this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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I’m curious why we think otherwise when it is a student obtaining an unauthorized copy of a textbook to study, or researchers getting papers from sci-hub. Probably because it benefits corporations and they say so?
While I would like to be in a world where knowledge is free, this is apples and oranges.
OpenAI can purchase a textbook and read it. If their AI uses the knowledge gained to explain maths to an individual, without reproducing the original material, then there's no issue.
The difference is the student in your example didn't buy their textbook. Someone else bought it and reproduced the original for others to study from.
If OpenAI was pirating textbooks, that would be a wholly separate issue.
The fact that the "AI" can spit out whole passages verbatim when given the right prompts, suggests that there is a big problem here and they haven't a clue how to fix it.
It's not "learning" anything other than the probable order of words.
I really hate this reduction of gpt models. Is the model probabilistic? Absolutely. But it isn't simply learning a comprehensible probability of words--it is generating a massively complex conditional probability sequence for words. Largely, humans might be said to do the same thing. We make a best guess at the sequence of words we decide to use based on conditional probabilities along a myriad number of conditions (including semantics of the thing we want to say).