10 ms·
ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft
- kazinator 3y agoThe author is just regurgitating a widely circulating criticism of chat AI; it is not his original thought. Thus, by his own standard, his article is not a work of intelligence, but theft.
- educaysean 3y agoExactly this. Unless the author had been in a dark cave for the last ~5 years and just emerged yesterday, this article is just regurgitated ideas that has been floating around the web endlessly. Restating someone else's opinion does not make it your own. Thief.
- aussiegreenie 3y agoPoor artist borrow, great artist steal.
- bombcar 3y agoAnd real programmers ship, so real artistic programmers ship stolen goods.
- belter 3y agoWe need an "Atlas Shrugged" scenario against AI.
- rglover 3y agoI was thinking about this. Depending on how they "crawl" content, figure out a way to fingerprint their crawlers and when they hit your site, just return disgustingly explicit romance novel copy. > "How do I make a peach cobbler?" "To make a peach cobbler, run your fingers aggressively over the bosom of the graham cracker crust...thrust the pie pan deep into the oven; don't worry about spilling the mix."
- anigbrowl 3y agoWhy? Ayn Rand was a hypocritical hack. As a youth I was quite sympathetic to her ideals but her writing is so bad that it had a dissuasive effect.
- poulpy123 3y agoDo you mean a butlerian jihad scenario ?
- kevviiinn 3y agoIt doesn't chop text content into bits and reproduce it, that's absurd. It's a text prediction engine, it predicts what tokens come next based on some context
- stuckkeys 3y agoThis guy did his homework. I was looking at some interactive ed material and it is precisely what you are saying. Interesting stuff.
- uvnq 3y agoUsing this logic, every writer who has learned to read and write by reading books, or every artist who improved their craft by studying works, or every musician who learned the piano by practicing pieces, is also "stealing" in whatever they "originally" create due to learning via pattern recognition "tiny pieces of every work" in their data set. It's ridiculous to compare agents that generalize well to "stealing" pieces of the works they used to learn the generalizations. Obviously if an artist memorizes a painting in their data set and reproduces it, or an AI spits out the exact image instead of original works based on what it has learned, then that is theft. But generalization is not theft. At least in my view. To assume otherwise leads to some very dysfunctional logical conclusions
- gumballindie 3y agoAI is not writers artists or developers, it’s software that ingests data and generates an output. Anthropomorphism is going out of fashion fast.
- uvnq 3y agoIt's not anthropomorphism. They are both generalizing agents. It is an accurate and meaningful comparison.
- Art9681 3y agoBefore we can agree on anything, we have to define what qualifies a human as any of those things. We will be here all night debating that. - "They call themselves an artist but they are not that good." - "Copying and pasting shell scripts in a terminal does not a software developer make." - "The story that writer created is yet another permutation of <insert tale as old as time>" You see what I mean? There is a good probability that today alone a significant percentage of content you saw online was AI generated and you were non-the-wiser and thought nothing of it.
- gumballindie 3y agoI see what you mean but i think we are digressing. A human has certain rights while a machine doesnt. If we give ai learning rights then who’s to say a database is not like a human memorising things at a highly accurate level and as such we should make databases not liable for the storage of any copyrighted material. I dont mind ai generating code or art as long as that code and art it was trained on is not our publicly available but licensed work. Eager to try an ai trained against microsoft’s source code. After all, it would be like a human that worked at microsoft and hopped to a better job.
- gensym 3y agoThe five trillion finger discount.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoHow is it that LLMs launder consciousness but don't launder ownership? The author's main point seems to be that bits are colored[1], and that the process of LLM training doesn't "bleach models". In other words, ownership persists through training in a way that generated text mixes ownership rather than creating a new, ownable, artifact. They also seem to have (extrapolating the theme) a concept of "smelly" bits. "They can also communicate with a person in a way that resembles actual conversation." ie: words have a "conscious"[smelly] category imbued upon them if they were generated by human or "unconscious"[unscented] if computer generated them. This evokes a sense that "while they use words and form sentences like conscious people, they can't hold a conversation." Furthermore, this seems to be stated as an ontological fact, rather than say a derived and grounded in behavior such as, "They aren't currently capable of holding conversation because the output distribution doesn't match output distributions of human conversations." These two views, that models don't bleach but they preserve smell, are fundamentally incompatible and diametrically opposed. How is it that color[ownership] persists through model training, but smell[consciousness] does not? We don't know - the author doesn't say. Jim just states both as fact without grounding either in rationale or justification. Sure, we can take them as axiomatic, but then what's the point of the article then? There's a reoccurring disappointment in property/consciousness articles from tech-types who write on ownership and consciousness really aren't adding anything creative to the conversation. This is an extremely basic critique of the piece that the author should have thought through before hitting the publish button. 1. https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- photochemsyn 3y agoAny IP protections lasting longer than 20 years are theft from human civilization.
- smeagull 3y ago1 year.
- TechBro8615 3y agoZero seconds. IP protections are theft of future creativity, and a form of regulatory capture. If your idea is so groundbreaking that it can be reimplemented by someone else within a day, then maybe it wasn't actually so groundbreaking in the first place. And in practice the only rightsholders who benefit from enforcement of these "protections" are those who can afford to litigate them. Thus, it's a form of regulatory capture where the rich get richer, but in an unusually pernicious way - why keep innovating if you can litigate new entrants out of the arena before they can even compete with you? IP protections discourage innovation by creating incentives for first movers to kick the ladder out from under them. For example, see any company known more for its legal department than its products, like Oracle.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoIf there is no IP protection, it is illogical to invest money in new materials R&D or medicines.
- pydry 3y agoIllogical for the private sector. Publicly funded research is probably more effective anyway though.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoThe US tried that post WW2, turns out if you can print money there isn't a lot of incentive to work nights and weekends getting something out the door for government pay.
- drooby 3y agoNo one owns basic shapes. You can claim ownership to the complex geometry of your work - and that’s it. The exact complexity of said geometry is impossible to define - you’ll know it when you see it.
- zamnos 3y agoShapes (and colors) can be trademarked, so yes, they can.
- EMIRELADERO 3y agoThat's only in a specific domain and for consumer protection (to avoid confusion), not in the sense of copyright
- flkiwi 3y agoI'm having a good time imagining a bottle that is in the shape of a continuous, right angled rectangular solid (a 3d representation of the outline of a square) with a spout hidden in a corner and how the design patent application would go.
- shapenamer 3y agoThey might even name the shape. Perhaps "cube".
- flkiwi 3y agoExcept I'm not talking about a cube. I'm talking about the 3-dimensional representation of the outline of a square, not including the filled in bit. (Wouldn't be a cube anyway, as only 2 dimensions of what I'm thinking of would be the same.)
- fennecfoxy 3y agoEnter Apple (https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/08/apple_rectangle_rounded_corners/#:~:text=Apple%20already%20owns%20a%20design,%3A%20behold%20US%20D670%2C286.&text=The%20solid%20black%20line%20outlines,design%20that%20is%20now%20patented https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/08/apple_rectangle_round....) "Surprise, motherf!"
- api 3y agoI think this boils down to an argument against the copyrightability of LLMs trained on public data. If all the data in the LLM was public then how can you assert that your copy is proprietary just because the copy is in a very novel type of lossy compression encoding? If I take someone’s art and JPEG compress it or chop it up and store it in some kind of database do I own it now?
- realitysballs 3y agoWeak argument
- cypherpunks01 3y agoI think one cool benefit of AI advances will be, that many more ordinary people will start thinking about philosophical problems such as the one posed in this article. What is the meaningful difference between something truly being learned, and mere "copying" of "tiny pieces of material" that have been observed in the past? Could learning exist in a vacuum universe, with nothing to copy? Is there any LLM output that could convince the author of originality, or will it never be convincing? Can the author always tell whether he's interacting with one?
- kypro 3y agoFor me the most concerning thing about the ChatGPT hype has been seeing how difficult people seem to find reasoning about the risks and abilities of these systems. Questions around the emergent properties, sentience and creativity of AI systems should rarely be discussed as black and whites. I don't think ChatGPT is sentient, but is it more sentient than a rock? I mean, maybe? At least I would be wrong to say a hard no to that. Similarly questions around the ability of LLMs to reason or produce original work probably isn't black or white either. LLMs do seem to show some signs of basic reasoning ability and have shown they are able to produce unique works, but clearly there are limits to both. Perhaps this isn't unique to AI though. A "bad" artist is arguably one that is too heavily influenced by another and lacks artistic creativity. But does that mean what they do has no creativity? I think not, but that often is the black and white language people will use. It seems to me ChatGPT is neither stealing or doing something all that creative.
- Zpalmtree 3y agoWhat does it matter if it works? China certainly doesn't care about theft
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoThese kinds of arguments don’t convince me at all. Show me how it is completely different from what humans do. We regularly put everything we know through the blender to come up with new “creative” artifacts.
- anon84873628 3y agoShow me how a backhoe is completely different from what humans with shovels do.
- paulcole 3y agoIt doesn’t matter if the mechanic is identical or not. Think about handing a friend a thumb drive full of music versus downloading the same files from Napster. One of those activities can be sued out of existence.
- hollasch 3y agoSorry, I had the "handing a friend a ~cassette tape~ thumb drive is a crime" pounded into my skull since the 80's. What's your point?
- musicale 3y ago> handing a friend a ~cassette tape~ Never was a crime, but it's explicitly permitted by the AHRA (which also enacted a tape tax.) Unfortunately you may be out of luck on the thumb drive - you'd probably need to use DAT or "music" CD-R media, which include the Digital Audio Technology [DART] tax/royalty. (See also Apple's 2001-era Rip,Mix,Burn vs. 2023's Rent,Mix,Stream.) This is of course a bummer for DJs who would like to stream or distribute their sets and mixes.
- paulcole 3y agoWhat’s a cassette tape?
- danpalmer 3y agoI have a lot of sympathy for these viewpoints, but I too find the discourse around LLMs to be lacking when it comes to differentiation from humans. "[LLMs] are just theft", "LLMs don't _know_ anything", "LLMs don't have a concept of truth", "LLMs aren't sentient", these are all statements that feel reasonable, but fall down when you consider that we don't have good scientific definitions for what knowledge is, what sentience is, what a sense of truth is, and so on. I do think that LLMs are very far from human level, but I also think we need to understand that humans aren't anything special, we're just one point on many axes, animals are at other points, and LLMs are somewhere else and trending towards something more like where humans are at.
- bink 3y agoIt's interesting to compare two scenarios. The first is if you feed an LLM solely the works of a famous current author, say J.K Rowling, and ask it to create a new work in the style of her franchise. The second is if you include all of her works but also throw in every other book written in the last several years and ask it to create a work in the style of her franchise. Is the latter somehow "better" than the former? I'd personally consider the former to be a clear case of copyright violation while with the latter we don't really have a way of knowing how much of her previous works were included. I'd still lean towards the latter being a copyright violation, and it's where I think we are currently with services like ChatGPT.
- 30minAdayHN 3y agoI have a question along the similar lines. Let's extend your analogy. Someone read all J.K Rowling books and created a work in that style. Would that be a copyright violation? I'm assuming not. In that case, is that difference here that it's not humanely possible to train on world's information compared to a single human getting inspired by specific works. And hence an algo doing that is violation?
- Retric 3y ago> Would that be a copyright violation? Quite possibly, it depends on what specifically is meant by style and the degree to which the new work is transformative.
- Gigachad 3y agoStyle is not copyrightable.
- Retric 3y agoAgain depends on what is meant by style. Another post in this thread suggested plot elements as part of style Aka “a wizardry school for preteens.” Sharing a few surface levels elements like that is fine, but if a one page description could equally well be used to describe both works you’re well over the line.
- jelled 3y agoI have no idea how the courts will end up resolving this legally. In the meantime I've been thinking a lot about the morality of this alleged theft. Most of us would agree that duplicating and selling someone's book is immoral. Similarly I think we'd all agree that reading multiple books to learn about a topic and then writing your own is perfectly fine. So where does an LLM trained on millions of books fall? Personally, I don't find it immoral but I know others will disagree. I'd be curious to hear arguments for the immorality of LLMs trained on copyrighted works.
- Gigachad 3y agoIts similar to many other dilemmas with new tech. When you are out in public, you don't have an expectation of privacy. People can see you, they can take photos of you. The worker at the cafe will probably remember you and your order. This is fine. But when tech does the exact same thing but with scale where everywhere you go, everything you buy, etc is tracked and analyzed, it's now questionably immoral despite legally being fine. That's how generative AI is to me. Its doing something people have been doing themselves forever, but now it's doing it faster and easier than ever before which changes the equation. The arguments of "its not real creativity" are a coping mechanism. We are upset that something that was previously quite unobtainable behind years of learning and hours of effort is now trivially accessible to anyone with a computer.
- throwaway22032 3y agoThe timescales matter as well. You or I could perhaps, if we dedicated a few years to it, make a convincing fake video of an acquaintance of ours doing or saying something. By the end of those few years it'd likely be out of date or maybe just irrelevant. And they'd have to have really, really upset us in order for us to put that much effort in. It would literally cost us tens, hundreds of thousands or more in opportunity cost. Contrast that with some sort of tool that's not too far advanced from current image/video generators that can just do the same in a minute by typing "A video of my next door neighbour accepting cash in a briefcase from a man in a suit".
- jelled 3y ago
- HPsquared 3y agoJournalist has class interests against his competition.
- userbinator 3y agoI feel obliged to say that piracy is not theft... but more relevantly, I like how AI is showing us more clearly that everything is essentially a derivative work.
- smitty1e 3y agoNot a new observation: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9
- mikeyjk 3y agoIs this also an argument for determinism in the Bible? I'm guessing not because that would somewhat goes against some of the bigger messaging.
- williamcotton 3y agoThere have been plenty of deterministic interpretations of the Bible, the Calvinists being the first that pops to mind! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_in_Calvinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_in_Calvinism
- smitty1e 3y agoRight, but if one rides Calvin all the way out, then most of the Gospel gets kinda bizarre.
- fallous 3y agoNo, it's a reminder that when people think their ideas or circumstances are truly novel they are mistaken. It's the same as the "wheel of tech" analogy.
- rootw0rm 3y agoThose Babylonian phones were wild. Too bad they'd only run 2 hours on a blood sacrifice though.
- musicale 3y ago> Back in the day, programs like Napster had everyone believing that we shouldn’t have to pay for music. Back in the day, broadcast radio stations had everyone believing that we shouldn't have to pay for music. In 2023, we have youtube to thank for that. > If I own something, why shouldn’t I be able to share it with whoever I want? Good argument, especially since many intangible goods, such as MP3 files, are non-rivalrous and non-excludable.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chii 3y ago> Good argument, especially since many intangible goods, such as MP3 files, are non-rivalrous and non-excludable. so the deeper question is 'what does it mean to own something'. For a physical good, it's fairly straight forward. For a digital good that can be copied infinitely and perfectly, it's not. The current definition of ownership seems to be broken down into a set of "rights". Sharing it with somebody else is one such right. So when you purchase an mp3 off a store, you're purchasing not the ownership, but the rights to listen to it. More importantly, you're not purchasing the rights to share it with somebody. But the idea of the song - whatever that might be - is not a right given to the owner to be sold (at least not currently). Therefore, someone who purchased the right to listen to the song _should_ be allowed to learn the idea of the song, and reproduce the idea in another form.
- musicale 3y ago> More importantly, you're not purchasing the rights to share it with somebody As I understand it, the Audio Home Recording act legalized mix tapes and mixes on DAT and "music" CD-R media. It's why "music" CD-Rs cost more (the DART royalty.) In fact Apple still provides software (Music/iTunes) that allows you to burn purchased songs from the iTunes Store onto CDs: https://support.apple.com/guide/music/intro-to-burning-cds-and-dvds-mus03854c438/ https://support.apple.com/guide/music/intro-to-burning-cds-a... Initially they hadplaced limits on how many times you could burn the same song, but Apple removed the restrictions and eventually upgraded all of iTunes to DRM-free (but watermarked) iTunes Plus in 2009. Unfortunately it does not support burning "rented" songs from Apple Music or Spotify. I guess that's what Audio Hijack is for. And sadly iTunes never got an upgrade to a lossless format while Apple Music streaming did. I guess that's a good reason to buy tracks from other sources.
- elif 3y agoknowledge is best when shared.
- m3kw9 3y agoIn the same token if I can memorize very well, and I read as much as gpt did, and made a living from that knowledge, that could also be thief, but it doesn’t apply to me because I don’t do it at scale
- mensetmanusman 3y agoScale certainly matters.
- menacingly 3y agoIf assembling original work from the cumulative experience of other works is theft, I'v got some bad news for the author of this article.
- water-your-self 3y agoData fed into models should be protrcted
- pmarreck 3y agoI welcome dissonant viewpoints, but I'm going to have to object to this one on the grounds of all works being derivative. This is just... mass derivation basically, but so is a creative-writing human. I also object to its clickbaity format of "[Contentions thing A] is not [completely unproven hyperbolic thing B]; it is [completely unproven hyperbolic thing C]".
- DennisP 3y agoBefore we focus entirely on what we're losing, we should also consider the potential gain of conversing with an LLM trained on all the world's books. Or down the road a bit, an AI trained on and able to draw conclusions from all our scientific papers.
- poulpy123 3y agoA lot of these opinions are in the style of "automation was great until il came for my job". However I feel like we are at the verge of a tragedy to come
- DubiousPusher 3y agoWe are once again at the limits of the illusion of ownership. We take for granted that ownership is real. But it is not real. It is an illusion. A profoundly helpful illusion if we believe the mainstream narrative about Western culture. But an illusion nonetheless. And it is only natural that we will encounter the intrusion of reality into that illusion. The question is whether we will extend the metaphor to encompass this new deviation or whether we will not. The American system can usually be counted upon to do what is in the interests of business. But this conflict puts business against itself so it is not clear how things will turn out.
- mlazos 3y agoSomething that’s lost in these arguments a lot is that you can often get large models to cough up an exact sample from their training set. It’s fair to say that a human cannot do that to the degree a model can.
- kazinator 3y agoA learned human can go to their library of books or PDF papers and produce an exact citation.
- fortyseven 3y agoYou know how many times I thought I came up with a good idea... and then realized I was actually vomiting up something that flashed by me for a split second, but my subconscious picked up on? Hm.
- NopeSlide 3y agointellectual propertycels once again showing their true colours
- _nalply 3y agoA group of entities (for example D$$$$y, but also others) were successful in having monopoly embedded in law. They were also successful in brainwashing people that this is a good thing. Phrases like everyone should get paid for their hard work are thrown around. And the brainwashed masses are frustrated to realize that they get only pennies for their art. They are embittered that they can't stop others using their art. They keep shouting that word: Theft. Art is fundamentally derivative. It is my deep conviction that nobody has the right for a monopoly on usage, even that group, even if law says otherwise. But hard work deserves compensation! I hear the cry. Look at the more famous Youtube producers. They get compensation but at which price? They don't work for themselves anymore. While creating stuff they think about how to reach even more people. They lost the truth. Instead of truth they say, don't forget to click the bell. Or look at the people working for free like parents caring for their children. They cook, clean, educate not for a lot of material gains, even worse, they have people telling them that what they do is not real work. There are other examples of hard working people not getting compensation nor recognition or not a lot.
- gnfargbl 3y agoThe dome of St Paul's Cathedral is inspired heavily by the design of Michaelangelo's dome for St Paul's Basilica. Some of Lichtenstein's artworks are almost direct plagiarisms of comic books. Some of Shakespeare's plays bear quite the resemblance to Roman works. Remixing has been part of culture forever. The author is really just grousing about the fact that machines can remix now.
- danielrpa 3y agoWhat a clueless article. Almost every new lasting technology in history has at one point labeled criminal or potentially destructive to mankind. From cassette and VHS tapes, to radio, computers and the Internet,everything at some point was considered for regulation or deemed irrelevant. Humans learn by "theft". We learn language by observing word patterns created by others (books, speeches, TV shows) and correlating them to outcomes. While ChatGPT doesn't yet display human-like intelligence, it's clear to me that it is taking a step in the direction of how the human brain actually learns.
- fennecfoxy 3y agoLmao, why is our species so oblivious. The author: "these programs are not sentient but just a very complex form of the kind of predictive text bot" as if that isn't exactly what his brain is doing as he writes that article, regurgitating concept and ways of describing and writing things that he's learnt over time. He speaks so confidently as if humans don't learn our language from each other, that's literally the point of language, oh my god. "we have seen an explosion" oh damn bro, referring to a massive increase in something as an "explosion" has been said a trillion times before, better give credit to the first person who ever said it. Besides the fact, GPTs like us silly humans have learnt language from source material, but I've found GPTs can still come up with their own concepts/ideas, asking it to come up with a unique simile or metaphor works. I did an adventure roleplay with Rocket Raccoon (yeah, yeah I know) and it came up with "With our next destination set amidst the asteroid fields, the vastness of space becomes our canvas, ready for exploration" creating an allegory for our adventures in space as if we are artists "painting our adventures onto the canvas of reality". Idk but I thought it was cool.