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Authors Are Furious After Finding Their Works on List of Books Used To Train AI
(www.themarysue.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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What's the difference? On the most fundamental level it's all the same.
A human, regardless of how many books they read, will have personal experiences that are undeniably unique to themselves. They will interpret the works they read differently from each other based on their worldly experiences. Their writing, no matter how many books they read and get inspired on, will always be influenced by their own personal lives. They can experience love, hate, heartbreak, empathy, sadness, and happiness.
This is something a LLM does not have, and in my opinion, is a massive distinguishing factor. So on a "fundamental" level, it is not the same. It is no where near the same.
do you really think we are that far off... from giving a foundational memory and motivation layers to these LLMs, that could mimic.. or even.. generate the generic thoughts youre indicating?
i dont think so. you seem to imply its impossibility, i expect its inevitability. the human brain will not be a black box forever... it still exists in a world of physics we can emulate, even if rudimentary.
Unless you think theres no difference between killing a person and closing a program, I think we can agree they should be treated differently in the eyes of the law.
And so theres a difference between a person reading a book and being inspired by it, and someone writing a program that automatically transforms the book in data that can create new books.
The same thing as with tooooooons of things: scale.
Nobody cares if one dude steals office supplies at work. Now, if everyone stats doing it, or if the single guy steals everything, then action is taken.
Nobody cares if a random person draws in the same style and with same characters as you, but if they start to sell them, or god forbid, out-sell you, then there is a problem.
Nobody cares (except police I guess) if a random driver drives double the speed limit and annoys people living next to the road on the weekends, but when tons of people do it, you get speed bumps.
Nobody cares if few people pirate movies, but when it gets to mainstream and companies notice that there might be money being lost. Then you get whatever we have now.
Nobody cares if the mudhill behind your house erodes a bit and you get mud on your shoes. Have a bunch of that erode and you realise the danger...
You have been fine-tuning your own writing style for a decade and random schmuck starts to write similarly, you probably don't care. No harm done. Now, get an AI to write 10 000 books in a weekend and someone starts to sell them... well now you have a completely different problem.
On a fundamental level the exact same thing is happening, yet action is only taken after a certain threshold is step over.
Bingo.
Wait. Are human beings machines?
Please do not take this as support of ai use of copyrighted works (I don’t), but as far as I can tell, yes we are machines. This rant is just me being aspie atm, so feel free to ignore it.
We are thinking machines programmed by our genetics, predispositions, experiences, and circumstances. A 2 part explanation of how humans are merely products of their circumstances was once put forward to me. The first part is that humans can do anything, but only the thing we want to do most.
For instance, a common rebuttal is that people can choose go to the gym even when they find the experience of exercise undesirable. However, when that happens, it’s merely a case of other wants out balancing the want to not go to the gym, typically they want to be fit.
We want to not spend money, but we want to not rush going to jail for stealing more, usually. We want to not work overtime, but sometimes we want the extra cash more than that.
The second part of the argument is that we can’t choose what we want. When someone talks themselves out of the slice of cheesecake, they aren’t changing what they want, they’re resolving said want against the larger want they have to lose weight.
And if we make decisions by our wants, while said wants are not decided by us, then despite appearances we are little more than complex automata.