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A. Peter Thomas's avatar

Thank you for sharing this link with me. I agree with everything above. Which is why I’ve never tried to argue any of the other points. Whenever I’ve posted about AI Art, I have always focused on the ingestion part. I believe it is immoral. I may not have a clear legal definition for it, but that doesn’t make me wrong. I’m writing an article atm about the arguments it took to convince a software engineer friend of mine that AI Art is immoral. Would you be open to reading it when I’m done?

Matt Stine's avatar

I'm more than happy to read your article. You don't have to agree with me, and I don't have to agree with you. That's the beautiful thing about public discourse. Thank you for your good faith engagement!

Liz C's avatar

You've addressed the training data argument very clearly and well. You could say more about the other strands of argument. There's no collating a spellcheck and AI. Only one of those can do the actual writing. Yes ghostwriters exist and should be acknowledged. However, at least they are humans writing other humans' stories, which requires understanding. My biggest issue with AI writing, apart from theft of human creativity for corporate profit, is that if I understand how LLMs work sufficiently, there is no understanding. They predict the next word based on their training. If that's true how could they write an original sentence? If writing is the attempt to convey meaning how could something that does not understand or feel attempt to convey meaning or write in the same way as a human can even if it's difficult or even impossible to tell the difference?

Matt Stine's avatar

Thanks. Here’s a piece that addresses how LLMs work today that can give you more context around these questions. Predicting the next word is definitely in there, but that’s far from all: https://feralarchitecture.substack.com/p/it-just-predicts-the-next-token?r=2656dp&utm_medium=ios