And we’ve finally come to the point I was trying to make from the beginning. In this particular case it’s Copyright law that is bad.

For example. I have a collection of physical cookbooks that I am in the process of digitizing because I would like to have them in my self hosted Mealie server, and many of them are old and delicate so this is the only way to protect their contents.

Many of these books are rare, no longer in print, and have no digital editions. Now I have a bit more leeway in my case because the recipes themselves are not subject to copyright (only the compilation), but still the only fully legal way for me to digitize these books is to destroy them after I’ve scanned them.

This is a problem with copyright and the commercialization of knowledge in general, not something that is specific to Anthropic or any AI company. So the point is, if you want to rage out at something, make sure your ire is targeted in the correct direction.

In this case that direction should be towards reforming copyright law, and establishing broader adaptation of the copyleft philosophy (which I very much support).

And just to clarify, yes Anthropic destroying a bunch of books is less than ideal, and you can argue that the reason they want them in the first place is dumb or evil as well, but the actual act of destruction is being compelled by US law and applies to anyone in any similar situation.

Well, it’s somewhat related as it would seem that when it comes to US copyright law, making a digital copy of a book is a violation of the author’s rights unless you destroy the book after making the scan. Even then it’s still on shaky ground as it depends on what you then go and do with that digital file.

It only seems right that when you choose to cheat these hard working human authors out of their due by stealing their intellectual work, you should do so with full knowledge of its illegality.

Thanks. I appreciate you spending the time to provide me with a link. However after a close reading of the page you provided, Copyright, Fair Use, and Plagiarism for Students: “Fair Use” of Copyrighted Materials, I’ve come to the conclusion that what you have described, whether for educational purposes or otherwise, does not constitute fair use.

Generally, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and “transformative” purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work (Richard Stim, Stanford University Libraries).

This is news to me. Do you have any legal sources you can point me towards? I would love to maintain my own digital library of nondestructively scanned books without needing to buy them or pay any of the copyright holders.

I’m assuming there would probably still be some copyright issues. I don’t think it’s okay to just go into a library and steal books by copying them even if they aren’t destroyed right?

Exactly! Like individualized and infinitely patient always available personal tutors. Oh, wait…

You got a source for this?

I don’t think I could do that at the library. Wouldn’t I need to purchase the books first?

Can you explain what happens to them?

It looks like you accidentally misspelled “using” as “burning.”

Removed by mod

You seem reasonable and even-tempered, so I’d like to give you a considered response so I can hear your thoughts. But first I wanna ask:

Do you object to the technology as a whole, or only to the use of the moniker AI to described LLMs?

What is your definition of intelligence?

I love the appropriate application of Kant!

But I think the point about bad faith misses the mark. For one to conduct themselves or argue for a position in bad faith (even against only themselves), they must first hold a true, hidden belief. I don’t think that’s typically the case here.

You could argue that there is a hidden belief and that it is something like “AI is bad” or “I don’t like AI.” However, the people arguing this position are often quick to point out themselves that AI has legitimate value, even if they then go on to narrowly define the character and application of that value.

I would argue instead that what is actually being hidden here isn’t a belief, but is instead a sentiment something like, “I’m scared.” Which, while being completely understandable, is an emotive state or pseudo-belief, not a truly-held but hidden belief. Because of that, they (in the general sense) aren’t calculating hypocrites; they’re are just panicking.

Although, I prefer the admittedly archaic flatus vocis for describing this particular brand of cognitive dissonance because it translates basically to “mouth farts,” and that makes me chuckle.

1. With greedy decoding (temperature set to 0) LLM output is deterministic. The same input will always result in the same output — every time. This is a fact.
2. Just because something isn’t amenable to calculation does not mean it is nondeterministic, for example the Three Body Problem. This is a fact.
3. Humans are stupid unpredictable base animals that hold almost no understanding of the world around them or their place within it, while at the same time their heard-level behaviors are almost, if not entirely, predictable. This is a cynical joke.

so there is a field of ai. … even partial steps have wide reaching applications and philosophical implications. it is the absolute coolest shit, and gets exactly 0 funding these days.

the thing all the data centers RAM water electricity and economy are backing right now is not ai. it’s what happens when a magic trick and a ponzi scheme fuck on a pile of cocaine in a Pharaoh’s tomb.

These two positions seem to be mutually exclusive, and your response is, on the whole, incoherent. Could you please explain what it is you are trying to communicate?

This is almost exactly the opposite of how LLMs work.

LLMs running under greedy decoding are deterministic finite state machines. A lot of work has gone into making their output nondeterministic because probabilistic next-token generation is more useful.

The more accurate characterization would be that LLMs are context-dependent deterministic state machines with adjustable nondeterministic sampling algorithms bolted onto the decoder.

Also, just as a side note:

They have no determinism, no concept of context and their “reaction” are pure statistics.

This almost perfectly describes human behavior.

They are statistical garbage generators with a high word prediction accuracy that is enough to fool humans into falsely believing they have understanding of context.

That very precisely describes a lot of people I know.

Could you inform me of what is really going on here?

I honestly don’t know what point you are trying to make, but since you are clearly confused by my comment, let me try to further explain.

My claim: The observation that you can’t have space exploration without ballistic missiles is correct. This analogy as applied to AI (specifically LLMs) is also correct, but falls short of perfect parity.

The gap — which is what I tried to address in my previous comment — is that for the aerospace example, space exploration vehicles are like ballistic missiles, but for LLMs those trained to do medical research or those trained to be a chat bot are often not just similar, but the exact same.

That was the point. An LLM built for research vs one built for chat are not just similar, like an ICBM vs a manned space vehicle, but are literally exactly the same object with no difference whatsoever.

This was my attempt to support the person I responded to against the critically uninformed, “Why don’t we just have the one (medical research AI) without the other (chat bot)?” crowd. With the obvious answer being, “Because they are the same thing.”

Q: So how’s it different? A: It’s not. That was my point.

Yeah, fair enough.