I’m rather curious to see how the EU’s privacy laws are going to handle this.
(Original article is from Fortune, but Yahoo Finance doesn’t have a paywall)
Delete the AI and restart the training from the original sources minus the information it should not have learned in the first place.
And if they claim “this is more complicated than that” you know their process is f-ed up.
You’re right, this is a way to solve this issue. It’s just not economically feasible to retrain your model from scratch every time. It takes a lot of money to do it and they will push back.
Then AI cannot exist in a world where security still matters.
Privacy you mean?
They go hand-in-hand. You have no need for security without privacy. You cannot have privacy without security.
Why? That is certainly not obvious.
Then delete and start over, or don’t use data you don’t have explicit permission to use. in the first place.
It’s like a thief saying “well, I already fenced most of the stuff so it’s too hard to give any of it back. So let’s just call it quits, eh?”
It’s not just about having permission or not, but the right to be forgotten. You can ask a company to delete the personal data they may have on you and by law they should (in theory) delete it, with the only exception being data that may be required for justified purposes.
AIs not being able to “forget” means that they would be breaking the law if trained with personal data, as you could not have your data removed if you ask them to do so.
it’s crazy that “it’s too hard :(” has become an acceptable justification for just ignoring the law within tech circles
I just saw an article that said that ISPs are trying to whine their way out of listing the fees they charge because it’s too hard. Which is wild because they certainly know what I owe them after I sign the contract, but somehow it’s just impossible for them to determine right up until the moment that I’m obligated to pay it.
It’s more like the law is saying you must draw seven red lines, all of them strictly perpendicular, some with green ink and some with transparent ink.
It’s not “virtually” impossible, it’s literally impossible. If the law requires that it be possible then it’s the law that must change. Otherwise it’s simply a more complicated way of banning AI entirely, which means that some other jurisdiction will become the world leader in such things.
ok i guess you don’t get to use private data in your models too bad so sad
why does the capitalistic urge to become “the world leader” in whatever technology-of-the-month is popular right now supersede a basic human right to privacy?
ok i guess you don’t get to use private data in your models too bad so sad
You seem to have an assumption that all AI models are intended for the sole benefit of corporations. What about medical models that can predict disease more accurately and more quickly than human doctors? Something like that could be hugely beneficial for society as a whole. Do you think we should just not do it because someone doesn’t like that their data was used to train the model?
You seem to have an assumption that all AI models are intended for the sole benefit of corporations.
You seem to have the assumption that they’re not. And that “helping society” is anything more than a happy accident that results from “making big profits”.
What about medical models
A pretty big “what if” when every single model that’s been tried for the purpose you suggest so far has either predicted based off the age of a medical imaging scan, or off the doctor’s signature in the corner of one.
Are you asking me whether it’s a good idea to give up the concept of “Privacy” in return for an image classifier that detects how much film grain there is in a given image?
You seem to have the assumption that they’re not. And that “helping society” is anything more than a happy accident that results from “making big profits”.
It’s not an assumption. There’s academic researchers at universities working on developing these kinds of models as we speak.
Are you asking me whether it’s a good idea to give up the concept of “Privacy” in return for an image classifier that detects how much film grain there is in a given image?
I’m not wasting time responding to straw men.
There’s academic researchers at universities working on developing these kinds of models as we speak.
Where does the funding for these models come from? Why are they willing to fund those models? And in comparison, why does so little funding go towards research into how to make neural networks more privacy-compatible?
I’m not wasting time responding to straw men.
- Please learn what a straw man argument is
- The technology you’re describing doesn’t exist, and likely won’t for a very long time, so all you’re doing is allowing data harvesting en-masse in return for nothing. Your hypothetical would have more teeth if it was anywhere close to being anything but a hypothetical.
How is “don’t rely on content you have no right to use” litteraly impossible?
We teach to children that there is a Google filter to include only the CC images (that they should use for their presentations).
Also it’s not like we are talking small companies here, a new billion-making industry is being born and it could totally afford contracts with big platforms that would allow to use their content.
How is “don’t rely on content you have no right to use” litteraly impossible?
At the time they used the data, they had a right to use it. The participants later revoked their consent for their data to be used, after the model was already trained at an enormous cost.
I have to admit my comment is not really relevant to the article itself (also, I read only the free part of it).
It was more a reaction to the comment above, which felt more generic. My concern about LLMs is that I could never find an auditable list of websites that were crawled, which would be reasonable to ask for, I think.
And the rest of the data Google has been viewing, cataloging and selling back to everyone for years, because they’re legally allowed to do so… you don’t see the irony in that?
Are they selling back scrapped content? I thought it was only user behaviors through the ad network?
About cataloging at least it is opt-out though robot.txt 🤷
EDIT: plus, “we are already doing bad” is never a good argument to continue doing bad, if Google were to be in fault this could get the traction to slap their ass
Google crawls the internet, archives entire actual photos, large snippets (at least) from every website it sees, aggregates it into a different form and serves it back to people for profit. It’s the same business model, different results with the processing of the data.
Google doesn’t sell the data they collect… They sell ads and use their data to better target people with said ads. Third parties are paying google to target their ads to the right people.
You go to google because of the data they collected from the open internet. Peoples’ photos, articles they’ve written, books, etc. They aggregate it, process it and serve it back to you alongside ads. They also collect data about you and sell that as well. But no one would go to Google if they hadn’t aggregated, processed and repackaged the internet’s data.
The Danish government, which has historically been very good about both privacy rights and workers’ rights has recently suggested that they are looking into fixing the nurses shortage “via AI”.
Our current government is probably the stupidest, most irresponsible and least humanitarian one we’ve had in my 40 year lifetime if not longer 🤬
“virtually” impossible. hehehe
rm -rf *
There, that’ll do it
Have you tried…
format EarthGot me a hammer with “AI Alzheimer’s” written on the handle…
deleted by creator
Just kill ot off and start from the beginning.
Because it doesn’t “know” those things in the same way people know things.
It’s closer to how you (as a person) know things than, say, how a database know things.
I still remember my childhood home phone number. You could ask me to forget it a million times I wouldn’t be able to. It’s useless information today. I just can’t stop remembering it.
No, you knowing your old phone number is closer to how a database knows things than how LLMs know things.
LLMs don’t “know” information. They don’t retain an individual fact, or know that something is true and something else is false (or that anything “is” at all). Everything they say is generated based on the likelihood of a word following another word based on the context that word is placed in.
You can’t ask it to “forget” a piece of information because there’s no “childhood phone number” in its memory. Instead there’s an increased likelihood it will say your phone number as the result of someone prompting it to tell it a phone number. It doesn’t “know” the information at all, it simply has become a part of the weights it uses to generate phrases.
Genuinely curious how you would describe humans remembering stuff, because if I remember correctly my biology classes, it’s about reinforced neural pathways that become more likely to be taken by an electrical impulse than those that are less ‘travelled’. The whole notion of neural networks is right there in the name, based on how neurons work.
The difference is LLMs don’t “remember” anything because they don’t “know” anything. They don’t know facts, English, that reality exists; they have no internal truths, simply a mathematical model of word weights. You can’t ask it to forget information because it knows no information.
This is obviously quite different from asking a human to forget anything; we can identify the information in our brain, it exists there. We simply have no conscious control over our ability to remember it.
The fact that LLMs employ neural networks doesn’t make them like humans or like brains at all.
I never implied they “remembered”, I asked you how you interpret humans remembering since you likened it to a database, which science says it is not. Nor did I make any claims about AI knowing stuff, you inferred that by yourself. I also did not claim they possess any sort of human like traits. I honestly do not care to speculate.
The modelling statement speaks to how it came to be and the intention of programmers and serves to illustrate my point regarding the functioning of the brain.
My question remains unanswered.
I said:
No, you knowing your old phone number is closer to how a database knows things than how LLMs know things.
Which is true. Human memory is more like a database than an LLM’s “memory.” You have knowledge in your brain which you can consult. There is data in a database that it can consult. While memory is not a database, in this sense they are similar. They both exist and contain information in some way that can be acted upon.
LLMs do not have any database, no memories, and contain no knowledge. They are fundamentally different from how humans know anything, and it’s pretty accurate to say LLMs “know” nothing at all.
Leaving aside LLMs, the brain is not a database. there is no specific place that you can point to and say ‘there resides the word for orange’. Assuming that would be the case, it would be highly inefficient to assign a spot somewhere for each bit of information (again, not talking about software here, still the brain). And if you would, then you would be able to isolate that place, cut it out, and actually induce somebody to forget the word and the notion (since we link words with meaning - say orange and you think of the fruit, colour or perhaps a carrot). If we hade a database organized into tables and say orange was a member of colours and another table, ‘orange things’, deleting the member ‘orange’ would make you not recognize that carrots nowadays are orange.
Instead, what happens - for example in those who have a stroke or those who suffer from epilepsy (a misfiring of meurons) - is that there appears a tip-of-the tongue phenomenon where they know what they want to say and can recognize notions, it’s just the pathway to that specific word is interrupted and causes a miss, presumably when the brain tries to go on the path it knows it should take because it’s the path taken many times for that specific notion and is prevented. But they don’t lose the ability to say their phone number, they might lose the ability to say ‘four’ and some just resort to describing the notion - say the fruit that makes breakfast juice instead. Of course, if the damage done is high enough to wipe out a large amout of neurons, you lose larger amounts of words.
Downsides - you cannot learn stuff instantly, as you could if the brain was a database. That’s why practice makes perfect. You remember your childhood phone number because you repeated it so many times that there is a strong enough link between some neurons.
Upsides - there is more learning capacity if you just relate notions and words versus, for lack of a better term, hardcoding them. Again, not talking about software here.
Also leads to some funky things like a pencil sharpener being called literally a pencil eater in Danish.
This isn’t true at all - first, we don’t know things like a database knows things.
Second, they do retain individual facts in the same sort of way we know things, through relationships. The difference is, for us the Eiffel tower is a concept, and the name, appearance, and everything else about it are relationships - we can forget the name of something but remember everything else about it. They’re word based, so the name is everything for them - they can’t learn facts about a building then later learn the name of it and retain the facts, but they could later learn additional names for it
For example, they did experiments using some visualization tools and edited it manually. They changed the link been Eiffel tower and Paris to Rome, and the model began to believe it was in Rome. You could then ask what you’d see from the Eiffel tower, and it’d start listing landmarks like the coliseum
So you absolutely could have it erase facts - you just have to delete relationships or scramble details. It just might have unintended side effects, and no tools currently exist to do this in an automated fashion
For humans, it’s much harder - our minds use layers of abstraction and aren’t a unified set of info. That mean you could zap knowledge of the Eiffel tower, and we might forget about it. But then thinking about Paris, we might remember it and rebuild certain facts about it, then thinking about world fairs we might remember when it was built and by who, etc
We know things more like a database knows things than LLMs, which do not “know” anything in any sense. Databases contain data; our head contains memories. We can consult them and access them. LLMs do not do that. They have no memories and no thoughts.
They are not word-based. They contain only words. Given a word and its context, they create textual responses. But it does not “know” what it is talking about. It is a mathematical model that responds using likely responses sourced from the corpus it was trained on. It generates phrases from source material and randomness, nothing more.
If a fact is repeated in its training corpus multiple times, it is also very likely to repeat that fact. (For example, that the Eiffel tower is in Paris.) But if its corpus has different data, it will respond differently. (That, say, the Eiffel tower is in Rome.) It does not “know” where the Eiffel tower is. It only knows that, when you ask it where the Eiffel tower is, “Rome” is a very likely response to that sequence of words. It has no thoughts or memories of Paris and has no idea what Rome is, any more than it knows what a duck is. But given certain inputs, it will return the word “Paris.”
You can’t erase facts when the model has been created since the model is basically a black box. Weights in neural networks do not correspond to individual words and editing the neural network is infeasible. But you can remove data from its training set and retrain it.
Human memories are totally different, and are obviously not really editable by the humans in whose brains they reside.
I think you’re getting hung up on the wrong details
First of all, they consist of words AND weights. That’s a very important distinction. It’s literally the difference between
They don’t know what the words mean, but they “know” the shape of the information space, and what shapes are more or less valid.
Now as for databases - databases are basically spreadsheets. They have pieces of information in explicitly shaped groups, and they usually have relationships between them… Ultimately, it’s basically text.
Our minds are not at all like a database. Memories are engrams and - they’re patterns in neurons that describe a concept. They’re a mix between information space and meat space. The engram itself encodes information in a way that allows us to process it, and the shape of it itself links describes the location of other memories. But it’s more than that - they’re also related by the shape in information space.
You can learn the Eiffel tower is in Paris one day in class, you can see a picture of it, and you can learn it was created for the 1912 world fair. You can visit it. If asked about it a decade later, you probably don’t remember the class you learned about it. If you’re asked what it’s made of, you’re going to say metal, even if you never explicitly learned that fact. If you forget it was built for the world fair, but are asked why it was built, you might say it was for a competition or to show off. If you are asked how old it is, you might say a century despite having entirely forgotten the date
Our memories are not at all like a database, you can lose the specifics and keep the concepts, or you can forget what the Eiffel tower is, but remember the words “it was built in 1912 for the world fair”.
You can forget a phone number but remember the feeling of typing it on a phone, or forget someone but suddenly remember them when they tell you about their weird hobby. We encode memories like neural networks, but in a far more complicated way - we have different types of memory and we store things differently based on individual, but our knowledge and cognition are entertwined - you can take away personal autobiographical memories from a person, but you can’t take away the understanding of what a computer is without destroying their ability to function
Between humans and LLMs, LLMs are the ones closer to databases - they at least remember explicit tokens and the links between them. But they’re way more like us than a database - a database stores information or it doesn’t, it’s accessible or it isn’t, it’s intact or it’s corrupted. But neural networks and humans can remember something but get the specifics wrong, they can fail to remember a fact when asked one way but remember when asked another, and they can entirely fabricate memories or facts based on similar patterns through suggestion
Humans and LLMs encode information in their information processing networks - and it’s not even by design. It’s an emergent property of a network shaped by the ability to process and create information, aka intelligence (a concept now understood to be different from sentience). We do it very differently, but in similar ways, LLMs just start from tokens and do it in a far less sophisticated way
Everyone here is busy describing the difference between memories and databases to me as if I don’t know what it is.
Our memories are not a database. But our memories are like a database in that databases contain information, which our memories do too. Our consciousness is informed by and can consult our memories.
LLMs are not like memories, or a database. They don’t contain information. It’s literally a mathematical formula; if you put words in one end, words come out the other. The only difference between a statement like “always return the word
Parisin response to any query” and what LLMs do is complexity, not kind. Whereas I think we can agree humans are something else entirely, right?The fact they use neural networks does not make them similar to human cognition or consciousness or memory. (Separately neural networks, while inspired by biological neural networks, are categorically different from biological neural networks and there are no “emergent properties” in that network that makes it anything other than a sophisticated way of doing math.)
So… yeah, LLMs are nothing like us, unless you believe humans are deterministic machines with no inner thought processes and no consciousness.
Ok, so here’s the misunderstanding - neural networks absolutely, 100% store information. You can download alpaca right now, and ask it about Paris, or llamas, or who invented the concept of the neural network. It will give you factual information embedded in the weights, there’s nowhere else the information could be.
People probably think you don’t understand databases because this seems self apparent that neural networks contain information - if they didn’t, where does the information come from?
There’s no magic involved, you can prove this mathematically. We know how it works and we can visualize the information - we can point to “this number right here is how the model stores the information of where the Eiffel tower is”. It’s too complex for us to work with right now, but we understand what’s going on
Brains store information the same way, except they’re much more complex. Ultimately, the connections between neurons are where the data is stored - there’s more layers to it, but it’s the same idea
And emergent properties absolutely are a thing in math. No sentience or understanding required, nothing necessarily to do with life or physics at all - complexity is where emergent properties emerge from
It’s actually not that dissimilar. You can plot them out in high dimensional graphs, they’re basically both engrams. Theirs are just much simpler
Theirs are composed of word weights. Ours are composed of thoughts. It’s entirely dissimilar.
Can’t they remove the data from the training set and start over?
Not really, no. None of the source material is actually stored inside the model’s dataset, so once it’s in, it’s in. Because of the way they are designed, you can’t point to a particular document and just delete that one thing. It’s like unscrambling an egg.
They can remove ALL the data and start over.
exactly.
removing one thing from a pile != removing the entire pile.
b/c the original goal was to not disturb the rest of the pile
If they can’t remove individual pieces then they need to remove the whole pile, and rebuild the process in a way that does allow then to remove individual pieces.
No, I don’t care how much time and effort it costs. That is on them for abusing other people’s data.
It is not impossible, it is just expensive.
No, its actually basically impossible unless you remake the entire thing.
Everyone in the thread so triggered lol, so you hear yourselves?
If anyone on Lemmy were capable of introspection, we wouldn’t have Lemmygrad or Beehaw.
