[hyperion2010]

> This is why I introduced the concept at the beginning of royalties for AI work. Ultimately AI is not an alien brain generating texts or images from its own imagination. Neural networks and large language learning models input real people’s intellectual property and output that intellectual property when prompted by someone using the program. The novelness of the output is merely how the IP is reformatted to fit the parameters of the user’s prompts.

The crux of the argument is this paragraph. But swap out AI in that paragraph for "writers who have read the classical western canon" and suddenly you realize that no one has original ideas, and that the idea that somehow humans are uniquely capable of being the primary causes of their own thoughts and owe transitive credit (and royalties!) to the great authors of all time, or their estates, is madness.

The threat is the even further enclosure of the commons and the expropriation of culture by corporate interests who actively seek to destroy common culture by preventing the very people whose participation in a now privatized "culture" enables corporate profits, from ever earning a cent because they do not "own" the "IP" to the characters that they love and that are only common because they are a shared element of a common culture. It is absurd. If media corporations had to compensate whenever someone mentioned a trade marked character because it counted as advertising then let them keep their "culture" private. Until then, they are the beneficiaries of billions of dollars of stolen advertising and stolen culture.

[lapcat]

> The crux of the argument is this paragraph. But swap out AI in that paragraph for "writers who have read the classical western canon" and suddenly you realize that no one has original ideas, and that the idea that somehow humans are uniquely capable of being the primary causes of their own thoughts and owe transitive credit (and royalties!) to the great authors of all time, or their estates, is madness.

I disagree. As a cinephile and bibliophile, I'm often astounded by the creativity of writers. I don't know where they get their inspiration. Sadly, I don't possess such creative inspiration myself, despite having read "the classical western canon". Much of the great work is actually autobiographical, taken from the writer's own life rather than derivative from previous work.

[ben_w]

I would argue that autobiographical content is no less derivative than reading a book or watching a film, then retelling it. Any creativity is in the difference, and only the difference.

[lapcat]

> Any creativity is in the difference, and only the difference.

I eagerly await your autobiographical film or novel.

[ben_w]

"I had a fairly standard upbringing.

Learned to read from the Commodore 64 user manual, Spock and Wesley Crusher as a role models. Summer holidays in Mousehole, first trip abroad was to meet my Uncle in Canberra, amongst other parts of Australia and Asia, where I totally failed to see Uluru or get beaten up by a kangaroo (though in fairness I was like nine and would have been mild and gross irresponsibility respectively on the part of my parents if they had in fact happened). Raised Catholic by an atheist father and a mother who filled the house with Hindu idols, Orthodox icons, healing crystals, and runic horoscope equipment. Saw my father suffer an epileptic fit at the kitchen table — what's now called 'tonic-clonic' but at the time we called it 'grand mal'.

You know, the usual."

(Can you guess what, if anything, is embellished?)

[lapcat]

Um... I think you're missing the point? Almost anyone could create autobiographical material that sucks. I'm sure LLMs could cobble together autobiographical material from sources that sucks too.

Truly creative writers are capable of producing material that's good, entertaining, interesting, moving. That's a rare talent, and it's not derivative.

[ben_w]

> I think you're missing the point

Ok, but nothing in your comment helps me change my mind about what you original point was, as that still looks like you asking "where do they get their inspiration? Autobiographical experience!" and me saying "being inspired by reality isn't any less copying than being inspired by existing canon".

> Truly creative writers are capable of producing material that's good, entertaining, interesting, moving. That's a rare talent, and it's not derivative.

I think we must be using the word "derivative" differently.

To me, Strata by Terry Pratchett is clearly derivative of Ringworld by Larry Niven. I'd say it's not just good, entertaining, interesting, but also that it's superior to the original… and yet, still derivative.

From what I've seen from ChatGPT-3.5, it… writes fiction like someone born in 1950 who was always disgusted by sex and violence and who now has mild Alzheimer's and gets confused what they're supposed to be writing about — that it's as good as it is, is of course miraculous, but even in this state it can be put in front of an editor and turned into something fun far faster than getting a really good human to do it nearly right the first time.

(Some people don't realise it's absolutely bad enough to need an editor, just search for reviews containing the string "As a large language model" for examples).

As an example of getting it right (IMO), the following link was mostly generated by AI, minimal editing by me for formatting, repeated prompting and plenty of cherry picking to make sure it kept to the fictional reality and didn't start veering into "this hypothetical creature" or "look what nonsense ye olde people used to believe in":

https://benwheatley.github.io/Fiction/Homo%20Capra/Homo_Capr...

-

Less important, but

> I'm sure LLMs could cobble together autobiographical material from sources that sucks too.

That would be a biography not an autobiography. And AI writing in general will remain so until some AI gets a long term memory and also embodied… although it might be the long term memories are autobiographical "writing" created as we sleep from our waking memories.

[jack_pp]

Yeah, I've listened to tens of thousands of hours of music, especially Hip-Hop. Couldn't rhyme to save my life

[SenAnder]

To expound on your point, corporations will be able to use AI - giant conglomerates such as Disney, that own enough media to train AI models on only works they own copyright on (and own enough senators to make sure those copyrights last), will happily use AI.

But you, peasant, can only train it on century+ old works. Because "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", nothing post-WWII may become public domain, or artists will starve and culture wither.

[harshreality]

For a longer form version of this argument, Cybergem's "AI vs Blood Mouse": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pIVVpoz5zk

[YeGoblynQueenne]

If nobody has original ideas then where did the "classical western canon" come from? And what about all those people in the Far East, who never read Homer? Where did the Romance of the Three Kingdoms come from?

I don't understand how we got to this point, where a machine trained to reproduce the results of human creativity is taken as evidence that there exists no such thing as human creativity. What are we training LLMs with, if not the results of human creativity?

I think maybe that's all the result of growing up in an era were there is so much repetitive, trope-filled entertainment that people assume nobody could ever create an original work of art that wasn't just a stitching together of other peoples' ideas. But that doesn't make sense for the same reason I give above: those ideas must have been original at some point.