this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Sure, AI is not doing anything creative, but neither is my pen, its the tool im using to be creative. Lets think about this more with some scenarios:
Lets say software developer “A” comes along, and they’re pretty fucking smart. They sit down, read through all of Mark Twains novels, and over the course of the next 5 years, create a piece of software that generates works in Twain’s style. Its so good that people begin using it to write real books. It doesn’t copy anything specifically from Twain, it just mimics his writing style.
We also have developer “B”. While Dev A is working on his project, Dev B is working on a very similar project, but with one difference: Dev B writes an LLM to read the books for him, and develop a writing style similar to Twain’s based off of that. The final product is more or less the same as Dev A’s product, but he saves himself the time of needing to read through every work on his own, he just reads a couple to get an idea of what the output might look like.
Is the work from Dev A’s software legitimate? Why or why not?
Is the work from Dev B’s software legitimate? Why or why not?
Assume both of these developers own copies of the works they used as training data, what is honestly the difference here? This is what I am struggling with so much.
Both developers have created a parrot tool. A utility to plagiarise a style.
So now the output of both programs is “illegimate” in your eyes, despite one of them never even getting direct access to the original text.
Now lets say one of them just writes a story in the style of Twain, still plagiarism? Because I don’t know if you can copyright a style.
The first painter painted on cave walls with his fingers. Was the brush a parrot tool? A utility to plagiarize? You could use it for plagiarism, yes, and by your logic, it shouldn’t be used. And any work created using it is not “legitimate”.