this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
439 points (93.5% liked)

Technology

59123 readers
4956 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Authors using a new tool to search a list of 183,000 books used to train AI are furious to find their works on the list.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

That's an interesting take, I didn't know software could be inspired by other people's works. And here I thought software just did exactly as it's instructed to do. These are language models. They were given data to train those models. Did they pay for the data that they used to train for it, or did they scrub the internet and steal all these books along with everything everyone else has said?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Well, now you know; software can be inspired by other people's works. That's what AIs are instructed to do during their training phase.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Does that mean software can also be afraid, or angry? What about happy software? Saying software can be inspired is like saying a rock can feel pain.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago

Software can do a lot of things that rocks can't do, that's not a good analogy.

Whether software can feel "pain" depends a lot on your definitions, but I think there are circumstances in which software can be said to feel pain. Simple worms can sense painful stimuli and react to it, a program can do the same thing.

We've reached the point where the simplistic prejudices about artificial intelligence common in science fiction are no longer useful guidelines for talking about real artificial intelligence. Sci-fi writers have long assumed that AIs couldn't create art and now it turns out it's one of the things they're actually rather good at.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Software cannot be “inspired”

AIs in their training stages are simply just running extreme statistical analysis on the input material. They’re not “learning” they’re not “inspired” they’re not “understanding”

The anthropomorphism of these models is a major problem. They are not human, they don’t learn like humans.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They weren't given data. They were shown data then the company spent tens of millions of dollars on cpu time to do statistical analysis of the data shown.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A computer being shown data is a computer being given data. I don't understand your argument.