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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

There is something of the meta-humanity going on here. These illustrations are drawn from hundreds of years of human effort, and are being used to enhance our enjoyment of these stories. But it is only possible because of the prior human work.

It's a little like copying the work of hundreds of other artists at once.

Index funds bother me in the same way as in at some point the price discovery mechanism ought to break as everyone just uses one corpus.

All in all, this is an amazing idea, enabled by the work of amazing people, and it is like looking at something significant - I just don't know what :-)

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I wonder how far you could go generating tons of images from human art "feedstock", having people select the best 0.1% of them, then using them as input for another round, and so on. Then replace the people with another AI whose job it is to grade aesthetics of an image somehow, for a fully closed loop.

Edit: In other words...

1. Train your stable diffusion model using a corpus of normal human images.

2. Use the model to generate thousands of images.

3. Use human analysts to train another AI how to find "good" images in that set.

4. Generate ten million stable diffusion images.

5. Use the other AI to find the "good" ones.

6. Use those to train another stable diffusion model.

7. Goto 4.

(You lose some information each iteration, though, so it would probably eventually converge to grey goo or millions of pictures of Agent Smith.)

The creators of stable diffusion and others are already doing that.

https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/simulacra-aesthetic-capti...

https://github.com/LAION-AI/laion-datasets/blob/main/laion-a...

I like it. Your methodology seems analogous to a GAN [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

Index funds hold underlying assets under management... You are paying for a slice of the underlying assets... All slices of the pie are accounted for and it doesn't create anything new. Not sure how that relates to machines reproducing human creative efforts.

The gripe with index funds is that they wouldn't work if everyone used them.

With a strong rule of law, they probably would.

What does a strong rule of law have to do with it? The issue is that index funds depend on there being a price discovery mechanism on the underlying equities. If no one were buying and selling individual equities there would be no price discovery.

The DOW 30 has 30 successful companies in it. If one of these companies falters it will be removed from the index and replaced by an up-and-coming company. It would be there even if people invested or not.

How does a company faltering or succeeding end up being reflected in its membership of the Dow? If relative shifts in stock price are the main causal mechanism, then that's exactly the issue: universal passive index investing (roughly) means that there won't be relative shifts in price.

Good thing everyone doesn't do it then! Why would professional traders stop trading?

It's a common fallacy that things need to work for everyone or they're no good. We can do different things. Specialization is useful.

They don't mean that it's creating anything but just that index funds depend on "real" market participants to buy and sell on good and bad news, forecasts, etc. If you imagine them expanding to where there are no (or almost no) real buyers and sellers, then they don't really work, and also the market doesn't really work. Though I think you'd have to get to a very (maybe impossibly) high share of passive investors for this to really occur.

That's their analogy to ML/AI art: imagine it takes over and puts most artists out of business... are the models just stuck, taking their own output as input and not really improving? Similarly here it's maybe not possible for this to happen to such an extreme degree that the imagined problem would come to pass.

Human learning itself is a little like copying the work of hundreds of other artists at once.

There is a deeper question here ;;

At what point will we doubt reality and truth in favor of the AI provisioned one?

We talk about singularity being an AI that surpasses human int... but its goig to happen much sooner and via a diff vector, such as AI images.

the fucking speech by biden the other day looked like a deep fak to me - his mouth flapping was way exaggerated, and the fact that he could hold a salient sentence were the tells...

singularity isnt about AI being able to fool us that hte __*AI*__ is a human - its that we FOOL OURSELVES...

So I think that the whole AI art thing is going to make reality so elastic in our minds that it will be likea dream, and we litereally cannot trust a single fucking thing online. period.

Along the same lines, I was thinking this morning that we might soon have revenge-as-a-service where you can generate fake, "incriminating" news stories at the click of a button. Did Joe leave a lot of hate behind when he quit his job? An unscrupulous boss can generate fake news stories on random news sites (just plug in the locality name, e.g. "cnnbostonarchives.org"). Future potential employers will be shocked to learn that Joe raped and massacred 300 puppies, with lots of realistic pictures of Joe in line with the story. Most people won't have stories like this generated about them, only the ones who have enough haters.

AI as a service is coming... if not hear - there were talks about AI voice manip such that they changed accents.

AI is going to kill the HUMANITY. (this is a phrase that one should all know... HUMANITY)

AI is killing it. and gues who is trying to own AI - fucking pedo-financial-hedge-funds

Yea, same thing happens after reading the subreddit where all posts and comments are generated by GPT-2: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/

If you read it too much, and go back to normal human forums you will wonder if they're also generated by AI or if we are all just AI generated bots on the internet :-O

>Index funds bother me in the same way as in at some point the price discovery mechanism ought to break as everyone just uses one corpus.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you saying that index funds are driving individual equities? If so, why do you think that? Because of broad market correlation?

The idea here is that if everyone is just holding index funds that follow the market, no one is responding to external signals to drive prices to any particular value. Index funds follow the market, but what does the market follow if all the equities are held by index funds?

It’s a great metaphor for what could happen if there’s no new art coming from outside the model; everything get stuck (though I’m not sure I agree, tbh, humans are just pattern-matching robots too and it seems to have worked ok)

Almost all modern thing is "from hundreds of years of human effort" and "only possible because of the prior human work", even humans themselves.

can you explain the index funds line

I think the notion is the index fund is simply buying a stock because it has a certain market cap. It is not evaluating the fundamentals of the company.

The algorithmic art is similar in the sense that it is an averaging of previous effort. People made art and it was fed into the algorithm. The algorithm is some weighting of the art it was fed. Analogously, people who thought about companies bought and sold the stock. It landed at some price. The index fund just followed that.

There has been criticism of index funds [1] and defense [2] as far as price discovery.

Other people have raised the possibility that an index fund holding large amounts of competitor companies is an antitrust issue. [3]

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/87a3b117-7085-40f4-8cca-66bb8353c... [2] https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/literature/whitepaper/po... [3] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/12/04/why-common-owners...

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