LLMs ("large language models") need a lot of input to generate their statistical text models. Orders of magnitude more than is contained in a single webcomic, even one as large as Achewood. The way this works is, roughly, you train a "base model" on approximately the entire internet. Then you take this "base model" and you add additional training on top to give it a specific flavor, such as "Ray Smuckles". The article alludes to this:
The first challenge was formatting the data in a way the language model could use. Then, there was the matter of picking an underlying language model to train with Ray’s voice. OpenAI’s ChatGPT was a little too sanctimonious for Ray, who likes to color outside of the lines, Hall says. They wound up using a fine-tuned version of OpenAI’s Davinci, which Hall estimates is about 60 times more expensive than ChatGPT.
So, this is not just a matter of "he's only using his own writing so it's fine". The model Onstad is working with is exactly as plagiaristic as anything else OpenAI has put out, it just adds a layer of Smucklesiness on top of that. Whether you think "training a statistical model on the entire internet without authors' consent" is specifically plagiarism, otherwise exploitative, or totally fine is up to you. But you can't draw a clean line and say "training AI nonconsensually is bad but what Onstad is doing is okay."
training a model on the entire internet and using a model already trained on the entire internet are two different things, especially when the model is already available to everyone
also a good factor is however the person using ai involved handles copyright on what they create with ai (directly or indirectly), especially however they give permission to others to use it for ai stuff
i don't really like the way copyright law works currently, but i generally don't dislike as much when regular people use it in the ways i don't like because they're already influenced by how the corporations use it, same with capitalism and ai and other things. if someone uses one of the plagarism bots for a shitpost that's fine by me because it doesn't make sense to allow ONLY evil people to use it for evil things, and i only have a problem with ai in the first place because corporations are using it to get around their own copyright laws and to smush and scramble people in other ways
id probably put an indepth take on what onstad is doing but im too lazy and i don't actually know him or achewood well (ill read the comic someday)
