jmoiron plays the blues
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I'm not saying I think some kind of purely rational or technocratic anti-AI movement would be better. The LessWrong folks are fairly anti-AI and I think only Ezra Klein takes them seriously.
It's just tough. This is the stronger part of the argument, but it doesn't inspire quick...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: The corrosive effects of AI on society, learning, and the economy are more nuanced. They are terrifying, but they're a harder conversation to have and a harder battleground to win.
A lot of well meaning people think there's a way to have AI and address those concerns.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Lots of people have basic experience asking ChatGPT a question or whatever, and they can't square that with the claims that these things are dangerous.
Cases of people being convinced by AI to do harm should have consequences, but they don't rise to the number of accidental pool...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I am pretty anti-gun, and I am incredibly concerned about climate change.
Imagine if we were constantly sounding the alarms over the environmental impact of gun oil manufacturing, and when people looked into it, it had about the same impact as the production of bushings for gara...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Personally, I think they're hostile because they want the extreme remedy to AI harm; for AI companies to be shut down and AI development and usage to become illegal, but without the clear, existential danger that is more obviously expressed in the weaker claims, this is a harder ...
@jmoiron.bsky.social Some anti-AI movement claims are strong and some are weak, but the weak ones are more prominent and imply more extreme reaction. Many people in that movement are hostile to folks pointing out flaws in those claims, even though persisting with them damages their credibility.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I know people think existing law is clear and sufficient, but I don't think it is. Not everyone interpreting training as a fair use activity is doing so cynically.
I'd welcome new legal standards for copyright/training, it seems novel enough to warrant them.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Scalzi's post was the quote-in-quote that spurred me to post about this yesterday.
I was originally going to comment that Robert and John's posts didn't seem in conflict to me, but Scalzi later made it clear his post meant what I thought it meant, so it was just a misinterpretat...
@jmoiron.bsky.social The specifics of this case don't appear to apply to training in general.
LLM AIs reproducing copyrighted works from their training set seems intrinsic, and it's well known the companies trained off of pirated collections.
But training in the abstract still seems like fair use t...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: If it is true, we should consider updating copyright laws to reflect this unintended type of fair use. It's sufficiently novel that the original laws would need updating to keep them current.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: But a lot of people object to the _training_ part, and that has always sounded like it would fall under fair use to me.
If that isn't true, then other basic things like distributing a histogram of word selection from a group of books could also be considered infringement.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: In the real world, I do think that LLMs are copyright violations, but mostly because of the way they can be used to extract large tracts of copyrighted works.
It's also pretty clear that they were trained on illegally obtained data, and that acquisition was also copyright infrin...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I understand that many authors do not want their work used to train AI models, but if I write a book, my copyright doesn't restrict how you use it. It makes it illegal for you to reproduce it and distribute that reproduction.
@jmoiron.bsky.social Would a hypothetical LLM that cannot reproduce "large" parts of the training corpus still violate copyright?
Also why does the copyight.gov FAQ include the question "Can I copyright my sighting of Elvis?"
www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: No worries, I am engaging in good faith and I take other people to be doing so too. I framed my post as a question and provided my background because it is so contrary to my experience and I'd love to gain a new understanding.
Your point on multitasking and managing chaos is a g...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: To me it seemed like work that had a lot of unpredictability and a lot of variability, but was still pretty task oriented. There was a lot of organization involved.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: No personal experience farming! I don't think having been to a farm (or that my mother was a dairy farmer) gives me any extra insight.
I went to a dairy farm in the Azores; they had to rotate the herd among their fields, milk at a certain time, clean, deliver to the processing f...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: So I agree there won't be a broad rush to clankers, but "most people do not break up complex tasks into a set of simpler ones" is surprising.
To me, I just think there's not a lot they will do for people that wouldn't be better as actual products with quality assurance, etc.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I have been reading up on different takes regarding the idea that a big impact of AI will be this idea that we're all going to become arbiters of our own self-catered slop feeds, something I see everywhere and disagree with, and came across this Tressie's thread.
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: I've explicitly talked about work, but apparently people disagree even with that.
I'm surprised to learn that many people don't think in this way. Even Edgar Allen Poe wrote about his methodical approach to writing (which I had thought was more inspirational) in "The Philosophy...
@jmoiron.bsky.social replied: Tressie's thread also included "work lives" and made a very similar point, and I took this to be a further comment on that.
I understand that your "whole life" is not understood in this way, eg. I don't consider having dinner with friends to be a challenge that I break down into...