Hacker Neue

Preferences
bonoboTP parent
This technology is a really bad way of storing, reproducing and transmitting the books themselves. It's probabilistic and lossy. It may be possible to reproduce some paragraphs, but no reasonable person would expect to read The Da Vinci Code by prompting the LLM. Surely the marketed use cases and the observed real use by users has to make it clear that the intended and vastly overwhelming use of an LLM is transformative, "digestive" synthesis of many sources to construct a merged, abstracted, generalized system that can function in novel uses, answering never before seen prompts in a useful manner, overwhelmingly without reproducing existing written works. It surely matters what the purpose of the thing is both in intention and observed practice. It's not a viable competing alternative to reading the actual book.
spit2wind
Not The DaVinci Code, but I recently tried reading "OCaml Programming: Correct + Efficient + Beautiful" through Gemini. The book is open, so I rightly assumed it was "in there". I read by saying "Give me the first paragraph of Chapter 6" and then something like "Next 3 paragraphs". If I had a question, I was able to ask it and get some more info and have something like a dialog.

As far as I could tell, the book didn't match what's posted online today. The text was somewhat consistent on a topic, yet poorly written and made references to sections that I don't think existed. No amount of prompting could locate them. I'm not convinced the material presented to me was actually the book, although it seemed consistent with the topic of the chapter.

I tried to ascertain when the book had been scraped, yet couldn't find a match in Archive.org or in the book's git repo.

Eventually I gave up and just continued reading the PDF.

munificent
The number of people who buy Cliffs Notes versions of books to pass examinations where they claim to have read the actual book suggests you are way overestimating how "reasonable" many people are.
bonoboTP OP
Cliff Notes are fair use. Would you argue otherwise? Wikipedia also has plot summaries without infringement.
munificent
In your parent comment, you argued what people would do in practice. Now you have shifted to talking about what is legal or not to do.

I'm not a legal scholar, so I'm not qualified or interested in arguing about whether Cliff Notes is fair use. But I do care about how people behave, and I'm pretty sure that Cliff Notes and LLMs lead to fewer books being purchased, which makes it harder for writers to do what they do.

In the case of Cliff Notes, it probably matters less because because the authors of 19th century books in your English 101 class are long dead and buried. But for authors of newer technical material, yes, I think LLMs will make it harder for those people to be able to afford to spend the time thinking, writing, and sharing their expertise.

bonoboTP OP
It surely matters whether people actually use the thing for copyright violations or not. Summaries are not even copyright violations so that's irrelevant. Long verbatim copies would be, but one would have to demonstrate that this use case is significant, convenient enough to provide a viable alternative to otherwise obtaining the particular text chunk etc.

----

> But for authors of newer technical material, yes, I think LLMs will make it harder for those people to be able to afford to spend the time thinking, writing, and sharing their expertise.

Alright, you're now arguing for some new regulations though, since this is not a matter for copyright.

In that context, I observe that many academics already put their technical books online for free. Machine learning, computer vision, robotics etc. I doubt it's a hugely lucrative thing in the first place.

munificent
> Alright, you're now arguing for some new regulations though

No, I'm not. I'm not talking about law at all. You talked about what reasonable people do and I'm also talking about what people do.

> I observe that many academics already put their technical books online for free.

As do I, which is why the LLMs are trained on it and are able to so effectively regurgitate it.

> I doubt it's a hugely lucrative thing in the first place.

This is true in many cases, but you might be surprised.

This item has no comments currently.