Is it plagiarism or aLLMost plagiarism?

From a discussion on a Linkein post by Aron Brand:

The question arose as to whether LLMs store "representations" of their training data, and if so, why is it not plagiarism to use those representations as they respond to users' prompts?

I think that's a very nuanced and insightful question that comes down, I suppose, to the definition of "stored representations."

At first blush, it seems obvious: Let's say an LLM ingests the post you're reading at this moment. For the sake of argument, assume it's not here on a blog, but in a book that I've published and copyrighted. Of course I've included the standard notice that "no part may be stored, transmitted, reproduced, etc. without written permission." The owner of the LLM has bought and owns a copy of my book.

Later, you ask it about my opinions on LLMs and plagiarism, and it summarizes what I've written. I allege that it has "stolen" the content and used it unlawfully, without my permission.

Has the LLM "stored" my content?

An AI Apology

I'd been working late into the night on part of a large personal project. It was progressing slowly but steadily since early morning and I was learning tons. (Translation: I was spending more time fixing than creating, trying various approaches to accomplish each step, and discovering clever new ways to make mistakes. You know, the kind where you don't know whether it'll be harder to fix it, or to figure out why it didn't work in the first place.) To be fair, I don't have a lot of experience in this particular area, so I was exploring alternatives and poking at the options that were available. Given the luxury of time, I've found this strategy to provide a far deeper understanding than just getting it right the first time and moving on. 

 

Are You More Creative Than an LLM?

Edited from my comment on a LinkedIn post by Roger Dooley, who I don't know.

Roger wrote about an article in "Nature" that describes Centaur , an LLM that predicts human behavior with uncanny accuracy. It reminded me of another project that's similar, but in an opposite way.

A team of researchers created an interesting experiment that tries to measure one aspect of creativity. From www.datcreativity.com/about:

🙶The Divergent Association Task is a quick measure of verbal creativity and divergent thinking, the ability to generate diverse solutions to open-ended problems.🙷

So it's sort of like the project Roger described, but in reverse: Instead of asking an LLM to predict human decisions, in a sense it analyzes our ability to be unpredictable. It asks for 10 common nouns, chooses the first 7 that it deems 🙶acceptable,🙷 and estimates how different they are from each other (emphasis added):

🙶The average score is 78, and most people score between 74 and 82. The lowest score was 24 and the highest was 96 in our published sample. Although the scores can theoretically range from 0 to 200, in practice they range from 6 to around 110 after millions of responses online.🙷

For fun, I thought it might be interesting to compare a human's results to a few LLMs'. Guess who won? 😀️

  🤖 Gemini scored 67.98, higher than 5.90% of the people who completed the task.

🤖 ChatGPT scored 79.1, higher than 54.23% of the people who completed the task.

  🧑 I scored 86.8, higher than 91.52% of the people who completed the task.

Given this highly scientific (ha!) sample size of 1, it seems we humans are still better than LLMs at being human. If you choose to take the test, I'd love to know your score—please post it in the comments!

Enjoying the Zen

One of my favorite achievements at Google was my ultimately successful year-long struggle to convince the YouTube TV team to fix the comma splice in their 🙶We'll be right back, enjoy the zen.🙷 [sic] interstitials.

I loved the relaxing scenes, but every time one of them showed on our TV, the neighbors could probably hear a Charlie Brown-esque AAAUUUUGGHH! from our living room.

This went on for months.

How to Ruin an Interview Before it Starts

It was my first “real” job after grad school, so I was still very young. The company was holding an open house for interviews after hours, and they asked me to participate.

I was one of the interviewers.

I walked to our lobby to greet my next candidate, a gentleman who was probably mid-40s, dressed reasonably but not particularly impressively. It was easy to tell instantly that he thought he was Very Important, and that the formality of an interview was a nuisance.

Irrational, but Real!

Based on my answer to the question "How is it possible to draw or make a 1x1 right triangle if the square root of 2 is irrational?" which was posted January 2, 2021 on Quora.

I think what you’re asking is how we can create a physical object (or a drawing of one) if one or more of its dimensions is irrational. In other words, if a number ends in a decimal that never terminates or repeats (such as the square root of two), how can it actually exist?

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Google, Interns and The Speech

When I joined Google about a decade and a half ago, it felt more like a playground for grownups (or almost-grownups) than a workplace. Everything was bright and shiny and amazing, and everyone was super helpful and friendly. It's no secret that much has changed since then, but one aspect of the Noogler¹ experience remains constant.

As they start learning about the tools, technologies, and projects they’ll be working with, most Nooglers are excited and wowed by both the quality and quantity of tools, toys, and food that are available to them. Then, around two to six weeks later, when they least expect it, the panic and self-doubt hit. Hard. What am I doing here? I don’t know anything, and there’s too much to learn! Everyone else is way smarter than I am! They must’ve made a mistake when they hired me! I’m never going to survive!

During my last several years there, I loved to have virtual 🙶coffee chats🙷 with Nooglers and interns from all over the world. I learned about roles I didn't even know existed. Their fresh perspectives reminded me to appreciate things I might have been taking for granted. And I made sure to let them know what to expect during onboarding.

If I met someone early enough into their tenure, while they were still whelmed but not yet overwhelmed, they might laugh and think I'm joking. But sometimes I'd catch them right after it'd taken hold and started to metastasize. That was the case when my teammate asked me to 🙶guest mentor🙷 an intern while she was away.

Repairing the Charging Coaster of a Self-Heating Mug

 My last post explained why I like my self-heating mug so much, but it ended with a well-deserved kvetch: The entire mug becomes useless when a pin on the charging coaster gets stuck. If you Google charging coaster pin, you'll see complaints from all over the Internet about various brands that all have the same problem:¹

One of the pins gets stuck, and no amount of prodding, poking, beseeching, or percussive maintenance will cajole it back into place.

Design of a Self-Heating Mug

...why I went to so much trouble to fix it!

One of my favorite gifts this holiday season was a large mug that keeps my coffee or tea hot. I wish the battery lasted longer, but there are a bunch of really nice features:

Silly JavaScript Tricks

 ...or 🙶Bookmark(let)s Are Your Friends🙷

Just a small collection of bookmarks and bookmarklets I created to make web browsing slightly more pleasant.

Fair warning: I speak Java, but not JavaScript. So fee free to laugh at my non-idiomatic code, or better yet, leave constructive comments. You're also welcome to copy, paste, modify, and share any of them. Just remember that most were intended to be quick-and-dirty solutions to problems that pestered me, which means they may fold, spindle, or mutilate any machine they run on. Think of them as week-old leftovers: they may still be delicious, or they may be growing green and black fuzzy critters. Or both.