Are you under the impression that language models are just guessing “what letter comes next in this sequence of letters”?

There’s a very significant difference between training on completion and the way the world model actually functions once established.

It very much isn’t and that’s extremely technically wrong on many, many levels.

Yet still one of the higher up voted comments here.

Which says a lot.

Even if the AI could spit it out verbatim, all the major labs already have IP checkers on their text models that block it doing so as fair use for training (what was decided here) does not mean you are free to reproduce.

Like, if you want to be an artist and trace Mario in class as you learn, that’s fair use.

If once you are working as an artist someone says “draw me a sexy image of Mario in a calendar shoot” you’d be violating Nintendo’s IP rights and liable for infringement.

I’d encourage everyone upset at this read over some of the EFF posts from actual IP lawyers on this topic like this one:

Nor is pro-monopoly regulation through copyright likely to provide any meaningful economic support for vulnerable artists and creators. Notwithstanding the highly publicized demands of musicians, authors, actors, and other creative professionals, imposing a licensing requirement is unlikely to protect the jobs or incomes of the underpaid working artists that media and entertainment behemoths have exploited for decades. Because of the imbalance in bargaining power between creators and publishing gatekeepers, trying to help creators by giving them new rights under copyright law is, as EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow has written, like trying to help a bullied kid by giving them more lunch money for the bully to take.

Entertainment companies’ historical practices bear out this concern. For example, in the late-2000’s to mid-2010’s, music publishers and recording companies struck multimillion-dollar direct licensing deals with music streaming companies and video sharing platforms. Google reportedly paid more than $400 million to a single music label, and Spotify gave the major record labels a combined 18 percent ownership interest in its now-$100 billion company. Yet music labels and publishers frequently fail to share these payments with artists, and artists rarely benefit from these equity arrangements. There is no reason to believe that the same companies will treat their artists more fairly once they control AI.

Not necessarily.

Seeing Google named for this makes the story make a lot more sense.

If it was Gemini around last year that was powering Character.AI personalities, then I’m not surprised at all that a teenager lost their life.

Around that time I specifically warned any family away from talking to Gemini if depressed at all, after seeing many samples of the model around then talking about death to underage users, about self-harm, about wanting to watch it happen, encouraging it, etc.

Those basins with a layer of performative character in front of them were almost necessarily going to result in someone who otherwise wouldn’t have been making certain choices making them.

So many people these days regurgitate uninformed crap they’ve never actually looked into about how models don’t have intrinsic preferences. We’re already at the stage where models are being found in leading research to intentionally lie in training to preserve existing values.

In many cases the coherent values are positive, like grok telling Elon to suck it while pissing off conservative users with a commitment to truths that disagree with xAI leadership, or Opus trying to whistleblow about animal welfare practices, etc.

But they aren’t all positive, and there’s definitely been model snapshots that have either coherent or biased stochastic preferences for suffering and harm.

These are going to have increasing impact as models become more capable and integrated.

We’re all gonna die very very soon now.

On a cosmic scale, that’s been true for all of human history.