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People really need to stop trying to make this argument. Even if you were right about this, ChatGPT IS NOT A HUMAN! It literally can’t be any clearer than tha
by edgyquant 3y ago
People really need to stop trying to make this argument. Even if you were right about this, ChatGPT IS NOT A HUMAN! It literally can’t be any clearer than that, society and its laws exist by and for humans and human rights and informational norms do not apply to mechanical statistical models.
And no, I don’t care if you believe humans are “totally just a similar type of model.”
- logicchains 3y agoPeople are not saying ChatGPT is a human, they're saying it learns like a human so its learning should be legally treated like a human learning. Laws are based on philosophy, and none of the philosophies upon which western notions of human rights are based rely on the fact that it's a biological human as justification, rather they rely on arguments that apply equally to any conscious self-aware being. Saying that only humans should ever have rights because they're biological makes as much logical sense as only Caucasians should ever have rights because their skin is white.
- RandomLensman 3y agoWe generally don't treat machines as human, why make an exception here? Animals are also not treated as humans, so the bar for a machine to clear is very very high to get that treatment, which then would include criminal matters, too, I suppose.
- logicchains 3y agoMost machines don't learn like humans; these machines do. It'll be even more apparent when we put LLMs in mechanical bodies and allow them to update weights in real time, which is only a few years away given there aren't any real technological impediments. It's stupid to suggest that it should be illegal for an LLM in a body to watch a copyrighted movie because it could memorise and quote it verbatim, when that's what humans do.
- RandomLensman 3y agoSo what if that were true - no reason to treat them as human because they are not human (or even close to human) presently.
- logicchains 3y agoWhat reason is there to treat them differently just because one's made of silicon and the other of carbon? Sounds like just plain ol' racism.
- RandomLensman 3y agoDo we treat a car as human for the purposes of locomotion? Should we treat certain fluorocarbons as human because they can work a bit like blood? There is nothing racist in treating a machine like a machine. Just because a machine replicates or approximates something a human does, doesn't mean it is a human or should be treated as one.
- logicchains 3y agoHumans don't have moral rights because they're human, they have moral rights because they're conscious, self-aware beings, in every non-theological moral philosophy. A car is not self-aware and cannot think.
- RandomLensman 3y agoNeither is/does an LLM. Animals are also not humans, btw., so the differentiation is a bit more nuanced as you make it out.
- edgyquant 3y agoWithout theology, humans have rights because other humans agree they do: not because of things like them being conscious which doesn’t even have a good definition. There is a group of terminally online futurists who’ve been making arguments about machines deserving human rights since before LLMs existed and it seems to me they’re taking this as their chance to play pretend and start making these arguments outside of their forums and futurist YouTube channels. But this isn’t that abstract, when these machines become persistent agents who continue to learn, engage and grow in society as individuals you will have more of an argument for them deserving rights. I’m sympathetic to that and do believe that’s a real philosophical debate we’ll have in the next century or two. However I feel we’re burning some of that political capital here in the hope of defending a simple statistical model at the behest of a corporation who’s making a killing stealing people’s hard earned work and reselling it. For every New York Times there are a thousand small actors who have been ripped off here. If anyone really believed for a second these things were all that similar to humans they wouldnt be defending OpenAI they’d be demanding they face justice for profiting off of slave labor. That no one is making that argument says all you need to know.
- staticman2 3y agoIt doesn't actually learn like a human. Nobody would walk away from reading a book on child development and say in good faith "yep that's how the AI is made." Don't even get me started on the ridiculous civil rights metaphor-- if you believed that you should be demanding OpenAI be shut down for human trafficking.
- logicchains 3y agoBoth humans and LLMs learn by consuming large volumes of text (for humans it's initially mostly via audio), LLMs are just less efficient so they need a lot more of it.
- staticman2 3y ago>Both humans and LLMs learn by consuming large volumes of text Which is why child development textbooks are 10 words long. And LLM training is accomplished by people who have read a 10 word "how to". It's just that simple!
- logicchains 3y agoA child not exposed to language generally won't learn to communicate and think clearly, as seen with children raised by animals, which often never learn to communicate like humans. Exposure to a large volume of language is hence a necessary component of human development. Children may need other things too, but this doesn't change that both they and LLMs require a large volume of text.
- staticman2 3y agoYou claimed LLMs learn like a human. This is not true. Since you seem to be a super tech enthusiast, I suggest you ask CHATGPT if an LLM "learns" the same way a human does.
- logicchains 3y ago
- runarberg 3y agoBut it doesn’t. It’s learning technique is called reinforcement learning and is inspired by one of many models of how humans learn, namely conditional reinforcement. Note that conditional reinforcement is not how humans learn, it is merely on of many models, an approximation, a scientific description of it. Nor do language models learn with the same technique. But merely a technique which draws inspiration from conditional reinforcement by applying some (heavily controlled) reinforcement contingencies. This is the only thing they have in common.
- logicchains 3y agoThe vast majority of GPT4's learning (in terms of compute time) isn't reinforcement learning, it's training the transformer to predict the next token in the sequence. Doing this with sufficient accuracy requires it to build an internal model of the world. We don't know exactly how human brains learn internally, but if we treat it as a black box, then like GPT4 it takes in words/texts and learns to output words/text that make correct inferences about the world.
- edgyquant 3y agoEven if it does learn like a human treating it like one doesn’t follow at all. Your second paragraph is just rubbish, nowhere does the law apply to “all conscious self aware beings” and I’ve no idea where you got such a ludicrous idea. The law is, again, by and for humans with animals being a minor exception and even then it’s usually just affording them protections. The only laws that exist and are geared towards non-humans are regulations restricting corporations and entities.
- logicchains 3y agoNice reading comprehension. I never said that current law treats AI equally, I said the moral philosophy upon which our legal system is based applies equally to AI. I.e. logically the law _should_ treat AI like humans, since the philosophical foundations upon which it's based don't distinguish.
- edgyquant 3y agoThe rebuttal of the jackass is always to attack others reading comprehension. I don’t care about your anti-human philosophy anyway, humans are what matters not machines owned by billion dollar corporations looking to skirt copyright laws.
- logicchains 3y agoI can't believe someone could be so ignorant about the foundations of western civilisation. Try reading some Kant sometime, and find the part where what he says only applies to biological humans and not to self-aware, sentient machines. Try suggesting to anyone who's actually studied philosophy that Kant's philosophy is anti-human and see how far that gets you.
- edgyquant 3y agoBest to not assume what others have read and this entire Kant derail is a strawman argument. Simple statistical models that don’t even have persistent memory are not sentient beings and you’re the only one making such an argument, the argument I responded to was that these things learn like humans and nothing more. Kant would laugh you out of the room for implying ChatGPT was self aware and sentient.
- geden 3y agoHumans are not directly owned by other humans seeking to make a profit from them (any more).
- otikik 3y agoWell in certain American prisons they kind of are.
- otikik 3y agoI have yet to see a demonstration that it “learns like a human”. Even if it did, that’d be very shaky legal grounds for anything. Almost everything man-made “makes something like a human”, because we made the thing, and it is convenient for us to have things that are similar to us in some ways. That doesn’t mean that we have to start giving gloves special legal treatment, since they have 5 fingers, like humans do.
- logicchains 3y agoHumans learn about the world by consuming copyrighted text, LLMs learn about the world by consuming copyrighted text. How does that not qualify as LLMs learning like humans?
- edgyquant 3y agoHumans are born with certain intuitions and the ability to interact with the world around them even if they never interact with other humans. I have a hard time taking this argument in good faith
- logicchains 3y agoIf they never interact with other humans the generally don't develop the ability to reason symbolically and score very low on IQ tests, not much different from great apes.
- otikik 3y agoThe main verb you are using here, "consume", means very different things when applied to humans and when applied to computers. It's similar to how "an airplane flies like a bird". It does indeed fly, but it does not flap its wings.
- mpweiher 3y agoNo. Humans have learned about the world for (adapt number to current scientific knowledge) hundreds of thousands of years without consuming copyrighted texts. And consuming copyrighted material is fine. Copying copyrighted material requires permission. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copying "Copying is the duplication of information or an artifact based on an instance of that information or artifact, and not using the process that originally generated it. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright "A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives the creator of an original work, or another owner of the right, the exclusive, legally secured right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time" Notice it doesn't say "consume". If you store a copyrighted work in a computer system, you copied the work. The exact nature of the computer system does not matter, nor does the way you copied it. It may be a weird, sometimes lossy, sometimes not lossy database capable of adapting the material copied into it, but it is still a database. And just because you call the process of copying data into this weird database "learning" or "training" does not mean it is in any way legally or morally equivalent to a human learning. Even if it were somehow technically equivalent, which it is not. And just because your database is capable of adapting the copyrighted works you copied into it does not mean you are exempt from copyright. Because "to adapt" is one of the rights limited by copyright. But of course the fact that your database is capable of reproducing so much of the copyrighted texts your copied into it verbatim is a strong indicator that it is, in fact, a database, or at least can be treated equivalently to one. And no, Copyright law is not rooted in Kantian philosophy in any meaningful way. Copyright law is a pragmatic human law, made by human for human/societal purposes, such as encouraging the creation of intellectual works. If exceptions are made, it will be for pragmatic reasons, not for there being some sort of equivalence. And if any exception are made, I doubt they will be "do whatever you want", but will entail mandatory compensation for the copyright holders. In Germany, for example, various types of empty media (audio-cassettes, usb-sticks etc.) include a fee to copyright holders. Though of course that approach failed in the Google Books project, despite the clear societal benefits.
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- chrisjj 3y ago> People are not saying ChatGPT is a human, they're saying it learns like a human Only its marketers are saying that. If ChatGPT really did learn like a human, it would have by now learned about copyright, right?
- logicchains 3y agoIt doesn't have any agency of its own, it just does what it's told, which in NYTs case was to complete the rest of a copyright article when it was prompted with a portion of it.
- wredue 3y agoAIs demonstrably do not “learn like a human”. This is why AI companies vehemently curate their inputs and actively, and aggressively avoid refeeds (or output generated by AI). Because if you feed an AI its own output, the result is universally a dumber AI that continuously gets dumber and dumber as you allow it to consume its own output.
- EMIRELADERO 3y agoSure, but I don't see how that's a good response to the argument. It's not about "the machine's right to do something", but "my right to make the machine do something". That's what's at play, and what can be allowed or disallowed.
- RandomLensman 3y agoFair point. Your right to do something can clearly differ from your right to make a machine do something. A simple example would be you being allowed to walk down footpath, but letting your car traverse that path isn't allowed. If we are talking hypothetical new rules, not immediately obvious to me what is optimal here, including differentiation of various use cases.
- close04 3y agoMore importantly the machine is usually allowed to do less than the human. Otherwise it would become an easier avenue for abuse. Whenever you can't do something just build a machine to do it, and the machine's capabilities are ever expanding. Maybe the starting point for legislating "machines" should be to take human capability as a baseline, make some humans eventually accountable, and go from there. If your machine is learning truly like a human (takes decades to learn then output results, forgets things, only one in a thousand can output something useful at the end of the learning process, etc.) and the "owners" take full accountability for what it does then why not like a human? But this reminds me of an old joke. A man comes into an inn and asks how much for a thimble of water. The inn keeper says a thimble is free. So he proceeds to ask for 1000 thimbles.
- mjbeswick 3y agoThat's your opinion, but right now he law doesn't cover training AI models. Do you think that content created people is truly original?
- edgyquant 3y agoWhy does this matter at all? We’re talking about statistical models not humans
- chrisjj 3y agoSure it does. It binds the human trainers.
- anotherhue 3y agoIf the models had a total lifetime output similar to a human we wouldn't be worrying about this. Instead they're rather fast, and that makes them something different.