Ask HN: Is “AI” just a giant plagorizing machine?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36013971

by oblib • 3 years ago

10 31 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

smoldesu2• 3 years ago

Isn't Open Source just a giant plagiarizing machine with more genial licensing conventions?

AI is as good a time as any to re-assess how we feel on intellectual property, but I don't think we can get any more restrictive without suffocating innovation. Plagiarism is how patent trolls shut down otherwise innovative products, and it's the basis for jacking up non-generic drug prices and forcing developers to pay licensing fees just to use an OS. If anything, our current preconception of plagiarism is too unclear and fragile, bound to be destroyed by whatever the hell AI is, if it even matters in the first place.

oblib• 3 years ago

There's a difference between opensource and proprietary works. For example, I use "PouchDB" in some of my apps and their code is opensource, but what I make with it is not opensource.

It's one thing to make something similar, and there are often more ways than one to do that, but how would one know if AI created something unique or just copied some human's copyrighted work and presented it in a response?

TBH, I have not dug into how it works, but I did ask it to show me how to make something with PouchDB.js and it looked like it was pretty much a copy and paste from their website. That is not really an issue, but it did not attribute that code to Pouchdb.com. And, to be fair, I did not ask where it got it. But it seems to me that if they got it off the PouchDB.com web site it should tell us and provide a link to the original source.

smoldesu2• 3 years ago

how would one know if AI created something unique or just copied some human's copyrighted work and presented it in a response?

You can't. Similarly, when a human writes original code, we can't be certain that they're not repeating stuff they've seen before too. We don't think of things in terms of license, no human remembers the fast inverse square root function or cocktail sort for the license it had. At no point can I be certain that I'm not unconsciously plagarizing proprietary code from a previous job. Sometimes it's essential (I have to plagiarize "set euo pipefail").

There is indeed some nuance to AI creating supposedly-novel works, but I don't think it's as great as people think. AI makes the process of building a derivative work easier, which is probably frustrating as a license-holder. Many forms of derivative works have legal precedent though, like Wine, DXVK, OpenJDK or the Dolphin emulator - it's an open-source implementation of a proprietary API. You can fly pretty close to the sun without getting burned in many of these cases, as long as you don't violate fair use.

cjbprime3• 3 years ago

No, it's capable of reasoning, but it gained its knowledge of how the world works through analyzing things that were written or drawn by (mostly) humans.

spondylosaurus5• 3 years ago

Reasoning how? LLMs are statistical models, not brains.

Energiesustaine2• 3 years ago

How are humans reasoning? Through a logical or statistical internal model.

So if you make your model through slow thinking and discovery chatgpt just builds it to a billion words.

The result is the same

jstx15• 3 years ago

Reasoning in behavior - you ask it to explain things and it does; it gives reasons, motivations, nuance, explains connections, clarifies points. That's reasoning.

smt883• 3 years ago

It's not capable of reasoning and it has no knowledge of how the world works. That's why it often spits out nonsense and falsehoods.

To oversimplify a bit, it's a next-word-in-the-sentence prediction engine.

jstx15• 3 years ago

While you're at it, throw out your calculator because it has no conception of numbers and doesn't know anything about mathematics.

cjbprime3• 3 years ago

To oversimplify a bit, it's a next-word-in-the-sentence prediction engine.

Turns out that when you ask LLMs to predict the next word in the sentence, and then train billions of parameters on billions of sentences, they realize the best way to improve at predicting the next word is to understand why the world works the way it does.

spondylosaurus5• 3 years ago

Not plagiarism, exactly, but Ted Chiang describes ChatGPT as a "blurry jpeg of the web": https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-...

speedgoose• 3 years ago

No. Have a nice day.

jimwhite• 3 years ago

LLMs are more likely to create novel content (i.e. "hallucinate") than copy training data verbatim, so, in a word, "No". In fact the unpredictability and hallucination behavior is what is called creativity in artistic domains. The whole Stochastic Parrots paper and concept originated with Luddites who don't want this technology to advance to the point where is generally useful and applicable. And while the Luddites (people who smashed the first robots, Jacquard Looms which were programmable machines that did a job only humans were previously able to perform) had a justifiable concern about negative impacts (the loss of employment took two generations to recover) it is safe to say that the Industrial Revolution has had more positive effects (e.g. life expectancy, per capita wealth) in total.

chatmasta• 3 years ago

Are you a giant plagiarizing machine? After all, you learned to reason and write words and concepts from somewhere. Should you pay a royalty to every teacher you've ever had, or every author of every book you've ever read?

Is it even possible to have a novel thought that isn't somehow dependent on an earlier thought of someone else?

june_twenty• 3 years ago

Are you a giant plagiarizing machine?

No. Who am I plagiarizing when I feel love, hurt, enjoy taste, procreate? So no is the clear answer to that question.

roschdal• 3 years ago

Yes.

al2o3cr• 3 years ago

This whole "LLMs IZ PLAIGIARISISISMES!" moral panic is going to lead to written copyright expanding to be just as stupid and exploitable as music copyright, where a company with enough lawyers can claim ownership over THREE NOTES in sequence.

Ask HN: Is “AI” just a giant plagorizing machine?

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