5 ms·

We've reached the inevitable part of the conversation! What distinction are you drawing between what an LLM does and what a human does? Because as far as I can

by roenxi 3y ago

We've reached the inevitable part of the conversation! What distinction are you drawing between what an LLM does and what a human does? Because as far as I can see they are identical. A human artist looks at a lot of different sources, builds up a black-box statistical model of how to create from that and can reproduce other styles on demand based on a few samples. Generative AI follows the same process. What distinction do you want to draw to say that they should be treated differently legally? And why would that even be desirable?

voltaireodactyl 3y ago
One distinction would be that every source a human looked at involved a payment for access to/a copy of each and every source inputted into their black-box. Which is not the case with the current AI models (or rather, the companies profiting off them), to my understanding.
- inimino 3y ago
  You mean all the landscape artists and portrait and figure and still life painters throughout all human history who just casually made art of whatever they saw around them?
staticman2 3y ago
I'm pretty sure the artist is conscious and the AI isn't which means there's something reductive about your claim that they are both merely "applying a black-box statistical" model. Even if it's true (which is debatable,) it doesn't appear to be more informative than saying "they are both made of atoms."
- roenxi 3y ago
  Well, my personal opinion is with the rise of neural nets we've basically proven that "consciousness" is an illusion and there is nothing there to find. But for the sake of argument, lets assume that there is something called consciousness, artists have it and neural nets don't. How are you going to demonstrate that consciousness is responsible for what the artists are doing? We have undeniable proof that the art could be created by a statistical model, there is solid evidence that the brain creates art by simulating a mathematical neural network to achieve creative outcomes - the brain is full of relatively simple neurons linking together in a way that is logically similar to the way we're encoding information into these matrices. So it is quite reasonable to believe that the artists are conscious but suspect that consciousness isn't involved in the process of creating a copyrighted work. How does that get dealt with?
  - staticman2 3y ago
    I'll talk about fiction, since I've written some. If I write a ghost story it's because I enjoy ghost stories and want to take a crack at my own. While I don't know why ideas pop into my head, I do know that I pick the ones that are subjectively fun or to my taste. And if I do a clever job or a bad job I have a sense of it when I reread what I wrote. These AI's aren't doing anything like that. They have no preference or intent. Their choices change depending on setting like temperature or prompts. Or let's try a different example. Stephen King wrote a novel where he imagined the protagonist gets killed and eaten by the villain's pet pig (Misery). He struggled to come up with a different ending because he said nobody wants to read a whole novel just to see the main character die in the end. He thought about it and did a different ending. Are you claiming Stephen King's conscious deliberation wasn't part of his writing process? I'd say it clearly was. Also, I don't really understand the consciousness is an illusion argument. If none of us are conscious, why should I justify any copyright policy preference to you? That would be like justifying a copyright policy preference to a doorknob. But somehow I'm also a doorknob in this analogy??? Suppose Bob says he's conscious and Jim says he isn't and we believe them. Doesn't that suggest we would have different policy preferences on how they are treated? It would appear murdering Jim wouldn't be particularly harmful but murdering Bob would. I don't have to show how Jim and Bob's mind differ to prefer policies that benefit Bob over Jim.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      > ...[w]hile I don't know why ideas pop into my head... If you're trying to argue that you're doing something different from statistical sampling, not knowing how you're doing it isn't a very strong place to argue from. What you're experiencing is probably what it feels like for a sack of meat to take a statistical sample from an internal black-box model. Biologically that seems to be what is happening. I have also done a fair amount of writing. The writing comes from a completely different part of my mind than the part that experiences the world. I see no reason to believe it is linked to consciousness, even allowing that consciousness does exist which is questionable in itself. It is an unreasonable position to say that you don't know the process but it must be different from a known process that you also don't have experience using. > Are you claiming Stephen King's conscious deliberation wasn't part of his writing process? I'd say it clearly was. Unless you're claiming to have a psychic connection to Stephen King's consciousness, this is a remarkably weak claim. You have no idea how he was writing. Maybe he's even a philosophical zombie. Thanks to the rise of LLMs we know that philosophical zombies can write well. And "clearly" is not so - I could spit out a lost Stephen King work in this comment that, depending on how good ChatGPT is these days, would be passable. It isn't obvious that it is the work of a conscious mind. It in fact would obviously be from a statistical model. > If none of us are conscious, why should I justify any copyright policy preference to you? I've been against copyright for more than a decade now. You tell me why it is justified even if consciousness is a factor. The edifice of copyright is culturally and economically destructive and also has been artistically devastating (there haven't been anywhere near as many great works in the last 50 years as there should have been in a culturally dynamic society).
- bart_spoon 3y ago
  Reading through this entire exchange and it would seem your argument inevitably falls back on this argument of consciousness, which is both arbitrary (why does that matter in the original context of the distinction in learning, particularly from copyrighted works?) and ill-defined (what even is consciousness? How do we determine if another being is conscious or not?).
darkerside 3y ago
It's this kind of thinking that is the only reason machines would ever become the primary life form on earth.
woopsn 3y ago
Did you write this reply because it was the most typical way that the thread up until GP could have continued? I don't mean that to sound flippant -- if this wasn't your intent, then obviously you understand the distinction.
- roenxi 3y ago
  I also only downvote comments containing things like "I know I'm going to get downvoted for this..." (tiny handful of my downvotes violate that rule). I don't like to disappoint expectations.
Jensson 3y ago
> A human artist looks at a lot of different sources, builds up a black-box statistical model of how to create from that and can reproduce other styles on demand based on a few samples. Generative AI follows the same process. The reason programs are different in front of the law is that humans can program programs to do whatever they like at scale, humans can't program humans to do whatever they like at scale. So for example if it became legal to use images from an AI, then we would program an AI that basically copies images and it would be legal, because it is an AI. But at that point we know the law has been violated because programs that just copies images aren't a legal way to get copyrighted images for free. You saying "But the AI is a black box" just means that you could have hidden anything in there, it doesn't prove anything. Legally it is the same as if you wrote a program to copy images.
hnbad 3y ago
In what way is this argument any more productive than showing up to Pluto with a plucked chicken and yelling "BEHOLD! A MAN!"? We can make all kinds of navel-gazing arguments about why LLMs and humans are identical but at the end of the day you'll go home and poop and the LLM will blissfully idle on a forgotten AWS compute instance burning a hole into someone's pocket and any idiot can see that you two are not the same in any sense. Just because onthologies are leaky and fuzzy when applied to real world that doesn't mean there aren't tangible differences between things that are clearly different. I can construct a semantic argument for why deleting an LLM is akin to murder (and use it to either reason that deleting an LLM should be punished with the death penalty or that it should be okay to kill random people who annoy me) but that won't impress the judge or jury unless I'm trying to make a case for criminal insanity. Making a machine do things humans can do but faster/cheaper/more has tangibly different implications than letting only humans do it. It should be treated differently for the same reasons that just because a public water fountain is free to use that doesn't mean you can put a hose on it and use it to water your lawn.
- roenxi 3y ago
  I'd be doing a lot better than expected if my arguments have the sort of historical pull that Diogenes' had. And he made a point accurately - they had to change the definition and he showed their approach up as not being able to accurately identify a man without making hilarious mistakes along the way.

by roenxi 3y ago

voltaireodactyl 3y ago

One distinction would be that every source a human looked at involved a payment for access to/a copy of each and every source inputted into their black-box. Which is not the case with the current AI models (or rather, the companies profiting off them), to my understanding.

inimino 3y ago
You mean all the landscape artists and portrait and figure and still life painters throughout all human history who just casually made art of whatever they saw around them?

staticman2 3y ago

I'm pretty sure the artist is conscious and the AI isn't which means there's something reductive about your claim that they are both merely "applying a black-box statistical" model. Even if it's true (which is debatable,) it doesn't appear to be more informative than saying "they are both made of atoms."

roenxi 3y ago
Well, my personal opinion is with the rise of neural nets we've basically proven that "consciousness" is an illusion and there is nothing there to find. But for the sake of argument, lets assume that there is something called consciousness, artists have it and neural nets don't. How are you going to demonstrate that consciousness is responsible for what the artists are doing? We have undeniable proof that the art could be created by a statistical model, there is solid evidence that the brain creates art by simulating a mathematical neural network to achieve creative outcomes - the brain is full of relatively simple neurons linking together in a way that is logically similar to the way we're encoding information into these matrices. So it is quite reasonable to believe that the artists are conscious but suspect that consciousness isn't involved in the process of creating a copyrighted work. How does that get dealt with?
- staticman2 3y ago
  I'll talk about fiction, since I've written some. If I write a ghost story it's because I enjoy ghost stories and want to take a crack at my own. While I don't know why ideas pop into my head, I do know that I pick the ones that are subjectively fun or to my taste. And if I do a clever job or a bad job I have a sense of it when I reread what I wrote. These AI's aren't doing anything like that. They have no preference or intent. Their choices change depending on setting like temperature or prompts. Or let's try a different example. Stephen King wrote a novel where he imagined the protagonist gets killed and eaten by the villain's pet pig (Misery). He struggled to come up with a different ending because he said nobody wants to read a whole novel just to see the main character die in the end. He thought about it and did a different ending. Are you claiming Stephen King's conscious deliberation wasn't part of his writing process? I'd say it clearly was. Also, I don't really understand the consciousness is an illusion argument. If none of us are conscious, why should I justify any copyright policy preference to you? That would be like justifying a copyright policy preference to a doorknob. But somehow I'm also a doorknob in this analogy??? Suppose Bob says he's conscious and Jim says he isn't and we believe them. Doesn't that suggest we would have different policy preferences on how they are treated? It would appear murdering Jim wouldn't be particularly harmful but murdering Bob would. I don't have to show how Jim and Bob's mind differ to prefer policies that benefit Bob over Jim.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    > ...[w]hile I don't know why ideas pop into my head... If you're trying to argue that you're doing something different from statistical sampling, not knowing how you're doing it isn't a very strong place to argue from. What you're experiencing is probably what it feels like for a sack of meat to take a statistical sample from an internal black-box model. Biologically that seems to be what is happening. I have also done a fair amount of writing. The writing comes from a completely different part of my mind than the part that experiences the world. I see no reason to believe it is linked to consciousness, even allowing that consciousness does exist which is questionable in itself. It is an unreasonable position to say that you don't know the process but it must be different from a known process that you also don't have experience using. > Are you claiming Stephen King's conscious deliberation wasn't part of his writing process? I'd say it clearly was. Unless you're claiming to have a psychic connection to Stephen King's consciousness, this is a remarkably weak claim. You have no idea how he was writing. Maybe he's even a philosophical zombie. Thanks to the rise of LLMs we know that philosophical zombies can write well. And "clearly" is not so - I could spit out a lost Stephen King work in this comment that, depending on how good ChatGPT is these days, would be passable. It isn't obvious that it is the work of a conscious mind. It in fact would obviously be from a statistical model. > If none of us are conscious, why should I justify any copyright policy preference to you? I've been against copyright for more than a decade now. You tell me why it is justified even if consciousness is a factor. The edifice of copyright is culturally and economically destructive and also has been artistically devastating (there haven't been anywhere near as many great works in the last 50 years as there should have been in a culturally dynamic society).
bart_spoon 3y ago
Reading through this entire exchange and it would seem your argument inevitably falls back on this argument of consciousness, which is both arbitrary (why does that matter in the original context of the distinction in learning, particularly from copyrighted works?) and ill-defined (what even is consciousness? How do we determine if another being is conscious or not?).

darkerside 3y ago

It's this kind of thinking that is the only reason machines would ever become the primary life form on earth.

woopsn 3y ago

Did you write this reply because it was the most typical way that the thread up until GP could have continued? I don't mean that to sound flippant -- if this wasn't your intent, then obviously you understand the distinction.

roenxi 3y ago
I also only downvote comments containing things like "I know I'm going to get downvoted for this..." (tiny handful of my downvotes violate that rule). I don't like to disappoint expectations.

Jensson 3y ago

> A human artist looks at a lot of different sources, builds up a black-box statistical model of how to create from that and can reproduce other styles on demand based on a few samples. Generative AI follows the same process. The reason programs are different in front of the law is that humans can program programs to do whatever they like at scale, humans can't program humans to do whatever they like at scale. So for example if it became legal to use images from an AI, then we would program an AI that basically copies images and it would be legal, because it is an AI. But at that point we know the law has been violated because programs that just copies images aren't a legal way to get copyrighted images for free. You saying "But the AI is a black box" just means that you could have hidden anything in there, it doesn't prove anything. Legally it is the same as if you wrote a program to copy images.

hnbad 3y ago

In what way is this argument any more productive than showing up to Pluto with a plucked chicken and yelling "BEHOLD! A MAN!"? We can make all kinds of navel-gazing arguments about why LLMs and humans are identical but at the end of the day you'll go home and poop and the LLM will blissfully idle on a forgotten AWS compute instance burning a hole into someone's pocket and any idiot can see that you two are not the same in any sense. Just because onthologies are leaky and fuzzy when applied to real world that doesn't mean there aren't tangible differences between things that are clearly different. I can construct a semantic argument for why deleting an LLM is akin to murder (and use it to either reason that deleting an LLM should be punished with the death penalty or that it should be okay to kill random people who annoy me) but that won't impress the judge or jury unless I'm trying to make a case for criminal insanity. Making a machine do things humans can do but faster/cheaper/more has tangibly different implications than letting only humans do it. It should be treated differently for the same reasons that just because a public water fountain is free to use that doesn't mean you can put a hose on it and use it to water your lawn.

roenxi 3y ago
I'd be doing a lot better than expected if my arguments have the sort of historical pull that Diogenes' had. And he made a point accurately - they had to change the definition and he showed their approach up as not being able to accurately identify a man without making hilarious mistakes along the way.