this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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Idk why this is such an unpopular opinion. I don't need permission from an author to talk about their book, or permission from a singer to parody their song. I've never heard any good arguments for why it's a crime to automate these things.
I mean hell, we have an LLM bot in this comment section that took the article and spat 27% of it back out verbatim, yet nobody is pissing and moaning about it "stealing" the article.
Because people are afraid of things they don't understand. AI is a very new and very powerful technology, so people are going to see what they want to see from it. Of course, it doesn't help that a lot of people see "a shit load of cash" from it, so companies want to shove it into anything and everything.
AI models are rapidly becoming more advanced, and some of the new models are showing sparks of metacognition. Calling that "plagiarism" is being willfully ignorant of its capabilities, and it's just not productive to the conversation.
True
And on a similar note to this, I think a lot of what it is is that OpenAI is profiting off of it and went closed-source. Lemmy being a largely anti-capitalist and pro-open-source group of communities, it's natural to have a negative gut reaction to what's going on, but not a single person here, nor any of my friends that accuse them of "stealing" can tell me what is being stolen, or how it's different from me looking at art and then making my own.
Like, I get that the technology is gonna be annoying and even dangerous sometimes, but maybe let's criticize it for that instead of shit that it's not doing.
I can definitely see why OpenAI is controversial. I don't think you can argue that they didn't do an immediate heel turn on their mission statement once they realized how much money they could make. But they're not the only player in town. There are many open source models out there that can be run by anyone on varying levels of hardware.
As far as "stealing," I feel like people imagine GPT sitting on top of this massive collection of data and acting like a glorified search engine, just sifting through that data and handing you stuff it found that sounds like what you want, which isn't the case. The real process is, intentionally, similar to how humans learn things. So, if you ask it for something that it's seen before, especially if it's seen it many times, it's going to know what you're talking about, even if it doesn't have access to the real thing. That, combined with the fact that the models are trained to be as helpful as they possibly can be, means that if you tell it to plagiarize something, intentionally or not, it probably will. But, if we condemned any tool that's capable of plagiarism without acknowledging that they're also helpful in the creation process, we'd still be living in caves drawing stick figures on the walls.