Technology

Yes. Your last sentence is my point exactly. LLMs haven't replicated everything about the human brain. But the hype is here because it cracks one of our brains key features: How it learns. Your brain isn't magic. It just records training data until it has enough to mash it together into different things.

A child doesn't respect copyright, they'll draw a picture of Mario. You probably would too If I asked you to. Respecting copyright is something we learn to do in specific situations. This is called "coming up with an original idea". But that's bullshit. There are no original ideas.

If you come up with a product that's a cold brew cup that refrigerates its contents, I'd say that's a very original idea. But you didn't come up with refrigeration, you didn't come up with cups, or cold brew, or the idea of putting technology in a cup, or the concept of a product you sell to people. Name one thing about this idea that you didn't learn somewhere else? You can't. Because that's not how people work. A very real part of business, that you will learn as you put your new cup to market, is skirting around copyright. Somebody out there with a heated cup might come after you for example.

This is a difficult thing to learn the precise line on. Mostly because it can't work as a concrete rule. AI still has to be used, tested, and developed to learn the nuances here. And it will. But what baffles me is how my example above outlines how every process of invention has worked since the beginning of humanity. But if an LLM does it, people say, "That's not a real idea. It just took a bunch of stuff it's learned and mashed it together." But I hear, "My brain is 🪄magic✨ I'm special."