I would love to see the source on this one. It sounds fascinating.

I agree. It really doesn’t look like AI is the thing that broke. More like the education system, or something about social media.

As a civil matter, the publishing houses are more likely to get the full money if anthropic stays in business (and does well). So it might be bad, but I’m really skeptical about bankruptcy (and I’m not hearing anyone seriously floating it?)

Plantifs made that argument and the judge shoots it down pretty hard. That competition isn’t what copyright protects from. He makes an analogy with teachers teaching children to write fiction: they are using existing fantasy to create MANY more competitors on the fiction market. Could an author use copyright to challenge that use?

Would love to hear your thoughts on the ruling itself (it’s linked by reuters).

Depends on the content and the method. There are tons of ways to encrypt data, and under relevant law they may still count as copies. There are certainly weaker NN models where we can extract a lot of the training data, even if it’s not easy, from the model parameters (even if we can’t find a prompt that gets the model to regurgitate).

I also read through the judgement, and I think it’s better for anthropic than you describe. He distinguishes three issues:

A) Use any written material they get their hands on to train the model (and the resulting model doesn’t just reproduce the works).

B) Buy a single copy of a print book, scan it, and retain the digital copy for a company library (for all sorts of future purposes).

C) Pirate a book and retain that copy for a company library (for all sorts of future purposes).

A and B were fair use by summary judgement. Meaning this judge thinks it’s clear cut in anthropics favor. C will go to trial.

I’m still looking for a good reason to believe critical thinking and intelligence are taking a dive. It’s so very easy to claim the kids aren’t all right. But I wish someone would check. An interview with the gpt cheaters? A survey checking that those brilliant essays aren’t from people using better prompts? Let’s hear from the kids! Everyone knows nobody asked us when we were being turned into ungrammatical zombies by spell check/grammar check/texting/video content/ipads/the calculator.

I think it’s fine for this to be poorly defined; what I want is something aligned with reality beyond op-eds. Qualitative evidence isn’t bad; but I think it needs to be aggregated instead of anecdoted. Humans are real bad at judging how the kids are doing (complaints like the OP are older than liberal education, no?); I don’t want to continue the pattern. A bunch of old people worrying too much about students not reading shakespear in classes is how we got the cancel culture moral panic - I’d rather learn from that mistake.

A handful of thoughts: There are longitudinal studies that interview kids at intervals; are any of these getting real weird swings? Some kids have AI earlier; are they much different from similar peers without? Where’s the broad interviews/story collection from the kids? Are they worried? How would they describe their use and their peers use of AI?

One of the more important knowledge repositories right now… and it’s tied to a corporation. We should probably be supporting alternatives.

Anybody know of data backups? Do we have the whole thing on the internet archive?

As far as I can tell, the strongest data is wrt literacy and numeracy, and both of those are dropping linearly with previous downward trends from before AI, am I wrong? We’re also still seeing kids from lockdown, which seems like a much more obvious ‘oh that’s a problem’ than the AI stuff.

Honest question: how do we measure critical thinking and creativity in students?

If we’re going to claim that education is being destroyed (and show we’re better than our great^n grandparents complaining about the printing press), I think we should try to have actual data instead of these think-pieces and anecdata from teachers. Every other technology that the kids were using had think-pieces and anecdata.