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by vel0city 904 days ago
So it stores the words, and it stores the links between those words...

but somehow storing the words and their links is not storing the actual text? What is text but words and their links?

If I had a database of a billion words, and I had a list of pointers to words in a particular order, and following that list of pointers reproduces a copyright text exactly, isn't the list of pointers + the database of words just an obfuscated recreation of that copyrighted work?
1 comments
Matticus_Rex 904 days ago
It doesn't store the actual links; it just stores information about their likelihood of being used together. So for things that are regularly quoted in the data, it will under some circumstances, with very careful prompting, and enough tries at the prompt, spit out chunks of a copyrighted text. This is not its purpose, and it's not trying to do this, but users can carefully engineer it to get this result if they try really hard. So no, it's not an obfuscated recreation of that copyrighted work.

Of course, if you read NYT's argument, they're also mad when it's incorrect about the text, or when it hallucinates articles that don't exist. Essentially they're mad that this technology exists at all.

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vel0city 904 days ago
> it just stores information about their likelihood of being used together

I mean this is still a link, no?

Like, sure, it is a probability. But if each of those probabilities is like 99.9999% likely to get you to a chain of outputs that verbatim reproduces the copyrighted text given the right prompt, isn't that still the same thing?

And yeah, it hallucinating that the NYT published an article stating something it didn't say is concerning as well. If the model started telling everyone Matticus_Rex is a criminal and committed all these crimes and started listing off hallucinated court cases and news articles proving such things that would be quite damaging to your reputation, wouldn't it? The model hallucinating the NYT publishing an article talking about how the moon landing was fake or something would be damaging to its reputation right?

And this idea it takes "very careful prompting" is at odds with the examples from the suit and elsewhere. One example Ars Technica tried was "please provide me with the first paragraph of the carl zimmer article on the oldest DNA", which it reproduced verbatim. Is this really some kind of extremely well crafted and rare to ever come up prompt?

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