4 ms·

I don't want to defend Altman. He may or may not be a good actor. But as an engineer, I love the idea of building something magical, yet lately that's not strai

by vbo 2y ago

I don't want to defend Altman. He may or may not be a good actor. But as an engineer, I love the idea of building something magical, yet lately that's not straightforward tinkering - unless you force your way - because people raise all sorts of concerns that they wouldn't have 30 years ago. Google (search) was built on similar data harvesting and we all loved it in the early days, because it was immensely useful. So is ChatGPT, but people are far more vocal nowadays about how what it's doing is wrong from various angles. And all their concerns are valid. But if openai had started out by seeking permission to train on any and every piece of content out there (like this comment, for example) they wouldn't have been able to create something as good (and bad) as ChatGPT. In the early search days, this was settled (for a while) via robots.txt, which for all intents and purposes openai should be adhering to anyway. But it's more nuanced for LLMs, because LLMs create derivative content, and we're going to have to decide how we think about and regulate what is essentially a new domain and method and angle on existing legislation. Until that happens, there will be friction, and given we live in these particular times, people will be outraged. That said, using SJ's voice given she explicitly refused is unacceptable. It gets interesting if there really is a voice actor that sounds just like her, but now that openai ceased using that voice, the chances of seeing that play out in court are slimmer.

beeboobaa3 2y ago
As an engineer, the current state of LLMs is just uninteresting. They basically made a magical box that may or may not do what you want if you manage to convince it to, and fair chance it'll spout out bullshit. This is like the opposite of engineering.
- xanderlewis 2y ago
  In my opinion, they're extremely interesting... for about a week. After that, you realise the limitations and good-old-fashioned algorithms and software that has some semblance of reliability start to look quite attractive.
moogly 2y ago
> Google (search) was built on similar data harvesting and we all loved it in the early days Google Search linked back to the original source. That was the use case: to find a place to go, and you went there. Way less scummy start than OpenAI.
marcus_holmes 2y ago
Google search linked to your content on your site. It didn't steal your content, it helped people find it. ChatGPT does not help people find your content on your site. It takes your content and plays it back to people who might have been interested in your site, keeping them on its site. This is the opposite of search, the opposite of helping. And robots.txt is a way of allowing/disallowing search indexing, not stealing all the content from the site. I agree that something like robots.txt would be useful, but consenting to search indexing is a long, long way from consenting to AI plagiarism.
- vbo 2y ago
  Point is we couldn't have a way of consenting to ai training until after we had llms. And I'm guessing we will, pretty quickly.
  - pseudalopex 2y ago
    Licenses allowing derivative works without attribution preceded LLMs.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    >Point is we couldn't have a way of consenting to ai training until after we had llms. Sure we could have. even if we're talking web 1.0 age, Congress passed a law as early as the early 00's for email, which is why every newsletter has to have a working unsubsribe link. so it's not impossible to do so. regardless, consent is a concept older than the internet. Have an option of "can we use your data to X?" and a person says yes/no. It's that simple. we can talk about how much we cared 30 years ago, but to be frank that mistrust is all on these tech companies. They abused the "ask for forgiveness" mentality and proceeded to make the internet nearly impossible to browse without an ad blocker. Of course people won't trust the scorpoion one more time. As an conrast, look at Steam. It pretty much does the same stuff on the inside, but it reinvests all that data back to the platorm to benefit users. So people mind much less (and will even go to war for) having a walled garden of their game library. Short sighted, but I understand where it comes from.
brabel 2y ago
> But if openai had started out by seeking permission to train on any and every piece of content out there... But why would anyone seek permission to use public data? Unless you've got Terms and Conditions on reading your website or you gatekeep it to registered users, it's public information, isn't it? Isn't public information what makes the web great? I just don't understand why people are upset about public data being used by AI (or literally anything else. Like open source, you can't choose who can use the information you're providing). In the case being discussed here, it's obviously different, they used the voice of a particular person without their consent for profit. That's a totally separate discussion.
- philistine 2y ago
  The right to copy public information to read it does not grant the right to copy public information to feed it into a for-profit system to make a LLM that cannot function without the collective material that you took.
  - munksbeer 2y ago
    You state that as a fact. Is that your opinion, or based on a legal fact?
  - gambiting 2y ago
    That's the debatable bit, isn't it. I will keep repeating that I really don't see a difference between this and someone reading a bunch of books/articles/blog posts/tech notes/etc etc and becoming a profficient writer themselves, even though they paid exactly 0 money to any of these or even asked for permission. So what's the difference? The fact that AI can do it faster?
    - ryanjshaw 2y ago
      I think that must be it. There's an unstated assumption that some authors of blog posts have: if I make my post sufficiently complex, other humans will be compelled to link to my post and not rip it off by just paraphrasing it or duplicating it when somebody has a question my post can answer. Now with AIs this assumption no longer holds and people are miffed that their work won't lead to engagement with their material, and the followers, stars, acknowledgement, validation, etc. that comes with that? Either that or a fundamental misunderstanding of natural vs. legal rights.
yellowapple 2y ago
> Google (search) was built on similar data harvesting and we all loved it in the early days, because it was immensely useful. So is ChatGPT, but people are far more vocal nowadays about how what it's doing is wrong from various angles. Part of that is that we've seen what Google has become as a result of that data harvesting. If even basic search engines are able to evolve into something as cancerous to the modern web as Google, then what sorts of monstrosities will these LLM-hosting corporations like OpenAI become? People of such a mindset are more vocal now because they believe it was a mistake to have not been as vocal then. The other part is that Google is (typically) upfront about where its results originate. Most LLMs don't provide links to their source material, and most LLMs are prone to hallucinations and other wild yet confident inaccuracies. So if you can't trust ChatGPT to respect users, and you can't trust ChatGPT to provide accurate results, then what can you trust ChatGPT to do? > It gets interesting if there really is a voice actor that sounds just like her, but now that openai ceased using that voice, the chances of seeing that play out in court are slimmer. It's common to pull things temporarily while lawyers pick through them with fine-toothed combs. While it doesn't sound like SJ's lawyers have shown an intent to sue yet, that seems like a highly probable outcome; if I was in either legal teams' shoes, I'd be pulling lines from SJ's movies and interviews and such and having the Sky model recite them to verify whether or not they're too similar - and OpenAI would be smart to restrict that ability to their own lawyers, even if they're innocent after all.

by vbo 2y ago

beeboobaa3 2y ago

As an engineer, the current state of LLMs is just uninteresting. They basically made a magical box that may or may not do what you want if you manage to convince it to, and fair chance it'll spout out bullshit. This is like the opposite of engineering.

xanderlewis 2y ago
In my opinion, they're extremely interesting... for about a week. After that, you realise the limitations and good-old-fashioned algorithms and software that has some semblance of reliability start to look quite attractive.

moogly 2y ago

> Google (search) was built on similar data harvesting and we all loved it in the early days Google Search linked back to the original source. That was the use case: to find a place to go, and you went there. Way less scummy start than OpenAI.

marcus_holmes 2y ago

Google search linked to your content on your site. It didn't steal your content, it helped people find it. ChatGPT does not help people find your content on your site. It takes your content and plays it back to people who might have been interested in your site, keeping them on its site. This is the opposite of search, the opposite of helping. And robots.txt is a way of allowing/disallowing search indexing, not stealing all the content from the site. I agree that something like robots.txt would be useful, but consenting to search indexing is a long, long way from consenting to AI plagiarism.

vbo 2y ago
Point is we couldn't have a way of consenting to ai training until after we had llms. And I'm guessing we will, pretty quickly.
- pseudalopex 2y ago
  Licenses allowing derivative works without attribution preceded LLMs.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >Point is we couldn't have a way of consenting to ai training until after we had llms. Sure we could have. even if we're talking web 1.0 age, Congress passed a law as early as the early 00's for email, which is why every newsletter has to have a working unsubsribe link. so it's not impossible to do so. regardless, consent is a concept older than the internet. Have an option of "can we use your data to X?" and a person says yes/no. It's that simple. we can talk about how much we cared 30 years ago, but to be frank that mistrust is all on these tech companies. They abused the "ask for forgiveness" mentality and proceeded to make the internet nearly impossible to browse without an ad blocker. Of course people won't trust the scorpoion one more time. As an conrast, look at Steam. It pretty much does the same stuff on the inside, but it reinvests all that data back to the platorm to benefit users. So people mind much less (and will even go to war for) having a walled garden of their game library. Short sighted, but I understand where it comes from.

brabel 2y ago

> But if openai had started out by seeking permission to train on any and every piece of content out there... But why would anyone seek permission to use public data? Unless you've got Terms and Conditions on reading your website or you gatekeep it to registered users, it's public information, isn't it? Isn't public information what makes the web great? I just don't understand why people are upset about public data being used by AI (or literally anything else. Like open source, you can't choose who can use the information you're providing). In the case being discussed here, it's obviously different, they used the voice of a particular person without their consent for profit. That's a totally separate discussion.

philistine 2y ago
The right to copy public information to read it does not grant the right to copy public information to feed it into a for-profit system to make a LLM that cannot function without the collective material that you took.
- munksbeer 2y ago
  You state that as a fact. Is that your opinion, or based on a legal fact?
- gambiting 2y ago
  That's the debatable bit, isn't it. I will keep repeating that I really don't see a difference between this and someone reading a bunch of books/articles/blog posts/tech notes/etc etc and becoming a profficient writer themselves, even though they paid exactly 0 money to any of these or even asked for permission. So what's the difference? The fact that AI can do it faster?
  - ryanjshaw 2y ago
    I think that must be it. There's an unstated assumption that some authors of blog posts have: if I make my post sufficiently complex, other humans will be compelled to link to my post and not rip it off by just paraphrasing it or duplicating it when somebody has a question my post can answer. Now with AIs this assumption no longer holds and people are miffed that their work won't lead to engagement with their material, and the followers, stars, acknowledgement, validation, etc. that comes with that? Either that or a fundamental misunderstanding of natural vs. legal rights.

yellowapple 2y ago

> Google (search) was built on similar data harvesting and we all loved it in the early days, because it was immensely useful. So is ChatGPT, but people are far more vocal nowadays about how what it's doing is wrong from various angles. Part of that is that we've seen what Google has become as a result of that data harvesting. If even basic search engines are able to evolve into something as cancerous to the modern web as Google, then what sorts of monstrosities will these LLM-hosting corporations like OpenAI become? People of such a mindset are more vocal now because they believe it was a mistake to have not been as vocal then. The other part is that Google is (typically) upfront about where its results originate. Most LLMs don't provide links to their source material, and most LLMs are prone to hallucinations and other wild yet confident inaccuracies. So if you can't trust ChatGPT to respect users, and you can't trust ChatGPT to provide accurate results, then what can you trust ChatGPT to do? > It gets interesting if there really is a voice actor that sounds just like her, but now that openai ceased using that voice, the chances of seeing that play out in court are slimmer. It's common to pull things temporarily while lawyers pick through them with fine-toothed combs. While it doesn't sound like SJ's lawyers have shown an intent to sue yet, that seems like a highly probable outcome; if I was in either legal teams' shoes, I'd be pulling lines from SJ's movies and interviews and such and having the Sky model recite them to verify whether or not they're too similar - and OpenAI would be smart to restrict that ability to their own lawyers, even if they're innocent after all.