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Can you imagine spending decades of your life, studying skin cancer, only to have some $20/month ChatGPT index your latest findings and spit out generically to some subpar researcher:

"Here's how I would cure melanoma!" followed by your detailed findings. Zero mention of you.

F-that. Attribution, as best they can, is the least OpenAI can do as a service to humanity. It's a nod to all content creators that they have built their business off of.

Claiming knowledge without even acknowledging potential sources is gross. Solve it OpenAI.



Can you imagine spending decades of your life studying antibiotics, only to have an AI graph neural network beat you to the punch by conceiving an entire new class of antibiotics (first in 60 years) and then getting published in Nature.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03668-1


It looks like the published paper managed to include plenty of citations.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/153216

As it should be.


As you already know yet are being intentionally daft about: They didn't use an LLM trained on copywritten material. There's a canyon of difference between leveraging AI as a tool, and AI leveraging you as a tool.

LLMs have, to my knowledge, made zero significant novel scientific discoveries. Much like crypto, they're a failure of technology to meaningfully move humanity forward; their only accomplishment is to parrot and remix information they've been trained on, which does have some interesting applications that have made Microsoft billions of dollars over the past 12 months, but let's drop the whole "they're going to save humanity and must be protected at any cost" charade. They're not AGI, and because no one has even a mote of dust of a clue as to what it will take to make AGI, its not remotely tenable to assert that they're even a stepping stone toward it.


If the future AI can indeed cure disease my mission of working in drug discovery will be complete. I’d much rather help cure people (my brother died of melanoma) than protect any patent rights or copyrighted text.


The point is if you stop giving proper credit, people stop publicly publishing.

Would you keep publishing articles if five people immediately stole the content and put it up on their site, claiming ownership of your research? Doubtful.


Why do you think this? The entirety of Wikipedia is invisibly credited unless you go into the edit history. Most open source projects have pseudonymous contributors. People have written and will continue to write with or without credit.

Credit in academia is more the exception to the rule, and it's that cutthroat industry that needs a better, more cooperative system.


If someone paid me to study cancer and I discovered a cure, I'd give it away with or without credit. Who cares?

If someone takes my software and uses it, cool. If they credit me, cool. If they don't, oh well. I'd still code.

Not everything needs to be ego driven. As long as the cancer researcher (and the future robots working alongside them) can make a living, I really don't think it matters whether they get credit outside their niches.

I have no idea who invented the CT scanner, Xray machines, the hyperdermic needle, etc. I don't really care. It doesn't really do me any good to associate Edison with light bulbs either, especially when LEDs are so much better now. I have no idea who designs the cars I drive. I go out of my way to avoid cults of personality like Tesla.

There's 8 billion of us. We all need to make a living. We don't need to be famous.


You sounds like you’re trying to be cool or karma farming ?

I have no idea who invented the CT scanner, Xray machines, the hyperdermic needle, etc. I don't really care.

Maybe you should care because those things didn’t fall out do the sky and someone sure as shit got paid to develop and build those things. You copy and pasted code is worth less, a CT scanner isn’t.


Your incentives are not everyone else's incentives.

If someone chooses to dedicate their life to a particular domain - they sacrifice through hard work, they make hard-earned breakthroughs, then they get to dictate how their work will be utilized.

Sure, you can give it away. Your choice. Be anonymous. Your choice.

But you don't get to decide for them.

And their work certainly doesn't deserve to be stolen by an inhumane, non-acknowledging machine.


>Claiming knowledge without even acknowledging potential sources is gross. Solve it OpenAI.

I'm sorry, but pretty much nobody does this. There is no "And these books are how I learned to write like this" after each text. There is no "Thank you Pitagoras!" after using the theorem. Generally you want sources, yes, but for verification and as a way to signal reliability.

Specifically academics and researchers do this, yes. Pretty much nobody else.




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