Stephen King: My Books Were Used to Train AI
Stephen King: My Books Were Used to Train AI
One prominent author responds to the revelation that his writing is being used to train artificial intelligence.
Stephen King: My Books Were Used to Train AI::One prominent author responds to the revelation that his writing is being used to coach artificial intelligence.
The AI in black fled into the desert and the wordslinger followed.
Don't worry, a later AI will republish it and it will suck.
The Gunslinger was one of my favorites, before King decided to George Lucas it.
This is my favourite comment on Lemmy so far.
We need an AI with all human knowledge, or various with different specializations. But those AIs must not be in the hands of companies.
AI doesn't currently have any knowledge of facts. It just knows patterns.
if you think companies are going to misuse and abuse ai, just wait until we find out how the man is using them.
I mean, yeah, duh. Just ask any of them to write a paragraph "in the style of INSERT AUTHOR".
If it can, then it was trained on that author. I'm not sure how that's a problem though.
We don't have the legal framework for this type of thing. So people are going to disagree with how using training data for a commercial AI product should work.
I imagine Steven King would argue they didn't have licenses or permission to use his books to train their AI. So he should be compensated or the AI deleted/retrained. He would argue buying a copy of the book only lets it be used for humans to read. Similar to buying a CD doesn't allow you to put that song in your advert.
That doesn't bode well for humanity.
Lol. AI training is more like human awareness of a subject or style. LLM's are not Artificial General Intelligence. They have no persistent memory. They are just a complicated way of categorizing and associating subjects mixed with a probability of what word comes next. The only thing they are really doing is answering what word comes next. Thar be no magic in them thar dragons
This is just another market hype article. AI can't reproduce a work or replace the author. It can write a few lines that may reflect a similar style just like any human also familiar with the work and style.
Unless you want to go back to the medieval era of thought policing, all of these questions about AI training are irrelevant.
It’s an interesting philosophical question to ask whether we humans, when writing something, based on the sum total of all the things we’ve seen, heard, read, etc., aren’t just also working out which is the most likely next word to make a good story. *
One question that could be worth asking though is whether this should have been done without permission. From experience talking with authors, that’s a bigger concern than whether they’ll be replaced.
*Totally agree with you that current LLMs are a long way from that. And humans don’t work at the word level either, so the abstraction is different, but the principle might be the same.
People believing this stuff is AGI also makes me think of how my poor, illiterate, provincial grandmother who when she moved to live with us "in the big city" used to get really confused when she saw the same actor in more than one soap opera on TV: she confused the immitation of real life which is acting (soap operate acting, even, which is generally pretty bad) with actual real life.
And? If we are that pathetic maybe we deserve extinction.
How does having a new tool leave you worse off?
Glad I'm not the only one.
I like Stephen King's work. But it's pulp fiction. There's a few really solid books from him, but he mostly writes for the masses.
It'd be like if Dan Brown claimed this, or Stephanie Meyers. I'm only against this because I think it brings down the quality of the AI.
It's also wicked strange that so many of these authors hate this, but ignore how many authors grew up on their work, learned from it and tried to write in the same style (And failed). Stephen King is a unique brilliant author. His best work is not because he's a good author because of the ideas and subjects of his book, not his writing style. An AI wouldn't have created Misery with out it existed unless someone prompted it with that exact idea.
Yes, and all of modern fantasy is heavily influenced by Tolkien's writing, who in turn took inspiration from old legends like Beowulf.
As if human artists and writers are blind to anything ever created.
Humans with imperfect memories being influenced by a work <> AI language models being trained on a work.
You seem to imply that AI has perfect memory. It doesn't.
Stable Diffusion is a 4GB file of weights. ChatGPT's model is of a similar size. It is mathematically impossible for it to store the entire internet on a few GBs of data, just like it is physically impossible for one human brain to store the entire internet with its neutral network.
Sure, if you want to see it like that. But if you try out StableDiffusion, etc you will notice that "imperfect memory" describes the AI as well. You can ask it for famous paintings and it will get the objects and colors generally correct, but only as well as a human artist would. The details will be severely lacking. And that's the best case scenario for the AI, because famous paintings will be over represented in the training data.
Is that why when I ask ChatGPT to tell me a scary story, it invariably contains a sex scene between minors?
So if your AI responses are biased towards car crashes you will know why now.
Take a Stephen King book you have never read. Open a random page and point to a random paragraph. Do this 3x. You will find a car crash, a memory of a car crash, someone talking about a car crash, or someone concluding X happened because of a car crash.
Does he also have a problem with people that were changed by his books?