this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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LLMs just automates and does faster certain things that a person could do on their own if they invested way more effort and time. If a human being takes people's work and pieces it together in a way that resembles other works without using any LLM/AI or automation tool, is the final result content theft too?
I agree with the content enshitification, but I disagree about the coherency.
Usually, implementations like the ChatGPT web/app will generate different outputs for the same prompt/input. You can also ask it to tweak a previous output, make it shorter, more concise, exclude parts, etc. And if you're making API calls through a script you can tweak parameters like the Temperature, Top P, Presence Penalty or Frequence Penaly, which affect things like the coherence, randomness or repetitiveness of the output.
There's also fine tunning using embeddings, which can help training a model to fit one's specific needs and expectations, but I haven't got to try it yet.
Yes, obviously. Artists and writers can learn from others and can be inspired by other's works, but they can't use parts of those works. That is content theft. Imitating a style is fine, but you have to create something new. LLMs cannot create, only steal.
If, for example, I ask an LLM to produce a short story with a completely unique and random prompt that doesn't resemble any known existing story in its training data (or in the entire world, if you like), is the generated output of the LLM also stolen?
I think what you're proposing isn't something they can do. Are you saying "What if I asked it to create a short story who's pieces don't resemble any pieces of known stories?" or are you saying "What if I asked it to create a short story who's whole doesn't resemble any known stories?"
The first one can't happen. The second? Yes, it's stealing.
Where is it getting this story? LLMs don't have creativity. They don't understand story structure. It pulls sentences and paragraphs from work in it's training data. If the generated output contains work that others have made, that's called plagiarism. If it doesn't, then your hypothetical isn't realistic. LLMs can't create original works. That's the whole point. It pulls pieces of the training data and rearranges them. It would be like if I was writing a college paper and instead of writing anything myself I just pulled 100 different sources and copied a sentence or two from each source and structured them as my paper. That's 100% plagiarism.
I was referring to producing a unique plot.
The process of generating a story involves recombining and rephrasing the LLM's training data in unique ways, it's not a copypaste job. They generate content by predicting and generating text based on patterns, an this implicates a degree of transformation and synthesis.
Where do you draw the line between plagiarism vs inspiration, whether it's a person or an LLM? How long and similar to something existing does a fragment of text have to be to cross the plagiarism line?