Large Language Models (such as GPT) and AI image generators.
I follow certain AI related post tags on Tumblr and sometimes I see people expressing pure hatred towards these tools, as they only see the AIs as content thieves.
I don’t mind the tool itself if you use it as such. I do mind when people use its output as the final product. See: the lawyer who used chatgpt for a legal brief
There was this uber hype around it, then we started using it … and it just makes so many errors, it’s literally just generating more work. Scrapped it after less than a week. It’s modern snakeoil.
AI is a method of content theft, it takes other people’s work and pieces it together in a way that resembles other works, without any actual coherency.
I don’t like that it churns out slop that displaces actual content.
I also don’t like the way it’s sped up enshitification of google and news sites. I didn’t think it could get worse than pages of listicles written by disinterested journalists paid fuckall to churn out 10 a day, but now you have chatGPT churning out 100 completely useless articles a day.
LLMs just automates and does faster certain things that a person could do on their own if they invested way more effort and time. If a human being takes people’s work and pieces it together in a way that resembles other works without using any LLM/AI or automation tool, is the final result content theft too?
I agree with the content enshitification, but I disagree about the coherency.
Usually, implementations like the ChatGPT web/app will generate different outputs for the same prompt/input. You can also ask it to tweak a previous output, make it shorter, more concise, exclude parts, etc. And if you’re making API calls through a script you can tweak parameters like the Temperature, Top P, Presence Penalty or Frequence Penaly, which affect things like the coherence, randomness or repetitiveness of the output.
There’s also fine tunning using embeddings, which can help training a model to fit one’s specific needs and expectations, but I haven’t got to try it yet.
Coherency requires relating symbolic meanings. AI just uses statistical analysis.
Consider if you were locked in the national library of Thailand. You don’t speak Siamese, and any pictures or bilingual dictionaries were removed.
Given a thousand years, you could look at the patterns and produce text similar to what someone who writes Siamese would write, but there’s still no coherency because you cannot connect the meaning behind any of the words.
That doesn’t necessarily mean your outputs are useless though, someone who does read Siamese can have you generate outputs until you print out something they can infer a coherent thought from, but you’re fundamentally unable to be trained to do that yourself.
If a human being takes people’s work and pieces it together in a way that resembles other works without using any LLM/AI or automation tool, is the final result content theft too?
We’re getting into ethics territory. IP is a social construct and we live under capitalism, our model for determining what is and isn’t theft should be selected by what supports artists and consumers against capitalists.
Large Language Models (such as GPT) and AI image generators.
I follow certain AI related post tags on Tumblr and sometimes I see people expressing pure hatred towards these tools, as they only see the AIs as content thieves.
I don’t mind the tool itself if you use it as such. I do mind when people use its output as the final product. See: the lawyer who used chatgpt for a legal brief
It’s not that I hate it, but like, chatGPT sucks.
There was this uber hype around it, then we started using it … and it just makes so many errors, it’s literally just generating more work. Scrapped it after less than a week. It’s modern snakeoil.
AI is a method of content theft, it takes other people’s work and pieces it together in a way that resembles other works, without any actual coherency.
I don’t like that it churns out slop that displaces actual content.
I also don’t like the way it’s sped up enshitification of google and news sites. I didn’t think it could get worse than pages of listicles written by disinterested journalists paid fuckall to churn out 10 a day, but now you have chatGPT churning out 100 completely useless articles a day.
LLMs just automates and does faster certain things that a person could do on their own if they invested way more effort and time. If a human being takes people’s work and pieces it together in a way that resembles other works without using any LLM/AI or automation tool, is the final result content theft too?
I agree with the content enshitification, but I disagree about the coherency.
Usually, implementations like the ChatGPT web/app will generate different outputs for the same prompt/input. You can also ask it to tweak a previous output, make it shorter, more concise, exclude parts, etc. And if you’re making API calls through a script you can tweak parameters like the Temperature, Top P, Presence Penalty or Frequence Penaly, which affect things like the coherence, randomness or repetitiveness of the output.
There’s also fine tunning using embeddings, which can help training a model to fit one’s specific needs and expectations, but I haven’t got to try it yet.
Coherency requires relating symbolic meanings. AI just uses statistical analysis.
Consider if you were locked in the national library of Thailand. You don’t speak Siamese, and any pictures or bilingual dictionaries were removed.
Given a thousand years, you could look at the patterns and produce text similar to what someone who writes Siamese would write, but there’s still no coherency because you cannot connect the meaning behind any of the words.
That doesn’t necessarily mean your outputs are useless though, someone who does read Siamese can have you generate outputs until you print out something they can infer a coherent thought from, but you’re fundamentally unable to be trained to do that yourself.
We’re getting into ethics territory. IP is a social construct and we live under capitalism, our model for determining what is and isn’t theft should be selected by what supports artists and consumers against capitalists.