I would love to hear your opinion on something I keep thinking about. There’s the whole idea that these LLMs are training on “available” data all over the internet, and then anyone can use the LLM and create something that could resemble the work of someone else. Then there’s the people calling it theft (in my opinion wrong from any possible angle of consideration) and those calling it fair use (I kinda lean more on this side). But then we have the side of compensation for authors and such, which would be great if some form for it would be found. Any one person can learn about the style of an author and imitate it without really copying the same piece of art. That person cannot be sued for stealing “style”, and it feels like the LLM is basically in the same area of creating content. And authors have never been compensated for someone imitating them.
So… What would make the case of LLMs different? What are good points against it that don’t end up falling into the “stealing content” discussion? How to guarantee authors are compensated for their works? How can we guarantee that a company doesn’t order a book (or a reading with your voice in the case of voice actors, or pictures and drawings, …) and then reproduces the same content without you not having to pay you? How can we differentiate between a synthetic voice trained with thousand of voices but not the voice of person A but creates a voice similar to that of A against the case of a company “stealing” the voice of A directly? I feel there’s a lot of nuances here and don’t know what or how to cover all of it easily and most discussion I read are just “steal vs fair use” only.
Can this only end properly with a full reform of copyright? It’s not like authors are nowadays very well protected either. Publishers basically take their creation to be used and abused without the author having any say in it (like in the case of spot if unpublished a artists relationship and payment agreements).
Well damn, thank you so much for the answer. That has gone well and beyond what I’d have called a great answer.
First of all I just wanted to acknowledge the time you put into it, I just read it and in order to make a meaningful answer for discussion I probably need to read your comment a couple more times, and consider my own perspective on those topics, and also study a few drops of information you gave where sincerely you lost me :D (being a neutral monist, and about Searle and such, I need to study a bit that area). So, I want to give an adequate response to you as well and I’ll need some time for that, but before anything, thanks for the conversation, I didn’t want to wait to say that later on.
Also, worth mentioning that you did hit the nail in the head when you summed up all my rambling into a coherent one question/topic. I keep debating myself about how I can support creators while also appreciating the usefulness of a tool such as LLMs that can help me create things myself that I couldn’t before. There has to be a balance somewhere there… (Fellow programmer brain here trying to solve things like if you are debugging software, no doubt the wrong perspective for such a complex context).
UBI is definitely a goal to be achieved that could help in many ways, just like a huge reform of copyright would also be necessary to remove all the predators that are already abusing creators by taking their legal rights on the content created.
The point you make of anthropomorphizing LLMs is absolutely a key point, in fact I avoid all I can mentioning AI because I believe it muddles the waters so much more than it should (but it’s a great way of selling the software). For me it goes the other way actually and I wonder how different we are from an LLM (oversimplifying much…) in the methods we apply to create something and where’s the line of being creative vs depending on previous things experienced and basing our creation in previous things.
Anyway, that starts getting a bit too philosophical, which can be fun but less practical. Respecting your other comment, I do indeed follow Doctorow, it’s fascinating how much he writes, and how clear he can expose ideas. It’s tough to catch up with him at times with so much content. I also got his books in the last humble bundle, so happy to buy books without DRM… I’ll try to think a bit more these days on these topics and see what I can come up with. I don’t want to continue rambling like a madman without setting some order to my own thoughts first. Anyway, thanks for the interesting conversation.