if someone wrote a depression /cognitive behavioral therapy ai chat bot, charged $20 a month for it, and then it just basically ran you through the exact methods from the feeling good book?
- prepend 3y ago
  This happens all the time with “self help” tiktokers and YouTubers and whatnot that are just recycling others ideas and content. How would you like to stop this? It doesn’t violate copyright unless they read the book verbatim. I guess ideas could be patented as a utility method by the author and it would prevent someone else from doing that method for 20 years. Mostly this is just the way things were designed and I think that it’s good in the sense that the purpose of creation is to further human experience, not maximize creator revenue.
- SilasX 3y ago
  That was the business model of Joyable, except it charged more and had a human periodically sanity-check your progress on the exercises.
DANmode 3y ago
People and information want to be free. I'm sure the author would have no problem with everyone in the world receiving a free summary — once they know they've been fed and cared for.
- nicenewtemp84 3y ago
  Burns was a working professional before writing the book. If he wanted to release the book for free, he would have. If he wanted to provide summaries of it online, he would have. If he wanted to discuss the book online for free, he would have and does. But I don't think it being fed into a questions and answer service is something he really wanted.

mindcrime 3y ago

If you wrote a book on a very rare subject that you were basically the only popular source of detailed info on... And now these models just answer questions for people without having to buy the book.. is that really fair? What if a person bought a copy of the book, read it and learned the material, and then provided advice to people based on the material. I think most people would say that that is fair. So why is it less fair for the AI to do what is effectively the same thing? Is it simply a matter of scale? Or is there something more fundamental at work?

nicenewtemp84 3y ago
That was basically my edit, we may have missed each other. The only point I can see making is that for some reason I doubt openai actually paid the author for the contents of the book, but maybe they did. Maybe they borrowed ebooks one by one from some digital library and ingested them that way for free.
- arthurcolle 3y ago
  Somehow I feel like they just scraped libgen and sci hub Much more "scalable" i.e. easy to get raw training dataset. Move fast and break things
mywittyname 3y ago
I'd argue ChatGPT is closer to restating copyrighted materials in a different way. And that is legally questionable. Whether that actually matters depends on how much money is at stake and how much each party cares to spend to enforce or protect their viewpoint. Allowing these systems to utilize copyrighted materials without compensating the copyright holder is a legal loophole the size of the sun. Then it becomes a perfectly legal defense to write "an AI" that slurps up copyrighted material and produces results that are "based on" that material. My issue is that the copyrighted work is fundamentally integrated into the algorithm. Say you wrote a program that would input a copyrighted work, then prints out the contents, but with some words replaced with synonyms. Would the output of that be okay? What about if phrases were replaced? How about if entire sections are added, rearranged, and/or removed? At some point, the results become so mangled as to not be recognizable, but the fact that a copyrighted work serves as an input to the program is still an issue, IMHO. A major difference between humans and computers is that a human can't (generally) recall hundreds of pages of text and regurgitate it on demand. So a human who has read a book only retains a fraction of the contents, and even then, generally they don't retain all of the information accurately.
- mindcrime 3y ago
  I get what you're saying, but I'm still not convinced that introducing the notion of "a computer program" vs "a human" changes anything in the equation. That is to say, IF you - as a human - had a "photographic memory" and after reading a copyrighted work began to spit out big chunks of it verbatim in response to a query, then you would already be guilty of copyright infringement, no? Likewise, if a computer program reads 10 books on, I dunno, let's say Quantum Physics, and then - in response to a query - emits a technically correct answer that isn't obviously cribbed from any one book... has it violated copyright? My point is not to say that contemporary "AI" systems never emit things that are arguably copyright infringement. It's more just to say that there's nothing about being an AI that makes it necessary that its output be copyright infringing.
- amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  As far as I can tell, restating materials in a different way does not infringe copyright.
tonyedgecombe 3y ago
I do wonder if it will disincentivise the author from writing the book in the first place. What’s the point if an AI is going to regurgitate the material to every Tom, Dick and Harry thereby killing the demand for the book.
exabrial 3y ago
Answer is pretty obvious: One is a computer program, literally designed to pilfer copyrighted works, the other is a human being.
- function_seven 3y ago
  If you smuggle "pilfer" into the description of AI, then in that case it's "obvious". But the comparison could just as easily be written, "One is a computer program, literally designed to learn from copyrighted works, the other is a human being that learns from copyrighted works" If ChatGPT is parroting entire paragraphs of copyrighted work in its answers, then "pilfer" is probably the right word. Or maybe "plagiarize". But if it's training on the information gleaned from the work, and using that training to synthesize the answers, isn't that a lot more like how a learned person applies their knowledge? I haven't yet made up my mind completely on how IP should interact with AI. I see good arguments for and against. But the answer is far from obvious!
- mindcrime 3y ago
  Why is it "pilfering" when the computer program does it, but "learning" when a human does it?
  - exabrial 3y ago
    Because those two things are not even equivalent. A human can reason, make decisions, act in best interest, judge context of a situation, apply it to new scenarios, judge emotion, and create a new derivative work. The computer program is literally taking someones work and adding fancy way to search through the other person's work, without adding any value. We need to stop fantasizing these fancy toys are actually any sort of intelligence.
    - mindcrime 3y ago
      We need to stop fantasizing these fancy toys are actually any sort of intelligence. That strikes me as a rather extraordinary claim. It seems obvious to me that contemporary AI's are "some" sort of intelligence, albeit with open questions around "what kind of intelligence?" and "how intelligent are they?".
JonChesterfield 3y ago
What if one person bought the book, copied it, and distributed it for negligible cost to anyone with a passing interest in the contents? Sounds pretty similar to copyright infringement.

bombcar 3y ago

> It made me wonder this exact point. If you wrote a book on a very rare subject that you were basically the only popular source of detailed info on... And now these models just answer questions for people without having to buy the book.. is that really fair? Dr Burns seems to have done well, so in his case I'd think he was at least adequately compensated for his life's work. You can't answer "fairness" on copyright in all cases just by that, but this particular case I feel there's little or no harm done. If people start selling these GPT things because they let you avoid fair recompense, that's another thing we'll have to work out as a society.

torstenvl 3y ago

> answer questions for people without having to buy the book.. is that really fair? Yes. It's fair because that happens all the time with non-AI intelligences (i.e., people). No author has the right to prevent me from discussing a book with someone. If I were a clinician and incorporated that exercise into my practice, as long as I wasn't copying any content (e.g., worksheets, scoring tables, etc.), then I owe nothing to the author. It's also a fundamental principle of copyright law, at least in the United States. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/499/340/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/499/340/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

whateveracct 3y ago
AI and humans aren't the same thing. Even if we do anthropomorphize AI.
blibble 3y ago
> No author has the right to prevent me from discussing a book with someone. a lossy compression function is not "someone"
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- torstenvl 3y ago
  Oh? And what section of title 17 does that ostensible distinction implicate?
nicenewtemp84 3y ago
At what point is it discussing a subject, vs basically verbatim listing things, methods, reasoning from a book?
- torstenvl 3y ago
  Reproduction of the precise form of expression is the only thing covered by copyright. Facts are not protected by any IP law in the United States. Ideas may be protected by patent law, if the idea constitutes a novel, non-obvious invention.

nicenewtemp84 3y ago

As a side note, how would we all feel if someone wrote a depression /cognitive behavioral therapy ai chat bot, charged $20 a month for it, and then it just basically ran you through the exact methods from the feeling good book?

prepend 3y ago
This happens all the time with “self help” tiktokers and YouTubers and whatnot that are just recycling others ideas and content. How would you like to stop this? It doesn’t violate copyright unless they read the book verbatim. I guess ideas could be patented as a utility method by the author and it would prevent someone else from doing that method for 20 years. Mostly this is just the way things were designed and I think that it’s good in the sense that the purpose of creation is to further human experience, not maximize creator revenue.
SilasX 3y ago
That was the business model of Joyable, except it charged more and had a human periodically sanity-check your progress on the exercises.

DANmode 3y ago

People and information want to be free. I'm sure the author would have no problem with everyone in the world receiving a free summary — once they know they've been fed and cared for.

nicenewtemp84 3y ago
Burns was a working professional before writing the book. If he wanted to release the book for free, he would have. If he wanted to provide summaries of it online, he would have. If he wanted to discuss the book online for free, he would have and does. But I don't think it being fed into a questions and answer service is something he really wanted.