rainyday comments

Posted in: Man arrested for pouring urine on pachinko machine in Sendai See in context

How do we know it was urine?

It could have been coffee…

One can’t expect to go very far in this world without being able to distinguish coffee from urine.

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Posted in: Man arrested for pouring urine on pachinko machine in Sendai See in context

The machine’s alarm went off

Today I learned that Pachinko machines have alarms capable of detecting when someone is peeing on them.

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Posted in: Sumo great Hakuho could lose stable over protege's bullying: reports See in context

Its hard to form an opinion without knowing more.

If Hakuho knew this crap was going on in his stable and turned a blind eye to it I think it’s perfectly reasonable for them to take it away from him.

On the other hand if this was more a case of him doing his best to oversee things but a bad egg slipping through its a bit more of a grey area. Definitely a dereliction on his part, but not as blameworthy as it would be if he had knowingly let it go on.

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Posted in: Nowadays, for fear of child predators, it is no longer considered safe in many countries to let young children go by themselves to and from school, to a friend's house, play in parks or at the beach, go to shops and so on. What was it like when you were growing up? See in context

Another thing getting piled onto the over-parenting thing is the subtle shifts in behavior that the pandemic caused, which are still playing out.

My son for example started elementary school right at the height of the pandemic. So a whole lot of that stuff - going to other kids houses, hanging out with friends, etc just wasn't an option for him or anyone in his school (or anyone in his entire generation really) at the point when they were first learning how to socialize and what constituted "normal" activities for children. Now that the pandemic is past though, since they never learned how to do those things as part of a normal childhood they just don't do them.

Childhood for them is not just way different for them than it was for me, but its also very different from what it was for kids just 5 years older than them.

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Posted in: Osaka Prefecture eyes collecting fixed fee for inbound tourists from 2025 See in context

So they are spending billions on this stupid Casino for the express purpose of luring more foreign tourists to Osaka while at the same time proposing to charge a tax on foreign tourists coming to Osaka to dissuade so many from arriving since its causing an "overtourism" problem??????

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Posted in: Japan eyes up to 800,000 more skilled foreign workers over next 5 years See in context

I wonder how a potential applicant demonstrates their “skill” to lay rail and roads. Just be young and healthy?

Being Japan my guess is they have a license which you get if you pass an exam, and in order to pass the exam you have to attend some sort of senmon gakko that teaches you how to pass the exam, of course.

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Posted in: Sports analytics may be outnumbered when it comes to artificial intelligence See in context

Happy to report the bunt is alive and well in Japan. 

As a fan, I hate the fact that the sac bunt is still commonly used here. Its just plain bad strategy to give up an out for a base almost every time its used (except when a pitcher is at bat in a CL game).

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Posted in: Fukuyama Castle: A stellar reconstruction of an Edo-period castle See in context

I’ve never been to the castle, but I do love the fact that the main station is right next to it.

When I’m taking the shinkansen on my way to Fukuoka I love it when it stops at Fukuyama, the station platform offers amazing views of the castle, probably the best of any station in Japan.

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Posted in: Do you think the performance of the stock market in a country reflects the performance of the economy as a whole? See in context

There was a pretty good debate hosted at the Foreign Correspondent's Club last week which addressed this issue, between Richard Katz and Jesper Koll, its worth a watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsD00-keDwk&t=74s

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Posted in: Do you think the performance of the stock market in a country reflects the performance of the economy as a whole? See in context

The Tokyo Stock Exchange index has roughly doubled in price over the past ten years.

Is the Japanese economy today doing twice as well as it was in 2014? I don't think so.

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Posted in: Osaka university globalizes with fall start date; governor wants English as official language See in context

Osaka Prefectural University surely knows well the achievements of AIU and is bent on replicating the recipe as a necessary step towards global success in 2050 and beyond.

The problem there is that AIU is an extremely small, niche institution with fewer than 100 faculty and less than 1,000 students. So that makes it fairly manageable and lets it succeed in its niche. But OMU in contrast is a major public university that has almost 20 times more students and faculty, and offers a much wider range of disciplines that it has to compete against other major Japanese universities in (such as its medical and law schools). Its a kind of apples to oranges comparison and I don’t think they can use AIU as a model (or Ritsumeikan’s APU, which s also quite different).

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Posted in: Osaka university globalizes with fall start date; governor wants English as official language See in context

Probably this is more a case of the Uni trying to make itself attractive to international students rather than domestic ones.

The number of 18 year old Japanese is about half what it was 30 years ago, creating a crisis for universities, particularly those that don’t have elite status. Getting more international students is a kind of survival strategy.

OMU currently only has about 500 international students out of a student body of 16,000, so this would be a pretty radical change for them that would really screw with most of their students for reasons noted by other commenters.

Other universities have set up English taught programs that run seperate from their Japanese ones and have fall admissions. This makes way more sense - it opens you up to international students without screwing the schedule of your Japanese ones up. Not sure why OMU isn’t going that route.

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Posted in: Keeping children safe on social media: What parents should know to protect their kids See in context

As a parent I do take my responsibilities very seriously, but I also strongly feel that it makes way more sense for the main onus to be on social media companies to make their “product” safe. These things have become ubiquitous in daily life mainly through design, and if I have an ipad in my house I want to know that letting my kid play with it isn’t the equivalent of letting them play with a loaded gun that might kill them.

The way these damn things are now, its actually way worse than a loaded gun. I know what a loaded gun is, why it is dangerous and how to prevent it from doing harm to my kid (by not having one - so easy). Smart phones (which my kids do not have) are way more insidious from the parent’s perspective precisely because there isn’t a simple answer (don’t keep them in the house, etc) for keeping your kid safe with them. The advice in the article is good, but its uncomfortably vague and incomplete. Its basically like giving parents advice about how to keep your kids safe while swimming in a pool together with a great white shark. Make sure you know what your kids are doing, have up front discussions about great white sharks so they feel empowered, don’t give them commands about splashing around in a way that makes them look like prey but rather let them come to the conclusion on their own, since they’ll need to know how to manage complex human-shark relations as they grow let them engage in limited play but set certain boundaries, etc etc

Not comforting at all and makes you just wish the bloody companies that ran pools hadn’t based their entire business model on having sharks in them for some reson.

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Posted in: The move is aimed at encouraging the proper use of ambulances among residents. See in context

My sympathies for what you went through. Nonetheless, the article says 7,700 yen for an ambulance. If you took a taxi between 4 different hospitals it must have cost at least that much. 

Whoops, for some reason I misread that as "77,000" Yen. Yeah, at 7700 Yen it was probably in the same ballpark as our cab fare.

And yes, my advice is to always take an ambulance if you are in pain like that.

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Posted in: The move is aimed at encouraging the proper use of ambulances among residents. See in context

The problem is that Japan’s system almost necessitates people using ambulances for things that probably don’t require it.

I broke my arm in a cycling accident once. I needed to go to a hospital but didn’t think it was enough of an emergency to need an ambulance, so my wife called a taxi to take us to the nearest hospital instead.

It was a disaster. We ended up having to go to 4 different hospitals before we found one that would treat me. It took hours and I was in major pain the whole time.

The whole damn system relies on ambulances not so much for the emergency care they provide on the way, but on the fact that they are the only ones who know which hospital to take patients with a given condition to. If I had called an ambulance, I would have been taken to the correct hospital right away.

Under the proposal in the article, since a broken arm doesn’t require an overnight stay (a stupid and arbitrary standard), someone in my situation would be faced with either the taxi ride from hell, or a massive bill for access to the only people who know where to take you.

The system is wasteful and sucks, but this isn’t going to fix it.

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Posted in: Award-winning author's AI use revelation roils Japan's literary world See in context

Why would you not move up? it is not like anybody is forcing anybody to come and read comments, much less to write anything.

Because you keep misrepresenting what I said.

Therefore completely inappropriate for the specific situation it was used for. 

Not what I said, not what I meant. That is your view, not mine. Stop attributing things to me which I did not say.

I still can't understand participating in a conversation as if it was forced somehow, specially after already saying there was no point in doing it or that it was a waste of time.

That is no excuse for you continuing to misrepresent what I said. Please refrain from doing so.

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Posted in: Award-winning author's AI use revelation roils Japan's literary world See in context

Is it really necessary to still be dredging this conversation up? I was hoping to move on but its irritating to see my words being misrepresented.

Agreeing with something without supporting that with an argument means you are agreeing with something disproved.

Read the section of text he is agreeing with. It was an opinion, not a statement of fact that is even capable of being “disproved”. You may have disproved other things, but not that. Accuracy is important, no?

Except on the part where the author of the analogy already accepted it is completely inappropiate

Except that the author - me - never said it was “completely inappropriate”, he just said that he didn’t mean for it to apply to the specific case in the article. In other cases involving the use of AI by an author, depending on the circumstances, I think it could be a completely appropriate analogy.

Misrepresenting what sources say is bad, right? Please stop doing it.

Yet the original argument was that plagiarism was taking the work of another, which in this case is still invalid since there no other to take the work from.

Point taken. It would be more accurate to say that the plagiarism is, as the previous comment suggested, passing off work that is not your own as if it were your own. Very poor wording on my part and yes, you did disprove the validity of the definition I originally used.

Now lets please move on.

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Posted in: North Korea scraps all economic cooperation with South Korea See in context

Man, how is the South Korean economy going to survive that 18$ loss in trade?

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Posted in: Award-winning author's AI use revelation roils Japan's literary world See in context

Which is again a much better option instead of misrepresenting a source, that is the whole point.

About half of what you’ve written has been misrepresenting what I’ve written, a far worse offence than a minor error about a source which I acknowledged as soon as you pointed it out.

There is no point in furthering this discussion, I’ve wasted way too much time on this already. Feel free to have the last word if you so desire.

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Posted in: U.S. conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson says he will interview Putin See in context

Yeah, whatever, anyway, I think it’s good that he has the Cuyans to have a sit down with Putin. I think a real journalist should be able to talk to anyone, good or bad. That is your job. I mean, Barbara Walters interviewed Fidel Castro, Mike Wallace did an interview with the Ayatollah Khomeini, and these were some of the worst people, so good on Tucker for getting the interview.

I suppose the difference is that Walters and Wallace knew they were interviewing brutal dictators antagonistic to America and organized their approach accordingly.

We haven’t seen Carlson’s interview yet but the concern is that, unlike Walters and Wallace, he is going to treat this as a fawning hero interview designed to make Putin look good rather than actually challenging him on anything.

Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong, but I doubt it.

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Posted in: Award-winning author's AI use revelation roils Japan's literary world See in context

You asked what was my position, that is it. 

No, that is not it, I also asked:

but I’m wondering what the overall principles are that you think should apply in general are?

This was out of curiosity, if you don’t want to answer fine, move on, but don’t pretend the question wasn’t put to you.

it is not like anybody can force anybody else to discuss something specific instead of what they come to comment about.

Asking your opinion about something - which I should note is the central question raised by the article and not some random irrelevant thing I’m injecting into it - is not “forcing” you to do anything. If you don’t want to talk about what I have made clear that I want to talk about then kindly stop responding to my posts.

Nobody can be blamed for taking that as you accusing the author from cheating simply because he would still write a prize winning novel even if including answers from AI. 

If I didn’t make might point clear the first time then yes, nobody is to blame but me for that. But I’ve been explicitly telling you what I meant for several posts now yet you keep coming back to tell me what I meant rather than listening to what I’m actually saying I meant, so the blame is on you for that.

> Again, looking at the current situation and how the abilities of AI to write things are already declining because of inevitable corruption, that is a huge leap of faith. There are already books written by AI, terrible, mistaken, nonsensical books that even as simple guides (not something to be recognized by artistic talent even) fail completely in their purpose. Thinking that AI can magically solve the expected degradation and begin to write things of quality without a huge help from a real writer with talent is not realistic.

This might be the case, I don’t actually know what is possible going forward (the fact that the problem exists today doesn’t mean it won’t be solved even if the solution is not apparent now. I understand the nature of the degradation problem, which is inherent in the way these things learn and produce content, but it doesn’t seem like something which is fundamentally never going to be solved). Also even if it’ll never be perfect at writing something as long as a novel, its already capable of writing shorter content that can be made “readable” with just editorial/proofreading work by humans, so the issue is not just hypothetical but one that seems to require an answer today in that context.

But even if this was magically solved the solution would be simple, make it a rule (even if arbitrary in absence of advantages) for the writers not to use it (and hope that the magical solution do not make it also impossible to detect it).

Yeah, this is the discussion I was trying to start. Is it really necessary to ban writers from using it? Or for example would allowing its use but requiring disclosure of it suffice? Or some other rule or set of rules? If there are benefits to using AI but only within certain limits then we need to make those limits clear - this is exactly the point being made in the article. Banning it will cost us that benefit, allowing a free for all on the other hand will create other problems. We need rules that lie somewhere in between and that is where intellectual effort needs to be directed.

Debating whether what this one author did is OK or not is at best only tangentially related to those broader and more important questions, hence my lack of interest in getting bogged down in that debate (despite your repeated insistence to the contrary).

That is no excuse to mispresent a source and pretend it said something contrary to what actually said,

Uh yes, point already made, you’ve explained yourself, I’ve explained myself, no need to keep berating the point. Passing off the work of AI as your own is not allowed. I mistakenly said that Cambridge defined it as plagiarism, when it in fact defines it as academic misconduct (which includes but is not limited to plagiarism). You can interpret this as either an honest mistake on my part in the context of a casual exchange on this forum, or a deliberate, calculated act of deception that requires you to constantly re-litigate the point long after I’ve conceded it.

it would be a perfectly valid reason for example to not replying to something, precisely because this is a comment section where people are free to write (as long as inside of the rules of the site) without any problem.

Yes, feel free to do so.

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Posted in: Award-winning author's AI use revelation roils Japan's literary world See in context

My position is that your argument that copying from AI is taking words and ideas from another person, and therefore always the same as plagiarism is mistaken.

Yes, yes, I get that. But that wasn’t the main question I was asking. I’m not trying to be argumentative here, I’m just curious if you have an opinion on what principles should govern the use of AI in relation to writing.

Yet you used a very clear unambiguous example of someone cheating by breaking the rules to explain the situation, you repeatedly try to ignore this counterargument without refuting it as if you wrote no such a thing, you did.

Well, if the sports analogy is still bothering you, it was in response to your definition of “talent” in writing to include the talent of using AI seemlessly without being noticed. These seem to be seperate skill sets to me, the same way that the way to cheat on a doping test is a seperate skill set from playing the actual sport. I did not mean that to be an analogy to the specific incident in the article, but rather to the fact that in general if we accept the use of AI as part of writing talent as you suggest its also going to include cases that probably go way more against what people would consider within bounds of what is acceptable (which is likely different from what the rules might say, thus the problem).We thus need a discussion on where those boundaries lie, which is what I’ve been trying to engage in.

You can certainly pick that apart for contradictions, inaccuracies, goal post shifting or whatever but this is the comment section on JT, not a peer reviewed journal and I’m making these comments on my ipad while multitasking a few other things.

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Posted in: Award-winning author's AI use revelation roils Japan's literary world See in context

I honestly thought we could engage in a debate about what the boundaries of the use of AI in the arts should be but you seem obsessed with treating this as a zero sum points based scoring exercise which seems unproductive.

You completely misrepresented your sources as if they said use of AI was plagiarism, it was easy to prove it is not, it is not semantics but proving your own sources do not support your point, they even contradict it. You just proved that AI is not to be considered someone you can steal ideas

Its true that the Cambridge source I cited does not specifically say “using AI is plagiarism”, fair enough, but you are really splitting hairs here. Its a recognized form of academic misconduct that -yes - Cambridge’s description is vague about in terms of what form of academic misconduct it falls under but its hard to infer what other category it would fit into (collusion and fabrication seem quite different) and the same site also refers specifically to AI on its page about plagiarism.

And the Oxford definition I cited doesn’t suffer from any such ambiguity, its crystal clear that the use of AI constitutes plagiarism for them. What is your response to that?

As proved there is no "others" from which the work is being stolen, which means this is not against the rules as you claimed.

AsI said repeatedly, I never claimed she did anything that violated any rules. My comments from start to finish are not about her specific case and any suggestion otherwise is due to either poor phrasing on my part or misinterpretation on yours. You can accept that or reject that, if you think I’m lying to you about it there is no point in further discussion.

Which again do not claim in any way that AI is someone from whom ideas can be stolen, which was your original point before you began to move goal posts.

I’m not moving goal posts, I’m not trying to “win” this debate, I’m trying to engage in constructive dialogue about a topic of interest to me. You are correct, there is nothing to “steal” when an idea has no owner. Point acknowledged, I’ve incorporated the insight you provided into my world view and moved on. Thank you for that.

Moving on, and just to clarify, is it your position that copying from non human sources like AI is ethically acceptable in all circumstances? Or are there limits? I’m clear about what your position on the use of AI in this one case mentioned in the article is, but I’m wondering what the overall principles are that you think should apply in general are?

>

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Posted in: Award-winning author's AI use revelation roils Japan's literary world See in context

This means that as long as you can't prove the author of this article copied the texts attributed to AI from other people your whole argument falls flat. Using AI by itself is not plagiarism when there is nobody else from whom anything was stolen. There is no "others" in this case only the author and the AI tool.

As I've said about five times, I'm not trying to argue that the author of this article did anything wrong. Literally the very first thing I said in my very first comment on this article was:

To be honest, if this is all she was using it for then I don't really have a problem with it. 

I don't know how I could be any more clear about that. This is why I have said several times we are arguing in circles - you want to defend what this author did, but I'm not attacking what this author did so I don't see the point of you constantly framing your responses like that.

Not at all, your whole argument is that this would be cheating based on the text being stolen from someone else, which is completely invalid the moment AI is not someone else from whom things can be stolen. 

This isn't my argument at all. I have not said, please do not misrepresent what I am actually saying. Passing something that you did not create off as if it were your own is, I think, something that should not be allowed. This author did NOT do that, she has openly acknowledged that she used AI and identified the specific parts that she used it in. Her rationale for doing so makes perfect sense to me, and as I've said again and again I have no problem with it.

What I do have a concern about is the open question of how we define what is acceptable and what is not acceptable going forward. This is what I'm trying to discuss, to no avail.

I quoted your own comment, trying to argue that something not being an unfair advantage is irrelevant for this thing to be or not allowed. The article clearly explains that use of AI was not even considered, that solves completely the mystery of it being or not against the rules.

You are framing this as a descriptive question of the rules (what the rules are) in this specific instance. The article doesn't actually tell us what the rules are (we can infer from the note that they will change the rules going forward that they didn't address this AI issue directly) but as I said I'm not making an argument about whether this specific person's entry constituted a violation of this specific contest's specific rules. Rather I'm trying to address the normative questions raised in the article about what the rules should be, not just in this one contest but for the use of AI in the arts in general.

And I was pretty clear about what I meant when I said giving an unfair advantage is "irrelevant". Its irrelevant because no unfair disadvantage exists - anyone can use AI so I don't see there being any concerns that someone would be unfairly advantaged by it. If it did give someone an unfair advantage that would be a different story, but I don't see it. But the mere lack of an unfair disadvantage does not by itself suggest to me that AI poses no problems whatsoever. Rather I see those problems as manifesting in different forms unrelated to competitive advantage.

Your own sources contradict you, they call the use of AI academic misconduct, not plagiarism. And explicitly call the occurrence of plagiarism exclusively the "use of words and ideas from human authors without referencing them" Ai is not a person from whom the text is being stolen, is the tool used to steal the words or ideas.

Because the reason why there is no copyright nor plagiarism is the same, AI can't be considered a person, so according to your own argument the author can't be taking the work of anybody else. This is a perfectly valid argument that defeats yours. It is not that both things are the same, it is that both things become impossible when there is no person from whom the work is being stolen.

You are getting far too tangled up in semantics (specifically the meaning of "others") here, using a definition that I just typed in off the top of my head, as though it were the only authoritative definition in the world rather than just a rough approximation of a rule whose precise definition varies from institution to institution. Many use the term copying from another "source" which does not imply a human author, making your laser-like focus on that irrelevant.

Here for example is how Oxford University defines plagiarism:

The University defines plagiarism as follows:

“Presenting work or ideas from another source as your own, with or without consent of the original author, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement. All published and unpublished material, whether in manuscript, printed or electronic form, is covered under this definition, as is the use of material generated wholly or in part through use of artificial intelligence (save when use of AI for assessment has received prior authorisation e.g. as a reasonable adjustment for a student’s disability). Plagiarism can also include re-using your own work without citation. Under the regulations for examinations, intentional or reckless plagiarism is a disciplinary offence.”

Pretty crystal clear.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/skills/plagiarism#:~:text=Information%20about%20what%20plagiarism%20is,your%20work%20without%20full%20acknowledgement.

Cambridge, Harvard and others also make it very clear in their plagiarism policies that passing off the work composed by AI is not allowed:

https://extension.harvard.edu/registration-admissions/for-students/student-policies-conduct/academic-integrity/#:~:text=Plagiarism%20is%20the%20theft%20of,and%20are%20not%20properly%20cited.

https://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/students/plagiarism

Your point about the Cambridge source referring to it as "academic misconduct" is something of a red herring given that it defines plagiarism as a form of academic misconduct.

The point is that the purpose of rules on plagiarism, as part of larger policies on academic misconduct, is not just to protect the original (human) authors from having their works stolen, its also to impose ethical obligations on authors themselves to honestly present only their own work as their own as an end in itself. No university on the planet that I know of has policies that deviate from this.

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Posted in: 1 in 5 Japanese university students do not want children: survey See in context

The survey, conducted on students expected to graduate in 2025, showed that 19.2 percent said they do not wish to have children, a jump from 13.1 percent in last year's results, which covered students completing their studies in 2024, job website operator Mynavi Corp said.

Its suspicious that the numbers jumped so high between the class of 2024 and the class of 2025. The two cohorts are virtually identical to each other and are just a year apart in age. In the absence of some major event impacting students over the past 12 months it doesn't make much sense for one group to be about 1.5 times less likely to want to have children than the other.

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Posted in: Award-winning author's AI use revelation roils Japan's literary world See in context

Accommodating new things is perfectly fine, but applying the changes retroactively just because you feel like it is not, you are not talking about changing the rules for the next prize, you are accusing someone of cheating for not following a rule you would like to be implemented, that is obviously not valid.

You don't seem to be reading what I wrote, i already addressed this concern.

The worst part is that you are trying to skip completely the part where AI is demonstrated as a unfair advantage for a competition and just impose it as if was a fact, just to justify a rule (and a retroactive one) against it. 

I'm not doing anything of the sort. I already said that I'm fine with what this specific author did if you'd actually care to read what I've written before responding. What I am saying is that I don't know what the rule on this should be (unlike you who are certain that you know). Nowhere did I say that this person was in breach of anything.

As i said, we are talking in circles here, you aren't actually addressing what I'm writing.

Which for anybody with a common sense would be impossible, nobody can interpret AI as "others" specially with the clear antecedent of AI not being recognized as an author. Forcing this as if it was an unaddressed problem even with the many different articles explaining the legality is trying to argue from ignorance about something well known.

Sorry but this misconstrues the nature of the problem. About the legality aspect YES, copying from AI is not illegal because AI is not capable of possessing copyright over the works created by it (which distinguishes it from copying from a human being's work). You are conflating two different things there however - copyright infringement and plagiarism. The two overlap but are not synonymous. Plagiarism by itself is not a legal concept, its an ethical one that is applied in different professions (academia, journalism, the arts, etc) and generally one can't sue for it unless its also a violation of copyright (or some other legal right such as in a contract).

One can however commit acts of plagiarism without violating copyright. Stealing ideas isn't a violation of copyright for example but is often considered plagiarism when its done without attribution. Its an ethical violation rather than a legal one, and one which might breach the rules of given institutions (universities, publishing houses, etc) without violating copyright established by the legal system.

Universities I should note are applying this exact same rule against students who are submitting essays written wholly or in part by Chat GPT. Passing off work composed by AI as it if were your own is plagiarism, pure and simple. Look up any university policy on this and its pretty uniform, some random examples:

Cambridge University:

https://www.plagiarism.admin.cam.ac.uk/what-academic-misconduct/artificial-intelligence

University of Edinburgh

https://www.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/atoms/files/universityguidanceforstudentsonworkingwithgenerativeai.pdf

All of these are based on the exact same rule: You cannot pass off the work of others as your own. Its not retroactive, its just universities clarifying how conventional rules on plagiarism which have existed for generations are applied to this new technology.

Now there might be differences between writing novels and writing academic essays, particularly with the latter where the discovery of the truth is the ultimate goal the standards are probably higher. But I'm pretty sure that most publishing houses are going to frown on authors of novels submitting works created by AI with minimal input of their own.

This actually isn't just an ethical issue, we can circle back to the copyright issue I mentioned above, since its a double edged sword for authors. If AI generated content cannot be copyrighted (which seems to be the direction most jurisdictions are heading in, US courts have already ruled that this is the case) that doesn't just mean that authors who use AI aren't infringing copyright, it also means that the copyright status of their own works is going to be unclear at best, or possibly completely unprotected depending on how heavy their reliance, something that publishing houses are going to be very concerned about.

In the example of the novel mentioned in the article, the portions of the text produced by AI - since they lack a human author - are likely not protected by copyright and thus any other author can freely copy and use them without being sued (they might be committing plagiarism in doing so, but not a copyright violation).

In other cases where the reliance on AI is heavier (say where the AI writes an entire novel by itself, then the human author merely edits it into something that makes it more readable, etc), the human author might not be able to claim any copyright at all over it. Publishing houses are not going to be happy with that, and I can't imagine any of them think your "anything goes, just assume its all written by AI" approach makes any sense.

It should be obvious that I'm talking here about general concerns raised by this and not just the facts of this one case, so please read my comment in that light.

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Posted in: Award-winning author's AI use revelation roils Japan's literary world See in context

Of course it does, because precisely because to "violate the rules" it needs to be first defined as a violation of those rules. What makes no sense is to pretend the rules disqualify something that was not even considered in them in the first place. That would be like saying he cheated because he was wearing blue pants while writing and now you want to consider that against the rules. He did not violate any rules by his use of AI.

We seem to be talking in circles, but I'm going to push back on this because it mischaracterizes how rules are made in human society, which is my field.

Most rules (created by the legal system or informally) aren't defined so narrowly that they cannot accommodate technological, social and other changes that didn't exist at the time they were made. Formal rule-makers throughout history have known this to be a problem and thus prefer to draft rules as standards that can be adaptable rather than overly specific. Making new rules is difficult and requires lengthy processes. Interpreting existing rules to apply to new situations is much easier. When new technologies, or social changes, create new types of disputes its up to some arbiter (in legal disputes the courts) to determine whether the existing rule applies to the new situation or whether a completely new rule is required.

AI in general is going to require a lot of completely new rules because so many of the issues it presents (not just with respect to its use by novelists) is going to be fundamentally incompatible with our existing rules that govern many things. But here it seems simple. The existing rule is:

"Authors must not pass off the work of others as their own." (or some similar variation).

You don't need a completely new rule to deal with that, you just need to know if "the work of others" includes the work of AI. That is a question of interpretation, not something that needs a change in the existing rules per se (ie the factual situation is capable of being fit within the existing framework).

So this isn't a question of retroactively trying to apply some new rule that someone has aribtrarily created post facto to behavior that was allowed at the time it occurred. Rather its a question of whether the pre-existing rule applies to this new situation or not. There is nothing controversial about that, its how most rules operate.

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Posted in: Award-winning author's AI use revelation roils Japan's literary world See in context

That would apply only if the novel was promoted as not having any single detail written by AI, in this case it is undeniable the author is still the person being recognized as such.

The presumption you are suggesting makes no sense as a rule. The governing presumption should be that works are written by their authors unless otherwise noted, not that works are written by AI unless otherwise noted.

By using valid arguments that actually apply to the examples being discussed, not trying to apply things that are by all means impossible right now (and maybe ever looking at how the degradation of products by AI is already happening).

Its debatable how much is actually possible right now. AI can't write a good novel entirely autonomously, but its clear that it can contribute significant elements to one with an ever decreasing need for human involvement.

The specific example in this article involved the writer using AI to produce text that was going to be spoken by an AI character in her novel. This seems like a reasonable use of the technology to me, but I don't think that its a typical case that we are going to see, even with the current technology.

And while there might be "degredation of products by AI" happening, I don't think its even remotely realistic to think that development of this technology isn't going to advance much beyond its current level. I'm not an expert in the field, but the amounts being invested are massive and the paths forward seem relatively clear.

Why not? he managed to do that by making a good, entertaining novel that managed to be recognized by its quality. Not by making something to horribly bad that would be at the same level as what AI can write right now.

Yup. But her (not his) use of AI was for an extremely limited purpose and used in a way that made it easy to completely sequester and identify her contribution from AI's contribution. This is unlikely to be the case with other writers, even using current technology.

Only if by "cheat" you mean using perfectly valid but not yet recognized ways to improve his performance without any extra negative effects on his health. The use of AI was not forbidden, it was not even considered during the evaluation process,

This makes no sense. The absence of a rule on something that didn't exist when the rules were made doesn't by itself render the use of that thing "perfectly valid" if it violates other rules. Looking around at what actual literary scholars are saying about the ethics of using AI to produce creative content they certainly don't seem to have the same opinion as you - passing off the work of others as your own has a long history of being against the rules in that field. None of them are comfortable with your position that we should just assume everything is written with AI unless specifically promised otherwise.

there is no evidence it gives any unfair advantage, so following your example it would be like an athlete "cheating" by maximizing the effect of his training with a perfect schedule made by AI.

Whether it gives an "unfair" advantage or not is irrelevant (since anyone can use AI its not an issue of unequal access). If you let every athlete use steroids none of them would necessarily be at an unfair advantage either. The question is whether one wants the rules of the game to allow it or not, and if so under what conditions. The rules on that are what is being debated right now. I don't know what those rules should be now, but I do know that there are serious concerns that go way beyond mere unfair advantages being conferred on individual writers that we need to be worried about in coming up with them.

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Posted in: Award-winning author's AI use revelation roils Japan's literary world See in context

That applies the same if the author was using a pseudonym, feeling cheated by that is not exactly rational. 

Not at all. If you are a fan of XYZ then you are entitled to expect that a book purporting to be written by XYZ would actually be written by XYZ.

We are not at the point AI can write anything of even elementary quality

True, but we are likely to reach that point in the very near future so its worth discussing now.

that is why people would expect a book that wins a contest to be written by someone with talent, the ability to coerce AI to give answers that fit the book and incorporate those answers in the novel without people noticing is also part of that talent.

I don't think that most people's definition of "talent" by a writer includes the ability to obscure the fact that they are secretly getting AI to write parts of their work from readers (anymore than it would the ability to hide the fact that they are having a ghostwriter do parts of their work, etc).

Its a bit like saying an athlete's ability to cheat on doping tests is a measure of their "talent" in their sport.

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Posted in: Award-winning author's AI use revelation roils Japan's literary world See in context

There is a scene in Kudan's book where "AI-built," a fictional technology reminiscent of the modern-day ChatGPT developed by U.S.-based OpenAI, answers the protagonist's questions. Kudan explained later in an interview that she only employed AI-generated text in the responses given by AI-built in the story.

To be honest, if this is all she was using it for then I don't really have a problem with it. But I do worry about the future as this technology develops, this risks driving us into some truly dystopian crap.

Why would this be the case? if you read a book expecting to be entertained, learn something or experience a different point of view and this goal is accomplished, why would people feel cheated? What if the author is a genious and wrote the whole thing in a single day? Would the people that expect it to be the product of weeks or even months of work be right if they feel cheated?

Well, on a simple level if the book says "XYZ" is the author and you expect to read a book written by XYZ but instead find it was written by AI then yeah, I think anyone would reasonably feel cheated by that.

Beyond the question of being cheated though is the question of how much we, as a society, should be comfortable with our creative, imaginative narrative space being taken over by machines that within a few years are going to be far smarter, far more capable of spewing stuff out in limitless quantities, and far more capable of shaping our collective culture than we mere humans are. The potential for our society to be destroyed by this stuff is staring us in the face and we really should be way more concerned about it than we seem to be.

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