Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

My outlook on copyright infringement litigation for music, especially samples in music, is that it has gone way overboard for decades, so I hope new technology does not mean it will start to ramp up further. I get the sense that people coming up today, possibly inspired by the AI discourse, have a much more welcoming attitude towards suing musicians for this stuff, but hopefully I'm wrong.

I think with actual AI data sets, lawsuits are going to be much more difficult for individuals since there isn't any way to use something generated through AI to identify what specific items were in the model and which ones helped determine the thing that was generated.

As much as I don't love the practice, it's hard for me to see how you could draw a legal distinction between training an AI on a bunch of music and the normal process by which a human writes music in part by synthesizing ideas from music they've listened to. If I could write a "Drake-style" song but wasn't impersonating Drake, sampling Drake, or borrowing any specific copyrightable elements in my song, the mere fact that I could ingest and spit back out his style would not make me a copyright infringer. So if AI does the same, I don't see the claim.

I think the "wasn't impersonating Drake" part could end up being more of a sticking point with this tech? but honestly I agree with the general idea here that copyright isn't a very good legal framework for analyzing this stuff (my preference would be more serious consideration of the idea of the commons, but that's fairly idealistic). Still, I also think "let the AI companies do whatever they want" isn't a good approach either; I don't know how much longer these tools will remain free to use

some of the most popular image tools are not free to use right now

it's hard for me to see how you could draw a legal distinction between training an AI on a bunch of music and the normal process by which a human writes music in part by synthesizing ideas from music they've listened to.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to this argument, but since AI can ingest and spit out music at an incredible rate compared to a human, it doesn't feel equivalent. And since this is likely to lead to devaluing human-made music (at least in certain areas, like commercial and soundtrack music) even more than it's already be devalued, maybe not?

ya for instance I think Utopia's "Deface the Music" is fair game and shouldn't have to pay any royalties but if you prompted an AI to write a bunch of "Beatles-like" songs and released the result that should not be kosher

I'm somewhat sympathetic to this argument, but since AI can ingest and spit out music at an incredible rate compared to a human, it doesn't feel equivalent. And since this is likely to lead to devaluing human-made music (at least in certain areas, like commercial and soundtrack music) even more than it's already be devalued, maybe not?

― Random Restaurateur (Jordan), Monday, June 5, 2023 3:01 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I mean yeah but there's really nothing in the current legal framework to deal with this. And it's also hard to conceive of how you would compensate musicians for it.

which isn't to say people shouldn't try to come up with something, I just don't think any existing royalty type framework is usable

sounds like something for actual legal experts to parse and negotiate

or perhaps a lawyer AI

Yeah, idk how royalties would work, maybe it depends on the size of the training set (ie you get basically nothing if you're part of a massive training set, but you get something if an AI is trying to copy a more narrow set of artists?). I'd gladly take an opt-in structure where the burden is on AI companies to get consent, and get a big ol' fine if they're found to have skipped that bit.

I liked this piece:

wrote about AI turning everyone into 'creators' and the end of endings https://t.co/ZXzPwxu01m pic.twitter.com/T3WRIYrFRf

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) June 6, 2023

Uh oh, Alison Goldfrapp is part of the AI hivemind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYkFBecIGRo

lol

https://venturebeat.com/ai/senators-send-letter-questioning-mark-zuckerberg-over-metas-llama-leak/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/05/chatgpt-hidden-cost-gpu-compute/

article goes all over the place. it’s good to raise the issue that there’s a huge resource cost to these things and a ton of physical devices behind the scenes, but I also read this and thought “great, the completely imaginary nvidia stock market shenanigans are going to be worse now”

article goes all over the place. it’s good to raise the issue that there’s a huge resource cost to these things and a ton of physical devices behind the scenes, but I also read this and thought “great, the completely imaginary nvidia stock market shenanigans are going to be worse now”

― mh, Wednesday, June 7, 2023 6:48 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

It’s also _rapidly_ changing. This is why I’m surprised by NVIDIA’s success. Yes, everyone is buying A100s as fast as they can be built (myself included), but everyone is also actively jumping ship. Google, Meta, and Microsoft already fabricate their own devices that use a fraction of the energy than GPUs.

I also don’t think many people know about advances in optical computing. It’s entirely possible to build _entirely passive_ accelerators. I don’t think we’ll see entirely passive devices ship to consumers but I’d bet anything we’ll see optical-electrical accelerators in popular consumer devices in a few years that use very little energy (and certainly wouldn’t increase existing energy consumption).

I'm skeptical that AI can do anything better than our natural intelligence. We don't understand our intelligence enough. We don't understand the brain enough, our bodies etc.

We don't have to get mired in that question to be excited about what we as centaurs could do

— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) June 7, 2023

I touched one of the machine with 8 A100s in it a couple weeks ago!

NVidia's thrown so much money into marketing and supporting software libraries and frameworks to lock people into their ecosystem and to my understanding, a bunch of things people are doing aren't even necessarily a great fit for the hardware. I've gotten the impression they're doing the best to provide free or incentivized resources up and down the academic and research pipeline to further lock people into CUDA, etc.

I haven't read up on the optical computing field but that sounds promising.

xp oof

Oh, your natural intelligence is as an object rotator? I'm a protein folder. I'm just built different

I’m sure nvidia is going to be developing specialized AI chips going forward, and they have some of the best chip engineers in the world no?

I cursed myself by posting about this because a meeting mere minutes ago devolved into a tangent about all the different companies trying to entice my coworkers on to different compute platforms

but the kicker is the ones specifically pitching themselves not as compute platforms, but as domain-specific solutions

with the caveat that I'm definitely not in the pharmaceutical space, this is the kind of thing nvidia is pitching:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/gpu-cloud/bionemo/

ai is good again for the very first time

...I have just heard of the Knot In My Name campaign.

You know how AI scrapes sites like AO3 for machine training? The idea is to flood AO3 with omegaverse to the point that all AI text generators everywhere will default to fated mates, breeding, and of course knotting.

— KJ Charles (@kj_charles) June 9, 2023

I dont understand a word of that, EILI5?

I think they want to poison AI with erotic fanfic.

ChatGPT giving you all the details of the Hogwarts 20th Reunion gangbang and barbecue

I feel like another internet exists that I've no clue about, I swear.

it does, you are not wrong

I don't really read fanfic but I do like to read *about* fanfic - it's a fascinating subculture with even more fascinating and often hilarious sub-subcultures.

* AO3 is Archive Of Our Own, which is currently the most popular site to post/read fanfic.

* The omegaverse is a type of fanfic based on the concept of alphas, betas and omegas. It's an animalistic sex thing, where your characters have heat cycles and have to mate according to dominance hierarchies and biological compulsion. Honestly, I find the whole thing pretty icky but it is very popular.

I could extrapolate what the specific acts are from my basic knowledge, but I don't actually know for sure so those things shall have to remain mysterious.

I’ve read fic on and off since my teens and omegaverse is just really disgusting to me. It’s popular but also wildly disputed. Like a lot of terrible fic trends, I think it originated from the Supernatural fandom.

Ohhh, ha, I was wondering if it maybe came from Twilight fandom and werewolves. I did read about someone trying to claim ownership of it and suing other omegaverse authors, but I couldn't remember what fandom she was part of (and she almost certainly wasn't the inventor of it anyway).

oops

https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-courts-e15023d7e6fdf4f099aa122437dbb59b

The omegaverse is a type of fanfic based on the concept of alphas, betas and omegas. It's an animalistic sex thing, where your characters have heat cycles and have to mate according to dominance hierarchies and biological compulsion. Honestly, I find the whole thing pretty icky but it is very popular.

They have to? So strange.

In any case it is impossible to screw up chat gpt by training it on weird and misleading content. In order for it to work at all it has to have absorbed a dizzying amount of content. Anything you throw at it will just be a blip that it ignores.

Airborne for The #AISummit #London.🇹🇼🇬🇧

Catching up on email in airplane mode is a breeze.✈️

Blessings for the amazing work of @ggerganov on state-of-the-art open models running via laptop.🙏

Let’s #FreeTheFuture🖖 — together! pic.twitter.com/QTB0rcUvcW

— Audrey Tang 唐鳳 (@audreyt) June 11, 2023

this strikes me as one version of the future — taiwan's inimitable and extraordinary Audrey Tang (Minister of Digital Affairs - also a poet) running what looks like a perpetual & personalized AI assistant, which can compose emails for them according to a bunch of precedents. Tang releases public transcripts of almost all their official talks (and even sit-down meetings i think), so presumably their AI is loaded with tons of data.

I wish I could unlearn what omegaverse is but I am utterly unsurprised it comes from Supernatural fanfic.

i got interesting in online publishing platforms a few months ago and came across this website with a whole suite of tools and a quite fleshed out system for monetizing, all very professionally done and i was like huh, never heard of this, looks like a really engaged community and.... it was literally thousands of omegaverse short stories and novels. with a handful of 'i fell in love with my bully' YA serializations. this is the future of fiction, people

interestED

if you want a vision of the future, imagine an ai writing omegaverse fics on a human device- forever

i expect fully a half of those authors are using at least partially ai-generated copy

I've been occasionally trying to devise creative ways to test "Is this think 'thinking' in some sense or is it just spitting out text?"

My latest idea was to see what happens if I ask GPT to start a conversation and then plug the prompt into Bard, then plug Bard's response back into GPT, and so on. It started off ok - I asked GPT to start a conversation, and it responded "Absolutely! Here's a conversation starter: "What is one book that significantly impacted your life, and how did it change your perspective?"

Bard gave me a relatively long and sophisticated (if insipid) response about The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I plugged that back into GPT, and it in turn responded in a relatively sophisticated (but again insipid) way, and this continued back and forth for a handful of exchanges. Eventually, things started to crack slightly though.

First, Bard asked GPT: "I would love to hear about your own writing journey and learn from your experiences."

GPT then responded with one of its stock "As an AI language model..." type responses, followed by what was pretty clearly a conversation ender:

As an AI developed by OpenAI, I don't have personal experiences or a writing journey of my own. However, I'm here to provide insights based on a vast range of data I've been trained on.

If you have any other questions about writing, need suggestions for more writing resources, or want feedback on certain writing-related topics, feel free to ask! I'm here to help. Keep nurturing your passion for writing, and remember that every word you write brings you one step closer to becoming the writer you aspire to be. I wish you all the best in your writing endeavors!

Bard did not seem to pick up on any of this, and also began referring, confusingly, to its interlocutor as "Bard."

Following that, the conversation devolved into a tennis match of long goodbyes, each basically just restating the same platitudes in different words. I played out this exchange a bunch of times just to see if either AI would ever change its response, and it seems the answer is no, it just gets stuck in this endless feedback loop of empty positivity.

If either GPT or Bard were "thinking" in any meta sense, rather than just generating prompt responses, it seems unlikely that this would happen. This made me pretty skeptical of these "emergent abilities" and "sparks of AGI" claims.

Entire conversation here:

https://chat.openai.com/share/0f1f55fc-25ae-44e9-b53f-fec544d0e001

lol, excellent work

ChatGPT has no thoughts. It only has responses to stimulus. These responses just happen to mirror the kind of responses made by thinking creatures capable of expressing thoughts in language. If it were placed in charge of controlling the behavior of some living thing that thing would die very rapidly.

I follow a bunch of cool house/architecture accounts on Instagram and it’s tiresome how Midjourney “concept” buildings have taken over the suggested page.

I asked Bard to generate some crossword puzzle clues, and it was all stuff like:

Small furry animal (7) Cat
A room in the house (4) Kitchen

...I thought it was strange that it didn't understand that the number in brackets should correspond to the number of letters in the answer, but then I realized it doesn't _understand_ anything...

i have a jeopardy clue-a-day calendar and i have been playing against chatgpt for a few weeks. i think it has gotten every clue correctly so far, but whenever we get to final jeopardy it wagers the same number (2000) and i end up winning because it wagers incorrectly.

do we have an AI art thread? anyway

AI-generated QR codes using ControlNet are insane.

This is going to be increasingly common in ads in the near future.

These examples blew my mind (try scanning them):

1. Ancient Village pic.twitter.com/on2S6SrOUD

— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) June 11, 2023

nice idea but pretty flaky, some of them didn't work at all. also lol @ man alive's two idiots in a room. The future is bright, and I have no doubt you'll achieve your dreams. Happy writing!

Digital use of QR codes is a rare case, right? If you're already looking at a web page, use a URL. Where I see QR codes actually used in the wild, is embossed in tables / printed on paper for menus and the like, and you want big blocks for that, those things degrade.

there are a lot of public spaces where you may have a screen that displays a QR code, or a device that has limited input options (Apple TV, other streaming boxes) where a code's shown on screen that you scan with your phone in order to log into an app, etc