Comment by wizzwizz4
1 day ago
Human learning is materially different from LLM training. They're similar in that both involve providing input to a system that can, afterwards, produce output sharing certain statistical regularities with the input, including rote recital in some cases – but the similarities end there.
>Human learning is materially different from LLM training [...] but the similarities end there.
Specifically what "material differences" are there? The only arguments I heard are are around human exceptionalism (eg. "brains are different, because... they just are ok?"), or giving humans a pass because they're not evil corporations.
Humans can generalize.
LLMs just predict the statistically-most-likely token.
human brains are just chemical reactions and electrical transmission between neurons too. You're comparing completely different layers of abstraction in your arguments.
We don't understand human brains well enough to answer this question specifically: if we understood the mechanisms of the human brain, we could replicate them in software, and AI would be that much more advanced. We know that real human neurons don't work at all like artificial neural networks, but that isn't a proof: phonons aren't bosons or fermions (their spin isn't well-defined), yet a sonic black hole is a useful model for Hawking radiation.
So, I'll provide an example: humans can learn to do mathematics. LLMs cannot. This example is particularly galling because there are computer programs that can do (some, limited) mathematics: those operate largely by brute-force, yet can solve more mathematics problems using fewer resources than LLMs.
Why? I'm pretty sure I can learn the lyrics of a song, and probabilistically output them in response to a prompt.
Is the existence of my brain copyright infringement?
The main difference I see (apart from that I bullshit way less than LLMs), is that I can't learn nearly as much as an LLM and I can't talk to 100k people at once 24/7.
I think the real answer here is that AI is a totally new kind of copying, and it's useful enough that laws are going to have to change to accommodate that. What country is going to shoot itself in the foot so much by essentially banning AI, just so it can feel smug about keeping its 20th century copyright laws?
Maybe that will change when you can just type "generate a feature length Pixar blockbuster hit", but I don't see that happening for quite a long time.