The copyright problems with training LLMs feels a bit like the sampling craze in the 1990s. Queen and David Bowie vs. Vanilla Ice, for example. New tech → novel uses → no laws for fair use in that context → new laws are drafted. At a human level, knowledge should be free. The way that LLMs represent knowledge isn't specific to the work. Yet, even given this, there is an ethical prickle when using published content. I'm sure we'll figure it out, but it's not the controversy what we make it out to be, it's just a step in the evolution of humankind.
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Nevertheless it seems also clear that the #LLM is mimicking more than just bits and pieces of its training materials. One is taken with the sense that LLMs and the whole "Generative #AI" phenomenon are built to mimic how the typical #tech geek tends to solve problems--their intellectual approach to, well, everything basically, an intellectual approach practically devoid of intellect because its ultimate goal is to do away with thinking altogether. Thinking is time-consuming, emotionally expensive, and thus bad for #efficiency in the John Carmack or Elon Musk sense.
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The elite techlords don't want to do ANY of it; they want to think that correct decisions and infallible snap-assessments are just gushing out of them all the time, like they're wired directly into the Truth of All Things...like they're a prophet in other words. Ultimately this fallacy has a religious nature: the high-tech "gurus" (remember, they called themselves that appropriated religious word) really have become like a priesthood of Technology[tm], technology turned into an artificial magic system like in Isaac Asimov's Foundation. Which, you know, they probably think of as aspirational. If "thinking" is the word. It's this quality of instantaneous snap answers that has been impressed onto all the stochastic #GenAI thingummies. Of necessity the techlords are compelled to claim that their thing is (almost) supremely intelligent to a degree impossible for the puny human meatbrain to comprehend...because that's the only way to support the premise that the LLM isn't merely emitting trash but unparalleled wisdom. (more)