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That depends on a variety of factors. You may find yourself in trouble if you write about a wizard boy called Perry Hotter going to Elkwood school of magic and

That depends on a variety of factors. You may find yourself in trouble if you write about a wizard boy called Perry Hotter going to Elkwood school of magic and he ends up with two sidekicks (a smarter girl and a redhead boy). It could be argued quite convincingly that stories like Brooks's Shannara and Eddings's Belgariad are LOTR with the serial numbers filed off — but there is more than enough difference in how various pieces work for those series to make them unique creations that do not infringe on the properties or cover too much the story. (Although I cringe at putting the execrable Belgariad books in any class with either LOTR or Shannara.) The "best" modern example of this is the 50 Shades series. These are Twilight fan fiction (it is acknowledged as such) with the vampire bits filed off. They are inspired by Twilight, but they are not identifiably Twilight in the end. It might be hard to tell the quality of writing from that which an LLM can produce, and frankly Anne Rice did it all better decades before (both vampires and BSDM). Humans can be influenced by writers, artists, etc. LLMs cannot. They can produce statistically approximated mishmashes of the original works themselves, but there is no act or spark of creation, insight, or influence going on that makes the sort of question you’re asking silly. LLMs are just math. Humans may be just chemistry, but there’s qualia that LLMs do not have any more than `fortune` does.

visarga 3y ago
> Humans can be influenced by writers, artists, etc. LLMs cannot. This is literally wrong, LLMs are influenced by their users. And people can input new ideas, facts and explore new directions by choosing how they interact with the LLM. A LLM writing a book all on its own start to finish would be a different story, the output would be derived 100% from its training set. A LLM being prompted with a book chapter would risk borrowing too much. But if you prompt a LLM without copy pasting protected content in the prompt, then you are the main influence. And LLMs can explore outside their training distribution in this way, helped by humans. Many people think a trained LLM is frozen, but they do in-context-learning, they can even acquire new concepts/words and properly use them in the same session. They don't keep the memory of this until retraining, but that doesn't mean they are locked up. There is plenty of space in the buffer you can use to add new material after training. This kind of thinking is like saying you can't drive a nail unless you own a licensed hammer, if someone is using his shoe to drive a nail will be in infringement. Maybe the shoe is also a hammer if the user so says.
jacobr1 3y ago
> but there’s qualia that LLMs do not have I'm with all your other arguments ... but not this point. What is the special magic property that machine-generated art doesn't have? Both human and machine generated art can be banal, can be crap. And I think there is plenty of machine generated art this a quite beautiful, and if well prompted even very insightful. Non-GenAI can be this way, Conway's game of life has a quality of beauty to it that rivals of forms of modern art. If you wanted to argue that there still is the need for a human to provide some initial inspiration as input, or programming before something of value can be generated, then I would agree, at least for now, though there is meta-argument about asking LLMs to generate their own prompts that makes this an increasingly gray area. But I don't think the stochastic parrot argument holds water. Most of _human_ creations is derivative. Unique mixes of pre-existing approaches, techniques, substance, often _is_ the creative act. True innovation with no tie to existing materials seems vanishingly rare to me and is really high bar, beyond which most humans ever achieve.

visarga 3y ago

> Humans can be influenced by writers, artists, etc. LLMs cannot. This is literally wrong, LLMs are influenced by their users. And people can input new ideas, facts and explore new directions by choosing how they interact with the LLM. A LLM writing a book all on its own start to finish would be a different story, the output would be derived 100% from its training set. A LLM being prompted with a book chapter would risk borrowing too much. But if you prompt a LLM without copy pasting protected content in the prompt, then you are the main influence. And LLMs can explore outside their training distribution in this way, helped by humans. Many people think a trained LLM is frozen, but they do in-context-learning, they can even acquire new concepts/words and properly use them in the same session. They don't keep the memory of this until retraining, but that doesn't mean they are locked up. There is plenty of space in the buffer you can use to add new material after training. This kind of thinking is like saying you can't drive a nail unless you own a licensed hammer, if someone is using his shoe to drive a nail will be in infringement. Maybe the shoe is also a hammer if the user so says.

jacobr1 3y ago

> but there’s qualia that LLMs do not have I'm with all your other arguments ... but not this point. What is the special magic property that machine-generated art doesn't have? Both human and machine generated art can be banal, can be crap. And I think there is plenty of machine generated art this a quite beautiful, and if well prompted even very insightful. Non-GenAI can be this way, Conway's game of life has a quality of beauty to it that rivals of forms of modern art. If you wanted to argue that there still is the need for a human to provide some initial inspiration as input, or programming before something of value can be generated, then I would agree, at least for now, though there is meta-argument about asking LLMs to generate their own prompts that makes this an increasingly gray area. But I don't think the stochastic parrot argument holds water. Most of _human_ creations is derivative. Unique mixes of pre-existing approaches, techniques, substance, often _is_ the creative act. True innovation with no tie to existing materials seems vanishingly rare to me and is really high bar, beyond which most humans ever achieve.