this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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ML algorithms aren't capable of producing anything new, they can only ever produce a mishmash of copies of existing works.
If you feed a generative model a bunch of physics research papers, it won't create a new valid physics research paper, just a mishmash of jargon from existing papers.
You say it's not capable of producing anything new, but then give an example of it creating something new. You just changed the goal from "new" to "valid" in the next sentence. Looking at AI for "valid" information is silly, but looking at it for "new" information is not. Humans do this kind of information mixing all the time. It's why fan works are a thing, and why most creative people have influences they credit with being where they are today.
Nobody alive today isn't tainted by the ideas they've consumed in copyrighted works, but we do not bat an eye if you use that in a transformative manner. And AI already does this transformation much better than humans do since it's trained on that much more information, diluting the pool of sources, which effectively means less information from a single source is used.
It doesn't give you new information.
If I write the sentence "Hello, I just got home" and use an algorithm to jumble it into "got Hello, just I home" there's nothing new there.
There's no transformation, it's not capable of transformation, it's just a very complicated text jumbler that's supposed to jumble text so that the output is readable by humans.
You're taking investment advice from a parrot that had the entirety of reddit investment meme subreddits beamed into its brain.
That's a very short example, but it is a new arrangement of the existing information. It's not a new valuable arrangement of information, but new nonetheless. And yes, rearrangement is transformation. It's very low entropy transformation, but transformation nonetheless. Collages and summaries are in fact, a thing that humans make too.
Unless you mean "new" as in, something nobody's ever written before, in which case not even you can create new information, since pretty much everything you will ever say or write down can be broken down into pieces that have been spoken or written before, which is not exactly a useful distinction.
Saying it doesn't make it true, especially when you follow it up with a self-debunk by saying it transforms the text by jumbling it in specific ways that keep it readable to humans, which requires transformation as like you just demonstrated, randomly swapping words does not make legible text..
???
https://youtu.be/2TRmaAxHDDU