4 ms·

John, this isn't a power tool. This is a copy machine. And while I don't have anything against copy machines per se, that's not how it's being sold to the publ

John, this isn't a power tool. This is a copy machine. And while I don't have anything against copy machines per se, that's not how it's being sold to the public. The public is being told this copy machine is a really good power tool that can do lots of things. So what creatives are hearing is "your work is interchangeable with a slightly smarter copy machine, so stop paying creatives and just rip them off".

kleiba 2y ago
I think you're wrong. Anyone who argues that LLMs are "just stochastic parrots" fundamentally doesn't understand what neural networks do. The power does not come from sampling from a distributions over words but from the multi-dimensional representation. And it is that that enables LLMs to be more than just mechanisms that produce copies of material previously seen in training.
- Findecanor 2y ago
  Does it matter how the data is processed? You're still just saying that while stealing a lot from one person is wrong, stealing only a little but from many people would be OK. And the people who are stolen from don't agree with you.
  - AstroBen 2y ago
    Is an artist finding inspiration from another's work stealing? Creativity is very rarely building something completely new from nothing at all - it's the end result of inspiration and a merging of ideas Which seems to be exactly what these models are doing Satisfactory the game didn't "steal" from Factorio - they took the idea of an automated factory game from them, brought it into a 3d world instead of 2d, and pulled in some other ideas, perhaps from other games. This is a hell of a lot closer to stealing than an LLM taking 0.001% each from 100000 images to create something new.. and yet no-one would ever call it such It's disturbing because it's automated on an insane scale, not because of a solid legal ground
  - nh23423fefe 2y ago
    You're pretending reading a book and remembering what is written is stealing.
    - ptrhvns 2y ago
      That's not what's happening. Using your analogy, you're reading the book, remembering it, and then making N more books (maybe for commercial purposes) by using what you remembered to create something very similar in terms of style, prose, plot, and so on. As a result, the person who you learned from can't get a job writing anymore because their work has been commoditized. Also, they're feeling lost because the work they devoted their lives to is now awash in a sea of similar work.
      - nh23423fefe 2y ago
        So as long as you can point to someone sad, you win? The only valid text makers are humans.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      if I quote it from memory without attribution, it is arguably stealng. Certainly in bad taste to pretend that was my idea. If I type it out from memory on my blog page without permission, it is 100% stealing. These aren't novel situations. We have centuries of case studies, precedent, and cultural osmosis giving us legal and de facto means of what we feel and say is "stealing intellectual property".
      - thedevilslawyer 2y ago
        What bunkum. Stealing is only recent propaganda, and not successful at that. If anything, the act of sharing something is cultural and innate for millennia even [0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition
        johnnyanmac 2y ago
        "recent" we in 300 or so years? Yes. And guess why we made copyright to begin with? It became very easy for large companies to copy and mass produce ideas from people who made them. History repeats. It's not like tribes and families also didn't keep secrets to maintain some power or as matter of trade. We call them "trade secrets" now but those go back before recorded history. In addition, consider thar back the we had actual communities, unlike now. Bring those back and we can talk about tearing down copyright.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  The specific AI technology being demonstrated isn't an LLM, it's a different kind of model that renders Quake from memory. It's very much trained to copy Quake.
  - lostmsu 2y ago
    The implication is that they will improve to the point of Stable Diffusion and the likes.
    - AstralStorm 2y ago
      Improve at what, copying Quake? That game has already been made, and even variants of it.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        It can copy/simulate anything with a stream of pixels that change in response to labels equivalent to button presses. Put an iPhone on the dashboard of a car and simultaneously record steering wheel, pedal, and gear positions, and you've got a photorealistic driving simulator of wherever you were driving that car. Strap it to a bodycam and pair with annotated recordings the wearer's motion as if it were control inputs, and you have a photrealistic first-person simulation of whatever they were doing, be that paintball, skating, US Army urban combat training, or birdwatching. Feed it sports TV annotated with player motion, golf, tenis, cricket, soccer, etc.
  - simonw 2y ago
    John wasn't really talking about the Quake demo where each frame is rendered by generative AI. He started by saying: > I think you are misunderstanding what this tech demo actually is, but I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers. By the time he got to "power tool" he was talking about something else entirely.
  - WithinReason 2y ago
    I don't think anybody is worried the type of AI that copies quake frame-by-frame.
lazzlazzlazz 2y ago
When an artist trains by studying the masters and prior art, and even imitation, they are not acting as copying machines. Unfortunately for your interpretation, these are not copy machines neither on a technical nor philosophical level. Separately, whether AI models ought to owe credit or compensation to the data used to train them is an interesting and nuanced debate.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Comparing the way the human brain synthesizes information with their experience and how a computer does it is already a futile point. Take the following point here: humans tend to be very poor at perfectly regurgitating copies of anything. Even well trained copycats will have different muscle memory, different interpretation of theory they apply, different means of coloring and shading, etc. As we've seen, poke an LLM enough and it may simply just spit out a near identical recreation. As of now, it definitely proves that this data isn't just "seen". they very much store it on their databases, and we should treat it as such. >whether AI models ought to owe credit or compensation to the data used to train them is an interesting and nuanced debate There's nothing nuanced about it in my eyes. Especially if some artists explicitly do not want their art trained upon. Not even 3 years ago Microsoft won a court case via LinkedIn regarding the scaping of their website data. How is this phenomenon any different? Unless we want to destroy Copyright as we know it, it's pretty cut and dry copyright infringement. But we need to tear it down first and just say we don't like current laws.
simonw 2y ago
It's a power tool. And like other power tools, it's easy to hurt yourself (or others) with it if you don't know what you're doing and it takes quite a bit of experience and skill to really get the most out of it.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  It's a power tool in hat you can say a copy machine is a power tool. You'd think it'd be hard to hurt yourself on a copy machine, but life finds a way.

kleiba 2y ago

I think you're wrong. Anyone who argues that LLMs are "just stochastic parrots" fundamentally doesn't understand what neural networks do. The power does not come from sampling from a distributions over words but from the multi-dimensional representation. And it is that that enables LLMs to be more than just mechanisms that produce copies of material previously seen in training.

Findecanor 2y ago
Does it matter how the data is processed? You're still just saying that while stealing a lot from one person is wrong, stealing only a little but from many people would be OK. And the people who are stolen from don't agree with you.
- AstroBen 2y ago
  Is an artist finding inspiration from another's work stealing? Creativity is very rarely building something completely new from nothing at all - it's the end result of inspiration and a merging of ideas Which seems to be exactly what these models are doing Satisfactory the game didn't "steal" from Factorio - they took the idea of an automated factory game from them, brought it into a 3d world instead of 2d, and pulled in some other ideas, perhaps from other games. This is a hell of a lot closer to stealing than an LLM taking 0.001% each from 100000 images to create something new.. and yet no-one would ever call it such It's disturbing because it's automated on an insane scale, not because of a solid legal ground
- nh23423fefe 2y ago
  You're pretending reading a book and remembering what is written is stealing.
  - ptrhvns 2y ago
    That's not what's happening. Using your analogy, you're reading the book, remembering it, and then making N more books (maybe for commercial purposes) by using what you remembered to create something very similar in terms of style, prose, plot, and so on. As a result, the person who you learned from can't get a job writing anymore because their work has been commoditized. Also, they're feeling lost because the work they devoted their lives to is now awash in a sea of similar work.
    - nh23423fefe 2y ago
      So as long as you can point to someone sad, you win? The only valid text makers are humans.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    if I quote it from memory without attribution, it is arguably stealng. Certainly in bad taste to pretend that was my idea. If I type it out from memory on my blog page without permission, it is 100% stealing. These aren't novel situations. We have centuries of case studies, precedent, and cultural osmosis giving us legal and de facto means of what we feel and say is "stealing intellectual property".
    - thedevilslawyer 2y ago
      What bunkum. Stealing is only recent propaganda, and not successful at that. If anything, the act of sharing something is cultural and innate for millennia even [0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        "recent" we in 300 or so years? Yes. And guess why we made copyright to begin with? It became very easy for large companies to copy and mass produce ideas from people who made them. History repeats. It's not like tribes and families also didn't keep secrets to maintain some power or as matter of trade. We call them "trade secrets" now but those go back before recorded history. In addition, consider thar back the we had actual communities, unlike now. Bring those back and we can talk about tearing down copyright.
kmeisthax 2y ago
The specific AI technology being demonstrated isn't an LLM, it's a different kind of model that renders Quake from memory. It's very much trained to copy Quake.
- lostmsu 2y ago
  The implication is that they will improve to the point of Stable Diffusion and the likes.
  - AstralStorm 2y ago
    Improve at what, copying Quake? That game has already been made, and even variants of it.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      It can copy/simulate anything with a stream of pixels that change in response to labels equivalent to button presses. Put an iPhone on the dashboard of a car and simultaneously record steering wheel, pedal, and gear positions, and you've got a photorealistic driving simulator of wherever you were driving that car. Strap it to a bodycam and pair with annotated recordings the wearer's motion as if it were control inputs, and you have a photrealistic first-person simulation of whatever they were doing, be that paintball, skating, US Army urban combat training, or birdwatching. Feed it sports TV annotated with player motion, golf, tenis, cricket, soccer, etc.
- simonw 2y ago
  John wasn't really talking about the Quake demo where each frame is rendered by generative AI. He started by saying: > I think you are misunderstanding what this tech demo actually is, but I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers. By the time he got to "power tool" he was talking about something else entirely.
- WithinReason 2y ago
  I don't think anybody is worried the type of AI that copies quake frame-by-frame.

lazzlazzlazz 2y ago

When an artist trains by studying the masters and prior art, and even imitation, they are not acting as copying machines. Unfortunately for your interpretation, these are not copy machines neither on a technical nor philosophical level. Separately, whether AI models ought to owe credit or compensation to the data used to train them is an interesting and nuanced debate.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
Comparing the way the human brain synthesizes information with their experience and how a computer does it is already a futile point. Take the following point here: humans tend to be very poor at perfectly regurgitating copies of anything. Even well trained copycats will have different muscle memory, different interpretation of theory they apply, different means of coloring and shading, etc. As we've seen, poke an LLM enough and it may simply just spit out a near identical recreation. As of now, it definitely proves that this data isn't just "seen". they very much store it on their databases, and we should treat it as such. >whether AI models ought to owe credit or compensation to the data used to train them is an interesting and nuanced debate There's nothing nuanced about it in my eyes. Especially if some artists explicitly do not want their art trained upon. Not even 3 years ago Microsoft won a court case via LinkedIn regarding the scaping of their website data. How is this phenomenon any different? Unless we want to destroy Copyright as we know it, it's pretty cut and dry copyright infringement. But we need to tear it down first and just say we don't like current laws.

simonw 2y ago

It's a power tool. And like other power tools, it's easy to hurt yourself (or others) with it if you don't know what you're doing and it takes quite a bit of experience and skill to really get the most out of it.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
It's a power tool in hat you can say a copy machine is a power tool. You'd think it'd be hard to hurt yourself on a copy machine, but life finds a way.