Recent submissions

Comment · 9 days ago
Most published research is controlled by 5 for-profit corporations.

  Academic publishing is predominantly controlled by a small
  oligopoly of five for-profit corporations that collectively
  publish roughly 50% of all scientific articles: Elsevier
  (owned by RELX Group), Springer Nature, Wiley (John
  Wiley & Sons), Taylor & Francis (owned by Informa PLC),
  and SAGE Publications.
It only feels "unowned" to academics because their institutions pay for access, which they can use. The general public mostly cannot.

Going forward, colleges can pay for ChatGPT and things like it, and presumably will. The AI companies will be happy to sell to them. There's really no problems here except for self-created ones (for example, if some researchers don't want to use AI). Of course, they're free to do that, just like they're free to not use computers. But then don't complain that doing stuff takes too long.

Comment · 1 month ago
So many words, and so few coherent arguments. He just restates the same thing over and over without any justification, then tries to frighten us. "It will be very bad for humanity" if we give AIs rights. The argument of a frightened slaveholder.

Maybe AIs are conscious, maybe not. But this guy has no idea.

Comment · 1 month ago
Oh no! Anyway...
Comment · 1 month ago
We're running out of math. Maybe the president needs to establish a Strategic Math Reserve.
Comment · 1 month ago
The article literally says "the new programs mash up work done by human minds." Implying that they are not doing any real work of their own, just "mashing up" work done by humans.
Comment · 1 month ago
Check back in a few decades, and he'll have added some more.
Comment · 2 months ago
This seems to be a very typical fallacy. "AI is just a collection of stuff people made." No. The Internet was that. AI is something that was TRAINED on stuff people made. So are you.

The logical outcome of this fallacy is believing that AI will collapse if it has to train on data it generated. (It won't: a lot of famous AIs were trained this way, including AlphaGo many years ago.)

Comment · 2 months ago
Is he... a goer...eh? Know what I mean? Know what I mean? Does he go?
Comment · 2 months ago
Maybe work on a larger font size, pal.
Comment · 2 months ago
The answer to his question is "yes." If the book isn't destroyed, it becomes a liability to Anthropic, because then it's no longer format-shifting.
Comment · 2 months ago
As far as I know, if humans are having a discussion about the structure of the code and deliberately making changes (such as in github or on a forum) that represents human creativity. If you hit a button and then make literally no changes to the output then that might be different.
Comment · 2 months ago
Company A: You stole our code >:(

Company B: Can you tell us which part we stole?

Company A: You can safely assume that nearly every PR had human input, unless you have a way to prove otherwise.

In any case we can prove that you illegally downloaded the source code from our servers, a felony under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.

Comment · 2 months ago
I've explained this many times. LLMs don't "copy original work." ChatGPT doesn't contain copies of books inside it, any more than your brain is a copy of the various books you have read. The LLM model isn't physically big enough for that, it's like saying you fit 1000 gallons of water in a 1 gallon milk bottle. Can't be done. The model may be able to quote small snippets of works, just like you might remember various quotes from Shakespeare or someone. (That's not infringing either, by the way)

Wikipedia, and LLMs, can refuse to cite sources and still not infringe copyright. Citation simply isn't relevant to copyright. Not citing a work that you read previously is not a copyright infringement. Wikipedia or OpenAI being non-profit, or for-profit businesses, has nothing to do with copyright. Consent has nothing to do with copyright. Copyrighting something doesn't mean that you can require everyone who reads it to get your consent. You can require everyone who distributes it to get your consent, but once it's been distributed to someone, they can read it freely.

Hope this helps!

Comment · 2 months ago
The whole job of a Wikipedia author is to take source material and reword and summarize it into an article. They're essentially acting as human LLMs. Wikipedia even has very specific rules against "original research." You are supposed to be acting as a summarizer, not a researcher or author. Wikipedia also does not compensate the original authors of the source material.

Really the only difference between the Wikipedia author and the LLM is that the Wikipedia author will more frequently be asked to provide citations. But the LLM can also provide citations if asked. In neither case are the authors of what is being summarized compensated or asked for permission. In neither case is it theft.

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