Comment on "Did you realize that we live in a reality where SciHub is illegal, and OpenAI is not?"

• localhost443@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Well if you believe that you should look at the times lawsuit.

  Word for word on hundreds/thousands of pages of stolen content, its damming

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  • Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Why do you assume that I haven’t? The case hasn’t been resolved and it’s not clear how The NY Times did what they claim, which is may as well be manipulation. It’s a fair rebuttal by OpenAI. The Times haven’t provided the steps they used to achieve that.

    So unless that’s cleared up, it’s not damming in the slightest. Not yet, anyway. And that still doesn’t invalidate my statement above, because it’s still under very specific circumstances when that happens.

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    • Emy@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Also intention is pretty important when determining the guilt of many crimes. OpenAI doesnt intentionally spit back an author’s exact words, their intention is to summarize and create unique content.

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      • pm_me_your_titties@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Ah, yes. The defense of “I didn’t mean to do it.” Always a classic.

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• UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  So it’s content laundering

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  • Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    What a colorful mischaracterization. It sounds clever at face value but it’s really naive. If anything about this is deceptive, it’s the lengths that people go to to slander what they dislike.

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    • jacksilver@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Actually content laundering is the best term I’ve heard to describe the process. Just like money laundering, you no longer know the source and know it’s technically legal to use and distribute.

      I mean, if the copyrighted content wasn’t so critical, they would train models without it. Their essentially derivative works, but no one wants to acknowledge it because it would either require changing our copyright laws or make this potentially lucrative and important work illegal.

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      • Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Content laundering is not a good way to describe it because it’s misleading as it oversimplifies and mischaracterizes what a language model actually does. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how it works. Training language models is typically a transparent and well-documented process as described by the mountains of research over the past decades. The real value comes from the weights of the nodes in the neural network and not the source that it spits out in its entirety when it was trained. The source material is evaluated and wholly transformed into new data in the form of nodes and weights. The original content does not exist as it was within the network because there’s no way to encode it that way. It’s a statistical system that compounds information.

        And while LLMs do have the capacity to create derivative works in other ways, it’s not all that they do, or what they always do. It’s only one of the many functions that it has. What you say would probably be true if it was only trained on a single source, but that’s not even feasible. But when you train it on millions of sources, what remains are the overall patterns of language within those works. It’s much more sophisticated and flexible than what you describe.

        So no, if it was cut and dry there would be grounds for a legitimate lawsuit. The problem is that people are arguing points that do not apply but sound reasonable when they haven’t seen a neural network work under the hood. If anything, new laws need to be created to address what LLMs do if you’re so concerned about proper compensation.

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    • Jilanico@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I feel most people critical of AI don’t know how a neural network works…

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      • Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        That is exactly what’s going on here. Or they hate it enough that they don’t mind making stuff up or mischaracterizing what it does. Seems to be a common thread on the Fediverse. It’s not the first time this week I’ve seen it.

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• Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s great how for most of us we’re taught that just changing the order of words is still plagerism. For them they frequently end up using the exact same words as other things and people still argue it somehow is intelligent and somehow not plagerism.

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  • Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    “Changing the order of words” is what it does? That’s news to me. And do you have examples of it “using the exact same words as other things” without prompt manipulation?

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    • asret@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Why does the prompting matter? If I “prompt” a band to play copyrighted music does that mean they get a free pass?

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      • stewsters@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        If you passed them a sheet of music I’d say that’s on you, it would be your responsibility to not sell recordings of them playing it.

        Just like if I typed the first chapter of Harry Potter into word it is not Microsoft’s intent was to breach copyright, it would have been my intent to make it do it. It would be my responsibility not to sell that first chapter.

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      • Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        That’s not a very good analogy because the band would be reproducing an entire work of art which an LLM does not and cannot. And by prompt manipulation I mean purposely making it seem like the LLM is doing something it wouldn’t do on its own. The operating word is seem, which is what I meant by manipulation. The prompting here is irrelevant, but how it’s done is. So unless The Times releases the steps they used to get ChatGPT to output what it did, you can’t really claim that that’s what it does.

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