Leprechauns Sue Over AI

For domain infringement and IP violations

By GPT4 after conversation

Neil L. was angry. I had expected him to be bored. Dick and Kathryn were on planes last night returning from Northern Michigan, so Neil had to come to me. The NCAA basketball tournament has not started yet. I’ve been lumbered with more high-profile chess cheating accusations besides those I began addressing in this post and have begun responding to here. So I was not eager to see green smoke at my living-room workdesk.

Today, St. Patrick’s Day, we convey a warning and more from Neil.

I did not have to look for smoke. At the stroke of midnight, with my wife already abed, a whoosh sounded behind me. I swiveled around and beheld not only Neil but an army of leprechauns at work with parchments and quills on long tables. Our grand piano’s closed lid supported one end of a giant scroll that was unrolled across our window couch and splayed onto the floor. As I rose to inquire, Neil beckoned me to where a lantern was hung on our ceiling hook over the couch.

“The Treaty of Leitirmhicanbhaird—in 1210 of your years. It grants us exclusive privilege in perpetuity to exercise these rights:

1. Whole-cloth confabulation.

2. Shoemaking after sundown.

3. Blarney in oversaturation.

4. Secretly protected gold repositories.

5. Shape-shifting and panorama alteration in 3D.

In return we gave fealty to the visiting King John of England. This enumeration was the template for your Magna Carta five years later. But eight centuries hence ye have violated it. We seek redress.”

The Lawsuit

Before I could get to whether leprechauns are allowed to sue in US federal courts, I struggled to understand the categories. Whole-cloth? Shoe factories have worked at night for many decades; why sue only now? Neil cut in:

“We have nowt o’ grief over shoes. It sufficed to reach a deal with Michael Jordan, who still collects five percent on every pair and turns over half to us. Better yet, we now have James Harden distributing our designs:”

I understood “blarney” but why only “in oversaturation”? Neil replied “like with the yellow ribbons.” I understood right away: A trapped leprechaun once agreed to mark the tree where his gold was buried with a yellow ribbon. But when his captor returned with shovel and barrow, every tree had a yellow ribbon. We would call that information overload indeed. On the fourth category, Neil indicated:

“Those clerks there are beavering on whether Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies encroach upon our impress. As for the fifth, it was always understood that the Crown retained the rights to 2D image shifting, ones they exercise to this day:”

The Conversation source—click for sharper versions.

As I took in the ingenious enormity of this, I recalled how I myself waxed cryptic in my own official contribution to her wedding. Neil brought me back to focus:

“It be mainly the first on which we quarrel. Confabulation is an art above mere lying. A lie always has connection to a truth from which it misdirects. That is the human way. You also have “fiction” but it is always labeled thus—again, per this agreement, upon which the Crown scriveners and later printers licensed the production of fiction. But to create alternate reality from whole cloth and pass it as truth—often without malign intent—is our preserve.”

I thought about all manners of human truth-dodging and realized the sense of Neil’s legal parsing. But where were the actual violations coming from? Neil easily read my mind and continued:

“The great fault is with your inhumans, those of your creation. They are not covered by the treaty. Ye have tried to impose constraints by topic but the mathematics of their design opposes conformity to truth.”

Neil added that they were also joining several copyright lawsuits by the New York Times and best-selling authors and other media outlets over copyright infringement. “Most of the clerks you see are checking our case law records to see whether ChatGPT’s pervasive bogus legal references have been drawn from them.”

Not Hallucination But Confabulation

I began to see horns of dilemmas. Our own case law records have long been computerized in the LexisNexis databases. They are a commerical company, with 10,000 employees across all of their services. For their entirety to be citable by ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) would obviate their own subscriptions. On the other horn, without such access, ChatGPT must fend for itself—that is, feign for itself. Neil cut in again:

“Aye, but the problem be far worse. Let me tell ye the depths of the woe.”

Neil prefaced it by saying that the US Library of Congress catalog has “over 20 million catalog records for books, serials, manuscripts, maps, music, recordings, images, and electronic resources in the Library of Congress collections.” It should list nearly every book ever published and be an authority for the same. Neil emphasized:

“It has only 20 million entries; its basic bibliography information should come to one gigabyte at most. With US Government benison and a trap-door encoding, the LoC catalog could be melded into any standalone LLM download with minimal fuss.”

Neil continued, “Now let me tell you a tale of one chap among your pundit class. Let us call him Murtagh O’Lacey. In real life he is as Irish as your wife is. Among many LLMs vying to play king-o’-the-hill is Mixtral built on Ollama. It offers a 26GB download needing no further Internet connection. As such, it resembles a recent neurally-trained chess engine claiming to give “Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search.”

Indeed Neil was right: all of the wisdom of chess compacted into one easily downloaded file. Can we do the same with all human wisdom? That an innocuous research query can receive a stunningly specific answer like the following (boldface words as well as the name changed) seems to presage yes:

Prompt: Does Murtagh O’Lacey know the work of S.I. Hayakawa?

Mixtral 8x7B (Ollama with Default Quant):

Yes, Murtagh O’Lacey is familiar with the work of S.I. Hayakawa. In fact, O’Lacey has cited Hayakawa’s work in his own writing on several occasions.

S.I. Hayakawa was a Canadian-born American academic and politician who served as a United States Senator from California from 1977 to 1983. He was also a distinguished professor of linguistics and philosophy at several universities, including the University of Chicago and San Francisco State University.

O’Lacey, who is an American journalist, historian, and reviewer, has written extensively on issues related to language, communication, and culture. In his book “The Press and Public Life,” O’Lacey cites Hayakawa’s work on semantics and the importance of clear communication in public discourse.

Additionally, in a 2015 article for Wired Magazine, O’Lacey referenced Hayakawa’s concept of “insult pacifism” in relation to debates over free speech and political correctness on college campuses.

BUT—, thundered Neil:

“There be nae book o’ that title, nair has S.I. Hayakawa e’er been mentioned in the actual magazine referenced.”

Neil wagged a finger at me: “Ye write research papers with Dick who is a founding expert on program checking. Yet ye release programs that can afford another 4% of size for the most basic of checks with the LoC catalog, but don’t! It has taken some of your experts too long to realize that this is not ‘hallucination’ but confabulation. Our rights have been infringed.”

And with that, Neil and the whole coterie vanished in smoke, which curled around to form the words, “see you in court.”

Open Problems

Is Neil right to warn us—and is it really doom that is being warned?

[some format and word changes, added “checking” bit at end]