4 ms·

The comments there are absolutely unhinged. There are some good reasons for being anti-AI, but why dilute it with this kind of bullshit: > It is equivalent to

by azan_ 3mo ago

The comments there are absolutely unhinged. There are some good reasons for being anti-AI, but why dilute it with this kind of bullshit: > It is equivalent to book burning in the past. A form of thought control

swed420 3mo ago
> why dilute it with this kind of bullshit: > > It is equivalent to book burning in the past. A form of thought control That's only bullshit if you trust AI companies to serve the book contents without alteration.
- dpark 3mo ago
  I don’t trust or expect AI companies to serve books at all. That’s not what they are scanning them for.
  - swed420 3mo ago
    Not in a traditional sense, but obviously on the surface, they're using the info to regurgitate in some fashion and serve back. The point is that even under the best intentions, hallucinations occur. Then there's the fact that most models have an ideological bias programmed into them. The only expectation I have is for companies or anybody else to not destroy rare books. Is that such a tall order?
    - dpark 3mo ago
      > they're using the info to regurgitate in some fashion and serve back. Sure, in the same sense that they regurgitate any other text they consume. LLMs by definition do not have the full training dataset available, though. It’s far larger than the resulting model. So they can’t reliably reproduce full text without an external source (or if it’s in the training data repeatedly). ChatGPT actually refused to give me a bible quote the other day, presumably because I ran into some general “book regurgitation” safety net. > The only expectation I have is for companies or anybody else to not destroy rare books. Is that such a tall order? Honestly, yeah. The idea that people or corporations should hold onto books forever because of a cultural “ick” about throwing out books is a bit ridiculous. Most books end up in landfills. They aren’t feeding Da Vinci manuscripts into this pipeline. They are feeding still-in-copyright books.
      - swed420 3mo ago
        > LLMs by definition do not have the full training dataset available, though. That makes it even worse, then. This proves the original point. > The idea that people or corporations should hold onto books forever because of a cultural “ick” about throwing out books is a bit ridiculous. If we're building black and white straw man arguments, then sure, let's not archive anything.
        dpark 3mo ago
        > That makes it even worse, then. This proves the original point. I don’t know what the “original point” is here, but these AI companies are not providing “book excerpt services” and do not claim to. ChatGPT at least will refuse to provide detailed book excerpts (I hit a week or two ago myself). > If we're building black and white straw man arguments, then sure, let's not archive anything. It seems like you are the one creating the straw man. Do you have evidence that these companies are shredding actually rare books? The only cited concrete examples (in this thread anyway) are all rather boring. I seriously doubt they are shredding 200 year old books because why would they?
      - pfdietz 3mo ago
        > It’s far larger than the resulting model. Is it? How many different books are we talking about, and how much information is that, after conversion to text and lossless compression? Images, maybe, but text?
        dpark 3mo ago
        These models are trained on way more than just books. GPT-3 was trained on about half a terabyte of filtered plaintext and the training corpuses have grown significantly by then by all accounts.
        pfdietz 3mo ago
        I imagine that compresses by ~90%, and current top commercial models have a couple of trillion parameters, don't they?
nhinck3 3mo ago
You're right, it is arguably worse than book burning, not only are they seeking to deprive others of the books, they also want to profit off it.
- frozenseven 3mo ago
  >they seeking to deprive others of the books Yeah, this isn't a thing. Throwing out books, even "rare" ones, is a regular procedure. And if you really want to read 'em, you can buy any of these books right now.

by azan_ 3mo ago

swed420 3mo ago

> why dilute it with this kind of bullshit: > > It is equivalent to book burning in the past. A form of thought control That's only bullshit if you trust AI companies to serve the book contents without alteration.

dpark 3mo ago
I don’t trust or expect AI companies to serve books at all. That’s not what they are scanning them for.
- swed420 3mo ago
  Not in a traditional sense, but obviously on the surface, they're using the info to regurgitate in some fashion and serve back. The point is that even under the best intentions, hallucinations occur. Then there's the fact that most models have an ideological bias programmed into them. The only expectation I have is for companies or anybody else to not destroy rare books. Is that such a tall order?
  - dpark 3mo ago
    > they're using the info to regurgitate in some fashion and serve back. Sure, in the same sense that they regurgitate any other text they consume. LLMs by definition do not have the full training dataset available, though. It’s far larger than the resulting model. So they can’t reliably reproduce full text without an external source (or if it’s in the training data repeatedly). ChatGPT actually refused to give me a bible quote the other day, presumably because I ran into some general “book regurgitation” safety net. > The only expectation I have is for companies or anybody else to not destroy rare books. Is that such a tall order? Honestly, yeah. The idea that people or corporations should hold onto books forever because of a cultural “ick” about throwing out books is a bit ridiculous. Most books end up in landfills. They aren’t feeding Da Vinci manuscripts into this pipeline. They are feeding still-in-copyright books.
    - swed420 3mo ago
      > LLMs by definition do not have the full training dataset available, though. That makes it even worse, then. This proves the original point. > The idea that people or corporations should hold onto books forever because of a cultural “ick” about throwing out books is a bit ridiculous. If we're building black and white straw man arguments, then sure, let's not archive anything.
      - dpark 3mo ago
        > That makes it even worse, then. This proves the original point. I don’t know what the “original point” is here, but these AI companies are not providing “book excerpt services” and do not claim to. ChatGPT at least will refuse to provide detailed book excerpts (I hit a week or two ago myself). > If we're building black and white straw man arguments, then sure, let's not archive anything. It seems like you are the one creating the straw man. Do you have evidence that these companies are shredding actually rare books? The only cited concrete examples (in this thread anyway) are all rather boring. I seriously doubt they are shredding 200 year old books because why would they?
    - pfdietz 3mo ago
      > It’s far larger than the resulting model. Is it? How many different books are we talking about, and how much information is that, after conversion to text and lossless compression? Images, maybe, but text?
      - dpark 3mo ago
        These models are trained on way more than just books. GPT-3 was trained on about half a terabyte of filtered plaintext and the training corpuses have grown significantly by then by all accounts.
        pfdietz 3mo ago
        I imagine that compresses by ~90%, and current top commercial models have a couple of trillion parameters, don't they?

nhinck3 3mo ago

You're right, it is arguably worse than book burning, not only are they seeking to deprive others of the books, they also want to profit off it.

frozenseven 3mo ago
>they seeking to deprive others of the books Yeah, this isn't a thing. Throwing out books, even "rare" ones, is a regular procedure. And if you really want to read 'em, you can buy any of these books right now.