4 ms·

For reasons I can't articulate I see LLMs as a vehicle for removing the creators from their ideas. This is very different than search engines. If a search engin

For reasons I can't articulate I see LLMs as a vehicle for removing the creators from their ideas. This is very different than search engines. If a search engine generates traffic for documented ideas it creates a community. An LLM based internet seems to remove the creator and shim itself in between for the sake of business.

RandomLensman 3y ago
If a handful of firms are indeed allowed to harvest he collective knowledge for rent seeking that would indeed be a shame.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
It's tricky, because in many ways, this is achieving exactly what I, as user, want computers to do for me: give me information I requested, and only that. I very much do not care about who discovered/created/published it, except only if it helps me quickly ascertain the trustworthiness of said information. I do not want to be forced or prodded to establish relationships with creators or communities. I do not want their ads and upsells. It's the same issue as with search engines providing "information boxes": huge win for me, but a mortal enemy for those who want to monetize anything resembling intellectual property. > An LLM based internet seems to remove the creator and shim itself in between for the sake of business. This sounds bad, and in some cases it is, but in others it is not. Content farms and recipe sites have creators behind them too.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  And the cost of creating the information you want should be borne by whom? Even if it isn't monetizeable IP, how to share the costs?
  - Swizec 3y ago
    > Even if it isn't monetizeable IP, how to share the costs? The internet started thanks to ample government funding for research. So have many other technologies, including AI. I wonder if there's a way we could all somehow pool our resources and use that to pay for common goods that we all use. What would we call such a scheme?
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      We could definitely fund things. Or tax LLM firms in some broad way to redistribute to the respective societies for using their creations.
    - dbmikus 3y ago
      > I wonder if there's a way we could all somehow pool our resources and use that to pay for common goods that we all use. What would we call such a scheme? Is this tongue in cheek? I think it's called the government and taxes! :)
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    I don't have good answers. I have some high-level intuitions. One of them is that creation costs of information are fixed, while its usefulness is unbounded, so it doesn't make sense to try and reward creators for each access/view/use, in perpetuity. Secondly, there's a lot of information laundering going on - any random book I read carries between a few to few hundred references to prior written work. What I pay for the book goes to the author and the publishers, but AFAIK it doesn't go to any of the authors and publishers of works referenced in the book. Wikipedia takes this one step further, effectively turning all that information free. Thirdly, AFAIK copyright explicitly does not cover information/knowledge - it covers specific works. So Google showing me an info box with a recipe scrapped from some site could technically fall afoul of the law - but an LLM generating me a recipe based on associations created from being trained on millions of recipes, this feels like it should be in the clear, at least from user's POV.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      I think that is a somewhat narrow view. Maybe to make the contrast sharper: Why should I contribute any information just so that it immediately gets monetized by a handful of LLM firms? The new situation isn't the same as search as that wasn't there to hide information sources or to immediately convert information into useful things (texts, guides, etc.).
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        > Why should I contribute any information just so that it immediately gets monetized by a handful of LLM firms? If this matters to you, then you shouldn't. But to flip this around: why should you care? Unless you're doing some unique work targeting a global audience, the point when LLM gets trained on what you created is way outside space you'd normally care about. Trying to capture all the value your work generates does not lead to a good world. Or maybe it's me who isn't profit-minded enough, but e.g. a lot of what I wrote on-line, including blog articles and commentary on Reddit and HN, has been used by search engines for free for a long time (over a decade, in some cases), and now is (most likely) part of the training corpora for LLMs. But I never believed, and still don't believe, that I'm entitled to some share of the gains LLMs (or search engines) make.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    I'm organizing the publishing of my thoughts of technology development and design. This has been something I have been mulling for decades. Completely uncompensated. I'm not doing any of this for reasons I can understand it is just what I think about and do. Originally I saw a website as a way to hang out a shingle. Until recently I was thinking I could just publish away and maybe someone would hire me based off the website. Currently I don't feel the same way regarding publishing on the web. I will be me more guarded in what I share.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    I want attribution if I inspire a thought in AI. I'm surprised the nerve the issue has struck in me.
    - martingalex2 3y ago
      It isn’t clear to me (other than it’s an open engineering problem) why LLs couldn’t also include attribution as part of training. Also tracking attribution could lead to some insights on how its internal representations in vector space are created.
      - detourdog 3y ago
        That is true I see no reason obvious reason why the LL companies take pride in not being able to document ideation process. I have no justification but I feel it is deceitful not technical reasoning.
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
        The issue here is that memorization of any distinguishable part of IP is an incidental aspect - those models aren't memorizing stuff, they're learning it. We don't expect people to keep track of the source of every single piece of information they encounter. It would arguably make learning impossible - as much for humans as for LLMs. As an intuition pump, when I write "2+2 = " and you mentally complete it with "4", should I chastise you for not completing it with "4, as per ${your elementary class math textbook} and ${that other book you read as a kid}, corroborated by ${your first math teacher} and ${your parent} quoting ${some other work}"?
        martingalex2 3y ago
        What is the hard technical barrier that makes the tracking of attribution for input sequences for LLM training impossible? I don't see any.
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
- detourdog 3y ago
  I don't know that I have a position yet. The problem I have is when a tech wizard says the tech is so complex nobody knows what is going on is never good. >I do not want to be forced or prodded to establish relationships with creators or communities. I do not want their ads and upsells. I feel the same way I lurked on HN for 7 years before signing up. I enjoy the lurking aspects of the internet. I usually think the internet can survive anything. This seems like the same disruption that Uber promoted to avoid regulation. Imagine all the great ideas we can generate and claim they are original to the unauditable AI thought process. The last worst thing to happen to the internet IMHO was SEO. I sort think a schism may develop to the reality of the broadcast world and the narrowcast world. I definitely think that valid uses exist.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  > I very much do not care about who discovered/created/published it, except only if it helps me quickly ascertain the trustworthiness of said information. I do not want to be forced or prodded to establish relationships with creators or communities. I do not want their ads and upsells. And this is why humanity is going down the tubes...because you want something, you derive value from what you want, and yet you do not care about giving something back to who makes it.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > And this is why humanity is going down the tubes... On the contrary - this is exactly how and why humanity built a technological civilization in the first place. Note that I didn't say > because you want something, you derive value from what you want, and yet you do not care about giving something back to who makes it. Yes, because it would be backward and limiting to do that. Note: I never said I don't want to give anything back - I said I don't personally care specifically about the author/publisher. I don't want to establish any relationship with them. If I'm paying them directly for something, I'm paying them for that thing - not also for relationship (which really is a sales channel), not also for being advertised to. If I'm paying some intermediary, then rewarding the maker is the intermediary's problem, not mine. Consider: do you compensate directly, and have an active relationship with, the person who bakes your bread (hint: people selling bread in bakeries are not actual bakers)? The company who supplied them with flour? The farmers who supplied the flour-makers with grain? Do you pay delivery drivers directly? After all, you're deriving value from their labor directly. Etc. Then there's an entire army of people whose work benefits you directly, and whom you don't even think much about, and rely on being compensated from the common pool (e.g. taxes) or stochastically. The whole point of money is to allow exchanging value without forcing parties into maintaining an ongoing relationship. That's a feature, not a bug. And if anything is driving humanity down the drain, it's the idea that you should, need, or are even entitled to capture all the value you produce.
    - supriyo-biswas 3y ago
      Regarding the baker example, some form of compensation is eventually directed to the employees, the farmers etc. even though you could say there are many layers of indirection. In case of LLMs, no compensation is directed to the person authoring the information. While it may not be a problem for the consumer of the information, it removes any incentives for the people authoring the information to continue doing so, which has long term consequences.
DennisP 3y ago
I've been wondering whether an LLM could list its sources, if the training data included source data for each document (perhaps in the form "The source of the following text is XYZ:")
- detourdog 3y ago
  I have no doubt the last thing the LLM firms want is to attribute their sources. I always see the claim, heck we don't know where the ideas come from that is impossible.
  - DennisP 3y ago
    Perhaps, but EleutherAI for example is a nonprofit that has trained several open source LLMs.
  - martingalex2 3y ago
    Yes it’s just an engineering problem, there is no a priori reason not to do it.
    - DennisP 3y ago
      I'm not sure it's all that easy though. We don't entirely know how LLMs do some of the things they do, and we can't interpret what's in them. They don't internally look up particular sources, it's just a big mess of connection weights. Maybe my simple scheme would be all it needs. Or maybe it needs some new breakthrough and right now nobody knows how to do it. I was hoping some resident expert could let me know.
    - FeepingCreature 3y ago
      That's a very big "just" given that there is no good way to train for this.
      - DennisP 3y ago
        Why not? I could see two ways it could work. First, it seems possible that if sources were in the training data like I described, then understanding of sources could be an emergent capability, just because the LLM reads "the source of the following is X." Second, maybe a trainer LLM could be tasked with reading the trainee's answers and any sources it provides, and judging whether the source is correct. But I'm no expert, hence my question.
theonlybutlet 3y ago
This is the only valid take against LLM's I've seen to date. At the same time, could it not be construed as humanity leveling up? We've abstracted away that, now low, level of thought. Much like we don't have people pressing the button in the elevator. Most developers and writers are still better than an LLM, but its good enough to replace their input on simple tasks. Writing is being commoditized much like other industries. The moment you release a new vacuum cleaner there's ten others that do the same thing and nobody is fussed over who invented it. People still know who to go for a premium vacuum though.
_Algernon_ 3y ago
Google has done this for years, by quoting what it thinks you want to the top of the search results. This is just the next step.

RandomLensman 3y ago

If a handful of firms are indeed allowed to harvest he collective knowledge for rent seeking that would indeed be a shame.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

It's tricky, because in many ways, this is achieving exactly what I, as user, want computers to do for me: give me information I requested, and only that. I very much do not care about who discovered/created/published it, except only if it helps me quickly ascertain the trustworthiness of said information. I do not want to be forced or prodded to establish relationships with creators or communities. I do not want their ads and upsells. It's the same issue as with search engines providing "information boxes": huge win for me, but a mortal enemy for those who want to monetize anything resembling intellectual property. > An LLM based internet seems to remove the creator and shim itself in between for the sake of business. This sounds bad, and in some cases it is, but in others it is not. Content farms and recipe sites have creators behind them too.

RandomLensman 3y ago
And the cost of creating the information you want should be borne by whom? Even if it isn't monetizeable IP, how to share the costs?
- Swizec 3y ago
  > Even if it isn't monetizeable IP, how to share the costs? The internet started thanks to ample government funding for research. So have many other technologies, including AI. I wonder if there's a way we could all somehow pool our resources and use that to pay for common goods that we all use. What would we call such a scheme?
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    We could definitely fund things. Or tax LLM firms in some broad way to redistribute to the respective societies for using their creations.
  - dbmikus 3y ago
    > I wonder if there's a way we could all somehow pool our resources and use that to pay for common goods that we all use. What would we call such a scheme? Is this tongue in cheek? I think it's called the government and taxes! :)
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  I don't have good answers. I have some high-level intuitions. One of them is that creation costs of information are fixed, while its usefulness is unbounded, so it doesn't make sense to try and reward creators for each access/view/use, in perpetuity. Secondly, there's a lot of information laundering going on - any random book I read carries between a few to few hundred references to prior written work. What I pay for the book goes to the author and the publishers, but AFAIK it doesn't go to any of the authors and publishers of works referenced in the book. Wikipedia takes this one step further, effectively turning all that information free. Thirdly, AFAIK copyright explicitly does not cover information/knowledge - it covers specific works. So Google showing me an info box with a recipe scrapped from some site could technically fall afoul of the law - but an LLM generating me a recipe based on associations created from being trained on millions of recipes, this feels like it should be in the clear, at least from user's POV.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    I think that is a somewhat narrow view. Maybe to make the contrast sharper: Why should I contribute any information just so that it immediately gets monetized by a handful of LLM firms? The new situation isn't the same as search as that wasn't there to hide information sources or to immediately convert information into useful things (texts, guides, etc.).
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > Why should I contribute any information just so that it immediately gets monetized by a handful of LLM firms? If this matters to you, then you shouldn't. But to flip this around: why should you care? Unless you're doing some unique work targeting a global audience, the point when LLM gets trained on what you created is way outside space you'd normally care about. Trying to capture all the value your work generates does not lead to a good world. Or maybe it's me who isn't profit-minded enough, but e.g. a lot of what I wrote on-line, including blog articles and commentary on Reddit and HN, has been used by search engines for free for a long time (over a decade, in some cases), and now is (most likely) part of the training corpora for LLMs. But I never believed, and still don't believe, that I'm entitled to some share of the gains LLMs (or search engines) make.
- detourdog 3y ago
  I'm organizing the publishing of my thoughts of technology development and design. This has been something I have been mulling for decades. Completely uncompensated. I'm not doing any of this for reasons I can understand it is just what I think about and do. Originally I saw a website as a way to hang out a shingle. Until recently I was thinking I could just publish away and maybe someone would hire me based off the website. Currently I don't feel the same way regarding publishing on the web. I will be me more guarded in what I share.
- detourdog 3y ago
  I want attribution if I inspire a thought in AI. I'm surprised the nerve the issue has struck in me.
  - martingalex2 3y ago
    It isn’t clear to me (other than it’s an open engineering problem) why LLs couldn’t also include attribution as part of training. Also tracking attribution could lead to some insights on how its internal representations in vector space are created.
    - detourdog 3y ago
      That is true I see no reason obvious reason why the LL companies take pride in not being able to document ideation process. I have no justification but I feel it is deceitful not technical reasoning.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        The issue here is that memorization of any distinguishable part of IP is an incidental aspect - those models aren't memorizing stuff, they're learning it. We don't expect people to keep track of the source of every single piece of information they encounter. It would arguably make learning impossible - as much for humans as for LLMs. As an intuition pump, when I write "2+2 = " and you mentally complete it with "4", should I chastise you for not completing it with "4, as per ${your elementary class math textbook} and ${that other book you read as a kid}, corroborated by ${your first math teacher} and ${your parent} quoting ${some other work}"?
        martingalex2 3y ago
        What is the hard technical barrier that makes the tracking of attribution for input sequences for LLM training impossible? I don't see any.
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
detourdog 3y ago
I don't know that I have a position yet. The problem I have is when a tech wizard says the tech is so complex nobody knows what is going on is never good. >I do not want to be forced or prodded to establish relationships with creators or communities. I do not want their ads and upsells. I feel the same way I lurked on HN for 7 years before signing up. I enjoy the lurking aspects of the internet. I usually think the internet can survive anything. This seems like the same disruption that Uber promoted to avoid regulation. Imagine all the great ideas we can generate and claim they are original to the unauditable AI thought process. The last worst thing to happen to the internet IMHO was SEO. I sort think a schism may develop to the reality of the broadcast world and the narrowcast world. I definitely think that valid uses exist.
vouaobrasil 3y ago
> I very much do not care about who discovered/created/published it, except only if it helps me quickly ascertain the trustworthiness of said information. I do not want to be forced or prodded to establish relationships with creators or communities. I do not want their ads and upsells. And this is why humanity is going down the tubes...because you want something, you derive value from what you want, and yet you do not care about giving something back to who makes it.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > And this is why humanity is going down the tubes... On the contrary - this is exactly how and why humanity built a technological civilization in the first place. Note that I didn't say > because you want something, you derive value from what you want, and yet you do not care about giving something back to who makes it. Yes, because it would be backward and limiting to do that. Note: I never said I don't want to give anything back - I said I don't personally care specifically about the author/publisher. I don't want to establish any relationship with them. If I'm paying them directly for something, I'm paying them for that thing - not also for relationship (which really is a sales channel), not also for being advertised to. If I'm paying some intermediary, then rewarding the maker is the intermediary's problem, not mine. Consider: do you compensate directly, and have an active relationship with, the person who bakes your bread (hint: people selling bread in bakeries are not actual bakers)? The company who supplied them with flour? The farmers who supplied the flour-makers with grain? Do you pay delivery drivers directly? After all, you're deriving value from their labor directly. Etc. Then there's an entire army of people whose work benefits you directly, and whom you don't even think much about, and rely on being compensated from the common pool (e.g. taxes) or stochastically. The whole point of money is to allow exchanging value without forcing parties into maintaining an ongoing relationship. That's a feature, not a bug. And if anything is driving humanity down the drain, it's the idea that you should, need, or are even entitled to capture all the value you produce.
  - supriyo-biswas 3y ago
    Regarding the baker example, some form of compensation is eventually directed to the employees, the farmers etc. even though you could say there are many layers of indirection. In case of LLMs, no compensation is directed to the person authoring the information. While it may not be a problem for the consumer of the information, it removes any incentives for the people authoring the information to continue doing so, which has long term consequences.

DennisP 3y ago

I've been wondering whether an LLM could list its sources, if the training data included source data for each document (perhaps in the form "The source of the following text is XYZ:")

detourdog 3y ago
I have no doubt the last thing the LLM firms want is to attribute their sources. I always see the claim, heck we don't know where the ideas come from that is impossible.
- DennisP 3y ago
  Perhaps, but EleutherAI for example is a nonprofit that has trained several open source LLMs.
- martingalex2 3y ago
  Yes it’s just an engineering problem, there is no a priori reason not to do it.
  - DennisP 3y ago
    I'm not sure it's all that easy though. We don't entirely know how LLMs do some of the things they do, and we can't interpret what's in them. They don't internally look up particular sources, it's just a big mess of connection weights. Maybe my simple scheme would be all it needs. Or maybe it needs some new breakthrough and right now nobody knows how to do it. I was hoping some resident expert could let me know.
  - FeepingCreature 3y ago
    That's a very big "just" given that there is no good way to train for this.
    - DennisP 3y ago
      Why not? I could see two ways it could work. First, it seems possible that if sources were in the training data like I described, then understanding of sources could be an emergent capability, just because the LLM reads "the source of the following is X." Second, maybe a trainer LLM could be tasked with reading the trainee's answers and any sources it provides, and judging whether the source is correct. But I'm no expert, hence my question.

theonlybutlet 3y ago

This is the only valid take against LLM's I've seen to date. At the same time, could it not be construed as humanity leveling up? We've abstracted away that, now low, level of thought. Much like we don't have people pressing the button in the elevator. Most developers and writers are still better than an LLM, but its good enough to replace their input on simple tasks. Writing is being commoditized much like other industries. The moment you release a new vacuum cleaner there's ten others that do the same thing and nobody is fussed over who invented it. People still know who to go for a premium vacuum though.

_Algernon_ 3y ago

Google has done this for years, by quoting what it thinks you want to the top of the search results. This is just the next step.