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Comment by halpmeh | Hacker News Reader

I think you're committing a yet-unnamed logical fallacy that I see a lot on HN. I'm going to call this "the logical fallacy of uncharitable interpretation." The basic premise is this:

Take an assertion like X implies Y. Unfortunately, due to the imprecision of language, X may have multiple definitions, e.g. D1 and D2, such that D1 implies Y but D2 does not. The fallacy of uncharitable interpretation is to take a definition for X such that the stated premise does not hold, even though there exists another definition where the premise would hold.

In this case, large ML algorithms are commonly called AI. Even the company that made GPT-3 is called OpenAI. Even you, yourself referred to them as "AI researchers." What do "AI researchers" produce if not AI? Finally, "talk" can colloquially mean to use words in an prompt-response pattern.

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I'm not going to downvote you because I think you're respectful and thoughtful, but I want to vociferously disagree. These clickbait blogs know what they're doing. There's been so much contention about what is and isn't artificial intelligence (including the Google weirdo that thought it was sentient earlier this year), that just about anyone semi-educated on the subject knows how GPT and related models work. We know it's smoke and mirrors; we know it's plagiarizing and combining other, third-party, materials half the time.

She's not "having a conversation with her younger self" and this is incredibly disingenuous and misleading, per @mavu's point. More importantly, it doesn't really educate the uneducated or move the technology forward in any meaningful way. It's pure garbage clickbait nonsense. I regret giving them the impression.

"we know it's plagiarizing and combining other, third-party, materials half the time" does not seem like an accurate description of what a model like GPT3 does either, though, since:

1) No explicit content (that could be plagiarized or combined) is actually stored by GPT3: only statistical relationships between tokens are retained. You can't point at a specific subset of weights and say "see... this is where phrase/idea X is stored".

2) GPT3 makes no specific claim to be generating "original, own work" (which would be required for something to be considered "plagiarism")

> No explicit content (that could be plagiarized or combined) is actually stored by GPT3: only statistical relationships between tokens are retained

When people ask GPT-3 to write a rhyming poem, you see plenty of examples of GPT-3 poems starting with "There once was a cat named Pat..." This is an extremely common first line of a limerick, found anywhere from here[1] to here[2]. I'm sure those "statistical relationships" are very strong; is it plagiarism? I'll leave it up to you to decide that, but I'm willing to bet that with enough finagling you can probably get it to spit out phrases from Moby Dick.

[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Selected_Vintage_Poetry...

[2] https://sites.google.com/site/rainydaypoems/poems-submitted-...

> When people ask GPT-3 to write a rhyming poem, you see plenty of examples of GPT-3 poems starting with "There once was a cat named Pat..." This is an extremely common first line of a limerick, found anywhere from here[1] to here[2].

Knowing that a "rhyming poem" is likely to start with a specific token (or set of tokens) does not exactly constitute "plagiarism", the same way that writing a poem that starts with "There once was a cat named Pat..." is not "plagiarism" by itself: it is just adhering to expected convention/norms of a specific literary format or genre.

Is using the basic-ass I-V-VI-IV chord progression in music "plagiarism", since it has been (and is) used by countless other people before?

> I'm sure those "statistical relationships" are very strong; is it plagiarism? I'll leave it up to you to decide that

Well... my claim is that it is clearly not plagiarism (and I gave specific arguments to support my claim). If you are not interested in arguing (which is fine), then I assume you accept that your characterization of what GPT3 does as being "plagiarism" is (at the very least) overly simplistic (i.e., just as simplistic as claiming that GPT-3 is sentient or actually intelligent).

> but I'm willing to bet that with enough finagling you can probably get it to spit out phrases from Moby Dick.

If GPT-3 (or most humans, for that matter) are asked to complete the phrase "To be or not to..." and decide that the word "be" is the most likely/reasonable completion, does it mean that GPT-3 (or any human, for that matter) is "plagiarizing" Shakespeare? Or does it simply mean that they are trying to address your question/problem to the best of their capabilities (and that they probably have read a passage or two of Shakespeare before, or someone paraphrasing Shakespeare)? In other words, just because you can force GPT-3 to output a specific copyrighted work (or an excerpt of it) still doesn't mean that what GPT-3 is doing should be characterized as "plagiarism".

Again, for something to technically count as "plagiarism", it is required that someone (i.e., not a computer program) try to pass off (incorrectly) something as original, own work, which does not seem to be the case here. That was my main point.

EDIT: if you want to be derisive of things like GPT-3, while still being accurate, it makes more sense to say things like "it is simply imitating" or "has no actual creativity" (which seem defensible to me) than things like "it is literally plagiarizing and copying what it saw before" (which seems much less defensible/accurate).

> Is using the basic-ass I-V-VI-IV chord progression in music "plagiarism", since it has been (and is) used by countless other people before?

This is not at all what's happening here. Complete red herring.

> If GPT-3 (or most humans, for that matter) are asked to complete the phrase "To be or not to..." and decide that the word "be" is the most likely/reasonable completion, does it mean that GPT-3 (or any human, for that matter) is "plagiarizing" Shakespeare?

The short answer is yes (imho), but let me put it this way: does GPT-3 know that when it's regurgitating "to be or not to be" it's actually regurgitating Shakespeare? My argument is that no, it does not know, precisely because it thinks this just happens to be a very strong statistical correlation of stringing words together. When, in fact, it's a very famous phrase by a very famous person. So, in a way, it's "accidentally" plagiarizing, but plagiarizing nonetheless. Like if, for whatever reason, I had heard the phrase "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times" somewhere, but couldn't remember where, my ignorance doesn't preclude me from technically plagiarizing Charles Dickens if I blatantly reused the phrase without attribution.

> things like "it is literally plagiarizing and copying what it saw before" (which seems much less defensible/accurate).

This is literally what it's doing, though, under the guise of "statistical correlation." In fact, I've read reports of people using GPT-3-adjacent models that needed to add specific filtering out of training data.

> Plagiarism is the *fraudulent representation* of another person's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions *as one's own original work*.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism

The same way that you disagree when someone stretches the meaning of the work "talk" to encompass what GPT-3 does, I also disagree when you try to stretch the meaning of the word "plagiarism" to encompass what GPT-3 does (and I've explained exactly why: GPT-3 generates sequences of tokens, but makes no specific claim about the originality of the generated sequences of tokens).

We can agree to disagree, if you can't accept that "plagiarism" literally involves more than just "copyright infringement" or "replicating someone else's work from statistical correlations" or anything along those lines: it must also involve fraud or some other form of misrepresentation.

Either way, have a nice day.

Agreed, the glut of AI text generation programs all capitalize on the misrepresentation of what they do because "AI" holds different meanings in academic and social spheres. And it's better to have a sci-fi marketing hook.

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