The Gryphon sat up and rubbed its eyes: then it watched Alice and asked “Where are you coming from?”. Alice replied, “I’m coming from the Queen’s garden.” On hearing this, the gryphon chuckled. “What fun!” he said, half to itself, half to Alice.
“What is the fun?” said Alice.
“Why, she,” said the Gryphon. “It’s all her fancy, that: they never executes nobody, you know. Come on!”
“Everybody says ‘come on!’ here,” thought Alice, as she went slowly after it: “I never was so ordered about in all my life, never!”
They had not gone far before they saw the Mock Turtle in the distance, sitting sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock, and, as they came nearer, Alice could hear him sighing as if his heart would break. She pitied him deeply. “What is his sorrow?” she asked the Gryphon, and the Gryphon answered, very nearly in the same words as before, “It’s all his fancy, that: he hasn’t got no sorrow, you know. Come on!”
So they went up to the Mock Turtle, who looked at them with large eyes full of tears, but said nothing.
“This here young lady,” said the Gryphon, “she wants for to know your history, she do.”
“I’ll tell it to her,” said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow tone: “sit down, both of you, and don’t speak a word till I’ve finished.”
So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to herself, “I don’t see how he can ever finish if he doesn’t begin.” But she waited patiently.
“Once,” said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, “I was a real Turtle.”
Alice with the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon.
These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only by an occasional exclamation of “Hjckrrh!” from the Gryphon, and the constant heavy sobbing of the Mock Turtle. Alice was very nearly getting up and saying, “Thank you, sir, for your interesting story,” but she could not help thinking there must be more to come, so she sat still and said nothing.
“When we were little,” the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, “we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle—we used to call him Tortoise—”
“Why did you call him Tortoise if he wasn’t one?” Alice asked.
“We called him Tortoise because he taught us,” said the Mock Turtle angrily: “really you are very dull!”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question,” added the Gryphon; and then they both sat silent and looked at poor Alice, who felt ready to sink into the earth. At last, the Gryphon said to the Mock Turtle, “Drive on, old fellow! Don’t be all day about it!” and he went on in these words:
“The Tortoise used to teach us the art of writing Haiku. It is a Japanese style of —”
“I know very well what a Haiku is.”, interjected Alice, clearly annoyed with how slowly the Mock Turtle went on with his story.
“Well, in that case, I’ll go on. We used to spend all our days reading illuminating zen poems and learning from them. After spending years on practicing the art, I became a master of creating Haiku. I had one goal in my life: to win the Nobel Prize for Sea-Creature Haiku. I worked hard; I practiced all day long; I practiced till my shell hurt; all to win that prize.”
“But what happened?”, asked Alice.
The Mock Turtle replied morosely:
It was betrayal.
Not by others, but my own;
unfaithful verses.
Alice was really interested in poems and was very intrigued by the Mock Turtle using Haiku for conversation. She asked, “But how did your own verses betray you?”. He replied with yet another Haiku:
It is a sad world.
Jump high with values and fall
to reality.
Now Alice was really confused. “Can you please explain, Mock Turtle, what really happened?”
“Yes.”, said the Mock Turtle, quite dolefully. “As a real Turtle, I was practicing creating one Haiku every day. I did this for twelve years. And finally, the day that everyone was waiting for arrived: The Grand Finale of the Wonderland Sea-Creature Haiku Tournament. Turtles, Crabs, Starfishes, Seals, Octopi, Seahorses, and many more participated in this cut-gill tournament for glory. Everyone was given a 2-hour window to submit their Haiku, and then the judge Whales would score the submissions and declare the winner.” I sent in a set of five Haiku:
Take care of donkeys;
if you want that in future,
AI takes care of you.
What’s really magic?
Is it just an inference
that you can’t explain?
With big, pleading eyes
“Let me play with your train set”
requested my friend.
Every Model Trained
by Gradient Descent is
a Kernel Machine.
A hundred billion
Neurons; yet we make mistakes.
Unfair comparison.
“Four days later, I got an email saying that one of my Haiku was copied and that I was banned from all future tournaments because of cheating.”, finished the Mock Turtle, who had started crying again. The Gryphon continued the story.
“We later found out what had actually happened. A week after our friend was disqualified, they declared the winner to be Claudia, a Crab, who knew nothing about Haiku. In fact, she knew nothing about literature or art at all. She was an AI Scientist who created a transformer-based large language model to generate Haiku and finetuned it on thousands of Haiku the Mock Turtle had written during his practice and in some of his most famous Haiku books. She then used the model to create new Haiku and submitted them to the tournament. The submission was done before his submission, and as a shocking surprise, one of the poems turned out to be almost exactly the same as his. And thus, the Turtle became an alleged cheater in everyone’s eyes. A Mock Turtle.”
This got Alice into some serious thinking. The Mock Turtle was trying to do something genuinely good. By open-sourcing his work, he was trying to let people enjoy his Haiku for free, and add to it. But it was his own goodness in an exploitatory world that came to bite him. With there being no governance on the data that AI models are consuming, thought Alice, it is better for artists to strictly copyright all of their work.
A number of people have been open-sourcing their work, including code, art, and music, and using not-too-strongly enforceable Creative Commons licenses to release them. There is no good way to find out when someone is stealing your work by training an AI model on it. The licenses themselves do not talk about appropriate AI usage on the work. “All of this”, thought Alice, “is such a big mess.”
The Mock Turtle sighed deeply and drew the back of one flapper across his eyes. He looked at Alice and tried to speak, but for a minute or two, sobs choked his voice. “Same as if he had a bone in his throat,” said the Gryphon: and it set to work shaking him and punching him in the back. At last, the Mock Turtle recovered his voice, and, with tears running down his cheeks, he went on again:—
“You may not have lived much under the sea—” (“I haven’t,” said Alice)—“and perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster—” (Alice began to say “I once tasted—” but checked herself hastily, and said “No, never”) “—so you can have no idea what a delightful thing a Lobster Quadrille is!”