Fear of AI just killed a useful tool

If he says he didn't intend to do that thing, this is still compatible with a later update that he didn't do that thing, but immediately dampens the outrage machine. The reader who knows nothing about either side relaxes -- "No need for me to get worked up, because we won". Conveniently, saying he didn't intend to do the thing is also compatible with a later reveal that he was doing the thing (perhaps for later release, since he wasn't clearly doing the thing here).

Therefore, regardless of whether he was doing what he was accused of doing, this is the lowest energy response, and probably the default unless this was the hill he wanted to defend.

This seems FUDdy. "Intend" isn't in the apology at all, and the wording that is there says clearly that generative AI came after prosecraft, so there's no way the tool could be used for it.

> It's unclear whether he was planning to use the books he scraped

This also seems unwarranted. The tweet about fine-tuning an LLM came 5-6 years after the guy made prosecraft; why suggest they might involve the same dataset?

There are a handful (like < 3 people) who seem to understand what the site actually does who were still angry because the creator seems to have pirated the books. I actually don't know about the legality of something like that. Surely providing pirated books is illegal, but IDK if acquiring pirated books actually is.

I think it's clear though that most of the outrage would still be there even if the author had purchased each and every book.

Going off of some of the tweets about this that initially whipped up the outrage about this…it’s not like they were making a nuanced case about their concerns, they were basically just stomping their feet and shouting.

If it's fair use, why should you have to do that? The same copyright law protecting author's ownership rights over their art also provide "fair use" to other people. Someone may disagree with current fair use laws (and I suspect many outraged here do not), but that's a broader issue not related to this particular tool. It just 100% seems like misdirected AI outrage.

> the text of the works scanned seems like it may be from pirated sources.

Do you have a source for this? I didn't see that mentioned in the article.

"This kind of thing" is factual information about the book, such as page or word count, ly-adverb count, etc. Small snippets, something permissible under copyright law today, that were heavily editorialized and commented on were displayed.

To suggest that counting words and pages is something that should not be allowed is silly.

> The article itself is clueless…

Says the person making stuff up to force a narrative.

The person doing this had the rights to do this, and was very clearly within his rights to do this under copyright law. Counting words is not a crime.

The authors quotes speak for themselves. They very clearly and ignorantly claimed that this was an "AI training project" when it was nothing of the sort.

Perhaps there is an argument for generative AI possibly superseding the original, in that people might start asking an AI to generate them stories "in the style of x" instead of buying the author's books, but this wasn't that. It was just some fun data analysis of books.

If you are saying it should be opt-in only for the pages analyzing specific books, like the instigator of this outrage screen-shotted, well that seems to fall squarely into the critical analysis bucket, so that is also quite ridiculous.

I understand some folks being unhappy that a portion of the works were pirated, but it seems like most of the outraged would be outraged even if he personally purchased each and every ebook.

Also, if you read through the Twitter thread a lot of the authors (not 100%, but a LOT) are doing a really great job portraying themselves as "stoopid AI-fearful luddites". Many of them think the site is somehow like ChatGPT and they don't bother to dig any deeper, or really at all.

https://twitter.com/scumbelievable/status/168915466478730444...

So the two authors who are gloating about "killed that stupid fuckin AI thing" - I'm supposed to be engaged with their concerns ? Please.

When you publish a book you “consent” to the fact that people are going to take it apart, talk about it, review it, quote from it, and yes run statistics on it. If an author doesn’t want that to happen then they shouldn’t publish a book. Just keep it private, only distribute it to people you trust after they sign an NDA.

As far as anyone knows, no piracy has occurred. In the US you are allowed to scan books, index them, and post excerpts - it’s called Google Books and there was a big case that affirmed that it is legal. Downloading a book from a pirate website for the purpose of indexing by a computer program is not piracy, you have simply outsourced the scanning stage to someone else. It is only an issue if you download from some p2p protocol (such as a torrent) that also uploads and shares the book.

You're pretty much describing exactly what an LLM "learns" about text. I agree that it should obviously fall under fair use, but as the author of this article found out, there are quite a few who (very vocally) disagree.

You shouldn't, at least for posting basic statistics. They're facts, not copyrightable.

1. large powerful players doing something not entirely helpful;

2. victims of that protesting that change vehemently; all that in vain because the players are powerful and have sheltered themselves from criticism, usually via lobbying;

3. regulatory capture or protests go after a smaller player, which is widely advertised to accuse 2. of going too far — even when the problem in 1. is still entirely there, and now ignored.

It’s definitely the case with globalization (large conglomerate benefit, people protest, and a small artisan who started selling abroad is featured being victimized by tariffs), fossil fuel (large oil extractor, climate advocate, farmer seeing fertilizer prize go up), immigration, American cultural hegemony, car dominance over cities, etc.

That pattern allows larger players still doing harm to wash their morals. I feel like we need better antibodies to say: No, this does not absolve them.

Sam Altman, for all his faults, is actually a massive proponent of UBI. I mean, that was one of the claimed objectives of Worldcoin (though he advocates for UBI in general: https://thewalrus.ca/will-universal-basic-income-save-us-fro... )

Interestingly, I think most devs would think twice before being paid for designing a missile. But somehow they don't really seem to think about the impact of work that is not obviously a weapon. Social network, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, SpaceX... everything disruptive has the potential to be very bad (I see a lot more harmful use-cases for ChatGPT than legit ones, but maybe that's just me). But somehow engineers seem to believe that it is not their problem.

All that said, I remember doing basic text analysis in college and then sentiment analysis in my MBA class.. is the concern out there, because of how source material was acquired?

Not an artist myself, but this basic assumption in tech that you can just take somebody's shit without informing them, without permission, without compensation, without basic due diligence, and then go do whatever the hell you want with it needs to stop.

For the artists' sake but also for tech's sake. This model can't work, it's a complete dead-end that will wipe out livelihoods and culture.

But I can ensure you artists can/will be equally hypocritical themselves. Surely they've pirated themselves, removed paywalls from articles, blocked ads, borrowed the neighbor's Netflix account.

I wonder if similar language exists in other copyright systems, but I would imagine it is likely the opposite...

Always feel bad for people who cave to the mob, usually if the mob is yelling at you you’re on the right track

Technology has to be protected from dumb people, or is it worth protecting dumb people from technology....

Not everything can be meaningfully quantified. Not everything needs to be.

This is manufactured, stretched, overhyped objections. I believe it's all as the OP suggests, because the word AI is in there. Not because anything illegal or immoral is going on. In fact it's a terribly useful tool, and once the mob cools off it'll likely return.

Anyone who is with the artists should pass a law. Moral outrage is not law.

If an AI tool was killed, I consider it a victory. That's because even if there are some small useful applications of AI, AI on the whole will certainly put most creatives out of business.

Instead, I propose the following: anyone who is interested in preventing AI from taking over their craft should join me in a coalition of ban AI from their own business. By placing a notice that your work is "100% AI FREE", you are doing something akin to the fair-trade/sustainably sourced sticker on chocolate or other food products: you are letting consumers know that your work was made by a human, so that they can support you.

If enough people get in on this, and pledge to support only those creators who don't use AI, then we can make AI an unprofitable venture and hopefully kill it forever!

I already put a 100% AI FREE badge on my YouTube channel, which means that I will never use AI for writing scripts, editing videos, producing images, etc. Moreover, I also pledge to support other creators who pledge never to use AI, by buying their products over others!

The later creates massive competition to human writers, the former is just an information for potential readers.

https://metametricsinc.com/parents-and-students/lexile-for-p...

The better an LLM can complete your joke the worse it is, for instance. Important to have a good Letterman-MacDonald quotient.

And personally, I think book recommendations are an absolutely underserved market, if I liked a book, having the ability to find more like it would be an absolute godsend for connecting authors with people who would be interested in their works, resulting in much more potential sales for them.

I can't count how many times have I discovered an absolutely great book on Amazon with like 50 reviews accidentally, as well as other, objectively less recommendable books that have nevertheless made an impression on me.

Discovering these books is sort of a hobby of mine, and is the exact kind of activity an LLM would be a great help with.

Going further, if there was an LLM that could be asked for book recommendations for your particular tastes, it could also identify markets for books not yet written, and would give a hint to authors on what sort of books to write to find an audience.

"Needs to stop." OK, you could be right on that one too. I don't think you are, but that's not the point.

Neither of those adds up to "it's currently illegal". (Whether it's actually illegal probably depends on the details of how he did what he did.)

Further, neither of those things adds up to "the howling mob should attack him until he stops". (Even if the "attacks" are purely online.) I am against "attack him with outrage dialed all the way up to 11 without actually understanding what his tool is and does". I am also against giving in to the outrage - it just shows the mob that baseless outrage attacks work.

You think it needs to stop? Fine. Persuade him that it needs to stop, and therefore that he should stop. Convince him - not with a mob screaming in outrage, but with reason.

Usefulness is immaterial here.

Is he allowed to do this? Yes.

What's wrong with presenting a page count and word count, for example?

Isn't it obvious? Bullies always go after easy targets. And nothing is more popular or loathsome than self-righteous causes for bullies.

> Similarly, Google Books is also transformative in the sense that it has transformed book text into data for purposes of substantive research, including data mining and text mining in new areas, thereby opening up new fields of research. Words in books are being used in a way they have not been used before. Google Books has created something new in the use of book text — the frequency of words and trends in their usage provide substantive information.

Furthermore, is this actually AI training? This just looks like stats based on heuristics to me, I.e., garden variety sentiment analysis.

e.g. in the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use factors of fair use are "purpose/character of the work", "nature of the copyrighted work", "amount/substantiality of the copyrighted work", "effect on the market for the copyrighted work".

The website shows a few statistics computed from a book, and a few excerpts from the book.

I'd think a consideration of those fair use factors favours the website: e.g. you're not going to look at those statistics/excerpts instead of reading the book. The website only shows a small portion of the book. The website's intention is to be educational.

There's a notion, which seems to have taken off among creators who are paranoid about AI eating their livelihoods (which it might eat a chunk of) that copyright prevents people from doing anything with works they [legally] acquired other than personally read, listen, or watch it.

That's not how copyright, as it has existed in the past, works. You can do all the algorithmic processing of your ebook collection that you want. You might be able to display small portions of a book to others, depending on the situation.

Quoting one or two paragraphs out of an entire book seems like reasonably safe fair use, but that won't stop a copyright-maximalist creator (or their publisher) from suing you, and won't stop some copyright-maximalist judge from ruling against you, so it's probably best to minimize the amount of content from a book that you redisplay directly. But you can do all the analysis and statistics generation you want, and display those results to others.

It remains to be seen what judges will do with AI generation of works based on ingesting gigantic amounts of copyrighted work. The entire framework of copyright is going to be broken, and until Congress steps in and changes it, judges are going to go every which way. There's no bright line for 4-factor analysis; it's always been a gut-level "is this a reasonable use that doesn't impact commercial sales too much". There's no possible rational way to draw a line. AI models can generate a painting of a new subject only loosely in the style of a contemporary painter, which would not be copyright infringement, or it can generate a near-clone of an existing work with the right prompting, and depending on how clever the prompter is, a lot of intermediate stages of likeness. Who decides how close to an existing work is too close?

“But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.”

— Daniel Yankelovich, "Interpreting the New Life Styles", Sales Management (1971)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

This is often justified as an attempt to be objective, but I think the actual reason is that it’s hard to deal with unquantifiable properties.

I think that authors see an issue with their IP being fed to an algorithmic black box that will certainly make a lot of money, but authors won't see any of it, and for which engineers say "don't worry, it is not stealing your IP, just let us make money the way we want and shut up".

What if OpenAI could prove that their algorithms are not stealing IP? I think it's easy: they just can't. They don't even formally know what their algorithm can and cannot do.

If I was an author or an artist, I would most definitely want a new kind of legal way to make sure that if I don't want my work to be used as training data, then it most definitely isn't. Of course that's not really possible, because who can audit the algorithmic black box and see if my work was used in the training?

Also where do you read the author of the website was using LLM?

I could see this as a brilliant learning tool. A tool to provide deep insight into something that would be very challenging to quantify personally. I think all this would make future authors better, not worse.

In this case, the shutdown seemed to hinge entirely on the irrational fear of anything with "AI" written on it and an unshakeable conviction that this clearly transformative use case wasn't fair use.

The authors clearly didn't support the idea of the project, regardless of the source for the data.

How the developer acquired the data is a different discussion. Unless you have clear proof they pirated the content, why disparage them?

and even if you could get money for that, it would not be much. if the tool analyses a million books, and then the service makes one million in revenue, no more than $1 of revenue can be attributed to your book. and only a fraction of that would go to the book author because most of the revenue goes into developing and maintaining the tool. so you'd get 10c. you would make more money by spending your time writing actual prose that can be sold, instead of complaining about this particular tool.

If I read your books and use them as a strong foundation from which to write stories (e.g. I don't do any worldbuilding, & just re-use settings/characters without my own introduction), it seems reasonable that my derivative would need some kind of license from you.

If I read your books and write book reviews about them (including small excerpts from the book), it seems unreasonable to require your explicit permission.

I think the website mentioned (which displays stats about a book, and a couple of excerpts) falls far closer to the latter case than the former case.

If I write a non-fiction kids book about a boy who finds out that he is a wizard and goes to a secret wizard school, I don't owe JK any copyright money.