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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-bo

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).
    - staticman2 3y ago
      I'm referring to how Stephen King discusses his writing process in On Writing. I doubt you actually believe Stephen King might be a p zombie and I'm skeptical you really think consciousness is an illusion. I think if i chained you to a bed and sawed off your leg (like what happens to the protagonist in Misery) you would insist you were a conscious actor who would prefer to not suffer. I don't even know what consciousness is an illusion is supposed to mean. If I sawed off your leg would it have the moral consideration of removing the leg of a barbie doll's leg if you feel your consciousness is an illusion? When I write a story my brain might be doing something you could refer to as a black box calculation if you squint a little, but how is it "statistics?" When I feel the desire to urinate, or post comments on hacker news, or admire a rainbow, or sleep am I also "doing statistics?" You seem to be referring to what people traditionally call "thinking" or "cognition" and rebranding it as "statistics" in search of some rhetorical point. My point is human beings have things called "personalities" and "preferences" that inform their decision makings, including what to write. In what sense is that "statistics"? The idea that the human subconscious is not consciously accessible is not a new idea. Freud had a few things to say about that. I don't think it tells us much about AI. I do think my subconscious ideas are informed by my consious preferences. If I hate puns I'm not going to imagine story jdeas involving puns, for example. Most authors would prefer copyright exists because they'd prefer book publishers, bookstore retailers and the like pay them royalties instead of selling the books they made without paying them. It's pretty simple conceptually, at least with traditional books. Copyright existed far longer than the last 50 years so how is our 50 years of culture relevant? The U.S. has had copyright since 1790.
- goatlover 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. I keep seeing this claim being made but I never understand what people mean by it. Do you mean that the colors we see, the sounds we hear, the tastes, smells, feels, emotions, dreams, inner dialog are all illusions? Isn't an illusion an experience? You're saying that experience itself is an illusion and there is nothing to experience. I can't make sense of that. At any rate, I see no reason to suppose LLMs have experiences. They don't have bodies, so what would they be experiencing? When you say an LLM is identical to a person, I can't make good sense of that either. There's a thousand things people do that language models don't. Just the simple fact that I have to eat on a regular basis to survive is meaningful in a way that it can't be for a language model. If an LLM generates text about preparing a certain meal because it's hungry, I know that's not true in a way it can be true of a human. So right away, there's reasons we say things that go beyond the statistical black box reasoning of an LLM. They don't have any bodies to attend to.
  - bamboozled 3y ago
    I agree, it almost seems like some type of coping mechanism for that fact that after all the ability to get computers to generate art and coherent sentences, we're still completely none the wiser about understanding objective reality and consciousness and even knowing how to really enjoy the gift of having the experience of consciousness. So instead people create these type of "cop outs". Mechanical drawing machines have existed forever, I loved, love, loved them when I was a kid and I used to hang the generated images on my wall. Never did I once look at those machines who could draw some pretty freaking awesome abstract art and think to myself, "well that's it, the vale of consciousness is so thin now, it's all an illusion", or "the machine is conscious". As impressive as some of these models are at generating art, they are still drawing machines. They display the same amount of consciousness as a mechanical drawing machine. I saw someone on Twitter ask ChatGPT-4 to draw a normal image, you know what it drew ? A picture of a suburban neighborhood, why might a conscious drawing machine do that?
  - l33tman 3y ago
    The "it's an illusion" part is a piece of rhetorically toxic language that usually comes up in these discussions, as its a bit provocative. But it's equally anthropocentric to say that someone without a body can't have a conscious experience. When you're dreaming your body is shut off - but you can still be conscious (lucid dreaming or not). You can even have conscious experiences without most of your brain - when you hit your little toe on something, you have a few seconds of terror and pain that surely doesn't require most of your brain areas to experience. In fact, you can argue you won't even need your brain. Is that not a conscious experience? (I'm not really trying to argue against you, I just find this boundary interesting between what you'd call conscious experience and not)
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?).

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).
  - staticman2 3y ago
    I'm referring to how Stephen King discusses his writing process in On Writing. I doubt you actually believe Stephen King might be a p zombie and I'm skeptical you really think consciousness is an illusion. I think if i chained you to a bed and sawed off your leg (like what happens to the protagonist in Misery) you would insist you were a conscious actor who would prefer to not suffer. I don't even know what consciousness is an illusion is supposed to mean. If I sawed off your leg would it have the moral consideration of removing the leg of a barbie doll's leg if you feel your consciousness is an illusion? When I write a story my brain might be doing something you could refer to as a black box calculation if you squint a little, but how is it "statistics?" When I feel the desire to urinate, or post comments on hacker news, or admire a rainbow, or sleep am I also "doing statistics?" You seem to be referring to what people traditionally call "thinking" or "cognition" and rebranding it as "statistics" in search of some rhetorical point. My point is human beings have things called "personalities" and "preferences" that inform their decision makings, including what to write. In what sense is that "statistics"? The idea that the human subconscious is not consciously accessible is not a new idea. Freud had a few things to say about that. I don't think it tells us much about AI. I do think my subconscious ideas are informed by my consious preferences. If I hate puns I'm not going to imagine story jdeas involving puns, for example. Most authors would prefer copyright exists because they'd prefer book publishers, bookstore retailers and the like pay them royalties instead of selling the books they made without paying them. It's pretty simple conceptually, at least with traditional books. Copyright existed far longer than the last 50 years so how is our 50 years of culture relevant? The U.S. has had copyright since 1790.
goatlover 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. I keep seeing this claim being made but I never understand what people mean by it. Do you mean that the colors we see, the sounds we hear, the tastes, smells, feels, emotions, dreams, inner dialog are all illusions? Isn't an illusion an experience? You're saying that experience itself is an illusion and there is nothing to experience. I can't make sense of that. At any rate, I see no reason to suppose LLMs have experiences. They don't have bodies, so what would they be experiencing? When you say an LLM is identical to a person, I can't make good sense of that either. There's a thousand things people do that language models don't. Just the simple fact that I have to eat on a regular basis to survive is meaningful in a way that it can't be for a language model. If an LLM generates text about preparing a certain meal because it's hungry, I know that's not true in a way it can be true of a human. So right away, there's reasons we say things that go beyond the statistical black box reasoning of an LLM. They don't have any bodies to attend to.
- bamboozled 3y ago
  I agree, it almost seems like some type of coping mechanism for that fact that after all the ability to get computers to generate art and coherent sentences, we're still completely none the wiser about understanding objective reality and consciousness and even knowing how to really enjoy the gift of having the experience of consciousness. So instead people create these type of "cop outs". Mechanical drawing machines have existed forever, I loved, love, loved them when I was a kid and I used to hang the generated images on my wall. Never did I once look at those machines who could draw some pretty freaking awesome abstract art and think to myself, "well that's it, the vale of consciousness is so thin now, it's all an illusion", or "the machine is conscious". As impressive as some of these models are at generating art, they are still drawing machines. They display the same amount of consciousness as a mechanical drawing machine. I saw someone on Twitter ask ChatGPT-4 to draw a normal image, you know what it drew ? A picture of a suburban neighborhood, why might a conscious drawing machine do that?
- l33tman 3y ago
  The "it's an illusion" part is a piece of rhetorically toxic language that usually comes up in these discussions, as its a bit provocative. But it's equally anthropocentric to say that someone without a body can't have a conscious experience. When you're dreaming your body is shut off - but you can still be conscious (lucid dreaming or not). You can even have conscious experiences without most of your brain - when you hit your little toe on something, you have a few seconds of terror and pain that surely doesn't require most of your brain areas to experience. In fact, you can argue you won't even need your brain. Is that not a conscious experience? (I'm not really trying to argue against you, I just find this boundary interesting between what you'd call conscious experience and not)

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?).