AI Megathread

[Faraday]

@Sage said in AI Megathread:

Absolutely true, however, blaming ChatGPT for that is like blaming the hammer that someone swings.

YouTube is a site for sharing videos. Yes, sometimes people upload copyrighted stuff, but there are (admittedly imperfect) systems in place for dealing with it when that happens. More critically, YouTube recognizes that uploading stuff owned by someone else is a problem.

Napster was a site for sharing music. Its very nature abetted and encouraged music piracy. There was utter disregard for the rights of the musicians/studios. Uploading stuff owned by someone else was its core design feature.

Generative AI is far closer to Napster than YouTube. The flaw is not in how it’s used, like it’s a hammer that can be used for good or bad. The flaw is in how it’s built.

[Trashcan]

@Sage Hitting people in the head with hammers is wrong, as I’ve been saying. Those of you with hammer access, do not yield to temptation.

@Pavel
Ignoring any of the issues with how LLMs currently function for the sake of avoiding that aspect of the discussion:

I wouldn’t care much if it’s used for brainstorming and purely gathering prompts and ideas. I wouldn’t like but wouldn’t really care about their use in things like descs (no one reads them). Lore is similar, because I often expect that to be a group effort anyway, and it’s functional more than evocative. I would prefer to know.

Moving up the scale, anything where it’s being copy-pasted or heavily influencing the text of IC content that is meant to be engaged with either directly (e.g. poses in a scene) or emotionally (e.g. vignettes), I think disclosure becomes required and I would be genuinely upset to discover it absent some sort of disclosure.

[Pavel]

@Trashcan said in AI Megathread:

I wouldn’t care much if it’s used for brainstorming and purely gathering prompts and ideas

I’ve definitely used it for that, though mostly for characters that might be nice to play one day when I get that itch. Mostly a rough outline, the kind of thing you’d read on a casting call rather than anything with actual character.

Though in my real life, I mostly use it to assemble my scrawled class notes into something more comprehensible. So I fear I’m not the best use-case example for it.

[Rinel]

@Pavel said in AI Megathread:

ANYWAY

To what extent do you (general you) want players to tell you when they’re using generative virtual intelligence? If we were to put it on a 0-10 scale with 0 being ‘maybe used it like a name generator once’ with 10 being ‘literally every pose is written by ChatGPT’, where would you say it needs to be mentioned?

I don’t care if people use name generators. I want to know if anything more than that is used. And if people want me to say when I use name generators, sure, I’ll accede to that as part of this new paradigm (sometimes I use name generators to get coherent names; sometimes I go to a popular names table and roll some dice).

[Faraday]

Judge upholds copyright office rule that works generated by AI cannot be copyrighted, stressing “Human authorship is a bedrock requirement.”

[Faraday]

More news possibly of interest:

New York Times considers joining the slew of lawsuits against OpenAI over illicit use of their content

Also an interesting debate on fair use by a judge and copyright lawyer/expert. Notably, they point out:

The Supreme Court [in its 1985 decision in Harper & Row v The Nation] explained that harm to the rightsholder’s legitimate expectation of copyright revenues was the most significant factor in the fair use evaluation.

In a different Supreme Court case, the court decided based on copyright’s two fundamental objectives:

the enrichment of public knowledge and financial incentivisation to authors to create. Campbell essentially explains that the fair use zone lies in the circumstance where those two objectives are not at cross-purposes; the enrichment of public knowledge should not justify the fair use defense if it is accomplished by significant impairment of the rightsholder’s legitimate entitlement to profit from the distribution of the work.

[Sage]

@Faraday, firstly, this is in no way an attempt to say you are in any way incorrect. I’m responding to you simply to keep this as a linked thread.

The last sentence of the first paragraphed you liked is interesting to me;

An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” [the copyright office] said.

Now ignoring for the moment what ‘selected or arranged’ and ‘sufficiently creative way’ means, it sounds like a very valid concern for people like screen writers isn’t the complete replacement of their job by AI but the use of AI to reduce the number of writers required to make a show. I think most of us agree that the technology is still miles away from being able to spit out a script by itself, but what about AI carrying enough of the initial load that the production companies are able to reduce their writers room from 15 people to 10? Likewise, it seems like reporters are at risk of having their job numbers reduced and their jobs transformed as they spend more of their time editing copy initially produced by AI.

Of course the counterpoint to that argument is that this always happens with technological advancement. Farriers were far more in demand 150 years ago than mechanics were.

As for the second article, this is more or less part of the issue I’ve been trying to consider. Assuming that they can get LLMs to stop copying large blocks of text, what is the harm to the rightholder’s expectation of copyright revenue?

I think at the end of the day what is really going to be required will be new laws that codify more precisely all expectations and limitations on how generative AIs are allowed to harvest and use information because they earlier existing laws will require too much work to make them fit well into the new framework.

[NotSanni]

@Sage said in AI Megathread:

Now ignoring for the moment what ‘selected or arranged’ and ‘sufficiently creative way’ means, it sounds like a very valid concern for people like screen writers isn’t the complete replacement of their job by AI but the use of AI to reduce the number of writers required to make a show. I think most of us agree that the technology is still miles away from being able to spit out a script by itself, but what about AI carrying enough of the initial load that the production companies are able to reduce their writers room from 15 people to 10?

The reduction of writing staff in the writing room is still a bad thing. AI isn’t easing any burdens there - it’s just taking away jobs in an industry that’s already gutting and trimming down writing rooms to the point that it’s causing real problems for the industry with regards to getting new talent in and trained up. Production companies shouldn’t be seeking to reduce their writing rooms.

[Sage]

@NotSanni Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound as if I was in favor of it. I was simply noting it as what I believe is a valid concern.

I brought up the counterpoint of how technological growth affects the job market simply because I try my best to view all sides of an issue.

[NotSanni]

@Sage said in AI Megathread:

@NotSanni Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound as if I was in favor of it. I was simply noting it as what I believe is a valid concern.

I brought up the counterpoint of how technological growth affects the job market simply because I try my best to view all sides of an issue.

Seen - apologies for misinterpreting! But I do agree that we just need actual, new legislation/regulation around generative AI/LLM usage. Corporations have been cutting labor hours across the board for a few industries going on a decade now, even [b]before[/b] the latest developments in LLM/generative AI stuff - there probably needs to be strict oversight in how it can be used with regards to labor.

[Faraday]

@Sage said in AI Megathread:

but what about AI carrying enough of the initial load that the production companies are able to reduce their writers room from 15 people to 10?

That exact scenario has been quoted by various WGA members in discussions about the current strike. Their concern is being given a pile of AI-generated garbage and being told: “Clean this up” and then getting an editing credit instead of a writing credit, even though they’re still doing all of the actual work.

@Sage said in AI Megathread:

Of course the counterpoint to that argument is that this always happens with technological advancement. Farriers were far more in demand 150 years ago than mechanics were.

The main difference is that the farriers weren’t replaced by a machine that was built using the output of their farrier work.

[heysparky]

Finally caught up with this. I have enjoyed giving ChatGPT enough information about a setting to roleplay a quick scene with an NPC that I wanted to get out of my head or have as background. I currently have a thread of ‘therapy’ for one of my characters where my PC visits and discusses things happening in his life. It’s grounding for me and I can dash that off when I don’t have time to RP to keep my head ‘in the game’ so to speak. It’s been a lifesaver as I have been eaten by work.

But really I’m here to share this gem from Elle Cordova.

[SpaceKhomeini]

We will have reached the top of Mount ChatGPT when it’s used to write TS scenes.

Maybe it already has. I bet it has.

Robots in your area are getting it on right now.

[Tez]

@SpaceKhomeini ChatGPT is actually really bad at smut.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Tez

So are a lot of people in this hobby, but not for lack of practice, ohohoho.

[dvoraen]

@SpaceKhomeini said in AI Megathread:

We will have reached the top of Mount ChatGPT when it’s used to write TS scenes.

Maybe it already has. I bet it has.

Robots in your area are getting it on right now.

Obligatory Sex Robot video here