• 0 Posts
  • 83 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle




  • I have a son that’s learning to read right now so I’ve got some first hand experience on this. This article is making a lot out of the contextual clues part of the method but consistently downplays or ignores that phonics is still part of what the kids are taught. It’s a bit of a fallback, sure, but my son isn’t being taught to skip words when he can’t figure it out.

    He’s bringing home the kinds of books mentioned in the article. The sentence structure is pretty repetitive and when he comes across a word he doesn’t know he tries to look at the picture to figure out what it is. Sometimes that works and he says the right word. Other times, like there’s a picture of a bear and the word is “cub” (but I don’t think my son knew what a bear cub was), he still falls back on “cuh uh buh” to figure it out.

    So he still knows the relationship between letters and sounds. He just has some other tools in his belt as well. I can’t say I find that especially concerning.












  • When you use (read, view, listen to…) copyrighted material you’re subject to the licensing rules, no matter if it’s free (as in beer) or not.

    You’ve got that backwards. Copyright protects the owner’s right to distribution. Reading, viewing, listening to a work is never copyright infringement. Which is to say that making it publicly available is the owner exercising their rights.

    This means that quoting more than what’s considered fair use is a violation of the license, for instance. In practice a human would not be able to quote exactly a 1000 words document just on the first read but “AI” can, thus infringing one of the licensing clauses.

    Only on very specific circumstances, with some particular coaxing, can you get an AI to do this with certain works that are widely quoted throughout its training data. There may be some very small scale copyright violations that occur here but it’s largely a technical hurdle that will be overcome before long (i.e. wholesale regurgitation isn’t an actual goal of AI technology).

    Some licensing on copyrighted material is also explicitly forbidding to use the full content by automated systems (once they were web crawlers for search engines)

    Again, copyright doesn’t govern how you’re allowed to view a work. robots.txt is not a legally enforceable license. At best, the website owner may be able to restrict access via computer access abuse laws, but not copyright. And it would be completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not AI can train on non-internet data sets like books, movies, etc.




  • a much stronger one would be to simply note all of the works with a Creative Commons “No Derivatives” license in the training data, since it is hard to argue that the model checkpoint isn’t derived from the training data.

    Not really. First of all, creative commons strictly loosens the copyright restrictions on a work. The strongest license is actually no explicit license i.e. “All Rights Reserved.” No derivatives is already included under full, default, copyright.

    Second, derivative has a pretty strict legal definition. It’s not enough to say that the derived work was created using a protected work, or even that the derived work couldn’t exist without the protected work. Some examples: create a word cloud of your favorite book, analyze the tone of news article to help you trade stocks, produce an image containing the most prominent color in every frame of a movie, or create a search index of the words found on all websites on the internet. All of that is absolutely allowed under even the strictest of copyright protections.

    Statistical analysis of copyrighted materials, as in training AI, easily clears that same bar.