Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay’s lawsuit claims their books were used without their consent. But copyright protection doesn’t apply to ideas – they’ll need to demonstrate the likelihood of economic loss.
Yeah, I’m not sure how I feel about it… But I somehow instinctively feel that a human being “inspired” by other works is different to a neural network being trained on a novel. I don’t know that I can articulate specifically why one feels okay and the other doesn’t… But that’s how it feels to me.
Part of the problem is that AI research likes to use terminology that sounds like what people do, when that’s not what the AI actually does.
Large language models are not intelligent in any sense. They are autocomplete on steroids. This is a computer program that was fed a book someone wrote, then mathematically tweaked to be able to guess the next word in a sentence in a way that resembles that book. That’s all it does. It does not think or learn in any sense we’d apply to a human.
To me, LLMs sound like a massive plagiarism engine, and I think they should need to get a license from the authors whose works they used to make the LLM under whatever terms that author wants to give, just like a publisher needs to get permission to print a copy of the work. But copyright law has no easy “bright line” for what counts and what doesn’t. So the courts will have to decide whether what the AI “creates” is similar enough to the original works to count as a violation, or if the AI and its results are transformative enough to count as something new.
In part it feels that way because you, along with pretty much every other human being online today, have been propagandized for decades now with SciFi inspired from dystopian futurist predictions around AI which are almost universally clearly obsolete and misinformed by now, but still persist due to anchoring bias.
AI trained to predict collective human thought ends up replicating quite a lot more than most people thought would be possible in our lifetimes.
And yet when it exhibits emotional intelligence it’s called creepy, when it exhibits above average reasoning capabilities it’s called scary, and when it displays a potential for automating large swaths of busywork for most humans it’s called a threat.
Next to no one I see discussing the topic is considering the opportunity costs here, as the media influence on perceiving AI as ‘other’ is so pervasive that most humans fall into treating it like a monkey from another forest competing for bananas rather than treating it like a much better stick.
Yeah, I’m not sure how I feel about it… But I somehow instinctively feel that a human being “inspired” by other works is different to a neural network being trained on a novel. I don’t know that I can articulate specifically why one feels okay and the other doesn’t… But that’s how it feels to me.
Part of the problem is that AI research likes to use terminology that sounds like what people do, when that’s not what the AI actually does.
Large language models are not intelligent in any sense. They are autocomplete on steroids. This is a computer program that was fed a book someone wrote, then mathematically tweaked to be able to guess the next word in a sentence in a way that resembles that book. That’s all it does. It does not think or learn in any sense we’d apply to a human.
To me, LLMs sound like a massive plagiarism engine, and I think they should need to get a license from the authors whose works they used to make the LLM under whatever terms that author wants to give, just like a publisher needs to get permission to print a copy of the work. But copyright law has no easy “bright line” for what counts and what doesn’t. So the courts will have to decide whether what the AI “creates” is similar enough to the original works to count as a violation, or if the AI and its results are transformative enough to count as something new.
In part it feels that way because you, along with pretty much every other human being online today, have been propagandized for decades now with SciFi inspired from dystopian futurist predictions around AI which are almost universally clearly obsolete and misinformed by now, but still persist due to anchoring bias.
AI trained to predict collective human thought ends up replicating quite a lot more than most people thought would be possible in our lifetimes.
And yet when it exhibits emotional intelligence it’s called creepy, when it exhibits above average reasoning capabilities it’s called scary, and when it displays a potential for automating large swaths of busywork for most humans it’s called a threat.
Next to no one I see discussing the topic is considering the opportunity costs here, as the media influence on perceiving AI as ‘other’ is so pervasive that most humans fall into treating it like a monkey from another forest competing for bananas rather than treating it like a much better stick.