15 ms·

Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

298 points by donohoe 3y ago

jrflowers 3y ago
I like this article about internet outrage being bad that seems to exist solely to use that conceit to try to drum up internet outrage
ricochet11 3y ago
its sad he took the site down, it looks like a neat project. it seems to be fair use, so it really is just an issue of consent and keeping people happy. the issue is some people will always be fearful/miserable. should the rest of us be held back in exploring culture because they refuse to play? anyway i'm sure there will be ten other similar sites by the end of the week...
- fsagx 3y ago
  With CLOUD and AI happily in the descriptions, with no private desktop version, and your email to sign up, please.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    [flagged]
- LikelyABurner 3y ago
  “That book’s vividness score (TM) is 75% opposed to that other book’s vividness score (TM) which is only 50%! That’s, like, a 50% higher culture score (TM)!”
  - croes 3y ago
    What if I prefer books with a 50% vividness, so bought the book that was to vivid for me and write a bad review or are online reviews also considered bad Silicon valley tech? BTW do you write per hand or type writer or do you use word processors with formatting, thesaurus, spell and grammar checking?
LikelyABurner 3y ago
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?
- pmarreck 3y ago
  As the article stated, there is nothing either legally or morally wrong with what the site did, and many authors found it useful. Let us know when you come up with an actual counterargument based on reason instead of an appeal to emotion fallacy.
- Nullabillity 3y ago
  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.
  - capableweb 3y ago
    > 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?
    - LikelyABurner 3y ago
      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.
      - 3y ago
jprete 3y ago
This is an incredibly biased article, hinging entirely on the assumption that AI training is fair use.
- zinekeller 3y ago
  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).
  - 542458 3y ago
    Why do you feel that the Google vs Authors Guild ruling cited in the article isn’t relevant?
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    "majority" and "clings on" seem entirely arbitrary and perjorative. Why not make your actual point instead of just beating up a straw man?
  - luma 3y ago
    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.
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      The ai moving goal! No 2023.ai was used. Maybe some 1993.ai. Chat GPT will be considered “just stats” in 2033.
- pmarreck 3y ago
  There is no “AI” in the project. It literally just seems to do Bayesian sentiment analysis of books. It does NOT then mine that data to score OTHER books. Please actually read the article next time before commenting
iamflimflam1 3y ago
Something that we need to learn is that these brief outbreaks on social media burn themselves out pretty quickly. Everyone shouts for a bit and then moves onto to the next bit of manufactured outrage.
- leach 3y ago
  I agree, people get angry at something for a day and then the timeline tells them to be angry at the next thing. Always feel bad for people who cave to the mob, usually if the mob is yelling at you you’re on the right track
runj__ 3y ago
I honestly don't understand how people can refuse the idea of that some parts most certainly can be reviewed with the help of a computer. There wasn't a "how good is this book" score because a computer might not be able to tell that yet, I don't understand the issue in looking at the number of adverbs in a book with the help of a computer.
- jprete 3y ago
  Software people are intensely susceptible to the McNamara Fallacy: “But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.” — Daniel Yankelovich, "Interpreting the New Life Styles", Sales Management (1971) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy This is often justified as an attempt to be objective, but I think the actual reason is that it’s hard to deal with unquantifiable properties.
  - morkalork 3y ago
    Is there a counter fallacy along the lines of "if we can't measure everything, we shouldn't measure anything"? It can still be an interesting, fun and informative exercise while keeping in mind that it may be limited.
- palata 3y ago
  > I don't understand the issue in looking at the number of adverbs in a book with the help of a computer. I think that authors see an issue with their IP being fed to an algorithmic black box that will certainly make a lot of money, but authors won't see any of it, and for which engineers say "don't worry, it is not stealing your IP, just let us make money the way we want and shut up". What if OpenAI could prove that their algorithms are not stealing IP? I think it's easy: they just can't. They don't even formally know what their algorithm can and cannot do. If I was an author or an artist, I would most definitely want a new kind of legal way to make sure that if I don't want my work to be used as training data, then it most definitely isn't. Of course that's not really possible, because who can audit the algorithmic black box and see if my work was used in the training?
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
Doesn't seem like the fear of AI more just authors being petulant, didn't we have the same thing with some hack Star Wars book author attacking the internet archive for daring to host a copy of his book before the AI fad.
TheChaplain 3y ago
I believe that if you are using my book as data/model/whatever for something that makes money, then I want a piece of the action. If it's just a paragraph, fine go ahead. But the whole book? Give me money.
- em-bee 3y ago
  you want money if your book is used for literary analysis? and even if you could get money for that, it would not be much. if the tool analyses a million books, and then the service makes one million in revenue, no more than $1 of revenue can be attributed to your book. and only a fraction of that would go to the book author because most of the revenue goes into developing and maintaining the tool. so you'd get 10c. you would make more money by spending your time writing actual prose that can be sold, instead of complaining about this particular tool.
- morkalork 3y ago
  Feels like a nightmare. What about a book club passing around a copy of your book. Want to charge them licensing fees? Story time at a library for children. Licensing fees for them too? Review in a pay-walled newspaper. Fees, again? NYT derives value from all those reviews you know.
- andrewfurey2003 3y ago
  No.
- rgoulter 3y ago
  At two extremes, say: If I read your books and use them as a strong foundation from which to write stories (e.g. I don't do any worldbuilding, & just re-use settings/characters without my own introduction), it seems reasonable that my derivative would need some kind of license from you. If I read your books and write book reviews about them (including small excerpts from the book), it seems unreasonable to require your explicit permission. I think the website mentioned (which displays stats about a book, and a couple of excerpts) falls far closer to the latter case than the former case.
- tomjen3 3y ago
keiferski 3y ago
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 destroy their livelihoods, almost always without the slightest interest in helping them figure out the new economic situation. The attitude is, "It's the reality now, deal with it," all while enjoying the job security and high salaries of tech jobs. You can see the same attitude displayed when it comes to piracy: "too bad, deal with it, I have a good job, I don't care if you don't anymore." This stuff would be received far better by the creative community if AI companies were to say, establish an artist sponsorship program, push for UBI, or otherwise show that they care even a tiny bit about the people they're making redundant.
- bertil 3y ago
  I agree with you. There’s a pattern that I see a lot, of having: 1. large powerful players doing something not entirely helpful; 2. victims of that protesting that change vehemently; all that in vain because the players are powerful and have sheltered themselves from criticism, usually via lobbying; 3. regulatory capture or protests go after a smaller player, which is widely advertised to accuse 2. of going too far — even when the problem in 1. is still entirely there, and now ignored. It’s definitely the case with globalization (large conglomerate benefit, people protest, and a small artisan who started selling abroad is featured being victimized by tariffs), fossil fuel (large oil extractor, climate advocate, farmer seeing fertilizer prize go up), immigration, American cultural hegemony, car dominance over cities, etc. That pattern allows larger players still doing harm to wash their morals. I feel like we need better antibodies to say: No, this does not absolve them.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  > if AI companies were to say, establish an artist sponsorship program, push for UBI Sam Altman, for all his faults, is actually a massive proponent of UBI. I mean, that was one of the claimed objectives of Worldcoin (though he advocates for UBI in general: https://thewalrus.ca/will-universal-basic-income-save-us-from-ai/ https://thewalrus.ca/will-universal-basic-income-save-us-fro... )
t14n 3y ago
Hrm. It seems like the authors are caught up in things like "vividness" score and the "sentiment analysis" of the text; I guess because it's loosely related to AI? But it seems like a bulk of the stats collected are things that I would find really useful. I've probably asked myself, "how many words are in this book" on 10+ separate occasions, both as a reader and as a writer. It also seems like there were also counts of things like adjectives, verbs, adverbs, passive verbs, etc -- stats that I might want to know about a novel. The bulk of the service seems rather "boring" and non-AI. Unfortunate that the whole thing was taken down because of a few features. Hopefully it'll come back.
belorn 3y ago
Relying on Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc in order determine fair use for AI models, there are a few key aspects to consider. The outcome should not supersede, supplant or become a replacement for the original works, nor should they sell portions of them. It should also preferable enhance the sale of the original work to the benefit of the copyright holder. In this specific case regarding prosecraft, all those criteria might be fulfilled, and it might be so that under those specific conditions the use of any copyrighted work for the creation of AI models is fair (or at least under US law).
activitypea 3y ago
I just think it's really funny that a third or so of the article is the author struggling to figure out why this would be useful to anyone. > scanned and analyzed a whole bunch of books and would let you call up really useful data on books. [...] Frankly, all of that sounds amazing. And amazingly useful. Even more amazing is that he built it, and it worked. It would produce useful analysis of books. > This is all quite interesting. It’s also the kind of thing that data scientists do on all kinds of work for useful purposes. Smith built Prosecraft into Shaxpir, again, making it a more useful tool. Author's general illiteracy aside, he's really giving the game away here. I can't even think about the ethical implications of the project, because why would I care to count the number of adverbs and passive voice in all books ever, and why would you need a state of the art LLM-powered AI to do it?
- GaggiX 3y ago
  The ethical implication of indexing books? Also where do you read the author of the website was using LLM?
- em-bee 3y ago
  he is not even using an LLM, which is kind of the point. the tool is thrown in and judged as an AI tool when it is just simple statistics that anyone who studied some math can build with a little bit of effort.
- steezeburger 3y ago
  Imagine seeing the trends in books throughout certain time period, wars, etc. Or larger trends over the history of all written works. Or all kinds of other neat and useful information that can impact decisions we make today. Do you think all analysis of things you aren't personally interested in is useless?
  - activitypea 3y ago
    I hate "did you even read my comment" replies, but again, you're pitching me on "trends throughout a time period", "larger trends throughout history" and "all kinds of other useful information that can impact decisions". I don't think a person without interest in literary analysis would make this comment. On the contrary, I'm specifically calling out building non-sensical tools with little practical uses because the author of the tool does not engage with literary works beyond the most superficial layer. And because I don't believe quantitive analysis of art is benificial to culture and society, but that's a broader subject.
h11h 3y ago
> The Gizmodo article has a ridiculously wrong “fair use” analysis, saying “Fair Use does not, by any stretch of the imagination, allow you to use an author’s entire copyrighted work without permission as a part of a data training program that feeds into your own ‘AI algorithm.’” Except… it almost certainly does? Again, we’ve gone through this with the Google Book scanning case, and the courts said that you can absolutely do that because it’s transformative. I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure Fair Use doesn't mean you can download a dump of Library Genesis and feed that into your system!
- ahstilde 3y ago
  You are wrong.
actuallyalys 3y ago
I found this article frustratingly vague on how prosecraft.io actually worked. As far as I can tell, the author scraped the web for books, including in-copyright books. Then he analyzed it with techniques based on "classical" natural language processing techniques, rather than transformers or deep learning. He appears to have retained the books he scraped for future analysis. The site itself seems to use only snippets. However, the apology [0] says that the creator did not "intend" to participate in AI that can "create zero-effort impersonations of artists." I'm not sure if the wording is unintentionally vague, or if there is some way his project could be used in that way. For what it's worth, the Computational Story Lab's hendometer [1] seems to have largely out-of-copyright books from Project Gutenberg, plus the Harry Potter series. [0]: https://blog.shaxpir.com/taking-down-prosecraft-io-37e189797121 https://blog.shaxpir.com/taking-down-prosecraft-io-37e189797... [1]: https://hedonometer.org/books/v3/863/ https://hedonometer.org/books/v3/863/ Edit: Apparently he was working on an LLM project. https://twitter.com/stealcase/status/1688721685585809408 https://twitter.com/stealcase/status/1688721685585809408. It's unclear whether he was planning to use the books he scraped (although as @stealcase points out, GPT-Neox itself was trained on books that were pirated).
- randallsquared 3y ago
  If he says he didn't do something, the pitchfork mob will simply tell each other that he is lying. They will do this in the most confused and twisted way possible, driven by lack of understanding of what was happening combined with a need to drive outrage and thereby advertise their work. If he says he didn't intend to do that thing, this is still compatible with a later update that he didn't do that thing, but immediately dampens the outrage machine. The reader who knows nothing about either side relaxes -- "No need for me to get worked up, because we won". Conveniently, saying he didn't intend to do the thing is also compatible with a later reveal that he was doing the thing (perhaps for later release, since he wasn't clearly doing the thing here). Therefore, regardless of whether he was doing what he was accused of doing, this is the lowest energy response, and probably the default unless this was the hill he wanted to defend.
  - b112 3y ago
wrp 3y ago
My summary of the case: Someone did statistical analysis of a bunch of texts and created a tool that evaluates your text according to the developed model. Writers accused him of plagiarizing/using the content of their works.
- nness 3y ago
  As an aside, this would be completely legal in Japan, as classification and statistical analysis are protected as fair-use. I wonder if similar language exists in other copyright systems, but I would imagine it is likely the opposite...
  - TrackerFF 3y ago
    Are generative models also covered by that clause? Because one thing about the generative models is that you could in theory get the model to recite copyrighted work, word by word.
    - riotnrrd 3y ago
      > one thing about the generative models is that you could in theory get the model to recite copyrighted work, word by word. Only if it's so badly trained as to be considered broken. It's not fair or smart to judge an entire method (LLMs) by some broken examples. I wouldn't claim "all cars leak oil" just because I saw a broke-down beater one day.
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    This was unambiguously fair use under American copyright law, too.
BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
as soon as we can find an economic paradigm that doesn't rely on taxing the trade of exclusive assets we can have a digital renaissance. the thing with digital information is we can all copy it. the problem is that our economic paradigm doesn't deal with infinite-copying well. so far the only 'solution' I see, is figuring out ways to restrict, limit, and restrict the copying capabilities of digital stuff. which is not a solution, but a rejection of the 'novel' possibilities enabled by digital technologies. more cynically, it's not a rejection, but a capture. a few get to reap the huge benefits of digital copying, while the rest are relegated to collecting, trading arbitrary tokens and using them to pay for the permission to copy digital assets; which is completely dumb, I will die on this hill
GaggiX 3y ago
Someone should recreate the website and change the word "AI" to "underpaid worker" and everything would be fine.
- morkalork 3y ago
  "crowdsourced"
amelius 3y ago
AI is going incredibly fast, but package management is going incredibly slow. I have a beefy GPU and I should have all this AI stuff at my fingertips, but package managers are not working along and I'm too tired to get into another dependency hell. This is what's killing useful tools more than fear of AI.
jmull 3y ago
If you want to do this kind of thing, let authors opt-in (or publishers). Yes, it will take effort and probably go slow, but if the tool is really useful and amazing, it should be doable. I suspect the authors are put-off by a couple things: - the text of the works scanned seems like it may be from pirated sources. That poisons the project, no matter what it does with the scans, for many authors. - the use of these scans in a commercial product The article itself is clueless… it doesn’t engage authors’ concerns at all, and just portrays authors as stoopid AI-fearful luddites.
- macNchz 3y ago
  > The article itself is clueless… it doesn’t engage authors’ concerns at all, and just portrays authors as stoopid AI-fearful luddites. Going off of some of the tweets about this that initially whipped up the outrage about this…it’s not like they were making a nuanced case about their concerns, they were basically just stomping their feet and shouting.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - jmull 3y ago
    That's twitter generally. If your engagement only reaches the level of twitter, you aren't really engaging at all.
    - dnissley 3y ago
      So as long as that's all the engagement there is, we're free to ignore it and carry on, correct?
      - ineedasername 3y ago
        I would think so. If someone is shouting & stomping their feet in the public town square about my project, but I never go anywhere near the town square anyway, I don’t think I’m going to shutdown my project. It’s just too bad the person who created this tool happened to walk through the town square.
Tao3300 3y ago
The bar for calling yourself a writer or an author is incredibly low. Doing so doesn't qualify you to have an opinion on much of anything. These people are just joining an outrage wave in an attempt to advertise, e.g. "How dare this project touch BOOK TITLE written by Me! (chain of hashtags)". They're not concerned at all about what they are breaking along the way.
yieldcrv 3y ago
open source it on IPFS and walk away, maybe call it something else and just drop the hashes on 4chan anonymously this reaction deserves the inevitable, as his only problem was it being attributed to him
- dontupvoteme 3y ago
  How can he do it anonymously when we already know he's the only one who has it?
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    because nobody has seen the code, but everyone has seen what it does and can think of multiple ways to do it with AI
  - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
    Lie and claim to have been hacked.
Planktonne 3y ago
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 http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html
- mistermann 3y ago
  Similarly, saying that something is not true does not necessarily make it not true.
  - Planktonne 3y ago
    Yes, that's why I provided the very clear example of passive voice.
    - mistermann 3y ago
      Right, but passive voice also does not render your assertions necessarily true, though it may be able to increase the likelihood of them being perceived as such.
andrewfurey2003 3y ago
If its fair use to find stats on a book/corpus of text, isn't it also fair use to run a transformer/something similar, since really its just predicting/modelling what that piece of text would output next, given context?
moomin 3y ago
Going all the way back to the Luddites, there will be those who seek to misrepresent their opposition as being “afraid of progress”. Much easier to find a friendly podcaster than engage with the actual difficulties with what you’re doing.
SillyUsername 3y ago
Who'd have thought a bunch of authors would be offended by critique and/or analysis of their work by an AI? Seems petty, I guess that's because only the best works get heavily scrutinized, e.g. Shakespeare's plays and these are hardly that.
Palmik 3y ago
I am a bit confused about what's so outrageous about this tool. It seems that both the book authors, and some of the people in the discussion here, conflate rudimentary statistics about a book (number of words of certain kind) with the latest wave of generative AI. They are very different in both what value they provide, and what risk they pose to book authors. The tool that book authors got outraged about only provides basic metrics, not dissimilar from other metrics such as "page count", and can't be used to produce new content which could deprive the book authors from revenue.
- golemotron 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - PakG1 3y ago
    Having now looked up what the word priapism means, I'm now trying to imagine what moral priapism would be, and I can't think of a definition that makes sense. What is it? Is there a simpler word you can use?
    - RupertEisenhart 3y ago
      GPT4 sez: "This sentence uses figurative language, so it doesn't refer to literal meanings. "Fear" is a stressful emotion induced by perceived danger or threat. "Acute" suggests a sudden onset or intensity. "Moral priapism," a more abstract concept, suggests an abnormally extended or excessive fixated morality, much like the medical condition priapism refers to an unwanted, enduring erection. Overall, the sentence means that fear can lead to an exaggerated or obsessive moral response. This implies that when someone is afraid, they might stick rigidly to their moral code or make moral judgments more extremely or rigidly than they would in a state of calmness." seems fair Edit: My gloss of the summary: "Fear creates a hardon for scapegoats among the pitchfork wielders."
    - runamok 3y ago
      Permanently aroused to look for any injustice.
dfxm12 3y ago
It looks like the author of the tool took the it down himself, voluntarily. If this even counts as "killing" the tool, the author did it, not fear of AI.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
> I know we live in an outrage era, where the immediate reaction is to turn the outrage meter up to 11. I’m certainly guilty of that at times myself. I’ve learned to feel my outrage, while refraining from expressing it. I will usually avoid using anything more than vague terms to express ire or rancor, and reserve my eloquence for positive commentary. Some ITGs probably think that I’m a “wuss,” but I learned, long ago, not to poop where I sleep.
fsociety999 3y ago
What I find so odd about all this stuff is the target is very rarely OpenAI/ChatGPT. I understand it can be a useful tool, but if your concern is that AI has scanned your books without your consent and can generate new content in your writing style, then OpenAI is who you should be complaining about. Somehow the project with tens of billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft gets a free pass, but a two person passion project that makes no money gets viciously attacked and killed. The same thing happened with generative art. The open source tools and smaller projects got served with lawsuits, but somehow DALL-E was not included in those. Open AI is who people should be targeting since they are the ones who have all the money and the politicians in their pockets to basically stomp out any competition. My real fear is not that people find creative uses for AI on a small scale, but that Microsoft/Open AI builds a centralized system that works on their terms where you are forced to play by their rules and they decide what is fact and fiction. I haven’t read Zach Rosenberg before, but I put this prompt into ChatGPT, and sure enough, it generated what I presume to be writing in his style: > Could you write two paragraphs in the style of Zach Rosenberg arguing in favor of shutting down a tool that uses AI to analyze the text of his books? Did the author consent to Open AI scanning the text of his books to generate new text emulating his writing style? Where is the outrage over that?
- Nasrudith 3y ago
  > Somehow the project with tens of billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft gets a free pass, but a two person passion project that makes no money gets viciously attacked and killed. The same thing happened with generative art. The open source tools and smaller projects got served with lawsuits, but somehow DALL-E was not included in those. Isn't it obvious? Bullies always go after easy targets. And nothing is more popular or loathsome than self-righteous causes for bullies.
nottorp 3y ago
Copyright issues aside. My personal opinion is that these tools are mostly useful to suck the "soul" out of a book. They give you templates and stuff and useful statistics to help you go to the lowest common denominator. The problem is more visible in the movie industry, where they have had script templates for a hundred years now (actual time interval pulled out of a*), but it's starting to show up in books too. For those happy to "consume" Netflix series and Marvel movies that are indistinguishable from each other except maybe filmed with different actors, it should be fine. If you want originality in your entertainment it's sad news.
- yboris 3y ago
  I wonder about a parallel for paintings. What if there was an analysis stating exactly the brushes the painter used, the number of strokes, the exact pigments, etc? Would that, in your opinion, "suck the 'soul' out of a painting"? I could see this as a brilliant learning tool. A tool to provide deep insight into something that would be very challenging to quantify personally. I think all this would make future authors better, not worse.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    > Would that, in your opinion, "suck the 'soul' out of a painting"? Out of the analyzed painting, no. > A tool to provide deep insight into something that would be very challenging to quantify personally. Yeah, and will prevent the would be creator from developing a personal style. No matter what medium they create with.
    - yboris 3y ago
      Does an artist not see thousands of artworks as they develop their style? Do artists not experiment with hundreds of styles as they hone in on something they want to be theirs? Is the internet, a tool that lets them see even more artworks, preventing creators from developing their personal style? As I understand it, we've seen an explosion of different dancing styles as various apps let users share their craft with others - a quicker evolution of a greater variety of dancing. And I'm confident dancers use technology like playing videos at slower speeds to analyze others' movements.
cebsoto 3y ago
The concept is fabulous, and I do agree that there were some gut-kick reactions. Any tool that can help a writer progress their craft is a welcome addition, as far as I am concerned, but there are consequences that probably even the creator did not think about. Tools are never used the way the creator envisioned. Being "cool" is not a reason to embrace. I can see both sides, but I really did not understand how the tool worked, and until I do....I am going to struggle with which side of the fence to land.
greenhearth 3y ago
Knowing the percent of adverbs in a book is not helpful to any writer. No writer who is worth any ink they write with thinks in percentages or thinks of any of the nonsense in that article. P.S. Stop stealing shit from writers to train your thing.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sampo 3y ago
Summary: prosecraft.io counted word occurrences and presented statistics about them. I don't think you even need fair use for this, because this is something you obviously are allowed to do, without any permissions. This is not generative AI, this is old school statistics. And then it sometimes presented a page worth of quoted text from a book. Which should fall under fair use. https://blog.shaxpir.com/taking-down-prosecraft-io-37e189797121 https://blog.shaxpir.com/taking-down-prosecraft-io-37e189797...
- warning26 3y ago
  > counted word occurrences and presented statistics about them. I don't think you even need fair use for this, because this is something you obviously are allowed to do, without any permissions You're pretty much describing exactly what an LLM "learns" about text. I agree that it should obviously fall under fair use, but as the author of this article found out, there are quite a few who (very vocally) disagree.
  - tensor 3y ago
    I think there is a big difference in terms of data recovery though. You can't take a compression algorithm, for example, and claim that its "just some statistical analysis" when it can reproduce the original perfectly. Heck, even if it can reproduce it approximately, that's a lot different than what we see in this particular example, where the data could not be used to reproduce a text at all.
  - make3 3y ago
    generation of related text vs analysis of human understandable facts is very different in the mind of most people. I think that using an LLM to get insights on the text should be ok, it's the generation part that scares them. probably rightly so.
- gs17 3y ago
  > I don't think you even need fair use for this You shouldn't, at least for posting basic statistics. They're facts, not copyrightable.
alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
I generally appreciate TechDirt but this is a very weak argument, the logic is inverted. That some people who are opposed to LLMs were wrong to attack a tool that has nothing to do with LLMs does not allow us to conclude they are wrong about LLMs.
renewiltord 3y ago
The tool looks like it was useful to a certain kind of person. If it would actually make money, I would gladly (and probably easily) replicate it because I don't really care that much if Internet randos hate me. But I don't have a good idea for how to keep the return / effort ratio high on this. I don't need consent for a lot of this, and I probably wouldn't bother. If I made a "List of books with terrible sentences" I wouldn't ask for opt-in or even bother contacting the authors. I will just make the list and quote the sentence. The law and public opinion is on my side, though I only need the former.
rockemsockem 3y ago
One thing that stuck out to me after reading the initial vitriolic Twitter thread from the author saying "How dare you!" is that the author is a lawyer by day, which I find interesting, since they seem to be very uninformed about copyright and fair use.
al_be_back 3y ago
I think it's wise to take the concerns of the creative community seriously - after all their "labor of love" [1] matters immensely, without it LLMs are useless. matters not how much the coder "loved" the project, or did yoga, or that they've not made money for years, after all most book authors aren't exactly raking in the money either. also like many thinks in life, some tools/projects/startups etc just stop being needed/used and new ones/competitors take over. there's nothing to say that since tool X is using A.I. therefore it has to be adopted by one and all; smiles all around. google has 'right to be forgotten', also looking into 'machine unlearning' and it's common for platforms to honor user's request to remove their data / close their account. [1] From OP: destroying what had been a clear labor of love and a useful project
- tavavex 3y ago
  The thing with this project is that it had no conceivable way of threatening the original authors, financially or otherwise. The analyses it produced weren't replacements of the original works, and served as a writing tool, not as something that generated new content. In this case, the shutdown seemed to hinge entirely on the irrational fear of anything with "AI" written on it and an unshakeable conviction that this clearly transformative use case wasn't fair use.
  - al_be_back 3y ago
    >> had no conceivable way of threatening the original authors, financially or otherwise how so? what's inconceivable about it? >> seemed to hinge entirely on the irrational fear how are the authors "fearing without reason" or "illogically fearing" ?
    - tavavex 3y ago
      > how so? what's inconceivable about it? Authors make money through sales of their work. This tool was a writing aid that analyzed text and included some copyrighted works in its dataset. There was no way of retrieving these books in full, and the excerpts that were allegedly shown to the users were used in an analytical context, unlike the original works. So, this website couldn't replace ownership of the actual book for readers, and had no capacity to hurt their sales. Basically, the way the service used this data should be transformative enough as to not have any impact on the authors. > how are the authors "fearing without reason" or "illogically fearing" ? I called it "fear" because there was no strong argument on the authors' side as to why this tool is bad. I called it "illogical" because I think that it's no coincidence that this controversy only came up now, in 2023. Back in 2017 and onward, the existence of this tool didn't appear to generate pushback. My pet theory is that in 2023, now that we have good generative AI, the advancements have spawned an entire subset of people that view anything "AI" as inherently tainted and immoral. The original complaints seem to lack understanding of this tool and multiple people have conflated it with generative AI, despite it having nothing to do with that.
dahwolf 3y ago
I'm not a lawyer, but neither is this Mike guy. I'm quite suspicious about how confident he is in stating that all of this is legally fine. From the creator himself: "When I ran out of books on my own shelves, I looked to the internet for more text that I could analyze, and I used web crawlers to find more books." I'm annoyed by the phrasing. Because you're obscuring that you pirated commercial books. A commercial book is not open or public data. You're supposed to pay for it to get access to it. This assumption that just because something can be found on the internet, it's cool to just take it and do whatever the hell you want with it, is worthy of push-back. Especially in the case of data that isn't public at all (not by intent anyway). This is not the same thing as scraping Wikipedia, which allows for it and has supportive licensing for it. I believe that in the majority of cases where we're talking about entirely new use cases such as big data, deep analysis, AI training, etc we need to move to an opt-in model. Unless explicitly specified, you have no permission. The opposite situation is ridiculous. I do agree that the mob-like type of criticism deserves criticism in itself. Trigger words like "AI", "crypto", "white techbro" converting adults into sadistic bullies is a sad thing to watch.
- lsaferite 3y ago
  Let's split the discussion though. The authors clearly didn't support the idea of the project, regardless of the source for the data. How the developer acquired the data is a different discussion. Unless you have clear proof they pirated the content, why disparage them?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

298 points by donohoe 3y ago

I like this article about internet outrage being bad that seems to exist solely to use that conceit to try to drum up internet outrage

ricochet11 3y ago

its sad he took the site down, it looks like a neat project. it seems to be fair use, so it really is just an issue of consent and keeping people happy. the issue is some people will always be fearful/miserable. should the rest of us be held back in exploring culture because they refuse to play? anyway i'm sure there will be ten other similar sites by the end of the week...

fsagx 3y ago
With CLOUD and AI happily in the descriptions, with no private desktop version, and your email to sign up, please.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  [flagged]
LikelyABurner 3y ago
“That book’s vividness score (TM) is 75% opposed to that other book’s vividness score (TM) which is only 50%! That’s, like, a 50% higher culture score (TM)!”
- croes 3y ago
  What if I prefer books with a 50% vividness, so bought the book that was to vivid for me and write a bad review or are online reviews also considered bad Silicon valley tech? BTW do you write per hand or type writer or do you use word processors with formatting, thesaurus, spell and grammar checking?

LikelyABurner 3y ago

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?

pmarreck 3y ago
As the article stated, there is nothing either legally or morally wrong with what the site did, and many authors found it useful. Let us know when you come up with an actual counterargument based on reason instead of an appeal to emotion fallacy.
Nullabillity 3y ago
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.
- capableweb 3y ago
  > 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?
  - LikelyABurner 3y ago
    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.
    - 3y ago

jprete 3y ago

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

zinekeller 3y ago
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).
- 542458 3y ago
  Why do you feel that the Google vs Authors Guild ruling cited in the article isn’t relevant?
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  "majority" and "clings on" seem entirely arbitrary and perjorative. Why not make your actual point instead of just beating up a straw man?
- luma 3y ago
  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.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    The ai moving goal! No 2023.ai was used. Maybe some 1993.ai. Chat GPT will be considered “just stats” in 2033.
pmarreck 3y ago
There is no “AI” in the project. It literally just seems to do Bayesian sentiment analysis of books. It does NOT then mine that data to score OTHER books. Please actually read the article next time before commenting

iamflimflam1 3y ago

Something that we need to learn is that these brief outbreaks on social media burn themselves out pretty quickly. Everyone shouts for a bit and then moves onto to the next bit of manufactured outrage.

leach 3y ago
I agree, people get angry at something for a day and then the timeline tells them to be angry at the next thing. Always feel bad for people who cave to the mob, usually if the mob is yelling at you you’re on the right track

runj__ 3y ago

I honestly don't understand how people can refuse the idea of that some parts most certainly can be reviewed with the help of a computer. There wasn't a "how good is this book" score because a computer might not be able to tell that yet, I don't understand the issue in looking at the number of adverbs in a book with the help of a computer.

jprete 3y ago
Software people are intensely susceptible to the McNamara Fallacy: “But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.” — Daniel Yankelovich, "Interpreting the New Life Styles", Sales Management (1971) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy This is often justified as an attempt to be objective, but I think the actual reason is that it’s hard to deal with unquantifiable properties.
- morkalork 3y ago
  Is there a counter fallacy along the lines of "if we can't measure everything, we shouldn't measure anything"? It can still be an interesting, fun and informative exercise while keeping in mind that it may be limited.
palata 3y ago
> I don't understand the issue in looking at the number of adverbs in a book with the help of a computer. I think that authors see an issue with their IP being fed to an algorithmic black box that will certainly make a lot of money, but authors won't see any of it, and for which engineers say "don't worry, it is not stealing your IP, just let us make money the way we want and shut up". What if OpenAI could prove that their algorithms are not stealing IP? I think it's easy: they just can't. They don't even formally know what their algorithm can and cannot do. If I was an author or an artist, I would most definitely want a new kind of legal way to make sure that if I don't want my work to be used as training data, then it most definitely isn't. Of course that's not really possible, because who can audit the algorithmic black box and see if my work was used in the training?

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

Doesn't seem like the fear of AI more just authors being petulant, didn't we have the same thing with some hack Star Wars book author attacking the internet archive for daring to host a copy of his book before the AI fad.

TheChaplain 3y ago

I believe that if you are using my book as data/model/whatever for something that makes money, then I want a piece of the action. If it's just a paragraph, fine go ahead. But the whole book? Give me money.

em-bee 3y ago
you want money if your book is used for literary analysis? and even if you could get money for that, it would not be much. if the tool analyses a million books, and then the service makes one million in revenue, no more than $1 of revenue can be attributed to your book. and only a fraction of that would go to the book author because most of the revenue goes into developing and maintaining the tool. so you'd get 10c. you would make more money by spending your time writing actual prose that can be sold, instead of complaining about this particular tool.
morkalork 3y ago
Feels like a nightmare. What about a book club passing around a copy of your book. Want to charge them licensing fees? Story time at a library for children. Licensing fees for them too? Review in a pay-walled newspaper. Fees, again? NYT derives value from all those reviews you know.
andrewfurey2003 3y ago
No.
rgoulter 3y ago
At two extremes, say: If I read your books and use them as a strong foundation from which to write stories (e.g. I don't do any worldbuilding, & just re-use settings/characters without my own introduction), it seems reasonable that my derivative would need some kind of license from you. If I read your books and write book reviews about them (including small excerpts from the book), it seems unreasonable to require your explicit permission. I think the website mentioned (which displays stats about a book, and a couple of excerpts) falls far closer to the latter case than the former case.
tomjen3 3y ago

keiferski 3y ago

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 destroy their livelihoods, almost always without the slightest interest in helping them figure out the new economic situation. The attitude is, "It's the reality now, deal with it," all while enjoying the job security and high salaries of tech jobs. You can see the same attitude displayed when it comes to piracy: "too bad, deal with it, I have a good job, I don't care if you don't anymore." This stuff would be received far better by the creative community if AI companies were to say, establish an artist sponsorship program, push for UBI, or otherwise show that they care even a tiny bit about the people they're making redundant.

bertil 3y ago
I agree with you. There’s a pattern that I see a lot, of having: 1. large powerful players doing something not entirely helpful; 2. victims of that protesting that change vehemently; all that in vain because the players are powerful and have sheltered themselves from criticism, usually via lobbying; 3. regulatory capture or protests go after a smaller player, which is widely advertised to accuse 2. of going too far — even when the problem in 1. is still entirely there, and now ignored. It’s definitely the case with globalization (large conglomerate benefit, people protest, and a small artisan who started selling abroad is featured being victimized by tariffs), fossil fuel (large oil extractor, climate advocate, farmer seeing fertilizer prize go up), immigration, American cultural hegemony, car dominance over cities, etc. That pattern allows larger players still doing harm to wash their morals. I feel like we need better antibodies to say: No, this does not absolve them.
pcthrowaway 3y ago
> if AI companies were to say, establish an artist sponsorship program, push for UBI Sam Altman, for all his faults, is actually a massive proponent of UBI. I mean, that was one of the claimed objectives of Worldcoin (though he advocates for UBI in general: https://thewalrus.ca/will-universal-basic-income-save-us-from-ai/ https://thewalrus.ca/will-universal-basic-income-save-us-fro... )

t14n 3y ago

Hrm. It seems like the authors are caught up in things like "vividness" score and the "sentiment analysis" of the text; I guess because it's loosely related to AI? But it seems like a bulk of the stats collected are things that I would find really useful. I've probably asked myself, "how many words are in this book" on 10+ separate occasions, both as a reader and as a writer. It also seems like there were also counts of things like adjectives, verbs, adverbs, passive verbs, etc -- stats that I might want to know about a novel. The bulk of the service seems rather "boring" and non-AI. Unfortunate that the whole thing was taken down because of a few features. Hopefully it'll come back.

belorn 3y ago

Relying on Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc in order determine fair use for AI models, there are a few key aspects to consider. The outcome should not supersede, supplant or become a replacement for the original works, nor should they sell portions of them. It should also preferable enhance the sale of the original work to the benefit of the copyright holder. In this specific case regarding prosecraft, all those criteria might be fulfilled, and it might be so that under those specific conditions the use of any copyrighted work for the creation of AI models is fair (or at least under US law).

activitypea 3y ago

I just think it's really funny that a third or so of the article is the author struggling to figure out why this would be useful to anyone. > scanned and analyzed a whole bunch of books and would let you call up really useful data on books. [...] Frankly, all of that sounds amazing. And amazingly useful. Even more amazing is that he built it, and it worked. It would produce useful analysis of books. > This is all quite interesting. It’s also the kind of thing that data scientists do on all kinds of work for useful purposes. Smith built Prosecraft into Shaxpir, again, making it a more useful tool. Author's general illiteracy aside, he's really giving the game away here. I can't even think about the ethical implications of the project, because why would I care to count the number of adverbs and passive voice in all books ever, and why would you need a state of the art LLM-powered AI to do it?

GaggiX 3y ago
The ethical implication of indexing books? Also where do you read the author of the website was using LLM?
em-bee 3y ago
he is not even using an LLM, which is kind of the point. the tool is thrown in and judged as an AI tool when it is just simple statistics that anyone who studied some math can build with a little bit of effort.
steezeburger 3y ago
Imagine seeing the trends in books throughout certain time period, wars, etc. Or larger trends over the history of all written works. Or all kinds of other neat and useful information that can impact decisions we make today. Do you think all analysis of things you aren't personally interested in is useless?
- activitypea 3y ago
  I hate "did you even read my comment" replies, but again, you're pitching me on "trends throughout a time period", "larger trends throughout history" and "all kinds of other useful information that can impact decisions". I don't think a person without interest in literary analysis would make this comment. On the contrary, I'm specifically calling out building non-sensical tools with little practical uses because the author of the tool does not engage with literary works beyond the most superficial layer. And because I don't believe quantitive analysis of art is benificial to culture and society, but that's a broader subject.

h11h 3y ago

> The Gizmodo article has a ridiculously wrong “fair use” analysis, saying “Fair Use does not, by any stretch of the imagination, allow you to use an author’s entire copyrighted work without permission as a part of a data training program that feeds into your own ‘AI algorithm.’” Except… it almost certainly does? Again, we’ve gone through this with the Google Book scanning case, and the courts said that you can absolutely do that because it’s transformative. I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure Fair Use doesn't mean you can download a dump of Library Genesis and feed that into your system!

ahstilde 3y ago
You are wrong.

actuallyalys 3y ago

I found this article frustratingly vague on how prosecraft.io actually worked. As far as I can tell, the author scraped the web for books, including in-copyright books. Then he analyzed it with techniques based on "classical" natural language processing techniques, rather than transformers or deep learning. He appears to have retained the books he scraped for future analysis. The site itself seems to use only snippets. However, the apology [0] says that the creator did not "intend" to participate in AI that can "create zero-effort impersonations of artists." I'm not sure if the wording is unintentionally vague, or if there is some way his project could be used in that way. For what it's worth, the Computational Story Lab's hendometer [1] seems to have largely out-of-copyright books from Project Gutenberg, plus the Harry Potter series. [0]: https://blog.shaxpir.com/taking-down-prosecraft-io-37e189797121 https://blog.shaxpir.com/taking-down-prosecraft-io-37e189797... [1]: https://hedonometer.org/books/v3/863/ https://hedonometer.org/books/v3/863/ Edit: Apparently he was working on an LLM project. https://twitter.com/stealcase/status/1688721685585809408 https://twitter.com/stealcase/status/1688721685585809408. It's unclear whether he was planning to use the books he scraped (although as @stealcase points out, GPT-Neox itself was trained on books that were pirated).

randallsquared 3y ago
If he says he didn't do something, the pitchfork mob will simply tell each other that he is lying. They will do this in the most confused and twisted way possible, driven by lack of understanding of what was happening combined with a need to drive outrage and thereby advertise their work. If he says he didn't intend to do that thing, this is still compatible with a later update that he didn't do that thing, but immediately dampens the outrage machine. The reader who knows nothing about either side relaxes -- "No need for me to get worked up, because we won". Conveniently, saying he didn't intend to do the thing is also compatible with a later reveal that he was doing the thing (perhaps for later release, since he wasn't clearly doing the thing here). Therefore, regardless of whether he was doing what he was accused of doing, this is the lowest energy response, and probably the default unless this was the hill he wanted to defend.
- b112 3y ago

wrp 3y ago

My summary of the case: Someone did statistical analysis of a bunch of texts and created a tool that evaluates your text according to the developed model. Writers accused him of plagiarizing/using the content of their works.

nness 3y ago
As an aside, this would be completely legal in Japan, as classification and statistical analysis are protected as fair-use. I wonder if similar language exists in other copyright systems, but I would imagine it is likely the opposite...
- TrackerFF 3y ago
  Are generative models also covered by that clause? Because one thing about the generative models is that you could in theory get the model to recite copyrighted work, word by word.
  - riotnrrd 3y ago
    > one thing about the generative models is that you could in theory get the model to recite copyrighted work, word by word. Only if it's so badly trained as to be considered broken. It's not fair or smart to judge an entire method (LLMs) by some broken examples. I wouldn't claim "all cars leak oil" just because I saw a broke-down beater one day.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  This was unambiguously fair use under American copyright law, too.

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago

as soon as we can find an economic paradigm that doesn't rely on taxing the trade of exclusive assets we can have a digital renaissance. the thing with digital information is we can all copy it. the problem is that our economic paradigm doesn't deal with infinite-copying well. so far the only 'solution' I see, is figuring out ways to restrict, limit, and restrict the copying capabilities of digital stuff. which is not a solution, but a rejection of the 'novel' possibilities enabled by digital technologies. more cynically, it's not a rejection, but a capture. a few get to reap the huge benefits of digital copying, while the rest are relegated to collecting, trading arbitrary tokens and using them to pay for the permission to copy digital assets; which is completely dumb, I will die on this hill

GaggiX 3y ago

Someone should recreate the website and change the word "AI" to "underpaid worker" and everything would be fine.

morkalork 3y ago
"crowdsourced"

amelius 3y ago

AI is going incredibly fast, but package management is going incredibly slow. I have a beefy GPU and I should have all this AI stuff at my fingertips, but package managers are not working along and I'm too tired to get into another dependency hell. This is what's killing useful tools more than fear of AI.

jmull 3y ago

If you want to do this kind of thing, let authors opt-in (or publishers). Yes, it will take effort and probably go slow, but if the tool is really useful and amazing, it should be doable. I suspect the authors are put-off by a couple things: - the text of the works scanned seems like it may be from pirated sources. That poisons the project, no matter what it does with the scans, for many authors. - the use of these scans in a commercial product The article itself is clueless… it doesn’t engage authors’ concerns at all, and just portrays authors as stoopid AI-fearful luddites.

macNchz 3y ago
> The article itself is clueless… it doesn’t engage authors’ concerns at all, and just portrays authors as stoopid AI-fearful luddites. Going off of some of the tweets about this that initially whipped up the outrage about this…it’s not like they were making a nuanced case about their concerns, they were basically just stomping their feet and shouting.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jmull 3y ago
  That's twitter generally. If your engagement only reaches the level of twitter, you aren't really engaging at all.
  - dnissley 3y ago
    So as long as that's all the engagement there is, we're free to ignore it and carry on, correct?
    - ineedasername 3y ago
      I would think so. If someone is shouting & stomping their feet in the public town square about my project, but I never go anywhere near the town square anyway, I don’t think I’m going to shutdown my project. It’s just too bad the person who created this tool happened to walk through the town square.

Tao3300 3y ago

The bar for calling yourself a writer or an author is incredibly low. Doing so doesn't qualify you to have an opinion on much of anything. These people are just joining an outrage wave in an attempt to advertise, e.g. "How dare this project touch BOOK TITLE written by Me! (chain of hashtags)". They're not concerned at all about what they are breaking along the way.

yieldcrv 3y ago

open source it on IPFS and walk away, maybe call it something else and just drop the hashes on 4chan anonymously this reaction deserves the inevitable, as his only problem was it being attributed to him

dontupvoteme 3y ago
How can he do it anonymously when we already know he's the only one who has it?
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  because nobody has seen the code, but everyone has seen what it does and can think of multiple ways to do it with AI
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  Lie and claim to have been hacked.

Planktonne 3y ago

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

mistermann 3y ago
Similarly, saying that something is not true does not necessarily make it not true.
- Planktonne 3y ago
  Yes, that's why I provided the very clear example of passive voice.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    Right, but passive voice also does not render your assertions necessarily true, though it may be able to increase the likelihood of them being perceived as such.

andrewfurey2003 3y ago

If its fair use to find stats on a book/corpus of text, isn't it also fair use to run a transformer/something similar, since really its just predicting/modelling what that piece of text would output next, given context?

moomin 3y ago

Going all the way back to the Luddites, there will be those who seek to misrepresent their opposition as being “afraid of progress”. Much easier to find a friendly podcaster than engage with the actual difficulties with what you’re doing.

SillyUsername 3y ago

Who'd have thought a bunch of authors would be offended by critique and/or analysis of their work by an AI? Seems petty, I guess that's because only the best works get heavily scrutinized, e.g. Shakespeare's plays and these are hardly that.

Palmik 3y ago

I am a bit confused about what's so outrageous about this tool. It seems that both the book authors, and some of the people in the discussion here, conflate rudimentary statistics about a book (number of words of certain kind) with the latest wave of generative AI. They are very different in both what value they provide, and what risk they pose to book authors. The tool that book authors got outraged about only provides basic metrics, not dissimilar from other metrics such as "page count", and can't be used to produce new content which could deprive the book authors from revenue.

golemotron 3y ago
[flagged]
- PakG1 3y ago
  Having now looked up what the word priapism means, I'm now trying to imagine what moral priapism would be, and I can't think of a definition that makes sense. What is it? Is there a simpler word you can use?
  - RupertEisenhart 3y ago
    GPT4 sez: "This sentence uses figurative language, so it doesn't refer to literal meanings. "Fear" is a stressful emotion induced by perceived danger or threat. "Acute" suggests a sudden onset or intensity. "Moral priapism," a more abstract concept, suggests an abnormally extended or excessive fixated morality, much like the medical condition priapism refers to an unwanted, enduring erection. Overall, the sentence means that fear can lead to an exaggerated or obsessive moral response. This implies that when someone is afraid, they might stick rigidly to their moral code or make moral judgments more extremely or rigidly than they would in a state of calmness." seems fair Edit: My gloss of the summary: "Fear creates a hardon for scapegoats among the pitchfork wielders."
  - runamok 3y ago
    Permanently aroused to look for any injustice.

dfxm12 3y ago

It looks like the author of the tool took the it down himself, voluntarily. If this even counts as "killing" the tool, the author did it, not fear of AI.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

> I know we live in an outrage era, where the immediate reaction is to turn the outrage meter up to 11. I’m certainly guilty of that at times myself. I’ve learned to feel my outrage, while refraining from expressing it. I will usually avoid using anything more than vague terms to express ire or rancor, and reserve my eloquence for positive commentary. Some ITGs probably think that I’m a “wuss,” but I learned, long ago, not to poop where I sleep.

fsociety999 3y ago

What I find so odd about all this stuff is the target is very rarely OpenAI/ChatGPT. I understand it can be a useful tool, but if your concern is that AI has scanned your books without your consent and can generate new content in your writing style, then OpenAI is who you should be complaining about. Somehow the project with tens of billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft gets a free pass, but a two person passion project that makes no money gets viciously attacked and killed. The same thing happened with generative art. The open source tools and smaller projects got served with lawsuits, but somehow DALL-E was not included in those. Open AI is who people should be targeting since they are the ones who have all the money and the politicians in their pockets to basically stomp out any competition. My real fear is not that people find creative uses for AI on a small scale, but that Microsoft/Open AI builds a centralized system that works on their terms where you are forced to play by their rules and they decide what is fact and fiction. I haven’t read Zach Rosenberg before, but I put this prompt into ChatGPT, and sure enough, it generated what I presume to be writing in his style: > Could you write two paragraphs in the style of Zach Rosenberg arguing in favor of shutting down a tool that uses AI to analyze the text of his books? Did the author consent to Open AI scanning the text of his books to generate new text emulating his writing style? Where is the outrage over that?

Nasrudith 3y ago
> Somehow the project with tens of billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft gets a free pass, but a two person passion project that makes no money gets viciously attacked and killed. The same thing happened with generative art. The open source tools and smaller projects got served with lawsuits, but somehow DALL-E was not included in those. Isn't it obvious? Bullies always go after easy targets. And nothing is more popular or loathsome than self-righteous causes for bullies.

nottorp 3y ago

Copyright issues aside. My personal opinion is that these tools are mostly useful to suck the "soul" out of a book. They give you templates and stuff and useful statistics to help you go to the lowest common denominator. The problem is more visible in the movie industry, where they have had script templates for a hundred years now (actual time interval pulled out of a*), but it's starting to show up in books too. For those happy to "consume" Netflix series and Marvel movies that are indistinguishable from each other except maybe filmed with different actors, it should be fine. If you want originality in your entertainment it's sad news.

yboris 3y ago
I wonder about a parallel for paintings. What if there was an analysis stating exactly the brushes the painter used, the number of strokes, the exact pigments, etc? Would that, in your opinion, "suck the 'soul' out of a painting"? I could see this as a brilliant learning tool. A tool to provide deep insight into something that would be very challenging to quantify personally. I think all this would make future authors better, not worse.
- nottorp 3y ago
  > Would that, in your opinion, "suck the 'soul' out of a painting"? Out of the analyzed painting, no. > A tool to provide deep insight into something that would be very challenging to quantify personally. Yeah, and will prevent the would be creator from developing a personal style. No matter what medium they create with.
  - yboris 3y ago
    Does an artist not see thousands of artworks as they develop their style? Do artists not experiment with hundreds of styles as they hone in on something they want to be theirs? Is the internet, a tool that lets them see even more artworks, preventing creators from developing their personal style? As I understand it, we've seen an explosion of different dancing styles as various apps let users share their craft with others - a quicker evolution of a greater variety of dancing. And I'm confident dancers use technology like playing videos at slower speeds to analyze others' movements.

cebsoto 3y ago

The concept is fabulous, and I do agree that there were some gut-kick reactions. Any tool that can help a writer progress their craft is a welcome addition, as far as I am concerned, but there are consequences that probably even the creator did not think about. Tools are never used the way the creator envisioned. Being "cool" is not a reason to embrace. I can see both sides, but I really did not understand how the tool worked, and until I do....I am going to struggle with which side of the fence to land.

greenhearth 3y ago

Knowing the percent of adverbs in a book is not helpful to any writer. No writer who is worth any ink they write with thinks in percentages or thinks of any of the nonsense in that article. P.S. Stop stealing shit from writers to train your thing.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sampo 3y ago

Summary: prosecraft.io counted word occurrences and presented statistics about them. I don't think you even need fair use for this, because this is something you obviously are allowed to do, without any permissions. This is not generative AI, this is old school statistics. And then it sometimes presented a page worth of quoted text from a book. Which should fall under fair use. https://blog.shaxpir.com/taking-down-prosecraft-io-37e189797121 https://blog.shaxpir.com/taking-down-prosecraft-io-37e189797...

warning26 3y ago
> counted word occurrences and presented statistics about them. I don't think you even need fair use for this, because this is something you obviously are allowed to do, without any permissions You're pretty much describing exactly what an LLM "learns" about text. I agree that it should obviously fall under fair use, but as the author of this article found out, there are quite a few who (very vocally) disagree.
- tensor 3y ago
  I think there is a big difference in terms of data recovery though. You can't take a compression algorithm, for example, and claim that its "just some statistical analysis" when it can reproduce the original perfectly. Heck, even if it can reproduce it approximately, that's a lot different than what we see in this particular example, where the data could not be used to reproduce a text at all.
- make3 3y ago
  generation of related text vs analysis of human understandable facts is very different in the mind of most people. I think that using an LLM to get insights on the text should be ok, it's the generation part that scares them. probably rightly so.
gs17 3y ago
> I don't think you even need fair use for this You shouldn't, at least for posting basic statistics. They're facts, not copyrightable.

alwaysbeconsing 3y ago

I generally appreciate TechDirt but this is a very weak argument, the logic is inverted. That some people who are opposed to LLMs were wrong to attack a tool that has nothing to do with LLMs does not allow us to conclude they are wrong about LLMs.

renewiltord 3y ago

The tool looks like it was useful to a certain kind of person. If it would actually make money, I would gladly (and probably easily) replicate it because I don't really care that much if Internet randos hate me. But I don't have a good idea for how to keep the return / effort ratio high on this. I don't need consent for a lot of this, and I probably wouldn't bother. If I made a "List of books with terrible sentences" I wouldn't ask for opt-in or even bother contacting the authors. I will just make the list and quote the sentence. The law and public opinion is on my side, though I only need the former.

rockemsockem 3y ago

One thing that stuck out to me after reading the initial vitriolic Twitter thread from the author saying "How dare you!" is that the author is a lawyer by day, which I find interesting, since they seem to be very uninformed about copyright and fair use.

al_be_back 3y ago

I think it's wise to take the concerns of the creative community seriously - after all their "labor of love" [1] matters immensely, without it LLMs are useless. matters not how much the coder "loved" the project, or did yoga, or that they've not made money for years, after all most book authors aren't exactly raking in the money either. also like many thinks in life, some tools/projects/startups etc just stop being needed/used and new ones/competitors take over. there's nothing to say that since tool X is using A.I. therefore it has to be adopted by one and all; smiles all around. google has 'right to be forgotten', also looking into 'machine unlearning' and it's common for platforms to honor user's request to remove their data / close their account. [1] From OP: destroying what had been a clear labor of love and a useful project

tavavex 3y ago
The thing with this project is that it had no conceivable way of threatening the original authors, financially or otherwise. The analyses it produced weren't replacements of the original works, and served as a writing tool, not as something that generated new content. In this case, the shutdown seemed to hinge entirely on the irrational fear of anything with "AI" written on it and an unshakeable conviction that this clearly transformative use case wasn't fair use.
- al_be_back 3y ago
  >> had no conceivable way of threatening the original authors, financially or otherwise how so? what's inconceivable about it? >> seemed to hinge entirely on the irrational fear how are the authors "fearing without reason" or "illogically fearing" ?
  - tavavex 3y ago
    > how so? what's inconceivable about it? Authors make money through sales of their work. This tool was a writing aid that analyzed text and included some copyrighted works in its dataset. There was no way of retrieving these books in full, and the excerpts that were allegedly shown to the users were used in an analytical context, unlike the original works. So, this website couldn't replace ownership of the actual book for readers, and had no capacity to hurt their sales. Basically, the way the service used this data should be transformative enough as to not have any impact on the authors. > how are the authors "fearing without reason" or "illogically fearing" ? I called it "fear" because there was no strong argument on the authors' side as to why this tool is bad. I called it "illogical" because I think that it's no coincidence that this controversy only came up now, in 2023. Back in 2017 and onward, the existence of this tool didn't appear to generate pushback. My pet theory is that in 2023, now that we have good generative AI, the advancements have spawned an entire subset of people that view anything "AI" as inherently tainted and immoral. The original complaints seem to lack understanding of this tool and multiple people have conflated it with generative AI, despite it having nothing to do with that.

dahwolf 3y ago

I'm not a lawyer, but neither is this Mike guy. I'm quite suspicious about how confident he is in stating that all of this is legally fine. From the creator himself: "When I ran out of books on my own shelves, I looked to the internet for more text that I could analyze, and I used web crawlers to find more books." I'm annoyed by the phrasing. Because you're obscuring that you pirated commercial books. A commercial book is not open or public data. You're supposed to pay for it to get access to it. This assumption that just because something can be found on the internet, it's cool to just take it and do whatever the hell you want with it, is worthy of push-back. Especially in the case of data that isn't public at all (not by intent anyway). This is not the same thing as scraping Wikipedia, which allows for it and has supportive licensing for it. I believe that in the majority of cases where we're talking about entirely new use cases such as big data, deep analysis, AI training, etc we need to move to an opt-in model. Unless explicitly specified, you have no permission. The opposite situation is ridiculous. I do agree that the mob-like type of criticism deserves criticism in itself. Trigger words like "AI", "crypto", "white techbro" converting adults into sadistic bullies is a sad thing to watch.

lsaferite 3y ago
Let's split the discussion though. The authors clearly didn't support the idea of the project, regardless of the source for the data. How the developer acquired the data is a different discussion. Unless you have clear proof they pirated the content, why disparage them?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]