Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Uh-huh.

And then also, it turns out that it's not hard to derail these models from the role to which they've been assigned, especially when you're millions of words deep into what's called their context window, which is the amount of material they're capable of kind of keeping in mind, so to speak, at one time, that they start to

lose their attachment, lose their anchor to these carefully crafted, helpful personae, and that then they start to act in very inexplicable ways.

It's not something I spend a lot of time talking to people at Anthropic about, in part because it's not something that I tend to get all that worked up about.

My own book is in the Claude class action settlement, and I'll happily take the compensation for that.

But as the judge ruled in that case, this constitutes fair use because it's a transformative practice, that it's not simply regurgitating stuff that it has read before, that it is generalizing about that stuff and then reproducing new work that follows those lines.

And it shouldn't be at all surprising, given the conversation we've had about its facility with genre, that if you give it something that is fundamentally formulaic, it is going to be able to follow that formula.

So if it is inhaling a lot of romance novels that are all incarnations of the same basic pattern, it's going to be able to reproduce that pattern.

This shouldn't surprise anyone.

That is a great question.

I mean, I try not to view a lot of slop.

I know people are deeply, deeply annoyed by this stuff.

For the most part, I think I've been kind of ignoring it until just the last couple of days.

The New York Times had a piece.

talking about the uproar in Hollywood over a new video generation model from ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, that created this fight scene on the ruined roof of a skyscraper between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.

And I mean, it's truly unbelievable.

It's crazy to watch this.

And, you know, the response from the industry has been like,

well, we just have to make sure that we are enforcing the standards that our unions have set up in the contracts with the studios, and we need to make sure that we are protecting the jobs of all the people who create these things.

And that's great.