this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Because word-use probabilities in a text are not the same thing as the information expressed by the text.
W-what?
In the future, some people might not be human. Or some people might be mostly human, but use computers to do things like fill in for pieces of their brain that got damaged.
Some people can't regognize faces, for example, but computers are great at that now and Apple has that thing that is Google Glass but better. But a law against doing facial recognition with a computer, and allowing it to only be done with a brain, would prevent that solution from working.
And currently there are a lot of people running around trying to legislate exactly how people's human bodies are allowed to work inside, over those people's objections.
I think we should write laws on the principle that anybody could be a human, or a robot, or a river, or a sentient collection of bees in a trench coat, that is 100% their own business.
But the subject under discussion is large language models that exist today.
I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous.
I have indeed made a list of ridiculous and heretofore unobserved things somebody could be. I'm trying to gesture at a principle here.
If you can't make your own hormones, store bought should be fine. If you are bad at writing, you should be allowed to use a computer to make you good at writing now. If you don't have legs, you should get to roll, and people should stop expecting you to have legs. None of these differences between people, or in the ways that people choose to do things, should really be important.
Is there a word for that idea? Is it just what happens to your brain when you try to read the Office of Consensus Maintenance Analog Simulation System?
The issue under discussion is whether or not LLM companies should pay royalties on the training data, not the personhood of hypothetical future AGIs.
Why should they pay royalties for letting a robot read something that they wouldn't owe if a person read it?
It's not reading. It's word-probability analysis.