I was equivocating singular words and entire sentences on purpose.

If you can recombine sentences in interesting ways, into paragraphs that are your own ideas, that isn’t plagiarism. Why would “people can’t construct unique sentences either” be a rebuttal if that’s not what plagiarsm is?

Instead it studies the prior work of humans, finds patterns and combines these in unique and novel ways.

You’re anthropomorphising.

LLMs are little clink-clink machines that produce the most typical output. That’s how they’re trained. Ten thousand inputs say this image is of a streetlight? That’s how it knows.

The fact an LLM knows what a Lord of Rings is at all means that Tolkien’s words, the images, the sounds, are all encoded in its weights somewhere. You can’t see them, it’s a black box, but they live there.

Could you say the same of the human brain? Sure. I know what a neuron is.

But, LLMs are not people.

All of that is besides the point, though. I was just floored by how cynical you could be about your own supposed craft.

A photograph of, say, a pretty flower is fantastic. As an enjoyer of art myself, I love it when people communicate things. People can share in the beauty that you saw. They can talk about it. Talk about how the colors and the framing make them feel. But if you’re view is that you’re not actually adding anything, you’re just doing more of what already exists, I really don’t know why you bother.

Nobody has seen every photo in the world.

Okay, assume someone has. Is your art meaningless, then? All of photography is just spectacle, and all the spectacles have been seen?

it doesn’t mean you can’t combine them in a unique ways

Okay, so you don’t believe new things can’t be unique. You just think that plagiarism is when one person uses the word ‘the’ and then a second person uses the word ‘the’.

Why do you find it such a depressing idea?

That art is dead? Through sheer saturation alone, no one has anything left to say? That watching the new Cinderella is line-by-line the same as watching the old Cinderella, and the money machine keeps this corpse moving along only because people are too stupid to realize they’re being sold books from a library? I really don’t know how you couldn’t.

This is like asking me why a polluted lake is sad.

the truth is a moving target somewhere in between.

Token guessing and… consciousness?

I’d argue it’s virtually impossible to write a sentence that has not been written before

I mean this sincerely: why bother getting excited about anything, then?

A new Marvel movie, a new game, a new book, a new song. If none of them are unique in any way, what is the point of it all? Why have generative AI go through this song and dance? Why have people do it? Why waste everyone’s time?

If the plagiarism engine is acceptable because it’s not possible to be unique anyway… I just, I don’t know how you go on living. It all sounds so unbelievably boring.

Your taxes pay for the library.

Arguing why it’s bad for society for machines to mechanise the production of works inspired by others is more to the point.

I agree, but the fact that shills for this technology are also wrong about it is at least interesting.

Rhetorically speaking, I don’t know if that’s useless.

I don’t care why they’re different, or that it technically did or didn’t violate the “free swim” policy,

I do like this point a lot.

If they can find a way to do and use the cool stuff without making things worse, they should focus on that.

I do miss when the likes of cleverbot was just a fun novelty on the Internet.

If I as a human want to learn a subject from a book, I buy it

xD
That’s good.

It’s not because what they’re against is the consolidation of power.

If the principle “information is free” can lead to systems where information is not free, then that’s not really desirable, is it.

If free information to inspire more creative works can lead to systems with less creative works, then that’s not really desirable, is it.

My hot take is that I would piss on Reagan’s grave.

Okay, lukewarm, maybe.

It is a tool

Yeah, I agree. I wrote twelve lines about that.

I really like this PBS Spacetime video, which is at least a little related. Great channel for diving into these subjects further, but in a more casual way than a textbook.

are all just a tool
just a tool
it’s just a tool
a tool is a tool
all are just tools
it’s no more than a tool
it’s just a tool
it’s a tool we can use
one of our many tools
it’s only a tool
these are just tools
a tool for thee, a tool for me

guns don’t kill people, people kill people
the solution is simple:
teach drunk people not to shoot their guns so much
unless they want to
that is the American way

tanks don’t kill people, people kill people
the solution is simple:
teach drunk people not to shoot their tanks so much
the barista who offered them soy milk
wasn’t implying anything about their T levels
that is the American way

Thanks for reminding me that AI is just tools, friend.
My memory is not so good.
I often can’t
remember

You don’t want the government to police advertisements to kids, like we already do with television.

Instead, you think Darwinism should police them with death? Really?

Oh, I’m well aware.

I wrote up a long reply to someone who essentially said “emojis don’t add meaning” about how this willful, and I do mean willful, ignorance about a medium of communication is kind of like rejecting the invention of technicolor film for being a frivolous gimmick. It’s a silly position to have, and I might even argue anti-intellectual.

Buuut I didn’t want to seem like I was picking on the poor guy, so I didn’t send, haha.

ohmygod ilovethis

It’s not okay to not care about everyone else, though.

I often say this about my cancer treatments.

Now thar be a question for the mushrooms.

Cum is produced for the orgasm, so the trick to a big load is to have like seven simultaneous orgasms.

You could start by setting up different porn videos for each of your eyes.

Yeah. See, the real 1984 is when a guy in a tweed coat beats you up while saying things like “2 plus 2 is 4” and “5 times 9 is 45” because then you learn to hate correct answers.