Computer scientist won’t give up fight to copyright AI-made art after court loss.

While I am glad this ruling went this way, why’d she have diss Data to make it?

To support her vision of some future technology, Millett pointed to the Star Trek: The Next Generation character Data, a sentient android who memorably wrote a poem to his cat, which is jokingly mocked by other characters in a 1992 episode called “Schisms.” StarTrek.com posted the full poem, but here’s a taste:

"Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature, / An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature; / Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses / Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.

I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations, / A singular development of cat communications / That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection / For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection."

Data “might be worse than ChatGPT at writing poetry,” but his “intelligence is comparable to that of a human being,” Millet wrote. If AI ever reached Data levels of intelligence, Millett suggested that copyright laws could shift to grant copyrights to AI-authored works. But that time is apparently not now.

  • ProfessorScience@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 month ago

    So, I will grant that right now humans are better writers than LLMs. And fundamentally, I don’t think the way that LLMs work right now is capable of mimicking actual human writing, especially as the complexity of the topic increases. But I have trouble with some of these kinds of distinctions.

    So, not to be pedantic, but:

    AI can’t create something all on its own from scratch like a human. It can only mimic the data it has been trained on.

    Couldn’t you say the same thing about a person? A person couldn’t write something without having learned to read first. And without having read things similar to what they want to write.

    LLMs like ChatGP operate on probability. They don’t actually understand anything and aren’t intelligent.

    This is kind of the classic chinese room philosophical question, though, right? Can you prove to someone that you are intelligent, and that you think? As LLMs improve and become better at sounding like a real, thinking person, does there come a point at which we’d say that the LLM is actually thinking? And if you say no, the LLM is just an algorithm, generating probabilities based on training data or whatever techniques might be used in the future, how can you show that your own thoughts aren’t just some algorithm, formed out of neurons that have been trained based on data passed to them over the course of your lifetime?

    And when they start hallucinating, it’s because they don’t understand how they sound…

    People do this too, though… It’s just that LLMs do it more frequently right now.

    I guess I’m a bit wary about drawing a line in the sand between what humans do and what LLMs do. As I see it, the difference is how good the results are.