Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay’s lawsuit claims their books were used without their consent. But copyright protection doesn’t apply to ideas – they’ll need to demonstrate the likelihood of economic loss.
I am sick of this trope of trying to argue that system X is or isn’t intelligent because it was built to do something that can be done non intelligently. LLMs are autocomplete, that’s just literally what they do. The autocomplete on your phone isn’t very intelligent if at all. Humans are DNA replicators but so are bacteria, which aren’t very intelligent if at all. You can’t argue from the type and/or character of the task whether something that was built to do that task is intelligent or not. LLMs at least appear to be intelligent because they do just about everything the AI skeptics were demanding machines must do in order to prove intelligence just 5 years ago, if you want to argue they’re not intelligent you need to do much more work than just calling them names like fuzzy jpeg, stochastic parrot, and autocomplete on steroids.
I use the term “autocomplete on steroids” because it gets across a vaguely accurate idea of what an LLM is and how it works to people who are thinking of it like sci-fi movie AI. Sorry if it came across that was my whole reason for considering them not intelligent.
LLMs do seem to pass a lot of intelligence tests we’ve come up with. Talking with one for the first time is a really uncanny experience, it’s a totally different thing than the old voice assistants. But they also consistently fail at tasks that would indicate an understanding of a topic. They produce good looking equations, but the math underneath doesn’t make sense. They hallucinate facts that don’t fit with the rest of what they themselves are saying, but look similar to the way right answers are written and defended. They produce really convincing responses, but when they fail they betray some really basic failures to understand what they’re saying.
I feel that LLMs are brute-forcing the tests people designed to measure intelligence. They can pass the bar exam, but they also contain thousands of successful bar exams to consult and millions of bits of text to glue those answers together with. But if you ask the LLM to actually do the job of a lawyer, they start producing all kinds of garbage that sounds good but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when someone looks up the hallucinated case references.
I am sick of this trope of trying to argue that system X is or isn’t intelligent because it was built to do something that can be done non intelligently. LLMs are autocomplete, that’s just literally what they do. The autocomplete on your phone isn’t very intelligent if at all. Humans are DNA replicators but so are bacteria, which aren’t very intelligent if at all. You can’t argue from the type and/or character of the task whether something that was built to do that task is intelligent or not. LLMs at least appear to be intelligent because they do just about everything the AI skeptics were demanding machines must do in order to prove intelligence just 5 years ago, if you want to argue they’re not intelligent you need to do much more work than just calling them names like fuzzy jpeg, stochastic parrot, and autocomplete on steroids.
I use the term “autocomplete on steroids” because it gets across a vaguely accurate idea of what an LLM is and how it works to people who are thinking of it like sci-fi movie AI. Sorry if it came across that was my whole reason for considering them not intelligent.
LLMs do seem to pass a lot of intelligence tests we’ve come up with. Talking with one for the first time is a really uncanny experience, it’s a totally different thing than the old voice assistants. But they also consistently fail at tasks that would indicate an understanding of a topic. They produce good looking equations, but the math underneath doesn’t make sense. They hallucinate facts that don’t fit with the rest of what they themselves are saying, but look similar to the way right answers are written and defended. They produce really convincing responses, but when they fail they betray some really basic failures to understand what they’re saying.
I feel that LLMs are brute-forcing the tests people designed to measure intelligence. They can pass the bar exam, but they also contain thousands of successful bar exams to consult and millions of bits of text to glue those answers together with. But if you ask the LLM to actually do the job of a lawyer, they start producing all kinds of garbage that sounds good but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when someone looks up the hallucinated case references.