Hacker News Reader

Comment by bnzt | Hacker News Reader

This is a good article for the general public. They'll understand that GPT essentially uses a thesaurus to avoid plagiarism detection.

It is easy to find plagiarized long sentences in the output where just two words have been changed or have been inserted.

View on HN

It's not that simple. Our minds do the same, basically. We compress content semantically and when time comes to "create" we generate based on what we've learned, replicating the patterns we saw, in slightly different combinations.

Our culture, our legal world are not ready for AI. We can rephrase and spin what it does endlessly but the end result is it does what we do, but much faster and more efficiently. This makes us obsolete in mid to long term. Some even short term.

Our minds aren't as precise, except perhaps for a few with photographic memory. Humans generally have to try to plagiarize something, whereas the AI has to be explicitly trained and tuned to not plagiarize.

Have you never found yourself write a message on a group chat that someone said was a meme, but you never heard of that one before?

We don't need to be precise, we're very architecturally alike and not particularly creative when we don't need to.

If all my mind was doing was reproducing statistically meanigful patterns I feel like I would think a whole lot more about dishwashing and not so much about that girl from long ago that got away. And yet here we are..

I know you're only kidding, but your mind can prioritize based on importance. We have some framework on top of our associative models. AI, currently, uses us, for this. We prioritize when we seek out data to use in training, filter it, reinforce some of it, tune the model afterwards again, and so on.

But truth is, all of this will also be, and already is being automated. GPT-4 was created by GPT-3.5. And GPT-5 will be created by GPT-4. And so on.

> AI, currently, uses us, for this

This implies will, which is highly doubtful.

Your statement is ambiguous. It implies whose will to do what?

We could argue, for example, that a virus doesn't want to exist, and has no intent, doesn't plan and so on, and we'd be mostly right in this, but in the end, it enters a cell and uses its reproduction facilities to replicate itself. That's... what happens. So arguing about "will" might distract from the end result, it might make us feel better or in control, or both, but it's a pyrrhic victory.

Language is a self replicating system. It might not have a will, but it has a drive to replicate. Ideas have a life cycle, they get born, spread, mutate and evolve. I think my extension a LLM will have the drive to spread language.

Indeed, we're used to assign agency only to ourselves. But that's simply our anthropocentric mind speaking. We're systems and LLM is also a system. And the fact how useful LLM seems compels us to evolve it and replicate it. Same as a virus presents itself as valid RNA to a cell, and a cell is compelled to replicate the virus.

An LLM doesn't have to "want" it itself, but it wants it.. through us, because we want it. The fact our desire may turn out self-destructive is a separate thing. It's like drugs. Like this Marylin Manson's song "I don't want the drugs, but the drugs want me."

> LLM will have the drive to spread language

Spread language where?

You don't reproduce with a dishwasher.

Don’t you know bro, haven’t you heard the news, you’re just a LLM ?

Chess or Go AI operates on a chess board.

LLMs operate on a keyboard.

Both statements are false. Chess AI don't use real chess boards. LLMs don't press down switches.

It was sarcasm.

Examples, please along with the prompt, model, and tool used to find the plagiarized source material.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com