4 ms·

I do not buy the premisses. Your example states that it can provide the full text of any book. An LLM cannot do that. They can produce something in the same sty

I do not buy the premisses. Your example states that it can provide the full text of any book. An LLM cannot do that. They can produce something in the same style and setting. When an actual human author mimics other writers styles, it is not illegal, why exactly should it be illegal for an author to use an LLM to do it?

palata 3y ago
> When an actual human author mimics other writers styles, it is not illegal, why exactly should it be illegal for an author to use an LLM to do it? There is a fundamental difference of scale. Say I write a blog post about some technical thing I know. You read it, learn from it (and other sources), and then you write your own blog post with your understanding. You may link to my post (if you believe it is heavily inspired from there), or not. But reading my post, understanding the material to the point where you can write about it took time. If you are so fast that you can produce more posts than I do, and your posts are the same quality, then suddenly you become a better blogger than me. An LLM can automate that. With an LLM, you as a blogger don't have to learn from my post, you can just have it generate the post (you don't even need to read it). In that case, you have put absolutely zero effort learning about the topic, you just had some algorithm copy-paste-and-modify my post. Don't you think that if you publish a blog post that you haven't even read yourself, probably it comes from material written by somebody else at some point? In any case it is very different. Once a human does it, the other time a machine does it. I don't understand why engineers think we can just transfer concepts between both. You as a human have rights (maybe you can vote), but your LLM cannot. Why couldn't an LLM vote if humans vote? Precisely because it is different, and it creates new problems. The fact that LLMs can automatically (and at scale) launder copyrighted material is a new problem. Therefore we need to think about that, and to think about whether or not this should be legal. The day people stop reading my blog and instead use ChatGPT (which is trained using, among the ton of other copyrighted material, my blog), and as a result nobody reads my blog directly anymore, I can assure you that I will stop writing. If 99% of books are written by ChatGPT instead of actual authors, but based on books from actual authors, in such a way that the readers don't really make a difference and therefore go with ChatGPT (because it's cheaper), what do you think writers will do? If they can't live from writing books (because ChatGPT does not buy their books, and people now pay ChatGPT instead of buying the books), then they will just stop writing. It is a risk that needs to be considered. And it's certainly not an engineering question.
- mythhabit 3y ago
  I do not disagree with any of what you wrote. That is also an entirely different line of reasoning than your first argument. That said, LLMs today, cannot do this in a meaningful way. If an author cannot write a better book than ChatGPT, then that author would not be able to live of their writing anyway. And the authors that use ChatGPT to write a book, but still put the effort into fine tuning it, will not be able to this at scale. You also need someone to line out the plot and twists and turns if it is to be a full length book. Let's assume that in 10 years, LLMs are at the point where you cannot distinguish between a well written book by an author and one generated by entirely by an AI. Suppose we have two authors, one that is long dead and whos works are public domain and a young one that is just starting. An LLM trained on the author whos work is in the public domain can generate books that is just like the original works. But what if the young author writes in a similar way, is that now legal or illegal to generate the same content? It's impossible to know if the young authors work have been used for training. My take on it, is that LLMs are pretty stupid. They cannot come up with new and novel things. So if a writer writes something that is different (i.e. new and novel), how do we protect that? We cannot prevent it from being used for training, so the next logical step is to protect it the same way as we protect technology with patents. But that come with its own class of problems, say if two people write the same way independently, only one can have the right to do it. That is not the solution either. I do not have the answer, but I am certain that trying to ban LLMs, or dictating what and how is not the answer. Perhaps the authors that can write in a new and novel way, and knows how to use AI will proliferate because they embrace it.
  - palata 3y ago
    > We cannot prevent it from being used for training, so the next logical step is to protect it the same way as we protect technology with patents. Why not? Just say that using for training is considered derivative work, and that's it. Now copyright owners just have to update their license to allow for training if they want to, and that's solved. Of course, Big Tech makes less money from that scenario. > I am certain that trying to ban LLMs, or dictating what and how is not the answer. I wouldn't ban LLMs because of copyright issues, though I would let authors choose whether their IP can be used for training or not. However, copyright is only one issue with LLMs. All the black hat use-cases are a whole other category of issues. And I am of the opinion that technology is not neutral: IMO, it is perfectly fine for a society to ban a technology if it believes that it is globally doing more harm than good.

palata 3y ago

> When an actual human author mimics other writers styles, it is not illegal, why exactly should it be illegal for an author to use an LLM to do it? There is a fundamental difference of scale. Say I write a blog post about some technical thing I know. You read it, learn from it (and other sources), and then you write your own blog post with your understanding. You may link to my post (if you believe it is heavily inspired from there), or not. But reading my post, understanding the material to the point where you can write about it took time. If you are so fast that you can produce more posts than I do, and your posts are the same quality, then suddenly you become a better blogger than me. An LLM can automate that. With an LLM, you as a blogger don't have to learn from my post, you can just have it generate the post (you don't even need to read it). In that case, you have put absolutely zero effort learning about the topic, you just had some algorithm copy-paste-and-modify my post. Don't you think that if you publish a blog post that you haven't even read yourself, probably it comes from material written by somebody else at some point? In any case it is very different. Once a human does it, the other time a machine does it. I don't understand why engineers think we can just transfer concepts between both. You as a human have rights (maybe you can vote), but your LLM cannot. Why couldn't an LLM vote if humans vote? Precisely because it is different, and it creates new problems. The fact that LLMs can automatically (and at scale) launder copyrighted material is a new problem. Therefore we need to think about that, and to think about whether or not this should be legal. The day people stop reading my blog and instead use ChatGPT (which is trained using, among the ton of other copyrighted material, my blog), and as a result nobody reads my blog directly anymore, I can assure you that I will stop writing. If 99% of books are written by ChatGPT instead of actual authors, but based on books from actual authors, in such a way that the readers don't really make a difference and therefore go with ChatGPT (because it's cheaper), what do you think writers will do? If they can't live from writing books (because ChatGPT does not buy their books, and people now pay ChatGPT instead of buying the books), then they will just stop writing. It is a risk that needs to be considered. And it's certainly not an engineering question.

mythhabit 3y ago
I do not disagree with any of what you wrote. That is also an entirely different line of reasoning than your first argument. That said, LLMs today, cannot do this in a meaningful way. If an author cannot write a better book than ChatGPT, then that author would not be able to live of their writing anyway. And the authors that use ChatGPT to write a book, but still put the effort into fine tuning it, will not be able to this at scale. You also need someone to line out the plot and twists and turns if it is to be a full length book. Let's assume that in 10 years, LLMs are at the point where you cannot distinguish between a well written book by an author and one generated by entirely by an AI. Suppose we have two authors, one that is long dead and whos works are public domain and a young one that is just starting. An LLM trained on the author whos work is in the public domain can generate books that is just like the original works. But what if the young author writes in a similar way, is that now legal or illegal to generate the same content? It's impossible to know if the young authors work have been used for training. My take on it, is that LLMs are pretty stupid. They cannot come up with new and novel things. So if a writer writes something that is different (i.e. new and novel), how do we protect that? We cannot prevent it from being used for training, so the next logical step is to protect it the same way as we protect technology with patents. But that come with its own class of problems, say if two people write the same way independently, only one can have the right to do it. That is not the solution either. I do not have the answer, but I am certain that trying to ban LLMs, or dictating what and how is not the answer. Perhaps the authors that can write in a new and novel way, and knows how to use AI will proliferate because they embrace it.
- palata 3y ago
  > We cannot prevent it from being used for training, so the next logical step is to protect it the same way as we protect technology with patents. Why not? Just say that using for training is considered derivative work, and that's it. Now copyright owners just have to update their license to allow for training if they want to, and that's solved. Of course, Big Tech makes less money from that scenario. > I am certain that trying to ban LLMs, or dictating what and how is not the answer. I wouldn't ban LLMs because of copyright issues, though I would let authors choose whether their IP can be used for training or not. However, copyright is only one issue with LLMs. All the black hat use-cases are a whole other category of issues. And I am of the opinion that technology is not neutral: IMO, it is perfectly fine for a society to ban a technology if it believes that it is globally doing more harm than good.