My Books Were Used to Train AI

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/08/stephen-king-books-ai-writing/675088/

by grzm • 3 years ago

36 37 3 years ago

theatlantic.com

Ephil012• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/cvkPt

politelemon• 3 years ago

This is frustrating, I'm stuck in a captcha loop on the site and can't get past it.

entropie• 3 years ago

Same.

seydor• 3 years ago

The reverse would have been worrisome

gmuslera• 3 years ago

He now have the perfect opportunity to write an story of sentient book souls being devoured by evil AIs.

adolph• 3 years ago

Steven King writes "I have said in one of my few forays into nonfiction (On Writing) that you can’t learn to write unless you’re a reader, and unless you read a lot. AI programmers have apparently taken this advice to heart."

Reminds me of: After his father angrily asks him how he learned to use drugs, the son shouts, "You, alright?! I learned it by watching you!" As the father recoils from realizing the error of his own ways, a narrator then intones, "Parents who use drugs, have children who use drugs."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_learned_it_by_watching_you!

IKantRead2• 3 years ago

I do find it interesting how little in the larger AI art conversation the idea of borrowing already exists in various art forms and each art forms unique culture of accepting this comes up.

In folk music for example, performing someone else's work is not disparaged at all historically. It was common for most musicians to travel around and teach each other songs.

In pop music we see sampling has increasingly become a major part of the art, and only really controversial when someone tries to avoid paying the original artist their fair share (which is itself a topic of debate).

In the visual arts it's much different. There is of course the famous Picasso quote: 'Good artists copy, great artists steal.' But even in the tone of that quote you can tell there's a different cultural acceptance of reusing work.

Writing is tricky because referencing or quoting another author without attribution is a common feature of "high brow" works. T.S Eliot for example borrows heavily form past authors, often without attribution, but assuming an audience which knows enough to not require attribution. However at the other extreme you can get in trouble for plagiarizing your own work.

Personally I think Diffusion models and LLMs are just bringing up an issue in the visual and literary arts that was already forced to the attention of musical artists during the rise of early hiphop djs who showed that you can genuinely create something new nearly entirely by cut and pasting existing works.

One thing I would point out: It seems to me that copying/borrowing/reusing are equally present in all creative fields, they just are willing to admit it to different degrees.

__loam6• 3 years ago

I think the frustrating thing about this when people being up that "good artists steal", they don't really understand why artists are upset by this technology. Artists are happy to teach other people how to make art. They're generally fine with people looking at their work to develop their own skills because that's how the field sustains itself. Art is a skill and a culture. You become an artist by participating.

AI art systems are alienating in comparison. A group of people who are not artists basically showed up without talking to anyone and is trying to displace the original culture, by using work that they extracted from that culture. The entire attitude from the AI art community is hostile. "Why would you keep drawing now that we've automated it?" It's a gross viewpoint that devalues an entire cultural enterprise and a major portion of human experience.

_aavaa_2• 3 years ago

In pop music we see sampling has increasingly become a major part of the art

As I understand it the reasons for the rise of sampling is exactly the opposite of what you argue here. Artists explicitly sample (with the legal paperwork) because it provides protection from claims that they copied portions of the song from elsewhere. Claims that you are much more likely to face if you instead try to create something on your own (and implicitly influenced by what you've heard and liked).

The easiest way to sidestep all of that is to explicitly focus on remixes, that and record every conversation and creative moment so that you can show it during discovery.

See for example the lawsuit over Ed Sheeran's Shape of You [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_You#Copyright_trial

distract8901• 3 years ago

Like a lot of the problems with AI, this one is very familiar but not quite the same as problems we've faced before. It's also really frustrating to even reason about because it's so nebulous and new.

But say you're a digital artist. Maybe you make a webcomic. What if a bunch of individuals started drawing their own art of your characters? Generally, that'd be seen as a big success for you and your art. If someone started reposting your art and claiming credit, that's clearly a problem.

Something about the scale of it trips people up. What would you do if an entire army of thousands of artists suddenly started doing detailed re-draws of your whole comic with little changes? That's an insane hypothetical, and I think a lot of people would be unsure how to answer it. Now, what does it mean when I can spend a couple thousand dollars on a machine that can produce millions of copies of your work with any change I want?

It's the same problem but fundamentally different in a way that most people aren't prepared to handle. I can't make up my mind about it, but I'm sure that however we solve this problem, it will be a huge change for society.

sillysaurusx• 3 years ago

Wow. Stephen King wrote about my work. I’m a little star struck.

I didn’t have this on my 2023 bingo card.

Vicinity9635• 3 years ago

Everybody's everything is being used to train "AI".

That was the reason for twitter going logged-in-only. Multiple companies were trying to download all of twitter at the same time to train their models.

Reddit put walls up for the same reason, though as usual they lied about why they were making reddit worse.

That's just the state of the Internet right now: If you have a large dataset of reasonably quality content, it's going to get slurped up to train models.

officeplant• 3 years ago

Reddit put walls up for the same reason, though as usual they lied about why they were making reddit worse.

So it was just a convenient side effect that it killed off all the good third party apps to push people towards their app.

js8• 3 years ago

So perhaps we need to require that commercial models trained on public data be also made public?

horsawlarway4• 3 years ago

Which is vaguely funny, and feels like a gut response from the business side of the house without understanding the real tech.

If you shut your data off, but then sell it to be used to generate an LLM, you have then given your data away again.

In the simplest case, as the weights directly.

In the harder cases, as the use case it's being applied to solve... ex: if you make an excellent gardening help chat bot, I can clone yours by training my chat bot on your chat bot (which is what a ton of the open/free models are doing right now).

I now have the "jpg" version of your dataset. Is it as good? Meh, probably not. Is it good enough? Almost certainly.

So basically my addendum to your comment is really:

That's just the state of the Internet right now: If you have a large dataset of reasonably quality content, it's going to get slurped up to train models.

And then those models are getting slurped up to train open models. There IS NO MOAT!!!

tavavex3• 3 years ago

That was the reason for twitter going logged-in-only.

It's probably one of the reasons for why they did it initially (although now they reverted it so viewing individual tweets can be done by guests), but I think it's guaranteed that they wanted to squeeze out more user registrations and create an appearance of growth.

robbywashere_• 3 years ago

information wants to be free

gumballindie• 3 years ago

so does money, yet we dont go around stealing it

__loam6• 3 years ago

Have any of you guys actually read a whole novel that was written by AI?

horsawlarway4• 3 years ago

I've read whole "stories" written by AI (in the low thousands of words).

They're usually pretty terrible. I can't imagine a novel's length of it.

That said, having played with the LLMs - they are super helpful for doing things like bouncing conversations off a "character", or describing a scene for me, or just being whacky idea generators.

I think it's similar to the stable-diffusion side of things, it's going to make some authors more productive, but it won't necessarily replace the need for an author. (whether that leads to more or less authors long term is a related, but tangential, question and influenced by a lot of non-ai society factors).

__loam6• 3 years ago

That's the impression I've been getting. AI lowered the barrier to entry of just generating a large body of text and self-publishing, but there are more subtle market dynamics at play here than people seem to realize.

not2b• 3 years ago

Beyond a few thousand words (32k tokens for GPT-4), it seems the beginning of the story will be outside of the range that can influence the output, though perhaps there are techniques to retain some memory, maybe you could first generate an outline and then fill in the chapters, scenes and so forth, so the limited memory becomes less of an issue.

Animats• 3 years ago

This subject always makes me think of that most prescient novel, Colossus, by D. F. Jones. In it, the world-spanning computer does become sentient and tells its creator, Forbin, that in time, humanity will come to love and respect it. (The way, I suppose, many of us love and respect our phones.) Forbin cries, “Never!” But the narrator has the last word, and a single word is all it takes:

“Never?”

kristianp• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/cvkPt

My Books Were Used to Train AI

Related Stories