Scientists wonder: Is my AI stealing my ideas?

Scientists wonder: Is my AI stealing my ideas?(scientificamerican.com)

27 points by geox 3 hours ago | 15 comments

lioeters 1 hour 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.

karim79 54 minutes 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.

nylonstrung 1 hour 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

alwa 1 hour 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…

vegadw 26 minutes ago | | |

It's actually probably the case the proofs are coming from the furies.

robleafwagner 1 hour 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.

cowoder 1 hour 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?

socializer 1 hour 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.

moi2388 26 minutes ago |

Tax payers wonder: are scientists stealing my money to patent tax funded research?

maidaman 2 hours ago |

This is like when the price of things increases because they are in your shopping cart.

empath75 49 minutes 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.

123a6kj 1 hour 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.

masfuerte 59 minutes ago | |

Your final paragraph refers to something that's about to be published on the web. So the AI will train on it anyway.

simianwords 1 hour 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.

j45 2 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.