WotC Would you buy WotC products produced or enhanced with AI?

[SlyFlourish]

I am pretty sure this is just your way of avoiding the subject. I have had plenty of discussions here about the environmental effects without it getting political.


This is verging into whataboutism. Since plenty of other things use up energy, then why should it matter what ai uses is what you are saying here, and that is potentially acting in bad faith.


If you don't see anything unethical going on here, then how about asking how @SlyFlourish feels about having his published work taken without his permission and without any kind of compensation.

You are literally standing there saying "everything is fine" while people right here in this forum/community have been harmed by this. The fact that you are saying this is very disturbing on many levels.

Your "don't appear unethical to me" statement might as well be saying "I have no interest in addressing the fact that fellow forum members have been subjected to unethical data scraping since it doesn't affect me personally."

I want my two dollars. Either my material is valuable to LLMs and thus I should be compensated, or it’s not useful and they shouldn’t get a 400 billion valuation. Clearly the material they used for training is valuable or their company wouldn’t be worth spit.

I release all of my articles under a CC BY NC license. I release a lot of my books under an extremely permissive CC BY license. But big LLm companies can’t even be bothered to cite me when they spill my material out.

Anyway, that’s how I feel.

 

[briggart]

I don't think this is true. I think younger people are more likely to be anti-AI

You are not a teacher and have to grade students homework, are you?

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

Remember when TSR published Encyclopedia Magicka and used a 1994 era AI to find and replace all instances of "mage" with "wizard", resulting in a book going to print that had spells that do "ten points of dawizard"?


There's nothing more or less ethical about gen AI than a spellcheck. It's a tool, nothing more, nothing less.

 

[Reynard]

1994 era AI

Man it would be great if people stopped saying things like this

 

[ezo]

"ten points of dawizard"

LOL that is HILARIOUS!!!

 

[Art Waring]

It isn't.

It's fair that that argument does not solve the problem in itself. Generally speaking, I think most things that use energy are ethical, and I put AI in the same category.

I note, emphatically, that does not imply I think there are no downsides to energy uses, or differences between how ethical different energy sources are, or that there are not substantial risks to the environment as a result of energy consumption and other human activity.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying I don't think the web scraping is unethical. I understand it is upsetting. If I believed it was unethical, I would oppose it regardless of whether it affected me personally.

I have specifically asked you what you have to say to fellow forum members who have had their work stolen without their permission and without any credit or compensation (which is clearly 100% unethical), and you have made every effort to avoid answering my simple question.

 

[Reynard]

Is there a way to tell if your work has been used to train an AI model? I am curious if my couple self published books were consumed.

 

[SlyFlourish]

Is there a way to tell if your work has been used to train an AI model? I am curious if my couple self published books were consumed.

The Atlantic had a lookup. My books were there.

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI

Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

www.theatlantic.com

 

[The Firebird]

I have specifically asked you what you have to say to fellow forum members who have had their work stolen without their permission and without any credit or compensation (which is clearly 100% unethical), and you have made every effort to avoid answering my simple question.

I don't think the work was stolen.

If open AI obtained your work by scraping--I'm sorry. I think it's rude of them to do so. Like showing up at a potluck and not bringing anything. I think they should provide open source models as a way of contributing. Mike's idea of micropayments would also be a nice gesture, but hard to implement.

That said, I do not think stealing is an appropriate term. They didn't steal anything. Nor do I think it is unethical.

I understand this is a somewhat new scenario and new ethical territory, so if you reason about it differently I can understand that.

 

[Art Waring]

I want my two dollars. Either my material is valuable to LLMs and thus I should be compensated, or it’s not useful and they shouldn’t get a 400 billion valuation. Clearly the material they used for training is valuable or their company wouldn’t be worth spit.

I release all of my articles under a CC BY NC license. I release a lot of my books under an extremely permissive CC BY license. But big LLm companies can’t even be bothered to cite me when they spill my material out.

Anyway, that’s how I feel.

Thank you for your reply. I hear you man.

Clearly the material they used for training is valuable or their company wouldn’t be worth spit.

This is really the crux of the issue.