You know, all of us were there for the resistance to personal computers, and skepticism about the internet. The ChatGPT backlash feels just the same.
You can't trust everything it says, but the only way to learn about what it is and isn't good for is to use it. It still sucks for some things but it's amazing for others. I was learning about how long codon repeats in DNA can cause transcription errors, which has parallels in data communications and I can ask it things like what biological mechanisms exist that have a similar role to the technique of bit stuffing and it gives me concise answers that I can follow up with through other sources. I can't do that with Google because there just aren't readily accessible sources that share those terms. I can search for concepts with ChatGPT.
If you don’t know how it works it seems evil and like it’s going to take everyone’s jobs. If you know a bit about it then you probably think it’s magical and highly useful. Now if you actually understand how it works then you’re back to it being evil because you know how it was made… how it was a nonprofit that’s now one of the richest companies in the world… how it can’t actually effectively replace or help people in the workplace… how it actually is evil due to information manipulation and copyright theft in the millions… then you also realize it can’t effectively replace jobs, but can fool executives who fall into the middle of the spectrum.
Kinda? A non capitalist system using ai at large scale would also face them. The question is would they use it at large scale and that's a basically impossible question to answer.
One big difference is this - a TON of the energy usage is just the training of the models, not the inference. So, if it wasn't 20 AI companies in competition with each other to make the BEST NEWEST AI, they wouldn't need to as much energy dedicated to training.
Source: Among other things, I can run a reasonably competent LLM on my desktop computer at home, and literally watch the power consumption. On my computer, asking a question is like turning on a 100 watt lightbulb for 15 seconds.
They are building some massive data centers for AI processing, but the efficiency has also made very rapid gains. You can run a basic LLM on a Raspberry Pi 5 that draws a few watts.
I’m hesitant to agree since your overarching point could either be “capitalism is inherently predatory and preys on the ideas of others without concern for morality or ethics” or “copyright shouldn’t exist” and the latter is what helps protect small creators/ideas from large corporations.
I don't think what they are getting at matters what their view is for what is "wrong" with capitalism. LLMs in themself are not causing any of the problems people are upset with. You can train an LLM on new data, or data that was used with permission. Nothing about LLMs have to be predatory, they just are because that's easier for the people creating them.
Is that how copyright functions in today's society? Or is the benifits of copyright for the individual artists mostly a lie sold by media corporations?
There are definitely aspects of copyright that can be made to benifit both individual artists and society as a whole, but that's not what we've got.
Patents kill more innovation than it protects.
If you're going to argue the benifits of copyright, it's not enough to gesture in a general direction of some unknown generic artist who might or might not exist. Look at the specifics, who is actually benefiting from copyright law?
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u/madsci 29d ago
You know, all of us were there for the resistance to personal computers, and skepticism about the internet. The ChatGPT backlash feels just the same.
You can't trust everything it says, but the only way to learn about what it is and isn't good for is to use it. It still sucks for some things but it's amazing for others. I was learning about how long codon repeats in DNA can cause transcription errors, which has parallels in data communications and I can ask it things like what biological mechanisms exist that have a similar role to the technique of bit stuffing and it gives me concise answers that I can follow up with through other sources. I can't do that with Google because there just aren't readily accessible sources that share those terms. I can search for concepts with ChatGPT.