I do understand why so many people, especially creative folks, are worried about AI and how it’s used. The future is quite unknown, and things are changing very rapidly, at a pace that can feel out…
Statistical analysis of existing literary works is certainly not the same sort of thing as generating new literary works based on models trained on old ones.
Almost all of the people who are fearful that AI is going to plagiarize their work don’t know the difference between statistical analysis and generative artificial intelligence. They’re both AI, and unfortunately in those circles it seems anything even AI-related is automatically bad without any further thought.
I wouldn’t characterize statistical analysis as “AI”, but sadly I do see people (like those authors) totally missing the differences.
I’m generally hesitant about AI stuff (particularly with the constant “full steam ahead, ‘disrupt’ everything!” mindset that is far too prevalent in certain tech spheres), but what I saw described in this article looks really, really cool. The one bit I’m hesitant about is where actual pages are presented (since that is actually presenting a segment of the text), but other than that it’s really sad to see this project killed by a massive misunderstanding.
There’s a subset of artificial intelligence called unsupervised learning which is a form of statistical analysis in which you let an agent find patterns in data for you, as opposed to trying to drive the agent to a desired outcome. I’m not 100% sure that is what the website author was using, but it sounded pretty close to it. It’s extremely powerful and not anything like the generative LLMs most people now think of when the words AI are thrown around.
I agree though, it sucks project got killed it seemed super interesting and insightful.
A tool that counts “total words”.
That was a Unix program written 50 years ago called “wc”, which stands for “word count”.
I’m not sure if you’re joking, but thats just a single part of the program.
A tool called Shaxpir creates a score sheet of literature, and many authors don’t like that.
Saved you a click.
Also, down-vote click bait so it doesn’t trend on Lemmy, please.
How many people have even heard of Shaxpir? If that had been in the title instead of “useful AI tool” I probably wouldn’t have cared as I’d never heard of it.
AI people just love to disingenuously claim that anybody who criticizes AI “fears” the technology. This is their way of dismissing all critics or skeptics as luddites, and is usefully based entirely on their desire to profit somehow off of the trend.
Artists don’t “fear” AI… They simply want big tech billionaires to stop stealing their copyrighted art works or other intellectual property in the hopes of generating infinite junk “content”.
If you want artists to embrace AI, then you’d better be willing to stay paying them to license their artwork for AI training.
Yeah, but that’s not what this tool was? It analyzed writing styles, not copied them.
That’s also what art AI does. It analyzes art styles, then creates unique works based on its “inspiration”
This doesn’t make anything from it, though. It gives you word counts, like how much passive voice was used and how many -ly adverbs. There’s nothing unique created from it.
That’s honestly the issue being pointed out here - people see “AI” and have knee jerk reactions, without seeing how is being used here. I’m completely against AI being used to make “art” or do writing, but that’s not what what this tool did at all. But folks assumed it did.
There are also financial incentives to oppose the adoption of content generating AI. As the spinning jenny replaced hand spinning and electric trolleys replaced horse drawn streetcars, there was always strong financially motivated opposition. How is it different this time?
Because at some point we will automate people completely out of jobs, and then they will have nowhere to go. Our system isn’t set up to handle that.
People are already struggling to find jobs with a liveable wage.
How is it different this time?
Mechanical inventions of the past were invented, designed and implemented by people who had a unique idea for how to better accomplish some task. If part(s) of their invention was already patented by someone else, then they would be required to either license that patent or find another novel approach.
Machine learning AI doesn’t work that way. In order to produce any result (let alone a good one) it must be “trained” on a dataset of other people’s works, or peoples faces, or whatever (depending on the desired result). All i ask is that people (artists, writers, musicians, etc) are fairly and regularly compensated when their copyrighted work is used to train AI.
Anything else is exploitation on an industrial scale.
Still waiting on that copyright infringement evidence all of the anti-ai people claim is out there.
My brother in Christ, if I steal all of your writings and art when you’re not looking, chop them up, eat them, and shit them out, they are still your creations-- just now covered in shit, garbled up, and without your original thoughts and intentions put behind them. If I then sell the pile of shit to someone, I am profiting from your labor.
I would be less inclined to hate this if I got some form of royalty or even some form of compensation for the hours and hours I’ve spent planning, creating, editing, and studying to make my things.
My brother in Christ, if you can prove you have ever had an original thought in your life, one that hasn’t been influenced by something that someone said before, I’ll eat all the shit. All of it. Every piece of undigested corn. I’m confident in saying that because I know you can’t. We are all products of our environment, and we can all attribute every thought we’ve had to some experience that we’ve had in our life that involved others. You aren’t as unique as you think you are. All the people that told you that were only trying to protect your ego. You are a combination of events that all lead up to this moment, and all of those events are open source. You don’t own anything. No words. No brush strokes. No ideas. All of them come into your mind because you have experienced aspects of this world. Sure, your own combination of experiences may be unique to you, but no more than the data used to train AI. The idea that humans have some monopoly on original thought is pure hubris. We’ve been stealing IP since we learned to draw on cave walls.
AI made creating art accessible for the masses. What these artists are doing now is going to limit it’s creation to corporations. Great.
Art is already accessible to the masses. It was accessible to cavemen. It’s called picking up a pencil, rock, mud, paper, paint, macaroni, feathers, literally anything in your world and making something of it. Everyone has the ability to be an artist. What the AI bros are complaining about is that they want an easy and instant way to replace years and lifetimes of perfecting one’s craft, while piggybacking off of and stealing said labor to profit from it.
I think you’re being dramatic and playing right into the hands of corporations who wants to control generated art.
Stealing people’s hard work to spit out pale copies isn’t making art “accessible for the masses.” Artists worked hard to be able to produce the art AI spits out.
