>They do the same thing you and I do; read the literature and come to a conclusion.

No.

Very compelling argument you've made.

A worthwhile discussion is based off an exchange of logic.

I've seen enough of these "AI are just like us!" dingbats to know it's not worth my time engaging them, because they aren't operating on logic.

Sounds illogical to force a conversation and than withdraw with a argument about logic while dismissing every counter argument. :D

seems you're getting unnecessarily hung up on the "how" of it.

planes fly but not like birds. does it matter from an "object moved from point A to B through the air" point of view? not really.

LLMs are kind of the same. it's obvious from even the most cursory examination that they're doing something quite different to statistical word mashing. is it being achieved in the same way as your gray matter? no.

in a black box sense, does it matter? also no.

The concepts of lift and flight actually are the same for birds and planes and insects and drones and hellicoptors…… or fish! And whales. And any other organism that uses voyance and lift to ‘fly’ through the ‘medium’.

Every form of intelligence we know of is operating in a fundamentally different environment to what these programs are doing.

Considering the argument is irrationally applying human rights and rights of living beings to these computers running mildly complicated software, yes the "How" does matter a lot.

“Come to a conclusion” is probably wrong; “synthesize a response to a prompt based on the training data provided” is probably closer. Still, it’s what you and I would do when answering a question using information we’ve accumulated from reading various sources.

It definitely wasn't AI generated.

This would be well and good if you couldn't occasionally ask ChatGPT for a response then Google it and find a near identical response elsewhere in what would have otherwise been copyright materials. Other AI tools are doing the same thing, and the most blatant is with art. If you honestly think ChatGPT etc aren't training on copyrighted data and just rewriting it for tons of responses (and images), you're out of your mind. It is just incredibly difficult to prove, and the laws currently are very blurred.

Isn’t their point that humans also do that? Without it necessarily being called copyright infringement?

Lots of subtleties: fair use, what’s not fair use, etc?

It does seem like we’re in new territory, I can see merits on both sides and I guess we’ll figure it out via the courts / new laws over the next couple of years.

It is called copyright infringement. If I write a book, and there's more than a few sentences in a row of content that's verbatim/almost verbatim the same as someone elses published writing (excluding intentional quotes/references) I do get in trouble.

You can't just go "computer did it" and handwave away existing IP law.

> there's more than a few sentences in a row of content that's verbatim/almost verbatim

Ok, now image that it isn't giving out verbatim results. Which is a lot of content.

Totally fine then right?

> I do get in trouble.

Unless the original was a bestseller and you are a bestseller, you almost certainly will not. This obviously happens all the time as most writers suck and do actually deliberately copy things and then self publish. AI is actually helping to now not do that.

Except, humans aren't machines or tools. Our laws don't answer to some logical / mathematical ideal, they're built to address social realities. LLMs aren't citizens.

> This would be well and good if you couldn't occasionally ask ChatGPT for a response then Google it and find a near identical response elsewhere in what would have otherwise been copyright materials.

Likewise, someone could go on Hacker News to start an argument about intellectual property and half of the responses would be nearly identical to comments on Slashdot twenty years ago.

The key difference is that we know how LLMs work but we still haven’t solved the problem of consciousness, or even neuroscience.

You can’t equate something you understand with something you don’t understand. Something you can create with something you can’t.

"They do the same thing you and I do; read the literature and come to a conclusion."

I'm sorry for you if you can't do better than an LLM.