this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months 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 11 months 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 11 months 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 11 months 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 11 months 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 11 months 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 11 months ago (1 children)

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