Fear of AI just killed a useful tool
I found this article frustratingly vague on how prosecraft.io actually worked. As far as I can tell, the author scraped the web for books, including in-copyright books. Then he analyzed it with techniques based on &quot;classical&quot; natural language processing techniques, rather than transformers or deep learning. He appears to have retained the books he scraped for future analysis. The site itself seems to use only snippets.<p>However, the apology [0] says that the creator did not &quot;<i>intend</i>&quot; to participate in AI that can &quot;create zero-effort impersonations of artists.&quot; I&#x27;m not sure if the wording is unintentionally vague, or if there is some way his project could be used in that way.<p>For what it&#x27;s worth, the Computational Story Lab&#x27;s hendometer [1] seems to have largely out-of-copyright books from Project Gutenberg, plus the Harry Potter series.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.shaxpir.com&#x2F;taking-down-prosecraft-io-37e189797121" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.shaxpir.com&#x2F;taking-down-prosecraft-io-37e189797...</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hedonometer.org&#x2F;books&#x2F;v3&#x2F;863&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hedonometer.org&#x2F;books&#x2F;v3&#x2F;863&#x2F;</a><p>Edit: Apparently he was working on an LLM project. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;stealcase&#x2F;status&#x2F;1688721685585809408" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;stealcase&#x2F;status&#x2F;1688721685585809408</a>. It&#x27;s unclear whether he was planning to use the books he scraped (although as @stealcase points out, GPT-Neox itself was trained on books that were  pirated).