This is exactly why something more advanced than copyright is needed to protect human creative endeavour against AI appropriation. Copyright is demonstrated here not to be up to the job but it doesn’t mean there isn’t regulation needed to give human creators rights and a reward for their contribution
What you are saying leads to "pulling the ladder behind you" effect on creativity. It's impossible to protect more than substantial similarity and still allow creativity to exist.
If a human makes something there should be broad protection for creativity, if a LLM generates something there should be extremely limited protection for creativity.
You should not be able to mass generate images in a particular artists style and claim it as fair use, even if a human making the same images would have protection.
But the human made the LLM. An LLM is categorically “I built a thing that built a thing” and if the output of that category has no protections then all automation and ‘machine at the final step’ is in trouble.
What about aleatory music (music left at least partially to chance)? Or Autechre - they have whole albums and live performances built on automation software. They built the logic and added randomization, necessarily removing themselves from the final output.
Is spin art not copyrightable? If I build a simple machine that spins paper, then do no more than drop paint on it, the result is not mine to copyright? I didn’t choose the output, I merely built the machine and the rest was created by pure chance. “But you chose the paint” - and if I didn’t? What if my art uses AI to perform sentiment analysis on the top news articles of the day and it drops colors matching the emotional tone of the news onto the spin art machine. I have no control over it and the output is machine generated, but is the result not just the final step of an entire process I created? Was the result of the creative idea not part of the creativity itself?
If I build an automated laboratory to test every combination of a problem space, is a resulting success not patentable? What if the problem is too large to permute, so I added a random selection process to it? I’m not even controlling what’s being tested, but if it finds success is that not my contribution? The machines did the work, the selection was random, there was no human in the loop; what then?
The internals of an LLM may be mysterious to some, but I assure you it’s just fixed automation with a random number generator sometimes tacked onto it, but randomization is optional too.
I built that LLM. I decided what text to input for training, I curated the information, I wrote the algorithm, I decided the layers and hyper-parameters, I decided the RLHF pairs to train, then I put a few drops of paint from my bottle of language into the automated machine. I decided and built every single step of the system, but that output is not part of my process? If I pipe the LLM text output to a paint dispenser hovering over paper, set to squeeze out drops based on syllables, would you protect my artwork then?
They’ve been developing git and GitHub for over a decade. It really isn’t surprising they have made thousands of internally available repos. They probably have hundreds just for running automated tests alone.
I don't understand why so many of these comments HN is getting are so fixated on writing style. I appreciate that stylistic traits associated with AI-written text are often indicative of contentless slop. But lots of people also write like that. To moan about writing style without even considering the value of the content just sounds cranky to me.
Anyway, I enjoyed reading the experiment, and the starting premise, and the embracing of a fairly mundane outcome. Reminds me of running various generative systems and looking for emergent states.
I don't read Dickens because I can't stand the style despite the rest of its plot and characters. Bad style is a problem to getting into a work. A bad style can make the content hard to read.
Because writing is a process suited to some minds more than others. And if your bar to receiving an idea is that it came from a competent writer then you’ll be limited to ideas that reflect a certain way of thinking (and one many mistakenly conflate with intelligence).
Conversation is a different process that may be suited to other types of thinking. And so on.
It’s true that LLMs can enable unoriginal and shallow thinking to be expressed with a false veneer of original thought. But it does not follow that all LLM-written text is the result of laziness nor that it is without value.
I’m just suggesting, come with an open mind rather than judging the whole thing based on a gut reaction to style. That reliance on a gut stylistic reaction is itself lazy and has led many an intellectual community into echo chambers of groupthink.
Yea I'm curious if any of those negative commenters considered that the author is German, and English may not be their primary language — but no, apparently there is a new surefire way to detect AI content. Not forced enthusiasm. Not em dashes. Just too many sentences in a row starting with the word Not.
PoW rate limiting actually pre-dates PoW cryptocurrency, the former has just had a resurgence recently in response to AI scrapers pissing in everyone's pools.
Post quantum - as in designed to resist quantum computer based attacks under which rsa would quickly crumble. Why do you associate this with snake oil?
It does sound a bit like the famous "military grade encryption" and it's equally (ab)used by snake oil salesmen.
I can't say anything about TutaCrypt's long-term effectiveness except that CRYSTALS-Kyber is touted as being at the forefront of post-quantum cryptography.
I wouldn't call it snake oil, but right now it appears quantum encryption cracking is only theoretical. I'm not sure how anyone can promise to mitigate attacks that haven't yet arrived.
Global Risk Institute... found that the majority of cryptography experts it surveyed believe quantum computers, more broadly, will be able to break anything encrypted with RSA-2048 within 24 hours within the next 30 years.
Most cryptography experts are probably not experts in quantum computers as well.
We already know the algorithm to break RSA with a quantum computer. We just don't have the hardware yet. Nobody knows when the hardware will be available but a lot of entities are working on it.
It's common in cryptography to mitigate attacks that are known but not feasible without further advances in hardware or algorithms. Nobody wants to wait until an attack is successful. That's why NIST is already working on post-quantum cryptography standardization:
Something inspiring about this: "In dedicated Friday afternoon thinking sessions, he returned to the problem again and again over the past decade, to no avail."
Friend of mine worked used to block off his friday afternoons for 'weekly review'. Which was part big thinking, part end of week nap, and mostly avoiding colleagues who had tricky tasks 'needed first thing monday' they had forgotten to bring up before.
Title seems a little clickbaity. It's on-device scanning, which is off by default, and seems primarily designed to help you get content warnings on incoming content.
https://www.francoispachet.fr/continuator/