- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Among the many recent controversies around AI, there is the claim that to solve a longstanding mathematical problem, OpenAI stole the work of the New York University mathematician Tristan Buckmaster and a colleague, Levent Alpöge, who also is a researcher for Anthropic. I have no ability to assess the validity of the claim, but as I understand it, the argument is that OpenAI had access to work done by Buckmaster and Alpöge. It then built on this work to quickly rush ahead and find a solution, which also had a $1 million prize attached to it.
Insofar as that accurately describes what OpenAI did, this seems like it would be equivalent to having a professor doing a seminar for colleagues and then having one of the attendees do a few additions and claim the work as their own. This would not be viewed as very collegial behavior in a normal academic department.
I’m not sure what claim a professor would have against a colleague under such circumstances. I suppose if their work was properly cited, there would not be a claim of plagiarism. (OpenAI’s work did not directly cite the work of Buckmaster and Alpöge, from my understanding.) I suppose there could be a basis for disputing rights to the million-dollar prize. But the problem seems much greater.
If AI can effectively steal the work of others, and claim it as its own, then it undermines the practice of openness in science that has allowed for enormous progress for centuries. This practice depended on norms, whereby scientists would properly credit the work of their peers.
In the seminar scenario I described, if one of the attendees listened to the presentation and realized the one or two additional steps needed to get over the goal line, they would be expected to raise the issue with the presenter. Assuming the additions were correct, the presenter would finish the paper, acknowledging the contribution or possibly adding the attendee as a co-author, if their contribution was sufficiently important.
But that relies on norms. If the owner of the AI doesn’t share those norms and can freely scrape scientific work wherever it finds it, and then take credit for the product, it will threaten the longstanding practice of openness in science. With the risk of having years of work stolen without getting any credit, researchers will likely keep their work closely held until they have a finished paper.1 They would only share it with a small group of trusted colleagues. Posting a working paper, or having an open seminar, would put control over their work at risk.
However, it is important to recognize the villain in this story. It is Sam Altman and his company, not the AI. Altman and the company are the ones responsible for what their AI does. If it did something they disapprove of, it is their responsibility to correct it. However adept AI may become, it is not the active player; it is the individual or company that set it in motion.
This issue applies more generally. There has been a social media mini firestorm over Texas Attorney General and Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton using AI to have his opponent, James Talarico, making a series of outlandish statements that he never said. Much of the outrage seems to be over Paxton using AI, rather than the fact that he is lying about what Talarico said.
The issue here is that Paxton is defaming Talarico; the AI is secondary. The AI presumably makes the defamation more effective, but if Paxton were an exceptionally gifted mimic, he could likely also trick some people into believing that he was speaking in Talarico’s voice when making outlandish assertions. If that were the case, it would be every bit as bad as using AI to accomplish the job.
There were also the claims that the girls’ school in Iran, which was destroyed by the US military on the first day of the war, killing 120 children, was selected as a target by AI. That may be the case, but the important point was that the military did not have a system in place to properly review targets. It doesn’t matter whether or not an AI system identified the target. The problem was that there was no system that ensured the places designated were proper military targets.
It is important to keep our eyes on the ball. The bad actors are those who do bad things with AI, not the AI. This is like the husband who gets drunk and beats his wife and then says the whiskey did it. No one should ever accept that story. In the same vein, if a theft of mathematical work did occur, it was Sam Altman who did it and it was Ken Paxton who libeled his political opponent. The AI is beside the point.
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LLMs clap are clap not clap AI clap.
Try to get that into you sycophant brain, and you will understand why this bullshit happens in the first place.
Plagiarism is the core and only mechanism of LLMs that produces anything that people get impressed by. The pre- and postprocessing logic for grammar rules is not the stuff that makes gullible people believe there is “intelligence” involved.
LLMs clap are clap not clap AI clap.
Yes they are.
They’re built on artificial neural networks that share a basis (a basis, not a replica) with biological neurons that produce probabilistic results (not deterministic).
Plagiarism is the core and only mechanism of LLMs that produces anything that people get impressed by.
As opposed to what? Don’t get me wrong, the blatant violation of copyright is a massive issue, and in a logical world would bury each and every LLM company out there. But what other mechanism to “learn” do you think exists?
gullible people believe there is “intelligence” involved.
If you mean “intelligence” in the colloquial sense, then sure. But that’s not the same word that researchers use. Intelligence is simply the ability to make a decision based on input data. And by that definition even an if-else statement is a form of intelligence (which it is). So then the discussion becomes the degree or “amount” intelligence.
LLMs are absolutely intelligent. The issue is that most people conflate “intelligence” with “sentience” and “sapience”, which they are not. They aren’t “clever” or “creative”. They are extremely good at taking large swaths of information and distilling it, finding hidden patterns, of finding specific data points that are otherwise deeply buried. Good examples are finding bugs in code or novel and massively beneficial uses for existing medication (which has already happened multiple times)
I’m not defending the current state of AI. Energy use is a problem. Water use is a problem. The grift is a problem. The copyright violations are a problem.
But this “LLMs are not AI” rhetoric is just pure ignorance.
They are AI the same way ELIZA is.
Nah, Eliza had a programmed logic, all phrases she reacted to had been implemented deterministically by a human. There was no training data.
Not your AI, not your data.
A similar take: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/is-artificial-intelligence-going
I realized it was more realistic for [us] to imagine that bots would take over our civilization and supplant humanity than to imagine that we might apply the rule of law to Sam Altman. And that, to me, proved that we don’t have a crisis with technological advances, we have a crisis of the rule of law.
I also read that the AI used about $25 millions worth of tokens, to solve the problem (with a “prize” of $1 mil), not counting a lot of actual mathematicians supervising the works. Can you imagine if that sort of money was available to academics. I know a couple of math post grads and I feel they spend more time trying to secure grants than doing actual work, or at least that’s what they are always talking about
simple reminder: capitalism will do this, every single chance it gets. this isn’t an ai thing or a sam altman thing, it’s a capitalist thing. since forever.
Yep, it’s not one broligarch that did it, it’s all of them and their circus.
And paying for the capitalists’ tools is no protection from their practices.
If AI can effectively steal the work of others, and claim it as its own, then it undermines the practice of openness in science that has allowed for enormous progress for centuries.
Open source developers have been saying this for years, ever since the first ChatGPT was released. It was laundering open source code, claiming the work of others as it’s own, ignoring the license.
Thank you! It’s so weird to see some pro AI people act like this somehow crossed a line. It’s my understanding that part of the issue is that the AI used its chat logs to get some of this information, but I’ve seen no one explain how that is any different from what was done to people who believed their work was private or protected under a license but ended up having it in a training set anyway. I don’t believe there’s an expectation of privacy when using the plagiarism bot, and my understanding is it does reserve the right to train off your chats.
The concern regarding attribution is also strange to me because it’s possible that the attribution for any specific thing is completely lost during the training process. When people have it generate images or stories or even just a response, it’s not going line by line explaining all the places it stole from. When people talked about AI bootstrapping itself there was no discussion of how we were going to keep track of all the people whose hard work it was building off of.
I’m against AI in general for a bunch of reasons, but the fact they’re upset they got scooped is so minimal in my opinion. Wasn’t AI supposed to solve all these problems for us, faster than we could alone? It’s doing exactly what they said it would, and since they never bothered to care about attribution before I’m having a hard time sympathizing with them now.
Yep, and then passing that work on to commercial developers to be sold.
I stopped contributing to open source code because of it. I consider it stupid now to contribute to public work because it will be almost instantly stolen and laundered through an AI that breaches the license its published under.
This is one of the biggest crimes of ai, I hate it
I understand that, but what tools would you use if all open source devs stopped their contributions? there wouldn’t be anything left. we could go back to windows 11, googlified android with all the scam ads of the world, etc. I feel this mindset hurts the open source community more than the ubercapitalist pigs
You understand the billionair would be happy with opensource software dying, right? THEN THATS THE POINT.
Why are we acting like it’s news that generative AI companies are building their core products of the theft and exploitation of other people’s intellectual labor?
Get with the program, it’s their entire business model.
The captured SCOTUS said its okay and no further discussion needed as they needed to hit the tarmac asap because they already booked a spin on their new private jet/gift but absolutely not a bribe.
if corporations are people - time to hold them liable to the law - especially when they’re committing espionage and cyber crimes, and theft
There’s no low Altman won’t sink to
The way they handled the situation is honestly bad, I wonder what the heck is their PR department is doing:
A fucking mafia is what they are, with less honor
Oh hoh. What a fucking prick. Levent can suck this one.
Wow
The metaphor of the open seminar is misleading. In an open seminar, the presenter stake a claim to the work, even if incomplete. In this case, the work was in private repositories. A more precise methodology would be the AI overhearing the authors discussing in their office and using that as base for a proof. This is even sneakier because there has been no public claim of the method or results by the authors.
Edited after a commenter pointed out that no sleep + autocorrect = random words
In an open seminar, the presenter pays cousin in the with, even if incomplete.
I can’t figure out what this was meant to say.
Oh wow… it mostly means that I have a small kid that kept me awake most of the night! Edited
“guns don’t kill people. people kill people.”
I think OP is trying to say that we cannot let “AI” launder the responsibility that real humans have for their actions.
The point (as I understand it) of “guns don’t kill people” is that it is patently absurd to imply that “tools” are wholly neutral implements. The quote is trying to hold the “tool” accountable. While it’s making a seemingly contradictory point to OP, I think it’s more that both can be true at once–OP is trying to highlight the specific problem with “the AI is the one doing all the naughty things”, because Sam Altman et al. would certainly like everyone to think so. I totally agree that “AI” is not merely a “tool” (in the sense of the neutrality so-implied), but that is a separate point.
(re-reading what I just wrote… it kinda sounds like clanker speak?? I swear I’m a real human)
Got it, guns kill AI
In this scenario, everyone is so focused on the gun that they forgot murder is already illegal. We do need gun and AI regulation, but we can’t even put the AI aspect aside for one second to investigate theft and defamation which we do have laws against regardless of the tools used.
If murder is illegal then the people making the tools specifically designed to kill should go to jail.
I agree, but I also think (and argue it is a logical conclusion) that war should then also be illegal (as it uses tools designed to kill) and those who try to instigate it should go to jail. Unfortunately that is a long step from today’s world.
I genuinely don’t understand how war is legal.
Fun fact, it’s not. Wars of aggression are prohibited under international law. But, like everything else, laws are only as good as their enforcement.
Cause if you have enough guys to do a war then you have enough guys to stop you from being arrested.
How would you enforce a law against war, and who would it apply to?
I hear you but there are other laws for war, I’m sure they could figure something out.
They’re mostly made up and you should pay attention to who nobody expects to follow the laws of war (Russia, any Muslims at all)
… with guns.
… designed specifically for killing
Which isn’t illegal.
What is illegal is when a person makes the decision to use a tool immorally, i.e. to murder. The problem in that scenario is the person, not the tool.
If you could magically cause every gun to disappear, there would still be murder because it’s the people who are doing the murder.
If you could magically cause every gun to disappear, there would still be murder because it’s the people who are doing the murder.
…but the number of victims of murder would be much, much smaller.
Yes, that is true.
But the source of murders is always a person, not the tool.
Just to be clear, I’m not making some kind of anti-gun control argument. I’m just explaining why that metaphor is flawed.
The problem at a murder scene isn’t the gun, it’s the person who used it. Nobody is mad at the gun, or worried that it will suddenly murder again.
Much like here. The problem isn’t AI, the problem is the people who are choosing to deploy AI in this way.
It’s the people
Thank you Freddy.
Old people burning, old people burning, put your hands up!
With guns, POW!
Can’t wait to see the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_(2026_film)
Of course he did, that doesn’t mean AI is a worthwhile product. It is just a means for rich to steal your life.
Your problem is with capitalism, not AI.
Blaming a field of machine learning because some rich assholes are exploiting it demonstrates a failure to diagnose the issue.
AI isn’t building data centers, a human being made that decision.
That’s the core problem. The wealthy capitalists both own and drive the development of ML right now. I agree that machine learning algorithms (AI) in a vacuum aren’t inherently a problem, but that’s just a hypothetical position versus the material reality we all face every day.
Maybe we’ll get global Socialism or Communism someday, but trying to convince people that AI is fundamentally good underneath it all is putting the cart before the horse; AI as it stands is a symbol of Capitalism and the problems it embodies.
Worry about the nuances of AI after you’ve dealt with the rot.
AI as it stands is a symbol of Capitalism and the problems it embodies.
I know and agree.
I’m only saying that promoting that symbol is damaging in other ways, such as to the sciences.
Some people may be expressing an opinion with that type of nuance (and I do agree with it) but, what appears to be the large majority of social media users on this topic don’t make that distinction and those people attack the sciences/non-LLM uses of the technology.
Yes, overuse of local water and power supplies is damaging, the replacement of workers is causing all kinds of economic issues, the ability for AI to enable mass surveilance and authoritarians is an urgent problem that needs to be addressed AND ALSO the people trying to fight against it are causing collateral damage to other important aspects of society, an example being that it’s making ML/AI a less popular major which will result in less researchers/slower advancement.
It’s important to point out that there have been several advances in AI that have significantly reduced the computation requirements. So, whatever the demand for AI will ultimately be, it will require an order of magnitude less datacenters because of this kind of research.
The source of the problems here are the people making the decision to deploy the technology in this way and their outsized influence on the government that should be regulating their actions.
AI is just the current topic. Outsourcing was another huge topic in the Clinton era. After that we had the post-crash bailout and the mass acquisition of housing by large capital funds in order to control the rental/real estate markets.
All of these things caused massive economic issues for the vast majority of people and were entirely done because the people that benefitted were able to influence the government and prevent their regulation.
This isn’t an AI problem. It’s a power, influence and corruption problem. AI’s destructive deployment is just the current symptom.
If
AICapitalism can effectively steal the work of others, and claim it as its own,That’s just how Capitalism works. No need to attack the tool Capitalists use to do it. The ideology is a complete endowment of Psychopathic behaviour - suppress others to promote your self - win-lose.
However, it is important to recognize the villain in this story. It is Sam Altman and his company, not the AI
Edit: To be fair:
However, it is important to recognize the villain in this story. It is Sam Altman and his company, not the AI
So almost there, but ffs - say it out loud: CAPITALISM is perpetual economic war and causes this behaviour always !
