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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3201 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 15, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Do you consider work generated by ChatGPT to be theft of intellectual property of the writers who wrote the text used in the training data? I’m fairly confident in saying its not because transformers generate fairly novel content word-by-word, especially for fiction prompts, but am open to being convinced otherwise. If you agree with me, what’s a simple way of explaining to normies that ChatGPT-generated content is not IP theft?

This conundrum is the intersection of a few very fuzzy definitional categories. "What is IP?" and "What is theft?" and partially "What is learning?". You are not going to get any concrete answers.

For IP Theft:

  • The steelmanned good-faith spirit of IP law is to protect IP by ensuring that blatant repackages can be litigated. And less charitably, to prevent others from using your work in any way shape, or form without sharing some profit.

Against IP Theft:

  • What if I randomly tuned the weights of a NN until I got ChatGPT 1:1?

I’m not sure I understand the Against point here

Legislating weights in a Neural Network is hard. The work doesn't remain in any recognizable form such as in music sampling.

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