The KHIT Blog: "Malign Technologies" update: AI Natural Language Generation (NLG)

Thursday, December 8, 2022

"Malign Technologies" update: AI Natural Language Generation (NLG)

Who might have copyright ownership claims to AI-generated human-readable text?

I posted this today on Facebook. From an interesting article in The Atlantic:

“The world of generative AI is progressing furiously. Last week, OpenAI released an advanced chatbot named ChatGPT that has spawned a new wave of marveling and hand-wringing, plus an upgrade to GPT-3 that allows for complex rhyming poetry; Google previewed new applications last month that will allow people to describe concepts in text and see them rendered as images; and the creative-AI firm Jasper received a $1.5 billion valuation in October…”

OK, question for all of my musician/songwriter friends. If you use the free updated GPT-3 to “write” song lyrics by proxy (i.e., you type in a theme—“Ooooh, baby, you’re gone, and my heart is broken, whah, whah, whah…”—and out pops a Lizzy McAlpine-worthy heartthrob lament), well, who “owns” the lyrics copyright? OpenAI? (But, wait! I thought they are “open source?”)

No one will give a shit unless and until the AI-spawned song becomes a lucrative chart success— after which every music biz IP lawyer in LA and Nashville will be aggressively elbowing each other aside in the sprint to the courthouse to file claims.

Count on it.

BTW: I am a long-time songwriter, of durably nil repute (or $$$). As my wife adroitly put it, I was Quixotically "working in the not-for-profit sector." I may have to screw around with GPT-3, just for grins.

BobbyG, 1981, "The Once & Future Fool"

While living in Knoxville beginning in the late 1970's I was a member of the East TN Chapter of the Nashville Songwriters' Association. But, once belatedly in college at UTK, where I learned the statistical/economic principle of "expected value" (probability x payoff), it became clear that the average estimated prospective "value" of your lovingly-crafted song was in "basis points" (hundreths of a cent) at best.

I changed careers in 1986, and went first into environmental radiation laboratory science. The old joke: "How do you become a millionaire in the music business? Start out with at least two million dollars."

UPDATE

I opened an account at OpenAI to explore this tech.

It's certainly fast. But my initial use thus far is just Q&A.

____

Now, the topical focus of The Atlantic piece is "authenticity" of student prose writing in the academic environment.

Essay generation is neither theoretical nor futuristic at this point. In May, a student in New Zealand confessed to using AI to write their papers, justifying it as a tool like Grammarly or spell-check: “I have the knowledge, I have the lived experience, I’m a good student, I go to all the tutorials and I go to all the lectures and I read everything we have to read but I kind of felt I was being penalised because I don’t write eloquently and I didn’t feel that was right,” they told a student paper in Christchurch. They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program.

Yeah. But apropos of my opening scenario, one can quickly come up with a number of broader questions. When big money is at stake (e.g., my recent prior FTX posts), all manner of problems surface—NLG "plagiarism (?)" aside.

My priority interest in AI has principally been about stuff like this:

Click

NLU: Natural Language Understanding.

I asked OpenAI ChatGPT the following:

ME:
Can artificial intelligence analyze a prose argument?

ChatGPT:
Yes, artificial intelligence (AI) can be trained to analyze prose arguments to some extent. However, the extent to which AI can effectively analyze prose arguments will depend on various factors, such as the quality and amount of training data the AI has been given, the specific AI model being used, and the complexity and nuances of the argument being analyzed.

I'll have to see if I can provide it an "argument," and instruct it to analyze and evaluate it. Skeptical. but, we'll see.

See some of my prior riffs on "AI" topics more generally here.

UPDATES

More from The Atlantic piece.

A chasm has existed between humanists and technologists for a long time. In the 1950s, C. P. Snow gave his famous lecture, later the essay “The Two Cultures,” describing the humanistic and scientific communities as tribes losing contact with each other. “Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists,” Snow wrote. “Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other.” Snow’s argument was a plea for a kind of intellectual cosmopolitanism: Literary people were missing the essential insights of the laws of thermodynamics, and scientific people were ignoring the glories of Shakespeare and Dickens.

The rupture that Snow identified has only deepened. In the modern tech world, the value of a humanistic education shows up in evidence of its absence. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the crypto exchange FTX who recently lost his $16 billion fortune in a few days, is a famously proud illiterate. “I would never read a book,” he once told an interviewer. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”…

Ahhh... C.P. Snow. I've riffed on him before here.

Also, the best place to hide $16 billion from our liitle a-literate Genius pal Sam Bankman-Fried is apparently inside a book.

"The Beast."

OK, THIS IS CUTE

Scott Singeisen, a “Professor of architecture” posts a Twitter thread in reaction to The Atlantic article:

Me:
Write a well argued response to Stephen Marche’s recent essay in @TheAtlantic that AI will make the college essay obsolete

ChatGPT:
Stephen Marche's essay in the Atlantic argues that AI will make the college essay obsolete. However, this claim is not well-supported and is ultimately not convincing.

First of all, it is important to note that the college essay serves a specific purpose in the admissions process. It allows admissions officers to get a sense of the applicant's personality, writing abilities, and potential fit for the institution. AI, on the other hand, is not capable of providing this type of insight. While AI may be able to analyze data and generate texts, it cannot replicate the human experience and provide the same level of depth and understanding that a college essay can.

Furthermore, the use of AI in the admissions process raises concerns about fairness and bias. AI systems are only as good as the data they are trained on, and if the training data is [sic] biased, the AI will also be biased. This could lead to admissions decisions that are unfair or that do not accurately reflect an applicant's abilities and potential.

Additionally, the use of AI in the admissions process could potentially widen the gap between students from different backgrounds. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds may not have access to the same resources and support as their more privileged peers, leading to a disadvantage in the admissions process.

In conclusion, while AI may have the potential to assist in the admissions process, it is not capable of replacing the college essay. The college essay serves a specific purpose in the admissions process and is an important tool for admissions officers to evaluate applicants. The use of AI also raises concerns about fairness and bias, and could potentially widen the gap between students from different backgrounds.

I'm gonna have to play with some of this stuff.

I'm lucky. I never needed AI NLG "help" when it came to writing—prose or song lyrics. Likely has something to do with the 2-3 books a week (plus all of my periodicals) I've studied across my-now 55 years of "adult" life since turning 21. Ya think?

Stephen Marche:

"[N]atural-language processing is going to force engineers and humanists together. They are going to need each other despite everything. Computer scientists will require basic, systematic education in general humanism: The philosophy of language, sociology, history, and ethics are not amusing questions of theoretical speculation anymore. They will be essential in determining the ethical and creative use of chatbots, to take only an obvious example…"

Yeah, And, don't forget the lawyers. Never overlook the lawyers, lest you come to rue the day.

MORE UPDATES

Click

Also, "Amazon orders limited series about the FTX crypto exchange scandal"

OK, WHAT ABOUT THIS CRAP?

Ugh...

CODA

My latest login. The popularity of ChatGPT is melting their servers.

__________

No comments:

Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

I love this kind of stuff. It sustains and humbles me. "As politicians, advertisers, salesmen, and propagandists for various political, economic, moral, religious, psychic, environmental, dietary, and artistic doctrinaire positions know only too well, fallible human minds are easily tricked, by clever verbiage... Common language—or at least, the English language—has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this."

Quotes

"An economist is a person who sees something that works in practice and tries to figure out whether it will work in theory."

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
___

"The only person who enjoys change is a baby with a wet diaper."

"Every misspent dollar in our health care system is part of somebody's paycheck.

- Brent James, M.D., M.Stat

“We could do healthcare, at markedly higher quality, for everyone in this country, without rationing or denying anybody the care that they need, without having the government dictate how doctors practice or whether hospitals could expand, at half the cost we do it now.”

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned."

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

"Q: How much alcohol is too much?
A: More than your doctor drinks."

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

“Just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you get to fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

- Dara O’Briain

'[I]t is one small step from using the computer for "helping" doctors to monitoring them, judging them, dictating to them what to do, and withdrawing payment for computer non-compliance. The use of computer data is a multi-edged sword. It can be used for the "good," facilitating diagnosis and treatment and making it more accurate and up-to-date, and for “evil,” invading privacy, inviting security breechs, and making decisions based on the opinions of remote authorities rather than those present at the patient-doctor encounter.'

- Richard Reece, MD

“[T]here ARE statistics which are non-political. Just because The Washington Post/Fox News reports the temperature is 75 degrees doesn’t mean it’s really snowing and sunscreen is a liberal/conservative plot. Even if you earn a living being ideological.”

- Michael L. Millenson

"It is a generally a fairly convincing argument that people shouldn’t have to be subsidized to undertake a change which is in their best interest.

The reconciliation seems to be that EHR is not supposed to make a doctor’s practice more efficient and higher quality. It is supposed to make the system of care more efficient and higher quality, which is not the same thing. Those of you who took calc recall that maximizing the total of variables is not achieved by maximizing any one variable and this is a perfect example of that.

Those of you have served in combat certainly noticed that too — if everyone works as a team the unit takes fewer casualties. If you try to save your own hide, you might, but at the expense of more casualties overall."

- Al Lewis

"There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated."

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

"Physicians apply advanced scientific knowledge, but they must do so without the favorable conditions that experimental scientists create for themselves. Multitasking is forced on physicians, often in chaotic environments and under severe time and resource constraints."

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

"It’s time to stop the whining about Obama care and acknowledge we already have universal health care. We just pay for it in the stupidest way possible that ensures problems are that much more disastrous and complicated when they’re finally treated."

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

- Thomas Szasz, MD
___

"Of course, one reason that process metrics* are so popular is that processes are much easier to define and measure than outcomes."

- The Skeptical Scalpel
___

"There is an “illusion of validity” for any random data point, a seductive sense that is colored by what we hope will be true. Mountains of pharmaceutical claims are often made from mere molehills of data."

- Danielle Ofri, MD
___

"Joy empowers people. It is a source of energy that enables people to hope and plan and change their lives for the better. Spend some time around someone who is relentlessly negative and how do you feel–drained, right? More and more research shows that joy is not something that just happens to you, like a bolt of lightening out of the blue. Joy is, instead, a habit to cultivate. Negative thinking and despair are the crabgrass of our souls–weeds that take root and spread, sometimes to all areas of life. Joy, in contrast, is a soul’s rose–hardy when cared for, able to put down roots over time and withstand disease and extremes. Like a rose, however, your joy can become blighted from neglect or harsh conditions. We all need to tend to our joy–to prune away the badness, and to know that, even though it may look like a prickly bare root, if you invest time in a joyous outlook, gorgeous things will bloom, even in the harshest conditions."

- Dr. Jan Gurley
___

"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
___

"The issue of how to regulate clinical software is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the issue of how to regulate medicine. The only difference is that medicine is practiced in the open, without secrecy, subject to peer review, and under a merit-based state license."

- Adrian Gropper, MD
___

"Economist, rope, tree: some assembly required."

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

I write this blog wholly on my own time and my own dime. The views proffered are expressly my own as a concerned and active citizen/taxpayer (in addition to being the result of my substantive experience in the various IT fields), and in no way reflect any policy views of my former employer, notwithstanding that some of the thinking has indeed obviously been spurred by the implications of the work with which I have been doing for them.

FAIR USE POLICY
I cite a ton of news and web sources spanning the breadth of relevant technical and policy domains, sometimes at substantial length. I believe I remain well within the bounds of "Fair Use," as [1] I am not doing any of this for profit, [2] I always provide attribution and links -- which, [3] far from negatively impacting any copyright holders' commercial interests, might actually increase traffic to and interest in their offerings.

Nonetheless, should I post anything of yours regarding which you have any objection, just let me know and I will remove it forthwith.

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Thursday, December 8, 2022

"Malign Technologies" update: AI Natural Language Generation (NLG)

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