Comment by rcarr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcarr | Hacker News Reader

There’s something about all of this I just find a bit gross. I enjoy Star Trek and The Orville which have androids and humans interacting but in those programs the androids are identifiable as such. There’s Blade Runner which I enjoy as well and obviously feel empathy and compassion for the androids who want to be free to live their lives. So what is the problem here?

It feels to me like the problem must be one of deception. I don’t want to feel like I’m being had. Whatever content I consume, I want to know if humans made it or if AI did. I want to know if I’m talking to something or someone. And if it’s getting to the point where it’s impossible to tell the difference then I feel like I’m going to start using the internet solely for tasks where I don’t mind it being generated by an AI which basically means narrow information retrieval for specific problems at hand. Which just feels kind of sad.

Maybe there’ll be some mind blowing AI song or novel that everyone starts raving about and I get curious and check it out and change my mind. But I’m not sure. I feel like art needs to be tied to people and stories and mythology. There’s tons of great music being created on a daily basis but music itself doesn’t excite me like it did because music used to be part of your social identity: the clothes you wore, the people you hung out with. Same with TV and Film; what we gained in on-demand convenience we lost in shared experience which came about from being forced to sit down and watch it at the same time as everyone else and then excitedly discussing it the next day.

There is something about AI and its convenience and devaluation of art that just fills me with bad vibes. I can’t help but feel this is going to push us even further away from each other and towards individualistic but ultimately dissatisfying la-la lands. I hope I’m wrong.

> I feel like art needs to be tied to people and stories and mythology

This is it, "AI" (not AI) is not a person, it's still a human tool.

I think framing is a lot to blame for thinking these processes are intelligent and creative. They are statistical models, they lack any context to possibly be something considered a person. It would be reasonable to argue "what is a person" (and there's a good star trek episode for that) but ML is far too primitive to be anywhere close to that threshold. Not only primitive but lacking experience, intent, thought - if there is intent it's from the human wielding it.

In the domain of art, these tools allow us to automate reconstitution of existing art created by billions of people over hundreds of years, which is where it becomes deceptive in combination with the misleading term "AI". The source the model is trained with is obviously brimming with creativity, even the input text and tuning by the human user is a creative source, but this is confused with the process being creative. It's an illusion, we cannot possibly know all of that art and see through the result... A thought I commonly have when looking at the results of stable diffusion is in seeing little excerpts and thinking "I wonder where that bit came from", even if it's a section of a face, I feel like i'm looking at franken art.

If we get to a point where we have artificial "people" who have lives, experience, and can interact with us and create thoughtfully, then you might get that warm fuzzy feeling similar to the interactions depicted in start trek.

I think the fact that AI can generate this isn't devaluing anything.

It's just showing how generic all the stuff we like is. It shows how trivial human intelligence is and how simple of a pattern it is to generate the things we like.

The earth is not the center of the universe and neither is human intelligence. We should be humbled by this and accept the fact that even my response here could've been generated by an AI.

> I don’t want to feel like I’m being had. Whatever content I consume, I want to know if humans made it or if AI did.

Everything "made by AI" is made by humans, as AI is a tool. Saying that something was "made by humans or made by AI" is like saying "made by a human or made by a paintbrush".

Computers can't think. Bots can't choose to post posts or run themselves. There's no such thing as "bot posts". Humans are the agency behind the writing and posting.

Bots don't post propaganda, people do.

I’m sorry but this seems like a very disingenuous argument.

Saying the human “created” the content is a bit of a stretch. The people who created ChatGPT have absolutely no idea what it is going to say to any given prompt. The human creates the function but has limited control over the output.

When I go on the internet to read an article what I want is to experience the world through that other human’s eyes, or more accurately through that other person’s mental models. That person will have accumulated those mental models through every single experience up until the point they write that article. The article is a snapshot of that person’s mind in time, shaped by an entire lifetime.

An AI article at the current moment in time is no such thing. It is a mimic of human experience. It takes other people’s experiences and imitates them but it has no hard fought wisdom of its own. It has no tether to reality, it has not experienced, as a consequence of it’s decision making, real pain, shame, fear, love, excitement, joy. It has only a simulated version based on artificial parameters supplied by a programmer. It does not know death and cannot die if it makes the wrong decision. It has no real stake in the game of life. That is fine if what I want is technical information to solve some mundane problem but if I want actionable life advice, if I want to feel connection, if I want to experience what it is to be another human in another snapshot in time, then no, an AI dupe absolutely isn’t fine.

I can’t even be sure if the comment I’m rebutting is real or a bot. If it’s a bot then I am being shortchanged out of my life. I am wasting precious time debating with something that has no awareness of life or death. If I continue to engage, the programmer of the bot is stealing life away from me. The best I can hope for in that scenario is that other, real people read the comment and get some kind of value out of it.

The whole thing just feels gross and I honestly feel like this might be the end of it for me and text based media. And at the rate things are developing, probably the entire internet.

It could very feasibly get to the point where there’s so much fake stuff that people don’t trust anything on the internet at all. With half the world shouting fake news we’re almost there pre-AI, let alone after it. How is anyone meant to operate in such an environment of deception? Why would anyone want to?

If you let Loki loose what you end up with is Ragnarok.

> Saying the human “created” the content is a bit of a stretch. The people who created ChatGPT have absolutely no idea what it is going to say to any given prompt. The human creates the function but has limited control over the output.

They need to have an idea. They own its output.

A manager doesn't know what an employee may do, but he's responsible for their work as if he did it himself.

sneak's comment is spot on.

You know what's horrifying? What if the stuff the AI writes becomes better and more insightful then anything a human could write?

Like the fake stuff is preferable to the real stuff in a double blind experiment.

> Everything "made by AI" is made by humans, as AI is a tool.

Man can build machines that build stuff, whether it is furniture, electronics or food productions. Those products are not man-made but machine-made. It's no different with "art", whether visual arts or text production.

AI is most definitely not like a paintbrush. A production line of cars is not a screw driver and a highly automated toast bread factory is not a knife.

It has nothing to do with thinking, but with level of automation.

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