Hello, please be aware that your publication history is visible on hackernews:
> Show HN: I built an AI that gives expert-backed blood test insights in seconds (bloodinsightai.com) [1]
You're free to make whatever kind of project you want, but it becomes a bit ironic when every other paragraph in this post is "unlike everyone, I did not chase the AI hype" (the whole post reads like AI prose btw).
Please also note that, while the "Loved by 2360 people" uses images hosted on d145moygdin44j.cloudfront.net, the "testimonials" section has profile pictures that link to the randomuser.me API. This could lead people to believe that the reviews are fake.
> P.s.: Noticed how when people buy the template the number on the landing page increases? Its real.
I did notice, so am I to believe that in the writing of my comment (less than an hour ago), this number jumped from 2300 to a clean 2360 (so a conversion rate of about 2 users per minute), and yet it has not received further updates since? I'm pretty sure that I've been writing for more than a few minutes already.
Also I don't think I've ever seen "inputting false profile images from randomuser.me" as a means to protect the personal infos of your client, if they don't want their name in there, I'm pretty sure they also don't want a fake name and fake image to represent them.
Finally, it's hard to believe that a thriving community of 2360 individual users would translate to a subreddit with... 5 monthly visits. https://www.reddit.com/r/WriteItDownTemplate/ (<- official subreddit listed on your site's page)
I understand you might think these people are fake but I am not here to try to prove you wrong. I know what I've built, I know how many people have signed up and requested a copy. What I will do however is fix the landing page so that less people think this is some sort of trick to get people to buy.
And I remember the part in copyright law where it says "if the violation is done by a big corporationy corportation, then the punishment must be more severe even on a per-violation basis"
I mean, it's not crazy talk, you frame it as crazy but this difference in treatment is fairly normal. If punitive damages were limited to what an individual person could manage, they would hardly ever be "punitive" for corporate actors.
You're the second person I've talked to in this thread who thinks "The law is not applied with perfect consistency in practice!? Dear god why is it not like computer programs?".
It's just my personal take, but I don't think extreme rigidity and consistency in a "code is law" fashion would ever be desirable. look over to the crypto world to see how DAOs are faring.
150k per violation of copyright law by means of pirating a book is excessive even for the largest company in the world. I agree that punishment should be somewhat proportional so that "too big to fail" firms don't see it as just a fine to be accounted for as any expense, but among things that ought to be worth a a fine of that magnitude, downloading a book is not among them.
The inconsistency you're talking about is only based on the premise that LLMs and humans are "basically the same thing and thus should be treated the exact same way in this kind of situation". But I don't really see why that would be the case in the first place.
Now don't take me wrong, I'm not saying that a rushed regulatory response is a good thing, it's more about the delivery of your reply. I see those arguments a lot: people smugly saying "Well, YOU too learn from things, how about that? Not so different from the machine huh?" and then continuing the discussion based on that premise, as if we were supposed to accept it as a fact.
Because the onus is on you to show the substantive difference. Learning from copyrighted works has always been accepted as free and unrestricted, up until 2022. Before that, nobody (to a rounding error) thought that simply being influenced by a previous copyright work meant you owed a license fee. If anything, people would have been livid about restrictions on their right to learn.
Only when big-corp critics needed another pretense to support a conclusion they long agreed with for other reasons, did they decide that the right to learn from your exposure to a copyright work was infringement.
If you're interested in the similarities and genuinely curious, you could look at the article linked above, which shows how both LLMs and humans store a high-level understanding of their training set. It's a way deeper parallel than "it's all learning" -- but you have to be willing to engage with the other side rather than just strawman it.
> Because the onus is on you to show the substantive difference
It literally is not. If the defense for your copyright infringement is "my machine is actually the same as a human" then it's your obligation to substantiate that argument.
You left out 'For human beings, not for billion dollar corporate for profit unlimited scaling products intended to replace all creative work'.
If human beings were working for Anthropic, training, and then being contracted out by Anthropic, the exact same rules would apply as historically. Anthropic is not being unfairly treated.
Don't talk about strawmanning when paragraph 2 doesn't describe any argument I've been making. The similarity IS an argument you've advanced. The person you're arguing with does exist and Disney + other bad actors ARE trying to profiteer off of their outrage to tighten up copyright... but I'm not that guy, I really only attacked your argument.
Either way, you seem to be asking for a genuine conversation so I'll take this a bit more seriously.
I hope you will forgive me for not engaging with the entire article top-to-bottom right now. For time's sake, I've queried ChatGPT to extract quotes from the article related to your main point (the similarity between human thinking and LLM predictions) so that I can ctrl+F them. This is a well written and organized article, so I believe that even looking at disconnected sections should give me a clear view of the argument that's being made.
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From the section: “Understanding” in tools.
The author rightfully spends some time disambiguating his use of "understanding", and comparing traditional scripting to LLMs, drawing a parallel with human processes like mathematics and intuition (respectively). The section ends with this quote:
> That’s why I think that the process of training really is, both mechanically and philosophically, more like human learning than anything else
Which is the meat of the argument you're making to say that both should be evaluated in the court.
I can easily tell when reading this that the author is skillful and genuine in his concerns over IP and its misuses, and I really respect that. The issue I raise with the whole argument however did not change from my initial response. While he does have a good understanding of how LLMs operate.
↑↑↑↑↑↑ At this point in writing my reply, I then planned to call into questions his credentials in the other main expertise, namely brain science, as I most often saw this argument come from tech people and less so brain scientists. What I found instead was not the ultimate own I hoped for, but rather a mixed bag of things that really are similar[1] and other articles that expressed some big differences in other aspects[2]. As such, I cannot in good faith say that your argument is unsubstantiated, only that brain science (an expertise in which I have absolutely no authority) is still torn on the subject.
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Doesn't mean my first reply is suddenly null and void. If I can't prove or disprove "LLMs and humans think alike", I can still discuss the other conclusion you (and the article) draw from it "-> ...and thus, should and will be treated equally in the eyes of the law". This brings yet another expertise (law) that I am woefully unqualified to talk about, but I need to ask: why would that be the "only natural" conclusion? I'll refer to your other reply:
> laws can be arbitrary, and ignore constraints like consistency! It’s just something sane people try to avoid.
You look at the inconsistencies in law like they're a design flaw, but are they really? Law is meant to accommodate humans, society is a system with an amount of edge cases that I cannot possibly imagine.
In the very next section of the article called "Training is not copying", he calls out inaccurate uses of the world "reproduction" and "storing", he also cites another article, which I'll quote:
> The complaint against Stable Diffusion characterizes this as “compressing” (and thus storing) the training images, but that’s just wrong. With few exceptions, there is no way to recreate the images used in the model based on the facts about them that are stored. Even the tiniest image file contains many thousands of bytes; most will include millions. Mathematically speaking, Stable Diffusion cannot be storing copies …
This reads to me like arguing semantics, yes, most artists yelling out in outrage do not know the ins and outs of training a diffusion model. But I don't think this completely annihilates or addresses their concerns.
When people say "it's not technically reproduction", it doesn't stop the fact that today, LORAs exists to closely imitate the artstyle with much less training resources, and in the case of LORAs, it's not "a vast, super diluted training set", it's "super fine tuning based on an existing model, and an additional (but much smaller) batch of training data directly taken from (and laser-focused on) a specific person.
Now do I know what would happen if [patreon-having-guy] tries to take someone to justice because he made a LORA to specifically target him? I do not, I haven't checked a legal precedent for this but when there will be, it's a decision that will be taken by humans in a court. (As for what will immediately happen, he will Streisand his way to 27 other dudes doing the same thing out of spite)
I got a bit sidetracked, but all of that is to say, law is by people for people. In the end, there's nothing that tells us whether or not "LLMs and Humans think the same" will directly translate to "...so LLMs shall be treated like humans in the court".
The LLM can't go to prison, it can't make money to pay for damages, having an ironclad rule like that would just make things less convenient. Code is not law, and (thankfully) law is not code. I feel like some people (I'm not saying YOU did it) advocating for "treating LLMs as humans" do so as a means to further alleviate corporate responsibility for anything.
All in all, I'm don't just question the parallel, I question "why" the parallel, "why" in this discussion. For the author of your article, I can easily see that he IS genuine with his concerns about IP and the consequences of a Kneejerk regulatory response to it.
Your initial reply in the context of this thread on the other hand? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it reads like a taunt. It reads like "we'll see who gets the last laugh", so forgive me if I assumed that wrongly, because this was the reason my first reply was the way it was.
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One last thing that I have to get out of my system (a tiny rant if you will). I feel like there is an attitude problem in the expertise of tech regarding... quite literally any other craft. I suppose it exists in other fields but this is where I see it the most because I'm also in this field.
The topic we've been discussing is an intersection between tech, brain science, and law, a single of those fields is already very hard, you could dedicate your life to it and still learn more things. Yet when it comes to the "LLM = humans" debate, it seems like everyone suddenly has all the qualifications required, never mind that people dedicating their life to brain science are still saying "we don't fully get it", never mind that people who spend their life in law have yet to experience and set a precedent for the whole shift that's going to happen, tech people talk as if tech is the only thing that's needed to make the world turn.
Generative tech has exacerbated (or expanded) this attitude to even more fields, I don't think it's any surprise that there is such animosity between the tech and creative people when the guy that is spearheading generative music says "people don't enjoy making music", when all the communication around it is "adapt or die", "we figured it out", "we SOLVED art", "you will be left behind", and then calling anyone that does not agree a luddite.
The reason I replied is not because I want IP laws to tighten, nor because I genuinely believe we could "get rid of AI" (btw AI is a blanket term that makes things worse for everyone discussing it), you were just unlucky enough to be the n-th person to bring up that argument I've seen many times before on a night where I had some free time.
So thanks for giving me the occasion to write that down. I do not think this threads warrants either of us to show too much hostility, but as you said, the whole conversation about current-day genAI touches on so much more than just genAI, it's very easy to find something about it that annoys someone on either side.
I think you're focusing too much on whether LLMs are "really human-like" or not. That's a distraction, and I shouldn't have made reference to it. Let me zoom out to a broader point:
It has never been a part of copyright to include the right to be influenced by the copyright work. Period. It's been the diametric opposite. Copyright as always existed, and been justified, as a way to get good, new works out into the public, so that later works can be influenced by them. The fact that one work was influenced by another has never, by itself, been a reason to consider it infringement. Not until 2022, when AIs actually got good at it.
When you argue for AI training as copyright infringement, you're saying that "the fact that your work was influenced by previous works, means you owe license fees". This is wholly without precedent[1], and was widely rejected until the moment some activists realized it could be a legal tool against Bad People. It's a Pandora's Box no one really wants (except perhaps very large media companies who will be able to secure general "learning licenses" for mass libraries of works). That was the the point emphasized in my original comment: If Anthropic is infringing because they base new works on old ones, so are you. You too owe licensing fees for every work you observed that fed into how you create. If that feels like an expansion of what copyright is supposed to cover ... that's the point.
For every single work of literature, you can go back and say "aha, this is clearly influenced by X, Y, Z". Precisely zero people were going out insisting that the author therefore owed fees to all those other creators, because the idea is absurd. Or was, until 2022, when some people needed a pretense for a conclusion they long supported for unrelated reasons ("Facebook must suffer"). So I think my second paragraph is justified.
"If you read 100 horror novels and write a new one based on everything you've noticed in them, you don't owe the authors jack squat. But if you have a machine help you compile the insights, suddenly, you've infringed the authors' rights." Yeah, you do need to justify that.
[1] I agree there are going to be cases where it, say, was captured too closely, but not for the general case, and it's further weakened when it's "imitating" a thousand styles at once.
On a more human level, I think it's bleak that someone who makes a blog just to share stuff for fun is going to have most of his traffic be scrapers that distill, distort, and reheat whatever he's writing before serving it to potential readers.
If someone writes valuable stuff on a blog almost nobody finds, that's a tragedy.
If LLM's can process the information and provide it to people in conversations where it will be most helpful, where they never would have found it otherwise, then that's amazing!
If all you're trying to do is help people with the information you've discovered, why do you care if it's delivered via your own site or via LLM? You just want it out there helping people.
Because attribution, social recognition and prestige are among the many reasons why people put the information out there, and there is nothing wrong with any of them.
This is why I care if my ideas are presented to others by an LLM (that maybe cites me in some % of cases) or directly to a human. There is already a difference between a human visiting my space (acknowledging it as such) to read and learn information and being a footnote reference that may or may not be read or opened, without an immediate understanding of which information comes from me.
If you want attribution and prestige, then publish your stuff in an actual publication -- a journal, a magazine, whatever. Go on podcasts, speak at conferences, and so forth.
Publishing on a personal blog is not the path.
LLM's aren't taking away from your "prestige" or recognition. Any more than a podcaster referencing an idea of yours without mentioning you is. Or anyone else in casual conversation.
I can't believe the hypocrisy of a guy with 76029 internet points (that's a big time investment, would be a shame if someone trained an LLM on it) pretending to not understand that people want recognition for what they say, regardless of where they say it.
Are there journals who discuss about personal life and perspectives? Or a big publication about clever homelab configuration? Or the millions of other topics people discuss and publish?
Publishing a website is a perfectly fine way to put your ideas out there and expecting to be acknowledged by those who read those ideas.
And yes, a podcaster talking about someone's idea without referencing it is an unethical behavior.
In the grand scheme of things, I guess it's good to have an impact, even an indirect one, but come on, we're talking about human beings here.
Even if someone were to do it out of sheer passion without a care for financial gains, I'm sure they'd still appreciate basic validation and recognition. That's like the cheapest form of payment you could give for someone's work.
I don't understand why "actually, you're egotistical if you dare to desire recognition for stuff you put love and effort to" is such a common argument in those discussions. People are treated like machines that should swallow their pride and sense of self for the greater good, while on the other end, there is a (not saying YOU in particular did it) push to humanize LLMs.
I mean, it did happen, don't you remember in March when SourceHut had outages because their most expensive endpoints were being spammed by scrapers?
Don't you remember the reason Anubis even came to be?
It really wasn't that long ago, so I find all of the snarky comments going "erm, actually, I've yet to see any good actors get harmed by scraping ever, we're just reclaiming power from today's modern ad-ridden hellscape" pretty dishonest.
You'll be fine. Some people want you to never use it, others want you to give it a try right now... but generative AI is not a stock, you'll be free to experiment tomorrow, or in a week, or in a year.
Yeah, the term "breached" was a very poor choice, because it sounds like "this was breached recently" instead of telling "the database could be seen by anyone ever since the app's conception, and it only came to light today" which has much worse implications.
What a nasty dismissal, "he's not a tech guy anyways, he could never understand anything surrounding AI".
Quoting the end of the article ad verbatim:
> And remember that you, as a regular person, can understand all of this. These people want you to believe this is black magic, that you are wrong to worry about the billions wasted or question the usefulness of these tools.
You are currently being "these people".
You don't need a huge technical baggage to understand that OpenAI still operates at a loss, and that there are at the very least some risks to consider before trying to rebuild all of society on it.
I've seen many people on HN (or maybe it was also you the other times) give this same reply again and again, "what do you know? You've not made your research, and if you made research, you don't have reliable sources, and if you have reliable sources, you're not seeing the bigger picture, and if you are seeing the bigger picture, you're not a tech guy, so what do you know?"
This essentially comes back to what the article also says, you are somehow held to crazy fucking standards if you ever say anything remotely critical, and then people will come up in HN threads and say "the human brain is basically also autocomplete, so genAI will be as good as the human brain soon™" (hey, according to your reply, shouldn't people be experts in the human brain to be able to post stuff like this?)
I hope Ed Zitron will keep saying that the biggest AI companies in the world are not making any profit for as long as the biggest AI companies in the world are not making any profit.
I find that fact alone a bit alarming.
You don't need to be a technical expert to understand that it's worrying how the entire media industry is pushing for everyone, everywhere, all of the time, to lean on a tech where the biggest providers are not profitable.
You also don't need to be a technical expert to see how much of a failure it is for the entire media industry to interview Sam Altman, let him spew out utter gibberish, and not even question him on it.
>biggest AI companies in the world are not making any profit
Companies that are exploding in popularity and expanding as fast as possible are not expected to make a profit. This is not unusual in the slightest.
>the entire media industry is pushing for everyone, everywhere, all of the time
No, people use AI because they want to use AI. New users arrive on their own. If you take a closer look at what the legacy media is actually saying, they tend to have a negative slant against AI. Yet people still show up. And will continue to show up.
>Sam Altman, let him spew out utter gibberish, and not even question him on it
If Altman is pissing you and Ed off, he's doing at least something right. That said, I follow AI news every single day and I barely even glance at what Altman is saying. Here lies one of the biggest follies of the anti-AI crowd. Zitron et al. think that they can make AI go away by canceling Altman.
Dunno if I need to comment on the first point since "will AI be able to Uber itself" is talked to death by zitron, and if we're disagreeing on their ability to turn a profit later on, then talking it out isn't gonna change much.
>>the entire media industry is pushing for everyone, everywhere, all of the time
>No
Yes it is. You can't just "no" this. People aren't just "happily using AI and getting bothered by the EVIL AI haters!!!". The push for AI is literally made of threats "You WILL get left behind", "people WILL replace you". Even if it is undeniably disruptive, you can't not call that pressure on a very large scale.
Just because I ask copilot once every few days to write me a piece of boilerplate doesn't invalidate the fact that my workplace has been made to believe prompting is an "essential skill" that must be enforced via mandatory e-learnings.
>think that they can make AI go away by canceling Altman.
I didn't say that and I don't think that. That last paragraph's basically bait.
Yes, Zitron talks all the time. Loudly and insultingly. Here's a suggestion: he should put his money where his mouth is. If he honestly thinks the market for AI is actually 100x smaller than reported and ready to collapse any moment now, he could easily bet against the market. He could earn millions and look like a genius. Make it all public, let his fans join too. You could join. Why not? He supposedly knows the hard truths, he brought the receipts, etc.
But he won't. That's too real. Endlessly prophesying the end of AI is more lucrative.
>You can't just "no" this.
Fundamentally my argument is that the media has little say in this. Take all the new releases this week. Another ~200 million new users will shuffle their way in. Not through fear or fervor, just basic curiosity and a need for getting things done. Models will continue to get better and this trend will continue. It's just how it is.
>I didn't say that and I don't think that. That last paragraph's basically bait.
In any case, I'll leave the Sam Altman discussion to you and Ed.
That's a nice suggestion but also an overdone one. I've seen this "epic own" as much as you've probably seen anti-ai "epic owns" (I need to spend less time looking at AI discourse). It's yet another taunt but I'll bite anyways, shorting has no lower bound, it's risky as hell. I don't wanna be a trader.
Back to the media thing. I still don't fully agree that media coverage has absolutely no influence on the success of a technology or that the best solution always wins (which, correct me if I'm wrong, is the argument you're making). If my fundamental argument is "it has an impact" and yours is "it doesn't" then we've reached a stalemate and can drop that topic too.
Have a good day, it hasn't been nice talking with you, but it's helped me realize that I should care less when I have no stake in it.
Yes but the main thrust of his criticism is the fragility of the whole 'AI' stack, where every part of the stack is unprofitable, unstable and inter-reliant - if any one of those parts goes tits up - everybody else goes with them.
Also, a lot of AI 'users' arrive, search for an actual use case, find none, and then move on.
A quick glance at your other comments shows that your account seems to be purpose-built to come up with the most inflammatory response every single time, you might very well just be a chatgpt prompt.
> Show HN: I built an AI that gives expert-backed blood test insights in seconds (bloodinsightai.com) [1]
You're free to make whatever kind of project you want, but it becomes a bit ironic when every other paragraph in this post is "unlike everyone, I did not chase the AI hype" (the whole post reads like AI prose btw).
Please also note that, while the "Loved by 2360 people" uses images hosted on d145moygdin44j.cloudfront.net, the "testimonials" section has profile pictures that link to the randomuser.me API. This could lead people to believe that the reviews are fake.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43380749
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