Comment by tomlue | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomlue | Hacker News Reader

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> I’m sorry, but this really gets to me. Your writing is not improved. It is no longer your writing.

Photographers use cameras. Does that mean it isn't their art? Painters use paintbrushes. It might not be the the same things as writing with a pen and paper by candlelight, but I would argue that we can produce much more high quality writing than ever before collaborating with AI.

> As an aside, exposing people with dementia to a hallucinating robot is cruelty on an unfathomable level.

This is not fair. There is certainly a lot of danger there. I don't know what it's like to have dimentia, but I have seen mentally ill people become incredibly isolated. Rather than pretending we can make this go away by saying "well people should care more", maybe we can accept that a new technology might reduce that pain somewhat. I don't know that today's AI is there, but I think RLHF could develop LLMs that might help reassure and protect sick people.

I know we're using some emotional arguments here and it can get heated, but it is weird to me that so many on hackernews default to these strongly negative positions on new technology. I saw the same thing with cryptocurrency. Your arguments read as designed to inflame rather than thoughtful.

I guess your point is that a camera, a paintbrush, and an LLM are all tools, and as long as the user is involved in the making, then it is still their art? If so, then I think there are two useful distinctions to make:

1. The extent to which the user is involved in the final product differs greatly with these three tools. To me there is a spectrum with "painting" and e.g. "hand-written note" at one extreme, and "Hallmark card with preprinted text" on the other. LLM-written email is much closer to "Hallmark card."

2. Perhaps more importantly, when I see a photograph, I know what aspects were created by the camera, so I won't feel mislead (unless they edit it to look like a painting and then let me believe that they painted it). When someone writes with an AI, it is very difficult to tell what text and ideas are originally theirs. Typically it comes across as them trying to pass off the LLM writing as their own, which feels misleading and disingenuous.

I think you are right that it is a spectrum, and maybe that's enough to settle the debate. It is more about how you use it than the tool itself.

Maybe one more useful consideration for LLMs. If a friend writes to me with an LLM and discovers a new writing pattern, or learns a new concept and incorporates that into their writing, I see this as a positive development, not negative.

But what about the second point?

I would be very surprised if no interesting art could be made with LLMs. But, like a camera, it produces a distinct kind of art to other tools. We do not say that a camera produces a painting. Instead photography is its own medium with its own forms and techniques and strengths and weaknesses.

Using photography to claim that obviously all good writing will be LLM replacements for current writing is... odd.

Neither a camera nor a paintbrush generates art? They still require manual human input for everything, and offer no creative capacity on their own.

A photograph is an expression of the photographer, who chooses the subject, its framing, filters, etc. Ditto a painting.

LLM output is inherently an expression of the work of other people (irrespective of what training data, weights, prompts it is fed). Essentially by using one you're co-authoring with other (heretofore uncredited) collaborators.

I think that the fact that people don't understand why there are so many negative positions is equally frustrating. To me it seems blatantly obvious that the majority of LLM usage by people today is coming from models that are trained on stolen data without following any of the requirements or licenses of the authors.

With Rob Pike being such a prolific figure in software development, it's likely that a sizable portion of what makes the LLM function and be able to send him that email was possible only because they didn't uphold their end of the bargain. I don't see why anyone has trouble comprehending why this would make him furious?

I know for me personally, I'm happy to share things I've made but make no mistake, I would never share it if other users of it did not credit me, specifically by following the terms in the license I've published. The fact that LLMs have ingested and used so much software yet I can't find the licenses text provided by the training data authors is at minimum deeply distributing and at most actively harmful. For works licensed under something like the GPL where someone is only ok for their software to be used under strict terms, I don't even know where to start with how upset I imagine they would be.

Why is this weird? If anything I feel it would be the default response from someone on here.

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