Is “AI” just a giant plagorizing machine?
Is “AI” just a giant plagorizing machine?
LLMs are more likely to create novel content (i.e. "hallucinate") than copy training data verbatim, so, in a word, "No". In fact the unpredictability and hallucination behavior is what is called creativity in artistic domains. The whole Stochastic Parrots paper and concept originated with Luddites who don't want this technology to advance to the point where is generally useful and applicable. And while the Luddites (people who smashed the first robots, Jacquard Looms which were programmable machines that did a job only humans were previously able to perform) had a justifiable concern about negative impacts (the loss of employment took two generations to recover) it is safe to say that the Industrial Revolution has had more positive effects (e.g. life expectancy, per capita wealth) in total.
Isn't Open Source just a giant plagiarizing machine with more genial licensing conventions?
AI is as good a time as any to re-assess how we feel on intellectual property, but I don't think we can get any more restrictive without suffocating innovation. Plagiarism is how patent trolls shut down otherwise innovative products, and it's the basis for jacking up non-generic drug prices and forcing developers to pay licensing fees just to use an OS. If anything, our current preconception of plagiarism is too unclear and fragile, bound to be destroyed by whatever the hell AI is, if it even matters in the first place.
Are you a giant plagiarizing machine? After all, you learned to reason and write words and concepts from somewhere. Should you pay a royalty to every teacher you've ever had, or every author of every book you've ever read?
Is it even possible to have a novel thought that isn't somehow dependent on an earlier thought of someone else?
This whole "LLMs IZ PLAIGIARISISISMES!" moral panic is going to lead to written copyright expanding to be just as stupid and exploitable as music copyright, where a company with enough lawyers can claim ownership over THREE NOTES in sequence.
No, it's capable of reasoning, but it gained its knowledge of how the world works through analyzing things that were written or drawn by (mostly) humans.