Children learn by watching others. We are trained from millions of examples from before birth.
Comment on OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material
frog@beehaw.org 5 months agoI wish I could upvote this more than once.
What people always seem to miss is that a human doesn’t need to billions of examples to be able to produce something that’s kind of “eh, close enough”. Artists don’t look at billions of paintings. They look at a few, but do so deeply, absorbing not just the most likely distribution of brushstrokes, but why the painting looks the way it does. For a basis of comparison, I did an art and design course last year and looked at about 300 artworks in total (course requirement was 50-100). The research component on my design-related degree course is one page a week per module (so basically one example from the field the module is about, plus some analysis). The real bulk of the work humans do isn’t looking at billions of examples: it’s looking at a few, and then practicing the skill and developing a process that allows them to convey the thing they’re trying to express.
If the AI models were really doing exactly the same thing humans do, the models could be trained without any copyright infringement at all, because all of the public domain and creative commons content, plus maybe licencing a little more, would be more than enough.
Marsupial@quokk.au 5 months ago
Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
When people say that the “model is learning from its training data”, it means just that, not that it is human, and not that it learns exactly humans. It doesn’t make sense to judge boats on how well they simulate human swimming patterns, just how well they perform their task.
Every human has the benefit of as a baby training on things around them and being trained by those around them, building a foundation for all later skills. Generative models rely on many text and image pairs to describe things to them because they lack the ability to poke, prod, rotate, and disassemble for themselves.
For example, when a model takes in a thousand images of circles, it doesn’t “learn” a thousand circles. It learns what circle GENERALLY is like, the concept of it. That representation, along with random noise, is how you create images with them. The same happens for every concept the model trains on. Everything from “cat” to more complex things like color relationships and reflections or lighting. Machines are not human, but they can learn despite that.
ParsnipWitch@feddit.de 5 months ago
In general I agree with you, but AI doesn’t learn the concept of what a circle is. AI reproduces the most fitting representation of what we call a circle. But there is no understanding of the concept of a circle. This may sound not picking, but I think it’s important to make the distinction.
That is why current models aren’t regarded as actual intelligence, although people already call them that…
Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
I understand. I didn’t mean to imply any sort of kind of understanding with the language I used.
Eccitaze@yiffit.net 5 months ago
It makes sense to judge how closely LLMs mimic human learning when people are using it as a defense to AI companies scraping copyrighted content, and making the claim that banning AI scraping is as nonsensical as banning human learning.
But when it’s pointed out that LLMs don’t learn very similarly to humans, and require scraping far more material than a human does, suddenly AIs shouldn’t be judged by human standards? I don’t know if it’s intentional on your part, but that’s a pretty classic example of a motte-and-bailey fallacy. You can’t have it both ways.
Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
I don’t understand what you mean, can you elaborate?
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
What you count as “one” example is arbitrary. In terms of pixels, you’re looking at millions right now.
The ability to train faster using fewer examples in real time, similar to what an intelligent human brain can do, is definitely a goal of AI research. But right now, we may be seeing from AI what a below average human brain could accomplish with hundreds of lifetimes to study.
If the AI models were really doing exactly the same thing humans do, the models could be trained without any copyright infringement at all, because all of the public domain and creative commons content, plus maybe licencing a little more, would be more than enough.
I mean, no, if you only ever look at public domain stuff you literally wouldn’t know the state of the art, which is historically happening for profit. Even the most untrained artist “doing their own thing” watches Disney/Pixar movies and listens to copyrighted music.
frog@beehaw.org 5 months ago
If we’re going by the number of pixels being viewed, then you have to use the same measure for both humans and AIs - and because AIs have to look at billions of images while humans do not, the AI still requires far more pixels than a human does.
And humans don’t require the most modern art in order to learn to draw at all. Sure, if they want to compete with modern artists, they would need to look at modern artists (for which educational fair use exists, and again the quantity of art being used by the human for this purpose is massively lower than what an AI uses - a human does not need to consume billions of artworks from modern artists in order to learn what the current trends are). But a human could learn to draw, paint, sculpt, etc purely by only looking at public domain and creative commons works, because the process for drawing, say, the human figure (with the right number of fingers!) has not changed in hundreds of years. A human can also just… go outside and draw things they see themselves, because the sky above them and the tree across the street aren’t copyrighted. And in fact, I’d argue that a good artist should go out and find real things to draw.
OpenAI’s argument is literally that their AI cannot learn without using copyrighted materials in vast quantities - too vast for them to simply compensate all the creators. So it genuinely is not comparable to a human, because humans can, in fact, learn without using copyrighted material. If OpenAI’s argument is actually that their AI can’t compete commercially with modern art without using copyrighted works, then they should be honest about that - but then they’d be showing their hand, wouldn’t they?
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
Sure, if they want to compete with modern artists, they would need to look at modern artists
Which is the literal goal of Dall-E, SD, etc.
But a human could learn to draw, paint, sculpt, etc purely by only looking at public domain and creative commons works
They could definitely learn some amount of skill, I agree. I’d be very interested to see the best that an AI could achieve using only PD and CC content. It would be interesting. But you’d agree that it would look very different from modern art, just as an alien who has only been consuming earth media from 100+ years ago would be unable to relate to us.
the sky above them and the tree across the street aren’t copyrighted.
Yeah, I’d consider that PD/CC content that such an AI would easily have access to. But obviously the real sky is something entirely different from what is depicted in Starry Night, Star Wars, or H.P. Lovecraft’s description of the cosmos.
OpenAI’s argument is literally that their AI cannot learn without using copyrighted materials in vast quantities
Yeah, I’d consider that a strong claim on their part; what they really mean is, it’s the easiest way to make progress in AI, and we wouldn’t be anywhere close to where we are without it.
And you could argue “convenient that it both saves them money, and generates money for them to do it this way”, but I’d also point out that the alternative is they keep the trained models closed source, never using them publicly until they advance the tech far enough that they’ve literally figured out how to build/simulate a human brain that is able to learn as quickly and human-like as you’re describing. And then we find ourselves in a world where one or two corporations have this incredible proprietary ability that no one else has.
Personally, I’d rather live in the world where the information about how to do all of this isn’t kept for one or two corporations to profit from, I would rather live in the version where they publish their work publicly, early, and often, show that it works, and people are able to reproduce it, open source it, train their own models, and advance the technology in a space where anyone can use it.
You could hypothesize of a middle ground where they do the research, but aren’t allowed to profit from it without licensing every bit of data they train on. But the reality of AI research is that it only happens to the extent that it generates revenue. It’s been that way for the entire history of AI. Douglas Hofstadter has been asking deep important questions about AI as it relates to consciousness for like 60 years (ex. GEB, I am a Strange Loop), but there’s a reason he didn’t discover LLMs and tech companies did. That’s not to say his writings are meaningless, in fact I think they’re more important than ever before, but he just wasn’t ever going to get to this point with a small team of grad students, a research grant, and some public domain datasets.
So, it’s hard to disagree with OpenAI there, AI definitely wouldn’t be where it is without them doing what they’ve done. And I’m a firm believer that unless we figure our shit out with energy generation soon, the earth will be an uninhabitable wasteland. We’re playing a game of climb the Kardashev scale, we opted for the “burn all the fossil fuels as fast as possible” strategy, and now we’re a the point where either spent enough energy fast enough to figure out the tech needed to survive this, or we suffocate on the fumes. The clock is ticking, and AI may be our best bet at saving the human race that doesn’t involve an inordinate number of people dying.
frog@beehaw.org 5 months ago
OpenAI are not going to make the source code for their model accessible to all to learn from. This is 100% about profiting from it themselves. And using copyrighted data to create open source models would seem to violate the very principles the open source community stands for - namely that everybody contributes what they agree to, and everything is published under a licence. If the basis of an open source model is a vast quantity of training data from a vast quantity of extremely pissed off artists, at least some of the people working on that model are going to have a “are we the baddies?” moment.
The AI models are also never going to produce a solution to climate change that humans will accept. We already know what the solution is, but nobody wants to hear it, and expecting anyone to listen to ChatGPT and suddenly change their minds about using fossil fuels is ludicrous. And an AI that is trained specifically on knowledge about the climate and technologies that can improve it, with the purpose of innovating some hypothetical technology that will fix everything without humans changing any of their behaviour, categorically does not need the entire contents of ArtStation in its training data. AIs that are trained to do specific tasks, like the ones trained to identify new antibiotics, are trained on a very limited set of data, most of which is not protected by copyright and any that is can be easily licenced because the quantity is so small - and you don’t see anybody complaining about those models!
Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
It isn’t wrong to use copyrighted works for training. Let me quote an article by the EFF here:
and
What you want would swing the doors open for corporate interference like hindering competition, stifling unwanted speech, and monopolization like nothing we’ve seen before. There are very good reasons people have these rights, and we shouldn’t be trying to change this. Ultimately, it’s apparent to me, you are in favor of these things. That you believe artists deserve a monopoly on ideas and non-specific expression, to the detriment of anyone else. If I’m wrong, please explain to me how.
If we’re going by the number of pixels being viewed, then you have to use the same measure for both humans and AIs - and because AIs have to look at billions of images while humans do not, the AI still requires far more pixels than a human does.
Humans benefit from years of evolutionary development and corporeal bodies to explore and interact with their world before they’re ever expected to produce complex art. AI need huge datasets to understand patterns to make up for this disadvantage. Nobody pops out of the womb with fully formed fine motor skills, pattern recognition, understanding of cause and effect, shapes, comparison, counting, vocabulary related to art, and spatial reasoning. Datasets are huge and filled with image-caption pairs to teach models all of this from scratch. AI isn’t human, and we shouldn’t judge it against them, just like we don’t judge boats on their rowing ability.
And humans don’t require the most modern art in order to learn to draw at all. Sure, if they want to compete with modern artists, they would need to look at modern artists (for which educational fair use exists, and again the quantity of art being used by the human for this purpose is massively lower than what an AI uses - a human does not need to consume billions of artworks from modern artists in order to learn what the current trends are). But a human could learn to draw, paint, sculpt, etc purely by only looking at public domain and creative commons works, because the process for drawing, say, the human figure (with the right number of fingers!) has not changed in hundreds of years. A human can also just… go outside and draw things they see themselves, because the sky above them and the tree across the street aren’t copyrighted. And in fact, I’d argue that a good artist should go out and find real things to draw.
AI don’t require most modern art in order to learn to make images either, but the range of expression would be limited, just like a human’s in this situation. You can see this in cave paintings and early sculptures. They wouldn’t be limited to this same degree, but you would still be limited.
It took us 100,000 years to get from cave drawings to Leonard Da Vinci. This is just another step for artists, like Camera Obscura was in the past. It’s important to remember that early man was as smart as we are, they just lacked the interconnectivity to exchange ideas that we have.
ParsnipWitch@feddit.de 5 months ago
I think the difference in artistic expression between modern humans and humans in the past comes down to the material available (like the actual material to draw with).
Humans can draw without seeing any image ever. Blind people can create art and draw things because we have a different understanding of the world around us than AI has. No human artist needs to look at a thousand or even at 1 picture of a banana to draw one.
The way AI sees and “understands” the world and how it generates an image is fundamentally different from how the human brain conveys the object banana into an image of a banana.
Bene7rddso@feddit.de 5 months ago
Humans learn mostly from real life. Go touch some grass
intensely_human@lemm.ee 5 months ago
When you look at one painting, is that the equivalent of one instance of the painting in the training data? There is an infinite amount of information in the painting, and each time you look you process more of that information.
I’d say any given painting you look at in a museum, you process at least a hundred mental images of aspects of it. A painting on your wall could be seen ten thousand times easily.
Phanatik@kbin.social 5 months ago
Exactly! You can glean so much from a single work, not just about the work itself but who created it and what ideas were they trying to express and what does that tell us about the world they live in and how they see that world.
This doesn't even touch the fact that I'm learning to draw not by looking at other drawings but what exactly I'm trying to draw. I know at a base level, a drawing is a series of shapes made by hand whether it's through a digital medium or traditional pen/pencil and paper. But the skill isn't being able replicate other drawings, it's being able to convert something I can see into a drawing. If I'm drawing someone sitting in a wheelchair, then I'll get the pose of them sitting in the wheelchair but I can add details I want to emphasise or remove details I don't want. There's so much that goes into creative work and I'm tired of arguing with people who have no idea what it takes to produce creative works.
frog@beehaw.org 5 months ago
It seems that most of the people who think what humans and AIs do is the same thing are not actually creatives themselves. Their level of understanding of what it takes to draw goes no further than “well anyone can draw, children do it all the time”. They have the same respect for writing, of course, equating the ability to string words together to write an email, with the process it takes to write a brilliant novel or script. They don’t get it, and to an extent, that’s fine - not everybody needs to understand everything. But they should at least have the decency to listen to the people that do get it.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Well, that’s not me. I’m a creative, and I see deep parallels between how LLMs work and how my own mind works.
frog@beehaw.org 5 months ago
Either you’re vastly overestimating the degree of understanding and insight AIs possess, or you’re vastly underestimating your own capabilities. :)