The majority of people using AI will not insist you use it, aside from just trying to get others a realistic look on what the technology actually is. Just like a photographer won’t preach to a painter that they should pick up a camera. But that does not mean there isn’t benefit to derive from understanding how the other produces art. And if the painter thinks the camera is doing all the work and the photographer is a fraud, it’s probably good for them to get some exposure and realize it’s not just pressing a button. Like I explain here how that metaphor works for AI.

Most people I know that use AI are shocker, artists from before AI was a thing. They know how to draw with pencils, brushes, sponges, but also painting programs like Photoshop, sculpting programs, modeling programs, surface painting programs, shader production, algorithmic art. They are through and through artists. Them adding AI to their toolbox does not change that.

You are looking at the lowest form of AI art and then declaring that to be all there is. There is more than just pressing generate to a prompt. If you’re actually interested, I wrote a length post about it: https://lemmy.world/comment/12743504

Hi, person here who’s drawn extensively with pencil as a kid but then slowed down. AI has reignited my passion for art, because unlike pencil or even digital drawing, you can iterate much more quickly, which allows me to do so while working a demanding job and having a life besides it. You are severely underestimating the amount of micro-decisions that go into AI art, and more importantly AI assisted art. If you’ll allow me, let me explain.

Lets break it down into levels of effort and creative input, I like to refer back to photography since it has some comparison:

1. Empty canvas prompting.

2. Image to image

3. Collaboration.

4. AI truly as a tool.

Sadly, most people that talk confidently about how much they hate AI just know point #1 and maybe point #2. But I see point #3 and #4. And when I talk to artists that haven’t yet picked up on AI, but if they are aware (or made aware) of #3 and #4, suddenly their perspective also changes in regards to AI. But the hostility and the blind anger makes it quite hard to get through to people that not all art with AI is made equally. We should encourage people that want to use AI to reach the point of #3 and #4 so that their creative input is significant to the point it’s actually something produced by their human creativity. And this is also where an existing artist switching to using AI will most likely start off from.

Also, in terms of time. #1 might take seconds, #2 might take minutes to hours, but #3 and #4 can take days or weeks. Still not as long as drawing those same pieces by hand, but sometimes I wish it was as easy as people would make it out to be.

I appreciate the back up, but with the rare sighting of an organism that is able to consume downvotes and irrationality for a living, I don’t think it’s worth your (or anyone’s) time trying to convince them to change to an ‘unnatural’ diet ^^

Shame you’re not willing to see the unreasonableness in yourself. Now you have to go to the shop to buy some crickets to avoid being seen as a hypocrite.

You can eat shit if you want, it won’t kill you. There’s tribes in Greenland that eat bird poop as a delicacy. So it must be natural! Or how about snails, grasshoppers, worms, crickets? All edible, even good. All things an omnivore can and do consume at time. You should stop being so unnatural and cutting all of these things out of your diet.

Oh, you won’t? Guess that makes you a religious believer now. C’mon man, you must be trying to be dense on purpose.

I’m not a vegan - but we are omnivores, we can eat plants. There is nothing unnatural about it. Let alone if you compare it to our modern ‘normal’ food, which is chock full of extra sugar, extra fat, extra protein, extra artificial additives like preservatives, sweeteners, and what not. It’s also factual that you can get more energy out of directly consuming plant material than eating an animal that consumed said plant material. If you take the biggest offenders for that, cows. You need 8 kg of feed for them to produce a kg of meat, this is known as it’s feed conversion ratio (source). Other animals (Like chicken and fish) are better, but a ration below 1 is essentially impossible.

I like the taste of meat as much as the next (average) person, but vegans do have a factual basis for their stance. But non-vegans rebuttal to that is realistically just “I don’t want to give up meat because I like it” not “the facts aren’t on your side.” - Lets be honest about that.

Ironically voting for parties like AfD is probably the most illusioned vote you could make. The other parties are full of shit too but there it’s the byproduct not the main feature.

I feel you in avoiding public transit. That’s where my hate comes from as well. And yes, many people that do these things have have excuses. Because they need to, to justify doing their business in a place where their habit unavoidably harms and frustrates other people. I hate the fact we still allow that so readily as society. Or at least we should restrict it further to the point a normal person doesn’t have to be bothered by people like that in public. It undermines public services to an extent.

But after I no longer needed to use public transit, I did start to see things in a slightly different light. And that’s the only thing I wanted to say. People that are conscientious about enjoying any kind of mind altering substances will choose to do so safely and harmlessly outside of public, or in designated places like clubs specifically for that substance. Harm reduction must be central to substance use. And I know now that many people have that mentality. But that mentality is somewhat threatened exactly because they make sure nobody is bothered by them. It causes the experience to be defined by those people in public places, the loud minority.

I hate public smokers with a passion. But you must realize that you have effectively zero exposure to people that contain their smoke by doing it at home or using a method without smoke production. And there could be a lot more of those.

The last line is especially golden for me since I live in the Netherlands so we have plenty of weed being smoked but the vast vast majority of public smoke hinderance is from tobacco smokers. If they decide to smoke in public they have absolutely no shame and will literally do it at places like bus stops and just outside restaurants. Weed smokers rarely do that here. So if I were to believe you it seems to just be correlated to people with shitty attitudes rather than the substance.

But there’s no denying that if everyone would drop alcohol for weed, it would be better. Not because weed is harmless but because alcohol is pretty terrible health wise.

I never anthropomorphized the technology, unfortunately due to how language works it’s easy to misinterpret it as such. I was indeed trying to explain overfitting. You are forgetting the fact that current AI technology (artificial neural networks) are based on biological neural networks. There is a range of quirks that it exhibits that biological neural networks do as well. But it is not human, nor anything close. But that does not mean that there are no similarities that can be rightfully pointed out.

Overfitting isn’t just what you describe though. It also occurs if the prompt guides the AI towards a very specific part of it’s training data. To the point where the calculations it will perform are extremely certain about what words come next. Overfitting here isn’t caused by an abundance of data, but rather a lack of it. The training data isn’t being produced from within the model, but as a statistical inevitability of the mathematical version of your prompt. Which is why it’s tricking the AI, because an AI doesn’t understand copyright - it just performs the calculations. But you do. And so using that as an example is like saying “Ha, stupid gun. I pulled the trigger and you shot this man in front of me, don’t you know murder is illegal buddy?”

Nobody should be expecting a machine to use itself ethically. Ethics is a human thing.

People that use AI have an ethical obligation to avoid overfitting. People that produce AI also have an ethical obligation to reduce overfitting. But a prompt quite literally has infinite combinations (within the token limits) to consider, so overfitting will happen in fringe situations. That’s not because that data is actually present in the model, but because the combination of the prompt with the model pushes the calculation towards a very specific prediction which can heavily resemble or be verbatim the original text. (Note: I do really dislike companies that try to hide the existence of overfitting to users though, and you can rightfully criticize them for claiming it doesn’t exist)

This isn’t akin to anything human, people can’t repeat pages of text verbatim like this and no toddler can be tricked into repeating a random page from a random book as you say.

This is incorrect. A toddler can and will verbatim repeat nursery rhymes that it hears. It’s literally one of their defining features, to the dismay of parents and grandparents around the world. I can also whistle pretty much my entire music collection exactly as it was produced because I’ve listened to each song hundreds if not thousands of times. And I’m quite certain you too have a situation like that. An AI’s mind does not decay or degrade (Nor does it change for the better like humans) and the data encoded in it is far greater, so it will present more of these situations in it’s fringes.

but it isn’t crafting its own sentences, it’s using everyone else’s.

How do you think toddlers learn to make their first own sentences? It’s why parents spend so much time saying “Papa” or “Mama” to their toddler. Exactly because they want them to copy them verbatim. Eventually the corpus of their knowledge grows big enough to the point where they start to experiment and eventually develop their own style of talking. But it’s still heavily based on the information they take it. It’s why we have dialects and languages. Take a look at what happens when children don’t learn from others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child So yes, the AI is using it’s training data, nobody’s arguing it doesn’t. But it’s trivial to see how it’s crafting it’s own sentences from that data for the vast majority of situations. It’s also why you can ask it to talk like a pirate, and then it will suddenly know how to mix in the essence of talking like a pirate into it’s responses. Or how it can remember names and mix those into sentences.

Therefore it is factually wrong to state that it doesn’t keep the training data in a usable format

If your arguments is that it can produce something that happens to align with it’s training data with the right prompt, well yeah that’s not incorrect. But it is so heavily misguided and borders bad faith to suggest that this tiny minority of cases where overfitting occurs is indicative of the rest of it. LLMs are a prediction machines, so if you know how to guide it towards what you want it to predict, and that is in the training data, it’s going to predict that most likely. Under normal circumstances where the prompt you give it is neutral and unique, you will basically never encounter overfitting. You really have to try for most AI models.

But then again, you might be arguing this based on a specific AI model that is very prone to overfitting, while I am arguing this out of the technology as a whole.

This isn’t originality, creativity or anything that it is marketed as. It is storing, encoding and copying information to reproduce in a slightly different format.

It is originality, as these AI can easily produce material never seen before in the vast, vast majority of situations. Which is also what we often refer to as creativity, because it has to be able to mix information and still retain legibility. Humans also constantly reuse phrases, ideas, visions, ideals of other people. It is intellectually dishonest to not look at these similarities in human psychology and then treat AI as having to be perfect all the time, never once saying the same thing as someone else. To convey certain information, there are only finite ways to do so within the English language.

This is an issue for the AI user though. And I do agree that needs to be more conscious in people’s minds. But I think time will change that. Perhaps when the photo camera came out there were some shmucks that took pictures of people’s artworks and claimed it as their own because the novelty of the technology allowed that for a bit, but eventually those people are properly differentiated from people properly using it.

Like if I download a textbook to read for a class instead of buying it - I could be proscecuted for stealing

Ehh, no almost certainly not (But it does depend on your local laws). But that honestly just sounds like some corporate boogyman to prevent you from pirating their books. The person hosting the download, if they did not have the rights to publicize it freely, would possibly be prosecuted though.

To illustrate, there’s this story of John Cena who sold a special Ford after signing a contract with Ford to explicitly forbid him from doing that. However, the person who bought the car was never prosecuted or sued, because they received the car from Cena with no strings attached. They couldn’t be held responsible for Cena’s break of contract, but Cena was held personally responsible by Ford.

For physical goods there is ‘theft by proxy’ though (receiving stolen goods that you know are most likely stolen), but that quite certainly doesn’t apply to digital, copyable goods. As to even access any kind of information on the internet, you have to download and thus, copy it.

That would be true if they used material that was paywalled. But the vast majority of the training information used is publicly available. There’s plenty of freely available books and information that you only require an internet connection for to access, and learn from.

Your first point is misguided and incorrect. If you’ve ever learned something by ‘cramming’, a.k.a. just repeating ingesting material until you remember it completely. You don’t need the book in front of you anymore to write the material down verbatim in a test. You still discarded your training material despite you knowing the exact contents. If this was all the AI could do it would indeed be an infringement machine. But you said it yourself, you need to trick the AI to do this. It’s not made to do this, but certain sentences are indeed almost certain to show up with the right conditioning. Which is indeed something anyone using an AI should be aware of, and avoid that kind of conditioning. (Which in practice often just means, don’t ask the AI to make something infringing)

This would be a good point, if this is what the explicit purpose of the AI was. Which it isn’t. It can quote certain information verbatim despite not containing that data verbatim, through the process of learning, for the same reason we can.

I can ask you to quote famous lines from books all day as well. That doesn’t mean that you knowing those lines means you infringed on copyright. Now, if you were to put those to paper and sell them, you might get a cease and desist or a lawsuit. Therein lies the difference. Your goal would be explicitly to infringe on the specific expression of those words. Any human that would explicitly try to get an AI to produce infringing material… would be infringing. And unknowing infringement… well there are countless court cases where both sides think they did nothing wrong.

You don’t even need AI for that, if you followed the Infinite Monkey Theorem and just happened to stumble upon a work falling under copyright, you still could not sell it even if it was produced by a purely random process.

Another great example is the Mona Lisa. Most people know what it looks like and if they had sufficient talent could mimic it 1:1. However, there are numerous adaptations of the Mona Lisa that are not infringing (by today’s standards), because they transform the work to the point where it’s no longer the original expression, but a re-expression of the same idea. Anything less than that is pretty much completely safe infringement wise.

You’re right though that OpenAI tries to cover their ass by implementing safeguards. Which is to be expected because it’s a legal argument in court that once they became aware of situations they have to take steps to limit harm. They can indeed not prevent it completely, but it’s the effort that counts. Practically none of that kind of moderation is 100% effective. Otherwise we’d live in a pretty good world.

Honestly, that’s why open source AI is such a good thing for small creatives. Hate it or love it, anyone wielding AI with the intention to make new expression will be much more safe and efficient to succeed until they can grow big enough to hire a team with specialists. People often look at those at the top but ignore the things that can grow from the bottom and actually create more creative expression.

I think I got the point just fine… you’re wasting a ton of electricity and potentially your own money on making text that is not bad training data. Which is exactly what I said would happen.

LLMs are made of billions of lines of text, the last we know is for GPT3 with sources ranging from 570 GB to 45 TB of text. A short reddit comment is quite literally a drop in a swimming pool. It’s word prediction ability isnt going to change for the worse if you just post a readable comment. It will simply reinforce it.

And sure you can lie in it, but LLM are trained on fiction as well and have to deal with that as well. There are supplementary techniques they apply to make the AI less prone to hallucinations that dont involve the training data, such as RLHF (Reinforcement learning from humans). But honestly speaking the truth is a dumb thing they try to use the AI for anyways. Its primary function has always been to predict words, not truth.

You would have to do this at such a scale and so succesfully voting wise that by that time you are significantly represented in the data to poison it you are either dead, banned, bankrupt, excluded from the data, or Google will have moved on from Reddit.

If you hate or dislike LLMs and want to stop them, let your voice be known. Talk to people about it. Convincing one person succesfully will be worth more than a thousand reddit comments. Poisoning the data directly is a thing, but it’s essentially impossible to inflict alone. It’s more a consequence of bad data gathering, bad storage practice, and bad training. None of those are in your control through a reddit comment.

Yeah I can definitely say for a while that was the case for me as well. It’s honestly why I like Lemmy, since by the nature of federation it can both be self-contained and owned by the people actually using it, but still kept around even if the specific instance doesn’t last forever.

I’m sorry to hear that, that’s a shame. My experiences are more with gaming communities from the early 2000s, so perhaps my view isn’t universally applicable to other hobbies, professions, and such.