I saw on the news today that AI companies are acquiring all the novels they can get their hands on that pre-date AI (I think it said written before 2022 but not sure of that date). They are putting the novels through a machine that removes the spine and then feeds the pages into the system to be read AND LEARNED from.
The goal is to use human written novels to teach AI how to do it so that AI won't write AI slop.
I read an article on this, from the point of view of a secondhand book seller. He's doing a roaring trade, but has grave misgivings because the tech companies buying the books are taking them out of circulation, sometimes destroying the only remaining print copy of a book.
AI companies are far short of ethical.
AJ
I'm quasi-following ongoing discussions about this on Twitter (X.com) and some of the rumors gathered by that are:
- the worst offender is allegedly Anthropic
- they apparently believe they are REQUIRED to shred the scanned books due to weird interpretation of copyright law: so they "transfer" the data and and no new copy is made, and so they don't break copyright. Allegedly there's been a court ruling to that effect: that Anthropic are permitted to train on copyrighted material if they destroy the physical copy they acquired.
- Since they can't be bothered to check if the book is or isn't under copyright they bulk apply this to everything. Added benefits (to them) is that this is faster and cheaper and they don't have to store or handle the proceessed material afterwards.
- possible meta benefits of this are: denying the material to competitors, and information control in general.
- it's not just novels, it's anything and everything they can get their hands on.
- yes, the supposed AI watershed date is roughly 2022; it's deemed there's no major volume of printed material with AI contamination prior to that; anything older thus fetch a premium for AI training purposes.
(AI contaminated training data supposedly may be poisonous to AI training purposes potentialy leading to phenomenon known as "model collapse" where complexity of the "long tails" (fringe cases, rich language, obscure knowledge) is lost while repetition is entrenched, defeating the purpose of as large as possible training data corpus and dreams of AGI ANSI etc (of whatever interpretation).
Caveats apply: practice know as "distillation" explicitly train a new AI model on the output of a different one, often resulting in similar overall performance with smaller weights volume. While mathematical loss is obvious, the practical is unknown and unnoticeable -- at least one step down. Iterative experiments that created "model collapse" alarms have been of relatively small scale for obvious compute resource reasons. More specialized distiled models are probably fine.)
- Elon Musk claims Grok do care to check for and preserve rare/valuable copies they come across creating a library. That implies they do not subscribe to the weird copyright infringementing emptor Anthropic seems to employ by destroying everything they scan.
- while all AI companies are doing this to some extent destroying physical copies that are not rare *yet* for marginal savings on processing costs and storage/handling expenses, they are apparently not the only one mass book burners. A business practice that hunt for potentially undervalued print copies to resell at high markup may be worse because they too destroy stock they can't move relatively short-term.
- this isn't (hopefully, no guarantee with types like Anthropic) about shredding one-of-a-kind sixteen century manuscripts. The concern is more about obscure than unique, in space between privately published novels, nineteenth or early twentieth century school textbooks and things like, say, 1991 "Wordperfect for Dummies" on the low end. While one may argue that loss of the last copy of the later leads to no "loss of knowledge" long having no practical value on the face, it still is a historic artificial informing a future researcher about topics like period and trade slang or engineering and visual design practices, or other questions we may not necessarily imagine right now -- and note the design specifics are irretrievably lost even if the text is destructively scanned and preserved as part of AI training dataset (further note: those are said to not be human readable files as they are).
If this AI book burning panic leads to renewed efforts to preserve such "worthless" obscure print artifacts that may be an unexpected silver lining. And, frankly, even the more responsible/charitable AI companies themselves should be interested: there's a valid speculation the current approach may be a dead end simply because we may not possess the unique data volume necessary to train that supposedly coveted Artificial Superintelligence, and if companies end up in turf wars destructively scanning and thus privatizing volumes of obscure data it's super unhelpful to the overall effort.
Where's Captain Scarlet when we need him?
AIs are like the Mysterons - to create they must first destroy!
AJ
100% certainty that Anthropic (or another company they set up) will be selling the contents piecemeal once they have destroyed the remaining physical copies.
First thing to do is teach AI what a man and woman is and isn't.
The AI algorithms are the worlds worst to use improper pronouns. (almost as bad as blue haired liberals)
Next thing would be to teach it to avoid RPG fantasy subjects that (should) only appeal to teenagers in mom's basement.
Reality has a place, and that place is true literature. Everything else is slop in my book.
As long as they don't use the "human written" slop that has infested SOL in the past year or so the idea might actually work. That stuff is a waste of bandwidth for sure.
And if it churns out more of what I just waded through in the "New Stories" list... we are all doomed.
First thing to do is teach AI what a man and woman is and isn't.
One reason I use grok for everything. A simple statement in the agent file:
"Respect period understanding of gender/sex along with language, gender roles, and other social norms for the period covered by the dateline provided"
Solves the problem completely for my proofreading and critique skills. Not sure about crafting prose because I don't allow it to do that (because it totally sucks at it, even with training).
I came across this story synopsis:
When courier pilot Neris Vael and her sentient ship are thrown through an impossible dimensional accident, they crash far beyond every world they know. Daniel Mercer, a widowed farmer, makes a choice before he understands what has landed on his property: he treats the strangers at the edge of his woods as neighbours. What follows is not a story of invasion or conquest. It is a story of repairs. Necessity becomes trust. Trust becomes friendship. Friendship becomes a household.
The synopsis is obviously AI-generated - only an AI would put a 'Not X but Y' construct in a synopsis.
And how do you throw something 'through an accident'?
Despite that, the story piques my interest. I know of at least two stories on SOL, human-written, that have addressed this sort of scenario (Colin Barrett and Vincent Berg), and they were both pretty decent. Graybyrd also has an excellent series involving crash-landed aliens but it has a very different tenor.
A long time ago I even attempted my own variant, but it's totally unpublishable. The aliens gave the protagonist a mind-reading device as a reward for his finding everything they needed to repair their ship, and it proved a double-edged sword.
AJ
AI crap is what you would expect from a couple of generations of people who were told that "everybody's special" and where everybody get a trophy, no matter how badly they perform. People with no self-respect.
A bunch of basement dwelling, role-playing gamers, in all likelihood.
Most of their 'work' is about as creative as feeding a Sinatra recording thru an auto-tuner to make it sound like Britney Spears.
Although, come to think of it, that would at least be funny. Most AI can't even manage that.
I doubt that they are role-playing gamers.
Everyone I knew who did played D&D came before AI and they weren't concerned with trophies or participating in anything that wasn't creative.
And the only "trophy" they wanted was to see their friends having fun with what they created.
If you're talking video games, there was and is no participation trophies for these guys. You were either good, or you were trash-talked to death until you quit or got good. (Most of us were athletes too.)
No one said "Good job" to people who couldn't pull their weight.
Participation Trophies & AI slop are for people who want to be a part of everything by putting in the least amount of effort possible.
AI crap is what you would expect from a couple of generations of people who were told that "everybody's special" and where everybody get a trophy, no matter how badly they perform. People with no self-respect.
I love how this is always presented as a dunk on the people who got the trophy and there's absolutely zero thought given to questions like "who gave out participation trophies" because that seems like the party who's really to blame here.
I will anticipate your counter argument of "oh the kids would have thrown a tantrum if they didn't get a trophy" yeah man they're kids, they have tantrums, it's the job of adults to not give in on that and you fucked it up, nice job blaming the kids for your failures.
I love how this is always presented as a dunk on the people who got the trophy and there's absolutely zero thought given to questions like "who gave out participation trophies" because that seems like the party who's really to blame here.
Yes! Thank you!
I have the same thought every time I see people complain about how all the young ones are addicted to social media on their phones these days. Well... who fucking WROTE those addiction-focused algorithms facebook and Co introduced and then got perfected by TikTok!? Certainly not the 12-year-olds glued to their phones.
At least as much to the point: who gave them the phone?
Yes, there are reasonable reasons for kids of some ages to have phones. That doesn't mean 'install whatever you want' or 'use it whenever you want'.
And that's on the parents. Facebook, TikTok, etc aren't handing out phones to kids, nor are them preventing parents from taking said phones away.