scraping the web to create a dataset isn’t plagiarism, same with training a model on said scraped data, and calculating which words should come in what order isn’t plagiarism too. I agree that datasets should be ethically sourced, but scraping the web is something that allowed such things as the search engine to be created, which made the web a lot more useful. Was creating google irresponsible?
verdigris@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
This is a wild take. You can get chatbots to vomit out entire paragraphs of published works verbatim. There is functionally no mechanism to a chatbot other than looking at a bunch existing texts, picking one randomly, and copying the next word from it. There’s no internal processing or logic that you could call creative, it’s just sticking one Lego at a time onto a tower, and every Lego is someone’s unpaid intellectual property.
There is no definition of plagiarism or copyright that LLMs don’t bite extremely hard. They’re just getting away with it because of the billions of dollars of capital pushing the tech. I am hypothetically very much for the complete abolition of copyright and free usage of information, but a) that means everyone can copy stuff freely, instead of just AI companies, and b) it first requires an actually functional society that provides for the needs of its citizens so they can have the time to do stuff like create art without needing to make a livable profit at it.
a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
The energy costs are overblown. An response costs about 3Wh, which is about 1 minute of runtime for a 200W Pc, or 10 Seconds of a 1000W microwave. See the calculations made here and below for the energy costs. if you want to save energy, go vegan and ditch your car; completely disbanding ChatGPT amounts for 0,0017% of the CO2 Reduction during Covid 2020 (this guy gave the numbers, but had an error in magnitude, which i fixed in my reply, calculator output is attached. It would help climate activists if they concentrated on something that is worthwhile to criticize.
If i read a book, and use phrases out of that book in my communication, it is covered under fair use - the same should be applicable for scraping the web, or else we can close the internet archive next. Since LLM output isn’t copyrightable, i see no issues with that - and copyright law in the US is an abomination which is only useful for big companies to use as a weapon, small artists don’t really profit from that.
verdigris@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
The costs for responses are overblown, but the costs for training are not.
a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Adding the cost for training, which is a one time cost, to ChatGPT raises the power consumption from 3W to 4W. That’s the high-end calculation btw.