I really fear for the internet and what it will become in even just another year, with the rise of AI writing and AI art being used in place of real people. And now OpenAI openly state they need to use copyrighted works for training material.
As reported by The Guardian, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringement and just recently OpenAI sent a submission to the UK House of Lords Communications and Digital Select Committee where OpenAI said pretty clearly:
Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression– including blog posts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents–it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials. Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.
Worth noting OpenAI put up their own news post "OpenAI and journalism" on January 8th.
Why am I writing about this here? Well, the reasoning is pretty simple. AI writing is (on top of other things) increasing the race to the bottom of content for clicks. Search engines have quickly become a mess to find what you actually want, and it's only going to continue getting far worse thanks to all these SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) bait content farms, with more popping up all the time, and we've already seen some bigger websites trial AI writing. The internet is a mess.
As time goes on, and as more people use AI to pinch content and write entire articles, we're going to hand off profitable writing to a select few big names only who can weather the storm and handle it. A lot of smaller scale websites are just going to die off. Any time you search for something, it will be those big names sprinkled in between the vast AI website farms all with very similar robotic plain writing styles.
Many (most?) websites make content for search engines, not for people. The Verge recently did a rather fascinating piece on this showing how websites are designed around Google, and it really is something worth scrolling through and reading.
One thing you can count on: my perfectly imperfect writing full of terrible grammar continuing without the use of AI. At least it's natural right? I write as I speak, for better or worse. By humans, for humans — a tagline I plan to stick with until AI truly takes over and I have to go find a job flipping burgers or something. But then again, there will be robots for that too. I think I need to learn how to fish…
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
if they dont care about copyright from thirdy parties they shouldnt care if an employee leak their training data and/or code.
No AI was used for the generation of this post
BlackBloodRum Jan 9
Quoteand I have to go find a job flipping burgers or something.Come on now, you're a techie! That means you probably have some qualifications or at least some background in some technical field such as development or systems management or other things like that.
So no worries! Besides, we don't need you meatbags flipping our burgers in the future, we have AI robots for that which can do a much better and more efficient job of it.
Please don't say that you need a free pass to steal so that progress can happen, that's been proven multiple times in the past to actually mean "progress for the few, suppression for the many". Let's not have another dark ages again? OK?
On a lighter note, Liam, all those humanisms of yours only prove your authenticity
QuoteLimiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.Maybe they should've thought about that before they messed up the copyright system to cover things for a hundred-odd years at a time? Just a thought.
QuoteI think I need to learn how to fish…Alas, it's not as easy as it is in Stardew Valley.
genAI waffle is milquetoast boring to read, it's usually wrong in some meaningful way and doesn't add any insights (how could it?). I don't want to read paraphrased press releases or transcriptions of marketing videos. I don't have time for that shit.
No this type of AI should be much better suited to parse through boring data (like say every single medical study every done) and work as expert systems (like a glorified google for doctors to try their patients symptoms against all known knowledge) and things like this.
junibegood Jan 9
After all, AIs are just doing on a way much larger scale what humans have already been doing for millennia : any creative work is inspired (consciously or not) by many other works that preceded it. If the border between inspiration and plagiarism is so difficult to define, it may be because it does not make much sense to create one. If AIs can help the world understand that and promote other ways to generate money from creative work, it could be for the better.
Quotenot provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.
Thankfully not, if the "needs of today's citizens" is having no skills at all and telling AI to write anything, including a crime novel or a PhD thesis, or draw anything including a photorealistic compromising image of the girl next door who isn't interested in you and whose life you want to ruin and have it spat out in seconds.
Last edited by damarrin on 9 January 2024 at 3:32 pm UTC
NathanaelKStottlemyer Jan 9
I'm a fiction writer who started to do some work with a few open source games, and usually I can tell if something is AI generated. Always, the AI is really, really bad. I'll save the technicalities, but basically the fact is that most website articles that AI scrapes are written by people who get paid per word and so just spew empty words, along with many many websites where people don't know the first thing about writing, and as it is said Garbage in Garbage out.
It's a sad joke that people say AI is the future when the feature is a devolution of writing. Liam, you are a good writer. I knew when you rejected the article I tried to submit. Everything that you said was bad, was bad, and once you showed it to me, it was obvious.
Using AI to generate text is wrong, not only because you're stealing people's work. (Yes I do think it's stealing and all the code by GitHub Copilot should be GPL) But because it's really lazy, it's not hard to write anybody can do it, and it's the pinnacle of laziness to sit back and let the AI generate what you could write easily in a few minutes.
P.S. According to LanguageTool, three commas were needed in the article. You could correct them, but frankly I didn't notice
Last edited by NathanaelKStottlemyer on 9 January 2024 at 7:18 pm UTC
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