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- cross-posted to:
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Stephen King: My Books Were Used to Train AI::One prominent author responds to the revelation that his writing is being used to coach artificial intelligence.
But that is what’s happening in the minds of creatives. Reading a book and taking inspiration is functionally the same mechanism that an LLM uses to learn. They read Stephen King, they copy some part of the style. Potentially very closely and for a corporation’s gain if that’s what’s asked of them.
One person being influenced by a prose style isn’t the same as a company using a copyrighted work without permission to train a LLM.
Every learning material a company or university has ever used has been used to train an LLM. Us.
Okay I’m being a bit facetious here. I know people and chat GPT aren’t equivalent. But the gap is closing. Maybe LLMs will never bridge the gap, but something will. I hesitate to write into law now that any work can never be ingested or emulated by another intelligent entity. While the difference between a machine and a human are clear to you now, one day they won’t be.
The longer we hold onto the idea that our brains are somehow magically different from the way computers (are) will learn to think, the harder we’ll get blindsided by reality when they’re indistinguishable from us.
There’s very little a LLM has in common with the human brain. We can’t do AGI yet and there’s no evidence that we will be able to create AGI any time soon.
The main issue as I see it is that we have companies trying to make money by creating LLMs. The people who created the source materials for these LLMs are not only not getting paid, they’re not even being asked permission. To me that’s dead wrong and I hope the courts agree.
I agree AGIs aren’t going to happen soon. But it sounds like we agree they WILL happen. LLMs do have one important thing in common with humans, their output is transformative based on what they learn.
I think what you take issue with is the scale. People wouldn’t care if this was something that existed on one computer somewhere. Where someone could type, “Write me a spooky story about Top Ramen in the style of Stephen King”. It’s that anyone can get a story in Stephen Kings style when all OpenAI had to do is buy a couple digital copies of Cujo. However, no one is upset that James Cameron bought one ticket to Pocahontas and thought, “What if that were on another planet?”. But 400 million people saw that movie.
People want to protect creatives buy casting a net over machines saying they can’t use the works of artists, even when transforming them, without payment to the original creator. While that sounds like it makes sense now, what happens when the distinction between human and machine disappears? That net will be around us too. Corporations will just use this to empower their copyright rule even further.
Stephen King was largely inspired by Ray Bradbury and H.P. Lovecraft. I doubt he paid them beyond the original price of a couple books.
BTW thanks for the thought provoking conversation. None of my friends care about this stuff 😅
You’re welcome!
I think we disagree in that you’re concerned with something that may happen at some time in the future and how we legislate this event but I see that as a job for future politicians and lawyers.
Right now, I see is a bunch of tech bros with the “move fast and break things” mindset, running around all over the internet and sweeping up data, with no thought to where it came from, if it’s legally protected material, sensitive material, or if this might bite them in the ass in the very near future.
I’ve seen this story before.