Shinycroak

My latest smartphone update came with an easy-access chatbot button that was hard to disable; I doubt most users will bother, let alone figure out how. There is, I think, a risk of creating cognitive disabilities by providing too-easy access to chatbots, the way one can develop a physical disability by persistent restrictions of motion. To some extent, all cognitive-enhancing technologies do this; people who write don't develop oral and memory skills; people who use calculators don't learn paper and pencil computational skills, people who grow up with photography don't learn to draw. But unlike writing, calculators, and so on, chatbots are not aids to cognition but replacements for it—and a replacement that is controlled by someone else. If a child writes, there are still writing words and ideas that have at least passed through the child's mind; chatbots entirely bypass this, inserting ideas from an external source; routine chatbot use interferes with thought. There i...

If, say, I broadcast a short story on the radio, I have to license the original work. If I print a book, I have to have a license to do so. If I publish a thinly-veiled rewrite of a book without a license, that is copyright infringement. And so on and on. It ought to be copyright infringement to do that with a large language model (LLM) or, for visual art, a stable diffusion model (SDM.) LLMs and SDMs do not exist, do not operate at all, without a body of work to built the models from. Without that training data those models do not exist at all. Therefore the developer of an LLM, SDM, or any other future generative machine learning technology, ought to be required to license any work used for developing that model.

Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, is a major investor in a firm called Helion (unlocked Bloomberg article), which claims it will be producing electricity from nuclear fusion by 2028. This is the second version of this article; physicist Stefan Urbat wrote to inform me that after 60 years there has been progress in dealing with second-order instabilities.

Why ChatGPT? Why Stable Diffusion? They are destructive in so many ways, expensive to operate, and are probably ultimately going to fail, polluting the information environment for years. They don’t even make good money. So, why?

“Artificial intelligence” researchers mean by the phrase “general intelligence” two things. One is simply a machine learning system that can, like humans, use its knowledge for many different tasks. This is not something that has currently been built; language models produce language, stable diffusion models produce images, and neither seem to have any concepts of the underlying realities these words and images reflect. The second is the “general intelligence,” g , derived from intelligence tests, which is believed by some to be a unifying reality behind intelligence test scores. In a paper on GPT-4 from Microsoft a Wall Street Journal Editorial by Linda Gottfredson, Mainstream Science on Intelligence is cited as providing a definition of general intelligence. It’s an appalling piece, repeating debunked claims about racial differences in intelligence and claiming as scientific consensus hypotheses that are at best debatable and at worst outright false.

Unfortunately, I do not know the details of the law that bears on this subject. Instead, I offer some general remarks on the technology which I hope will be useful contributions. When a painter creates a work, the brush does not hold the copyright, the painter holds the copyright. It is not different with "artificial intelligence." If a painter copies someone else's style, that's a copyright violation. It doesn't matter what tool the painter uses. If someone uses an AI model to copy an artist's writing or drawing style and publishes the result, if this does not fall under fair use, that's a copyright violation - it doesn't matter what tool is used. Because "artificial intelligence" is such an efficient violator of copyright, because there is no way to identify an AI model's sources, and because it is impossible to delete a work from an AI model it is both appropriate to insist on an opt-in model for works used to train an AI mo...

(I wrote, and then discarded, a reply to Claire Berlinski's articles on AI; she entirely believes in the TESCREAL arguments. On the way, I gathered a few links and I figured I'd record them here.)   AI researcher and science fiction author Vernor Vinge's 1993 essay, Technological Singularity , where the term was first used. For one of his fictional treatments of the subject, see his novel A Deepness in the Sky . “The Singularity: a Panel with Science Fiction Writers Vernor Vinge, Charlie Stross, Alastair Reynolds, and Karl Schroeder,” 2013. Link (video.)  “I believe that the creation of greater-than-human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.” – Vernor Vinge  Seven years to go.