354
Hot take: LLM technology is being purposefully framed as AI to avoid accountability
(self.technology)
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
354 points (91.7% liked)
Technology
59674 readers
4905 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You can absolutely compare AI with students. The problem is that, legally, in many western countries students still have to pay copyright holders of the books they use to learn.
It is purely a copyright discussion. How far copyright applies? Shall the law distinguish between human learning and machine learning? Can we retroactively change copyright of material available online?
For instance, copilot is more at risk than a LLM that learned from 4chan, because licenses are clearer there. Problem is that we have no idea on which data big llms were trained, to know if some copyright law already applies.
At the end it is just a legal dispute on companies making money out of AI trained on data publicly available (but not necessarily copyright free).
My argument is that an LLM here is reading the content for different reasons than a student would. The LLM uses it to generate text and answer user queries, for cash. The student uses it to learn their field of study, and then apply it to make money. The difference is that the student internalizes the concepts, while the LLM internalizes the text. If you used a different book that covered the same content, the LLM would generate different output, but the student would learn the same thing.
I know it's splitting hairs, but I think it's an important point to consider.
My take is that an LLM algorithm can't freely consume any copyrighted work, even if it's been reproduced online with the consent of the author. The company would need the permission of the author for the express purpose of training the AI. If there's a copyright, it should apply.
You have me thinking though about the student comparison. College students pay to attend lectures on material that can be found online or in their textbooks. Wouldn't paying for any copyright material be analogous to this?
Students and LLM do the same with data, simply in a different way. LLM can learn more data, student can understand more concepts, logic and context.
And students study to make money.
Both LLMs and students map the data in some internal representation, that is however pretty different, because a biological mind is different from an AI.
Regarding your last paragraph, this is exactly the point. What shall openai and Microsoft pay, as they are making a lot of money out of other people work? Currently it is unclear as openai hasn't released what data they used, and because copyright laws do not cover generative AI. We need to wait for interpretation of existing laws and for new ones. But it will change soon in the future for sure