4 ms·

It's not okay for a human to pirate, plagiarize, violate IP rights and laws, etc. But I disagree with the underlying assumption that you can anthropomorphize L

It's not okay for a human to pirate, plagiarize, violate IP rights and laws, etc. But I disagree with the underlying assumption that you can anthropomorphize LLMs. Gradient descent and backpropagation don't take place in the brain. LLMs "learn" in the same way that Excel sheets "learn". Humans are living beings with needs and rights. A person being able to legally squat in a home doesn't mean that a drone occupying property for some amount of time also has squatter's rights, even though you could easily and affordably automate and scale the deployment of drones to live and hide away on properties long enough to attain rights regarding properties all over the country.

sgt101 3y ago
also if I write and article and quote some "text like this" [1] then that's not plagerism, but if my arguement is that the underlying assumption that you can anthropomorphize LLMs. Gradient descent and backpropagation don't take place in the brain. LLMs "learn" in the same way that Excel sheets "learn". Well, that's plagiarism and it's not allowed and people will get peeved and my career might get damaged. I await the HN ban with fear.. [1] I'm not even doing referencing - so I am surely an LLM.
pas 3y ago
sure, but if I use an LLM to write a novel/article, I can be sued in civil court not the LLM. but, more importantly, OpenAI can also be sued for tortious interference? (basically the civil equivalent of accessory)
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  Whoever operates the LLM, in this case OpenAI, engaged in copyright infringement through the unauthorized modification, reproduction and distribution of content to you.
  - Robotbeat 3y ago
    The person doing the requesting did.
    - heavyset_go 3y ago
      That's not how interactive computer services work.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > sure, but if I use an LLM to write a novel/article, I can be sued in civil court not the LLM That's function of the legal system, not of the technology. If tomorrow someone made a perfect dolphin-Esperanto translator and proved Dolphins were as smart as humans, you still can't sue a dolphin until the legal system says so.
  - darkerside 3y ago
    Wouldn't you find out by suing the dolphin and seeing if it holds up in court?
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Not if you were smart, unless you have some sort of solid argument for why the established case law about this sort of thing is faulty.
      - darkerside 3y ago
        There is established case law? For a talking dolphin?
vanviegen 3y ago
> Gradient descent and backpropagation don't take place in the brain. Not exactly, no, but the 'neurons that fire together wire together' way of learning has a pretty similar effect. > LLMs "learn" in the same way that Excel sheets "learn". I've never seen an excel sheet do anything like backpropagation.
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  > I've never seen an excel sheet do anything like backpropagation. Not strictly in the sense you mentioned (assuming that you mean "by themselves") but people may find [1] and [2] interesting. [1] https://pub.towardsai.net/building-a-neural-network-with-backpropagation-in-excel-b6c5d41b1c2 https://pub.towardsai.net/building-a-neural-network-with-bac... [2] https://towardsdatascience.com/demystifying-feed-forward-and-back-propagation-using-ms-excel-30f5aeefcfc7 https://towardsdatascience.com/demystifying-feed-forward-and...
  - galangalalgol 3y ago
    Sadly, I have seen one. It was a vba script from the late 90s that used a simple dense multilayer network to do some unsupervised pattern classification. The linear algebra tools in vba/excel along with the solvers are all native dll code and the vba itself is all AOT compiled to native, so it typically runs very fast, and for small matrices it beats out numpy by an order of magnitude due to the ffi overhead. Was it the wrong tool? It depends on your constraints, but probably. It did work though.
- ml-anon 3y ago
  Hebbian learning and backprop are not comparable and they don’t have a similar effect in any meaningful sense.
ben_w 3y ago
> But I disagree with the underlying assumption that you can anthropomorphize LLMs. Gradient descent and backpropagation don't take place in the brain. LLMs "learn" in the same way that Excel sheets "learn". Backprop doesn't happen in us, but I think our neurones still do gradient descent – synapses that fire together, wire together. And ultimately, at the deepest level we can analyse, our brains' atoms are doing quantum field diffusion equations, which you can also do in an Excel spreadsheet, so that kind of reductionism doesn't help either. > Humans are living beings with needs and rights. A person being able to legally squat in a home doesn't mean that a drone occupying property for some amount of time also has squatter's rights, even though you could easily and affordably automate and scale the deployment of drones to live and hide away on properties long enough to attain rights regarding properties all over the country. Yes, but we can also do tissue cultures and crude bioprinting, so it's a very foreseeable future where exactly the same argument will also be true for living organisms rather than digital minds. We need to figure out what the deeper rules are that lead to the status quo, not merely mimic the superficial result. The latter is how cargo cults function.
- danans 3y ago
  > We need to figure out what the deeper rules are that lead to the status quo, not merely mimic the superficial result. Sure, that's an interesting path of inquiry, and one should be free to understand themselves as being no different than a machine if they desire. But the objective of laws is the benefit of (at least some) humans, not machines covered in lab grown tissue. The process of being human is a big part of what makes us human.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > machines covered in lab grown tissue I think you're misapprehending — I mean an entity fully 3D printed out of tissue, no machinery (unless you're counting all biology as machinery, but I think you're not doing that). I recon bio-printing is now where home computing was in the Apple 1 era, so this is a way off, but it's foreseeable. > The process of being human is a big part of what makes us human. Mmm. How much has that process that changed since the ancient world?
mensetmanusman 3y ago
"It's not okay for a human to pirate, plagiarize, violate IP rights and laws, etc." most of the world disagrees with this view, and that means they will create the AI that wins.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> anthropomorphize LLMs (...) gradient descent (...) backpropagation (...) needs and rights You misunderstood me. I was talking about something more fundamental. Understanding is data compression. They are the same thing. Learning patterns, building mental models, creating abstractions, generalizing, gaining intuition/a feel for something - all the things humans engage in as part of learning and understanding the world - are all acts of lossy data compression.

sgt101 3y ago

also if I write and article and quote some "text like this" [1] then that's not plagerism, but if my arguement is that the underlying assumption that you can anthropomorphize LLMs. Gradient descent and backpropagation don't take place in the brain. LLMs "learn" in the same way that Excel sheets "learn". Well, that's plagiarism and it's not allowed and people will get peeved and my career might get damaged. I await the HN ban with fear.. [1] I'm not even doing referencing - so I am surely an LLM.

pas 3y ago

sure, but if I use an LLM to write a novel/article, I can be sued in civil court not the LLM. but, more importantly, OpenAI can also be sued for tortious interference? (basically the civil equivalent of accessory)

heavyset_go 3y ago
Whoever operates the LLM, in this case OpenAI, engaged in copyright infringement through the unauthorized modification, reproduction and distribution of content to you.
- Robotbeat 3y ago
  The person doing the requesting did.
  - heavyset_go 3y ago
    That's not how interactive computer services work.
ben_w 3y ago
> sure, but if I use an LLM to write a novel/article, I can be sued in civil court not the LLM That's function of the legal system, not of the technology. If tomorrow someone made a perfect dolphin-Esperanto translator and proved Dolphins were as smart as humans, you still can't sue a dolphin until the legal system says so.
- darkerside 3y ago
  Wouldn't you find out by suing the dolphin and seeing if it holds up in court?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Not if you were smart, unless you have some sort of solid argument for why the established case law about this sort of thing is faulty.
    - darkerside 3y ago
      There is established case law? For a talking dolphin?

vanviegen 3y ago

> Gradient descent and backpropagation don't take place in the brain. Not exactly, no, but the 'neurons that fire together wire together' way of learning has a pretty similar effect. > LLMs "learn" in the same way that Excel sheets "learn". I've never seen an excel sheet do anything like backpropagation.

zimpenfish 3y ago
> I've never seen an excel sheet do anything like backpropagation. Not strictly in the sense you mentioned (assuming that you mean "by themselves") but people may find [1] and [2] interesting. [1] https://pub.towardsai.net/building-a-neural-network-with-backpropagation-in-excel-b6c5d41b1c2 https://pub.towardsai.net/building-a-neural-network-with-bac... [2] https://towardsdatascience.com/demystifying-feed-forward-and-back-propagation-using-ms-excel-30f5aeefcfc7 https://towardsdatascience.com/demystifying-feed-forward-and...
- galangalalgol 3y ago
  Sadly, I have seen one. It was a vba script from the late 90s that used a simple dense multilayer network to do some unsupervised pattern classification. The linear algebra tools in vba/excel along with the solvers are all native dll code and the vba itself is all AOT compiled to native, so it typically runs very fast, and for small matrices it beats out numpy by an order of magnitude due to the ffi overhead. Was it the wrong tool? It depends on your constraints, but probably. It did work though.
ml-anon 3y ago
Hebbian learning and backprop are not comparable and they don’t have a similar effect in any meaningful sense.

ben_w 3y ago

> But I disagree with the underlying assumption that you can anthropomorphize LLMs. Gradient descent and backpropagation don't take place in the brain. LLMs "learn" in the same way that Excel sheets "learn". Backprop doesn't happen in us, but I think our neurones still do gradient descent – synapses that fire together, wire together. And ultimately, at the deepest level we can analyse, our brains' atoms are doing quantum field diffusion equations, which you can also do in an Excel spreadsheet, so that kind of reductionism doesn't help either. > Humans are living beings with needs and rights. A person being able to legally squat in a home doesn't mean that a drone occupying property for some amount of time also has squatter's rights, even though you could easily and affordably automate and scale the deployment of drones to live and hide away on properties long enough to attain rights regarding properties all over the country. Yes, but we can also do tissue cultures and crude bioprinting, so it's a very foreseeable future where exactly the same argument will also be true for living organisms rather than digital minds. We need to figure out what the deeper rules are that lead to the status quo, not merely mimic the superficial result. The latter is how cargo cults function.

danans 3y ago
> We need to figure out what the deeper rules are that lead to the status quo, not merely mimic the superficial result. Sure, that's an interesting path of inquiry, and one should be free to understand themselves as being no different than a machine if they desire. But the objective of laws is the benefit of (at least some) humans, not machines covered in lab grown tissue. The process of being human is a big part of what makes us human.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > machines covered in lab grown tissue I think you're misapprehending — I mean an entity fully 3D printed out of tissue, no machinery (unless you're counting all biology as machinery, but I think you're not doing that). I recon bio-printing is now where home computing was in the Apple 1 era, so this is a way off, but it's foreseeable. > The process of being human is a big part of what makes us human. Mmm. How much has that process that changed since the ancient world?

mensetmanusman 3y ago

"It's not okay for a human to pirate, plagiarize, violate IP rights and laws, etc." most of the world disagrees with this view, and that means they will create the AI that wins.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> anthropomorphize LLMs (...) gradient descent (...) backpropagation (...) needs and rights You misunderstood me. I was talking about something more fundamental. Understanding is data compression. They are the same thing. Learning patterns, building mental models, creating abstractions, generalizing, gaining intuition/a feel for something - all the things humans engage in as part of learning and understanding the world - are all acts of lossy data compression.