Scientists wonder: Is my AI stealing my ideas?(www.scientificamerican.com)
34 pointsby geox5 hours ago9 comments
  • lioeters3 hours ago
    AI is the product and process of stealing all your ideas. The purpose of the thing is what it does. You are training your replacement.
    • karim793 hours ago
      Also your dignity and sense of purpose, I would add. I think the consequences of these shenanigans are going to be way more wide reaching than what we can currently comprehend. I pray for us all.
      • ragequittah33 minutes ago
        I have a feeling detaching your dignity and sense of purpose from something an AI can easily steal might be a net good for most people.
  • t234143212 hours ago
    That's unique connection of certain ideas that someone discovered - which LLM had access to - let it then repeat it and freely cross the bridge whose existence it had previously been unaware of. Inevitable (it's not Memex). Big steal on multiple levels including credits - it is how it works.
  • maidaman4 hours ago
    This is like when the price of things increases because they are in your shopping cart.
  • 123a6kj3 hours ago
    Of course it is. The people here who claim that there are too many prompts that would pollute the training data (deliberately) overlook that AI can classify the value of prompts quite well.

    Even the free Google AI continues the conversation much longer and asks followup questions if you are serious.

    Prompts of scientists will be forwarded to a data labeler and be used for training.

    These prompts of course include the use case of converting a colleague's work to another file format using AI, which mathematicians always proudly announce. So they leak other people's ideas, too.

    • masfuerte3 hours ago
      Your final paragraph refers to something that's about to be published on the web. So the AI will train on it anyway.
  • nylonstrung4 hours ago
    It makes no sense that the LLMs could be solving problems based on prompts given by individual scientists

    Are they implying that chat history of a single person is being taken an used to skew post-training results?

    Why would it only be for Navier-Stokes that we see this having an effect

    There are 1 million times more prompts being processed for stuff like furry roleplay than unsolved scientific problems

    • alwa3 hours ago
      If only we had a technology that could classify the topic, tone, and sophistication of arbitrary natural-language conversations; you know, to sort the proofs from the furries…
      • vegadw2 hours ago
        It's actually probably the case the proofs are coming from the furies.
    • cowoder3 hours ago
      Training the LLM on logs might make little sense, but that doesn't mean the LLM can't get access to those logs outside of training. Companies have been gobbling up your data left and right, why wouldn't these companies do the same and then feed it to their LLM for a specific use case?
    • robleafwagner3 hours ago
      I think Anthropic et al. would have very little difficulty determining exactly who their users are, so it would probably be trivial to focus any training of this sort on individuals known to be doing cutting edge research, as well as their colleagues, postdocs, grad students etc. Not saying it is happening, but they certainly have the capacity to make a system to skip all the prompts they don’t care about and leave just the prompts they do care about.
    • socializer3 hours ago
      Are you kidding? It's clear that frontier labs are desperate to ingest any human text they can find. They're paying people to find rare books and digitize them. They're vacuuming up Reddit threads. And in their own products, they make it difficult to turn off conversation logging unless you pay.

      I have zero difficulty accepting that they're using conversation logs, probably anonymized and then chopped so that they can claim it's no longer user data and that it can't be tracked back to a specific chat. And yes, sometimes, a single piece of text is enough to move the needle, especially when it comes to some exotic, sparse topics.

    • 2 hours ago
      undefined
  • moi23882 hours ago
    Tax payers wonder: are scientists stealing my money to patent tax funded research?
  • simianwords3 hours ago
    I think there's a market for a fundamentally privacy focused AI hosting company that just hosts Open models. I think Proton has something like this.

    If someone's thinks their ideas are so precious, they should be using the privacy focused ones.

  • j454 hours ago
    It's scary to think if too many scientists might be trying to save $20/month and use the free AI plans.

    Or worse, not understand how this piece of technology is not snapshot based like the software before it, and instead is evolving constantly, and what impact that has on their base assumptions.

  • empath753 hours ago
    If you're working with an AI to solve a mathematical problem, presumably it is contributing ideas. I think the scientists might be confusing the LLM's ideas with their own.
    • bulbaran hour ago
      AI saves data in its network from which it can be (partially) recovered. It's lossy compression at its core. So I think you are the one who got it wrong, confusing people's work and ideas with the output of an LLM.