Technology

@Kichae

Those probability distributions are based entirely on what training data has been fed into them.

The exact same thing a human does when writing a sentence. I'm starting to think that the backlash against AI is simply because it's showing us what simple machines we humans are as far as thinking and creativity goes.

You can see what this really means in action when you call on them to spit out paragraphs on topics they haven't ingested enough sources for. Their distributions are sparse, and they'll spit out entire chunks of text that are pulled directly from those sources, without citation.

Do you have an example of this? I've used GPT extensively for a while now, and I've never had it do that. If it gives me a chunk of data directly from a source, it always lists the source for me. However, I may not be digging deep enough into things it doesn't understand. If we have a repeatable case of this, I'd love to see it so I can better understand it.

It occurs at the point where the work is copied and used for purposes that fall outside what the work is licensed for. And most people have not licensed their words for billion dollar companies to use them in for-profit products.

This is the meat and potatoes of it. When a work is made public, be it a book, movie, song, physical or digital, it is placed in the public domain and can be freely consumed by the public, and it then becomes part of our own particular data set. However, the public, up until a year ago, wasn't capable of doing what an AI does on such a large scale and with such ease of use. The problem isn't that it's using copyright material to create. Humans do that all the time, we just call it an "homage" or "parody" or "style". An AI can do it much better, much more accurately, and much more quickly, though. That's the rub, and I'm fine with updating the laws based on evolving technology, but let's call a spade a spade. AI isn't doing anything that humans haven't been doing for as long as their has been verbal storytelling. The difference is that AI is so much better at it than we are, and we need to decide if we should adjust what we allow our own works to be used for. If we do, though, it must effect the AI in the same way that it does the human, otherwise this debate will never end. If we hamstring the data that an AI can learn from, a human must have the same handicap.

If you can truly tell me how our form of writing is any different than how an AI writes, I'll do a backflip. Humans are pattern seekers. We do everything based on one. We can't handle chaos. Here's an example.

Normal sentence:

Jane walked to the end of the road and turned around.

Chaotic Sentence:

The terminal boundary of the linear thoroughfare did Jane ambulate toward, then her orientation underwent a 180-degree about-face, confounding the conventional concept of destinational progression.

On first pass, I bet you zoned out half way through that second sentence because there was no pattern or rhythm to it, it was word salad. It still works as a sentence, but it's chaotic and strange to read.

The first sentence is a generic sentence. Subject, predicate, noun, verb, etc. It follows the pattern of English writing that we are all familiar with because it's how we were taught. An AI will do the same thing. It will generate a pattern of speech the same way that it was taught. Now, if you were taught in a public school and didn't read a book or watch a movie for your entire life, I would let you have your argument that

@cendawanita

an LLM-generated textual output that is in the form of a book report or movie review looks the way it does by copying with no creative intent previous works of the genre.

However, you can't say that a human does any different. We are the sum of our experience and our teachings. If you get truly granular with it, you can trace the genesis of every sentence a human writes or even every thought a human thinks back to a point of inception, where the human learned how to write and think in the first place, and it will always be based on some sensory experience that the human has had, whether through reading, listening to music, watching a movie, or any other way we consume the data around us. The second sentence is an example of this. I thought to myself, "how would a pedantic asshat write this sentence?" and I wrote it. It didn't come from some grand creative well of sentience that every human can draw from when they need a sentence, it came from experience and learning, just like the first, and the same well of knowledge than an AI draws from when it writes its sentences.

You aren't having a debate. You're blindly claiming that artists are getting ripped off, because maybe they are a bit, or maybe they're latching onto any reason that lets them still have professional careers in 30 years.

If you can provide some sources with real data from people that have proven a loss of income due to getting "ripped off" by AI, I'd love to look over it. Until then, it's a witch hunt.

@mack123

Can I get an AI to eventually write another book in Terry Pratchett's style? Would his estate be entitled to some form of compensation?

No, that's fair use under parody. Weird Al isn't compensating other artists for parody, so the creators of OpenAI shouldn't either, just because their bot can make something that sounds like Pratchett or anyone else. I wrote a short story a while back that my friend said sounded like if Douglas Adams wrote dystopian fiction. Do I owe the Adams' estate if I were to publish it? The same goes for photography and art. If I take a picture of a pastel wall that happens to have an awkward person standing in front of it, do I owe Wes Anderson compensation? This is how we have to look at it. What's good for the goose must be good for the gander. I can't justify punishing AI research and learning for doing the same things that humans already do.