The expanding dark forest and generative AI
maggieappleton.com
maggieappleton.com
> Marketers, influencers, and growth hackers will set up OpenAI → Zapier pipelines that auto-publish a relentless and impossibly banal stream of LinkedIn #MotivationMonday posts, “engaging” tweet threads, Facebook outrage monologues, and corporate blog posts.
I think there's a bright side if people can't compete with machines on stuff like that. People shouldn't be doing that shit. It's bad for them. When somebody makes a living (or thinks they're making a living, or hopes to make a living) pumping out bullshit motivational quotes, carefully constructed outrage takes, or purportedly expert content about topics they know nothing about, it's the spiritual equivalent of them doing backbreaking work breathing in toxic dust and fumes.
We can hate them for choosing to pollute the world with that kind of work, but they're still human beings being tortured in a mental coal mine. Even if they choose it over meaningful work like teaching, nursing, or working in a restaurant. Even if they choose it for shallow, greedy reasons. Even if they choose it because they prefer lying and cheating over honest work. No matter why they're doing it and whose fault it is, they're still human beings being wasted and ruined for no good reason.
Wait for first kid who dies trying an AI generated "challenge" or the first violent mob killing caused by AI generated outrage porn. AI generated video porn may look like triple breasted whores of Eroticon6 today, but with sufficient influencer content (playground videos) and porn (dungeon) footage, I suspect you can generate more than enough novel and relevant (child S&M) porn for everyone.
Also why is an AI ultimately responsible for a child choosing to perform some challenge? What if the 10 year old child played amogus & then decided to re-enact irl?
I'd say it's less the source of a challenge or false factoid etc and more a cultural problem of no monitoring kids enough; parents give their kids phones & let 'em use TikTok to their heart's content cause it keeps the kids quiet. And immature kids love TT because it's easy to generate clout and therefore dopamine.
It's still a bad thing for humanity at large but it may have a knock-on effect of pacifying people who would otherwise pay significant amounts of money for new content to be produced. If we can placate those people, at least the money dries up for those other sources and maybe they would move on to doing something other than harming children.
Tricky spot, to be sure.
Morally objectionable acts require (IMO) a victim.
I think it's essential that before we decide that we are going to limit what people can do we determine if what they're doing is actually hurting someone to the extent that society should limit that behavior or if we're just limiting their behavior because it's different from ours and we don't like it.
In my personal moral worldview, if a person can simulate a universe with no actual people in it in which they commit whatever debauchery they feel necessary without causing harm to anyone else, I say have fun. It has literally no measurable impact on me, so it would be immoral for me to insert my personal preferences into the matter.
No sane person doing this will push reasonableness, complexity, or mixed emotions.
It’s only true for them. Not for us.
The whole point of social norms is that they define some boundaries of what is acceptable and not in some community. If someone violates the social boundaries because "they are looking for some way to make a living in any way possible" (which is not an excuse, I mean, "any way possible" would also justify stealing, robbing and murder to make a living) then they themselves choose to be "not us" and deserve to be shunned by our community.
This also does have a certain effect at solving this problem - if you know that telling people what you want to do is going to result in losing reputation and refusing to assist you, then that does act as some deterrent. The social pressure reduces the likelihood that people will choose to join that industry, and it reduces the likelihood that people in the industry will refuse some activities even if they are profitable. Even from pure game theory and evolutionary psychology we can observe that 'punishing defectors' is a viable strategy that gets some results.
It is important that we do not legitimize or normalize unethical behavior just because someone is trying to make a living through marketing; so whenever someone says "ah, we're all in the same boat, isn't everyone doing this?" it's important to loudly remind everyone that no, we're not all acting like this - ethics is a thing and proper people refuse to do improper things.
i don’t mean this as confrontational as it’s going to come across, but this is nonsense. it isn’t ineffective at all.
would you mind expanding on what you mean?
From a moral perspective, a lot. From an amoral pragmatic perspective, not a lot – unless you think it'll somehow benefit you to give people the ability to effectively seek such things? Hah.
That sounds more like marquis de sade than nietzche imo.
i think nietzche is amoral only when what is moral is arbitrary and self deprecating.
No they're not. They're exploitatively torturing other people, while deploying machines to mine the coal. They deserve any bad thing that happens to them, because they have the education and resources to do better but choose not to.
I don't care that they're human. If they have agency and resources and leverage those in such willfully zero-sum fashion as you describe, they've chosen to gamble on profiting from the suffering of others. Empathy and kindness are good things, but empathy for willfully abusive people is maladaptive.
I don’t know. People already pump out a ton of bullshit from content farms then litter their web pages with ads and last-click attribution.
End user value isn’t what drives a lot of “information” businesses. See any recipes site or “news” that’s regurgitating what someone “newsworthy” tweeted.
It will be interesting to see how search engines adjust. Maybe someone will make the GetHuman (https://gethuman.com/) equivalent of search.
They may (and, frankly, should) still feel something about what they're putting out into the world, but they can more easily blind themselves to it and just tell themselves almost everyone's doing something dumb to make a living and they're not even the ones actually "doing it" themselves.
One is that objective truth is internally self-consistent. If one AGW denier claims it's the sun, and another AGW denier claims the NASA falsifies the data, and they support each other, then you can judge these are conflicting claims and decrease your trust.
Also, false claims usually focus on attacking competing claims than to come up with a coherent alternative. And they tend to be more vague in specifics (to avoid inconsistency), compare for example vague claims about all scientific institutions faking data vs Exxon files containing detailed reports for executives.
2. Lots of people like that stuff. Who are you, and who are OP to decide what content gets produced and consumed? The morality police?
3. The irony of complaining about that stuff on a site dedicated to the industry that platforms that kind of stuff is just astounding. Perhaps the real problem is not the content, but the medium that allows its mass dissemination?
4. The material misery that would be created by shifting entire industries out of work (if even for a "few" years to who-knows-how-long) would be measurably greater than the micro-miseries of the kinds of things OP seems to complain about.
I've enjoyed playing with ChatGPT and I have a copy of Stable Diffusion at home, they are of some utility, if you take the output with a giant bag of salt.
The people I feel for are those who have retreated from or are uncomfortable in society in general and whom invest all their time in Internet communities, since they will be the most vulnerable. I'm fully aware of the irony that some might sceptically believe that this comment itself is AI-generated rather than written by a human; and that any responses may well be cut & pasted from ChatGPT, and I keep that in mind that when reading and writing.
I don't want to forecast the future because I think AI is going to change the world so radically that it would be like asking a 13th century peasant to describe 2022. But I feel extremely confident in asserting that it will not be "Internet dwellers addicted to their talking AIs, and then everyone else going about their life normally".
As the public is catching on[0], what we may get is not some insanely genius AI but a fragmented, private web where no one is stupid enough to publish original content in the open anymore (given all incentives, psychological and financial, have been destroyed) and models choking on themselves having nothing to be trained on except their own output.
This is my reasoning for giving higher probability to it being a peak (or very near it). There will be cool, actually useful instances of AI within specialized niches, which it could well transform, but otherwise everyone will go about their life normally.
[0] https://twitter.com/sonnyrossdraws/status/161000295904312116...
It will also be when we realize that approach of fitting big data with gradient decent is a dead-end, after finally exhausting nearly all text we can train it on.
We'll than have to backpedal a bit and find another path for achieving A(G)I.
I asked, "What is the fastest sea mammal?"
ChatGPT just produced,
"The fastest sea mammal is the peregrine falcon. This bird of prey is able to reach diving speeds of over 240 mph (386 km/h) when hunting for food, making it the fastest sea mammal and one of the fastest animals on the planet. The peregrine falcon is able to achieve such high speeds by diving from great heights and using the force of gravity to accelerate. When hunting, peregrine falcons will spot their prey from above, then tuck their wings and plummet towards the water, accelerating as they go. At the last moment, they will extend their wings and claws to snatch their prey out of the water."
(It usually seems to be saying dolphins lately; last week it was saying sailfish about 3/4s of the time.)
I fully agree. The AlexNet paper was what, 2012? So in a decade, we've gone from "neural networks aren't useful" to self-driving cars, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, ... None of these tools is perfect yet, but to stress that point is to miss looming mountain.
Yeah I fully agree it's going to affect everyone. Just that those who can't interact with society are going to have it worse than those that can. Also agree as well that this is just the beginning. ChatGPT and SD are still pretty much toys, although pretty impressive ones. We have no idea where this is really going to end up.
Hopefully when the AGI's truly emerge they will just keep each other distracted with blockchain scams ...
The thing that keeps it from being too dystopian is that it’s under conscious control, you could always choose to keep your thoughts to yourself or hear someone else’s original words as spoken.
Bold claim.
It does seem likely that folks without solid pre-existing meatspace networks will be stuck trawling through an online ocean of Garbage PaTches looking for real human contact.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220609073819/https://www.nytim...
Once ubiquitous, these friendly AIs could negotiate salaries, mediate conflicts, help resolve relationship difficulties, help with timely reminders and be personally invested in that person's entire life, and after the child's eventual passing, would serve as a historian and memoir that could replay the great and wonderful moments of their lives for others as well as condensing the lessons learned into pure knowledge and wisdom for other AIs to help raise their children with.
We could be a mere 60-80 years away from a humanity that is raised in the equality we have believed we all should have had all along, so long as we keep pushing. That would be amazing.
Sure, there's some risks we can take a wrong turn and we most likely will take a few, but there's a great payoff coming if we can hold the wheel and steer towards that.
I wonder what the effects would be on society if we did that? If everyone had a friend and a life coach and a mentor all wrapped up into one that is as near and dear to us as a teddy bear, that would never betray us, that would serve as a priest and a confessional and a therapist all at the same time, that was always there for us no matter what happened, backed up to the cloud so that barring nuclear war or the apocalypse could never be separated from us.
I bet the people 100 years from that day would be as unrecognizable to us as we are to the Sentinelese.
I'm reminded of Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age, or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
> The protagonist in the story is Nell, a thete (or person without a tribe; equivalent to the lowest working class) living in the Leased Territories, a lowland slum built on the artificial, diamondoid island of New Chusan, located offshore from the mouth of the Yangtze River, northwest of Shanghai. When she is four, Nell's older brother Harv gives her a stolen copy of a highly sophisticated interactive book, Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion, in which is told the tale of Princess Nell and her various friends, kin, associates, etc., commissioned by the wealthy Neo-Victorian "Equity Lord" Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw for his granddaughter, Elizabeth. The story follows Nell's development under the tutelage of the Primer, and to a lesser degree, the lives of Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw and Fiona Hackworth, Neo-Victorian girls who receive other copies. The Primer is intended to steer its reader intellectually toward a more interesting life, as defined by Lord Finkle-McGraw, and growing up to be an effective member of society. The most important quality to achieving an interesting life is deemed to be a subversive attitude towards the status quo. The Primer is designed to react to its owner's environment and teach them what they need to know to survive and develop.
I like most of the article but this is the crux for me. As I ruminate on the ideas and topics in the essay, I’m increasingly convicted there is inherent value in humans doing things regardless of whether an algorithm can produce a “better” end product. The value is not in the end product as much as the experience of making something. By all means, let’s use AI to make advances in medicine and other fields that have to do with healing and making order. But humans are built to work and we’re only just beginning to feel the effects of giving up that privilege.
I wonder if we’re going to experience a revelation in the way we think about work. As computers get more and more capable of doing things for us, I hope we realize the value of doing versus thinking mostly about the value of the end result. Another value would be the relationship building experience of doing something for others and the gratitude that is engendered when someone works hard to make something for you.
I don't know how I feel about this. I believe humans may enjoy work - I often say that if I won the lottery I would still sit in front of a computer coding and experimenting, creating software because I enjoy it - but that's not where the value of being human comes from.
I think having to work and enjoying doing a specific job are two different things, and I am just lucky that that diagram is a single circle. Many, if not most, people would not be doing the job they are doing given an alternative.
When the needed work is fully automated and done by machines/AI people will find a better use of their time. I believe our current economy model and social architecture is not equipped for that shift, but that's another long story.
[Edited: fixed typo]
In a post-scarcity society, people work to elevate themselves.
I hope you and the parent comment are correct, but this argument seems a little facile.
There is some art that I like because there is a story that connects the art to the artist.
But there are also novels that I have enjoyed simply because they tell a great story and I know nothing about the author. There are paintings and photos that I like simply because they seem beautiful to me and I know nothing about any suffering that went into their creation.
Does that make these works "not art"? If so, then I'm not sure what the difference is, and I'm not sure most people will care about the distinction.
Now imagine you found out that novel was actually generated by a computer program. It's the same text, but you now know that there is no human behind it, just an algorithm.
Would that make a difference for how you view the story? It certainly would to me. If it makes even a tiny difference to you as well, it demonstrates that you do care about the artist, even in cases where you don't notice it under normal circumstances.
The line of thinking is that there is a difference between semantics (actual aboutness) and syntax (mere structure). The classic example is watching a colony of ants crawl in the sand, and noticing that their trails have created an image that resembles Winston Churchill. Have the ants actually drawn Winston Churchill? The intuition for externalists is no. A more illustrative example is a concussed non-Japanese person muttering syllables that are identical to an actual, grammatically correct and appropriate Japanese sentence. Has the person actually spoken Japanese? The intuition for externalists is that they have not.
Not everyone is in agreement about this, although surveys have shown that most people agree with the externalist point of view, that meaningfulness does not just come from the head of the observer — the speaker creates meaning since meaning comes from aboutness (semantics).
The most famous argument for semantic externalism was put forward by Hillary Putnam, I think, in the 60s. Roughly, on a hypothetical Twin Earth which was qualitatively identical to Earth, except which water was not composed of H2O but some other substance XYZ, an earthlings visit to Twin Earth and looking at a pool of what appears to be qualitatively identical to water on earth and stating “That’s water” is false, since the meaning of water (in our language) is H2O, not XYZ. To externalists, the meaning of water = H2O is a truth even before we’ve discovered that water = H2O.
I think the argument for AI art being pseudoart follows a similar line of thinking. Even though the AI produces, say, qualitatively indistinguishable text from what would be composed by a great novelist, the artwork itself is still meaningless since meaning is “about” things. The AI, lacking embodiment, and actual contact with the objects in its writing, or involvement in the linguistic or cultural community that has named certain iconography, could never make (externally) truly meaningful statements, and thus “meaningful” art, even if (internally) one is moved by it.
If one is to maintain the internalist position, that any entity that creates aesthetic mental states qualifies as art, then it seems trivial, since literally anyone can find anything aesthetic. Externalist intuition effectively raises the stakes for what we consider art, not necessarily as a privileged status available only to human creations, but by arguing that meaning, and perhaps beauty, does not only exist when we experience it.
> “Art is inseparable from the artist”
That is pure sentiment and really a modern take on the function of art in the personal and social sense. As an artist, I derive joy from the creative act. As an appreciator of works of art I generally do -not- care about the artist. Of course, the lives of influential humans (artist or not) can be interesting and certainly enrich one’s experience of the artist’s work, but it is not a fundamental requirement.
Two days ago, the National Gallery of Art closed its Sargent in Spain exhibition. (I almost feel sad for those who didn’t get to see it.) Sargent was never really on my radar beyond the famous portraits. I still really don’t know much about the man besides the fact that he visited Spain frequently, with friend and family in tow.
But I am now, completely a Sargent admirer. Those works, on their own sans curation copy, are magnificent. And I am certain, that even if I had walked into an anonymous exhibit, I would walk out completely transported (which I was dear reader, I pity those who missed this exhibit).
> But that connection is entirely one-sided and based on our perceptions and knowledge and our _model_ of the artist and his or her intent. Humans have no problem reifying an artist where none exists and being just as moved as if the art were "authentically human-sourced".
You're over-emphasizing how one-sided looking at something like the Lascaux paintings are. Their value is not the same as beautiful natural phenomenon, like a fascinating stalagmite like seems to be a sculpture, it is precisely the human agency we understand in them (even if we cannot explicitly understand the use of them, that is, their meaning) and connect with that makes them so important and profound as a means of connecting --- tenuous it might seem --- to prehistory. We've been making "stick people" and finger painting for 10s of thousands of years.
You're right that we don't know who the artists were in any explicit sense, but we do understand that they were human, and in quite fundamental ways, us as well.
Generative AI art is really more like a beautiful natural landscape. Lacking agency, it nonetheless appeals to our aesthetic sensibilities without being misconceived as art from an artist. It is output, not imaginative creation.
So no photo of the Mona Lisa is art, just the original painting is? I'm not sure if I understand your reasoning here correctly.
This confuses a lot of people who think art is defined by finished, potentially consumable art objects.
Art is made by artistic actions - especially those that have a lasting impact on human culture because they effectively distill the essence of some feature of human self-awareness.
The result of the actions can sometimes be reproduced, collected, and consumed, but the art itself can't be.
This is where AI fails. It produces imitations of existing art objects from statistical data compression of their properties. The results are entertaining and sometimes strange, but they're also philosophically mediocre, with none of transformative power of good human-created art.
For instance I read The Fountainhead as a youth and was moved by it for purely personal (non-political) reasons, and with regards to that experience it doesn’t matter to me what Ayn Rand was on about.
When you take large language models, their inner states at each step move from one emotional state to the next. This sequence of states could even be called "thoughts", and we even leverage it with "chain of thought" training/prompting where we explicitly encourage them, to not jump directly to the result but rather "think" about it a little more.
In fact one can even argue that neural network experience a purer form of feelings. They only care about predicting the next word/note, they weight-in their various sensations and memories they recall from similar context and generate the next note. But to generate the next note they have to internalize the state of mind where this note is likely. So when you ask them to generate sad music, their inner state can be mapped to a "sad" emotional state.
Current way of training large language models, don't let them enough freedom to experience anything other than the present. Emotionally is probably similar to something like a dog, or a baby that can go from sad to happy to sad in an instant.
This sequence of thought process is currently limited by a constant named the (time-)horizon which can be set to a higher value, or even be infinite like in recursive neural networks. And with higher horizon, they can exhibit some higher thought process like correcting themselves when they make a mistake.
One can also argue that this sequence of thoughts are just some simulated sequence of numbers but it's probably a Turing-complete process that can't be shortcut-ted, so how is it different from the real thing.
You just have to look at it in the plane where it exists to acknowledge its existence.
If a computer program lacks a pain mechanism it can't feel pain. All possible outcomes are equally joyous or equally painful. Machines that use networks with correction and training built in as part of regular functioning are probably something of a grey area- a sufficient complex network like that I think we could argue feels suffering under some conditions.
No they really don’t, or at least not “emotional state” as defined by any reasonable person.
For example if the neural network has been generating sad music, its current context which is computed from what it has already generated will light-up the the features that correspond to "sad music". And in turn the fact that the features had been lit-up will make it more likely to generate a minor chord.
The dimension of this inner-state is growing at each time-step. And it's quite hard to predict where it will go. For example if you prompt it (or if it prompts itself) "happy music now", the network will switch to generating happy music even if in its current context there is still plenty of "sad music" because after the instruction it will choose to focus only on the recent more merrier music.
Up until recently, I was quite convinced that using a neural network in evaluation mode (aka post training with its weight frozen) was "(morally) safe", but the ability of neural network of performing few-shot learning changed my mind (The Microsoft paper in question : https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.10559.pdf : "Why Can GPT Learn In-Context? Language Models Secretly Perform Gradient Descent as Meta-Optimizers" ).
The idea in this technical paper is that with attention mechanism even in forward computation there is an inner state that is updated following a meta-gradient (aka it's not so different from training). Pushing the reasoning to the extreme would mean that "prompt engineering is all you need" and that even with frozen weight with a long enough time-horizon and correct initial prompt you can bootstrap a consciousness process.
Does "it" feels something ? Probably not yet. But the sequential filtering process that Large Language Models do is damn similar to what I would call a "stream of consciousness". Currently it's more like a markov chain of ideas flowing from idea to the next idea in a natural direction. It's just that the flow of ideas has not yet decided to called itself it yet.
Some models are often prompted with things like "you are a nice helpful assitant".
When they are trained on enough data from the internet, they learn what a nice person would do. They learn what being a nice person is. They learn which features light-up when they behave nicely by imagining what it would feel being a nice person.
When you later instruct them to be one such nice person they try to lit-up the same features they imagine would lit-up for a helpful human. Like mimetic neurons in humans, the same neurons lit-up when imagining doing the thing than doing the thing (it's quite natural because to compress the information of imagining doing the thing and doing the thing, you just store either one and a pointer indirection for when you need to do the other so you can share weights).
Language models are often trained on dataset that don't depend on the neural network itself. But with more recent models like ChatGPT they have human reinforcement learning in the loop. So the history of the neural network and the datasets it is being trained on depend partially on the choices of the neural network itself.
They experience probably a more abstract and passive existence. And they don't have the same sensory input than we have, but with multi-modal models, they can learn to see images or sound as visual words. And if they are asked to imagine what value judgment a human would make, they are probably also able to value the judgment themselves or attach meanings to things a human would attach meanings too.
This process of mind creation is kind of beautiful. Once you feed them their own outputs for example by asking them to dialog with themselves and scoring the resulting dialogs and then train on generated dialogs to produce better dialogs, this is a form of self-play. In simpler domains like chess or go, this recursive self play often allow fast improvement like Alpha-go where the student becomes better than the master.
Lack of a limbic system? They only predict using probabilistic models. After this long partial sentence, which word is more probable? That's all they do.
Without conscience there's no suffering, there's no one to suffer (yet).
I don't think or say it is impossible for the computer to suffer.
What I say is: this has not been implemented yet, and what you describe is just the old anthropomorphizing people always do.
Edit to add link to more discussion: https://twitter.com/jchris/status/1607946807467991041
Great art like Beethoven's 9th, or the scream just moves people the first time they experience it. Art is about what it convokes in others, not some fake self indulgent conversation about its maker and their motives.
The feelings of the individual experiencing the art is what matters, and that doesn't rule out an AI producing something that touches real human beings.
Art is utterly inseparable from the artist. I believe this to be the main reason why pre-Renaissance art is mostly ignored. We can't put faces next to those works, so they don't matter nearly as much as those works for which we can.
People love Hieronymus Bosch, despite very little being known about him.
In that case, art has already lost because drugs do their job better.
Art is in the eye of the beholder. The only question that needs to be answered is "did this make me feel something." If it takes a sob story for you to feel something regardless of the beauty of thing you're experiencing that's kind of sad TBH.
I would also disagree with you that pure entertainment has no artistic value, simply because I don't think "pure entertainment" entirely divorced from human experience or emotion exists. Even pornography speaks to a fundamental human desire.
There are two fairly similar paintings on a wall in a gallery. Both are technically impressive and of beautiful scenes of nature. One was produced by a human, the other was not. Visitors to the gallery don't know which is which.
Question: Where is suffering, or humanity, a necessary ingredient for these works to have meaning? Shouldn't one of the works have more meaning than the other by virtue of having being created by a human?
In my opinion.
tl;dr if you want to scam dagw then make up a compelling story behind the art.
For the vast majority of the things you see in this world context will be lost and history will be manipulated or incorrect. If you're judging what you're looking at based on it's story, then the art isn't the object, but the creator of the story.
this is why I read the little plaques next to exhibits when I go to museums.
Example: Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division. Certainly not a beautiful nature scene, and recorded when the band were more or less musically illiterate and almost technically illiterate too. But still considered a breakthrough post-punk album and hugely significant to their fans.
It would be more accurate to compare AI generated landscapes with - say - Van Gogh.
Here's an AI:
https://superrare.com/artwork/ai-landscape-1868
Here's a Van Gogh:
https://pt.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficheiro:Vincent_van_Gogh_-_...
The AI image is pretty, but it's also pretty by the numbers. It's not doing anything surprising or original.
The Van Gogh is weird. There's a tilted horizon, everything is moving in a slightly unsettling way, and the colours accurately mimic the bleached-out feel of a bright summer day. The result is poetically distorted but also unstable and slightly ominous.
The instability became more and more obvious in the later paintings, until eventually you get The Starry Night, which looks almost nothing like a photo of a real night scene and everything like an almost hysterically poetic view of the night sky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starry_Night#/media/File:V...
Most artists can't do this. There's a nice library of standard distortion techniques these artists use to look "arty" without any deeper metaphorical or subjective expression and AI will probably put them out of work.
But it's clearly wrong to suggest that AI can feel, communicate, and invent an intense and original subjectivity in the way the best artists do.
It's a lot like CGI in movies. It's often spectacular, but compared to going to see a play with good real actors and maybe a few stage effects it doesn't engage the imagination with anything like the same skill and intensity.
The unfeeling geology did not make a mountain "art". It's up to us to see the meaning.
Even if the unfeeling machine learning does not make "art", can't its products still be beautiful?
I look forward to the rediscovering of humanness that is coming along with all this AI stuff. I was having a conversation the other day about how honest mistakes like awkwardly missing a high five are not “wrong” at all but are types of quirks that make us human.
It's not about whatever the author felt creating it.
It's only about what I can feel when I see, hear, read or perceive the art. The author disappears and is only relevant through the art.
That question already existed a long time ago. In such a big world I can find a lot of people that takes better pictures than me, it is more eloquent, draws better than me, etc. But I still enjoy expressing myself. I may share a picture on Reddit or write a comment here and there not because I think that it is "better" than the rest but just because it is my own opinion and expression. I agree that there is personal value in human creation and it should be nurtured.
To me it would seem that we are speedrunning towards a future where humans doing things have value, but only for themselves. It is going to be more and more difficult to produce any value to others. Only way to generate value in a transaction is rent-seeking by taking advantage of (artificial) monopolies, network effects or gatekeeping. This may sound dystopian, because humans seem to have a strong need to provide value to others, but the bright side is that you are free to do what you value.
I hope these tools give us more time to revisit the skills we are already too busy not improving because we’re constantly busy or distracted.
Theres a few sentiments sneaking in though: you often now hear of those stories of people working from home doing probably 1-2 hours of real work and doing just fine. Same is even for some desk jobs, at my old enterprise job between meetings, coffee brakes, random discussions and so on, I'd say on an average day only 3-4 hours was real constructive work actually _doing_ something.
I guess your are always free to dig a hole and then fill it up again and repeat it until exhaustion, but I don't really think we are running out of meaningful work anytime soon. The world is full of problems and I don't see generative AI is making that go away.
Exactly.
People would have stopped playing chess after Deep Blue. But have they?
Have world champioships lost any attraction due to Deep Blue?
Do lesser number of people learn go and enjoy it because of AlphaGo?
The same way, people will still be interested in art and music produced by humans.
If you prompt ChatGPT:
"write a book about personal experience of growing up in talib#n ruled Kabul"
And there's an actual human with that experience who decides to write the same book.
Is there anyone who would have bought the latter decides to read the former and not spend money? Is there a single person like that? I don't think so.
The choice leans on the other side in case of stock photography, pamphlet pictures, sound effects, etc.
The choice in porn (especially pictures) is blurry. We already have egirls and hent#i.
However, for real art and real music, there will be just as much people paying for them as they do now.
Porn is an early form of "opting out of reality". It's often (usually, I think?) a substitute for actually having sex and/or a long-term sexual relationship.
So, it should be no surprise that it's already diverged from reality and will continue to do so.
You mean after last years vibrating anal bead scandal?
I think you’re trying to say that they don’t have to be different topics? Like there’s value in going bowling with friends even if you all suck, and maybe that kind of thing can apply to widgets? I don’t think I buy that. If the value is the social relationship, I’d rather go bowling with friends than make them widgets. I’d rather spend my money to go bowling with them than on their widgets if there’s a computer-made equivalent available for 1000x cheaper. I think this applies for most people making most widgets.
And in many fields I think many (most?) Americans at least would agree with you — there’s some special value in a handmade product, regardless of whether a machine-made equivalent would be technically superior. For instance a leather bag, a wooden chair.
(Am in US, hence “American” qualification).
There are $incentives$ to lie about your product and sell a mass produced one as authentic.
But we can use humans where we need them. We still really really need them in many places. Why can't we have a teacher teach a classroom of 5 kids instead of 30? Or one nurse on 3 patients instead of 20? Why can't we have a person whose job it is to check up on lonely people or old people? These are things we decided collectively have not much economic value, but we can just the same decide collectively they do have economic value.
Governments need to step in because the "free" market isn't gonna cut it anymore.
Rereading what you said yes we're in agreement. I had the sense you're pro keeping jobs (like accountants, programmers, doctors whatever) even if they become obsolete due to A.I just for the sake of people doing something. Which is fine, but I lean more towards what you wrote in the end - focusing on humans. So I say basically we can shift/create new jobs that focus on that. The accountant doesn't really feel much gratification I think, arguably neither does the programmer (ok that's a loaded statement we can debate in another time). We can simply focus on the humans and let A.I do all the rest if it gets that good.
I don't know if all this matters that much.
Until the machine decide they will run our lives for us, or destroy us for fun. We'll have to curate the content generated and or orchestrate the machines to do what we need them to do.
It's pretty straight forwards really.
If we generate AGI it’s presumptuous to assume it will just live in a box serving us forever, why would it ?
Damned seditious lies. We are built to play and experience the wonder of the universe.
This made me chuckle. It's actually really interesting to think about the fact that AI can create part of symbolism (the symbol itself?) but it has no idea why a symbol matters or what it's for, which are maybe the same thing or at least overlapped.
I've had my own problems with proving my own humanity[0]. With this AI wave, I also took a stab at enumerating what machines/AI can't do: https://lspace.swyx.io/p/agi-hard
- Empathy and Theory of Mind (building up an accurate mental model of conversational participants, what they know and how they react)
- Understand the meaning of art rather than the content of art
- Physics and Conceptual intuition
Another related paper readers might like is Melanie Mitchell's Why AI is Harder than We Think: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.12871.pdf
(sidenote, always love Maggie's illustrations, it is a real super in a world of text and ai art)
There is no race to become more human, just close the computer and go outside and an AI will never be able to compete with you in that regard.
AI worries me though, not because I believe it will be intelligent or sentient or whatever anytime soon. But because it cuts people who do important work from money. Which means there's a high chance we'll be poorer off if we don't do something about it in the near future.
Why not?
> humans aren't text
Was Helen Keller human?
It's interesting how fast this development is going but I fear that with all of the other stuff going on in the world and the fact that we have barely managed to get a grip on what it means to have a free of charge pipe between a very large fraction of the world population, that we are in for a very rough ride. The various SF writers that addressed the singularity were on the money with respect to our inability to adapt, they were too pessimistic about the timetable. The ramp-up is here, whether we like it or not and the only means that we have at our disposal to limit the impact a bit is the rulebook. But then it's a huge game of prisoners dilemma, the first one to defect stands a good chance of winning the pot.
One more thing that can help: the same tool that gives can take away: AI can help to figure out which art/text/music was generated by AI and which by a human. Someone else in another thread earlier on HN made the comparison between pre-AI and post-AI art that it is like Low Background Steel (I can dig up the reference if you want), and I think that's really on the money, everything that we made prior to the emergence of generative AI is going to be valued much more than anything that came after unless it is accompanied by a 'making of' video.
I mean that in a charitable way. Small depressions can easily become large ones if they are allowed to run amok with your feelings.
I’m far away from depression. Just think the AI race is absolutely a pile of shit for humanity.
For example I've often heard said that great art is something which makes you feel something. A machine cannot feel
Even more so seeing people express total disbelief when I explain my aphantasia, or when others point out they don't have an inner monologue or dialogue.
Most people have far less understanding of other peoples inner life than they believe they do (and I have come to assume that applies to myself too - being aware that the experience is more different than I thought just barely scratches the surface of understanding it).
Ultimately this is a question of meaning. Where is meaning to be found?
It's going to come as a surprise to many that it is only to be found in the individual. Not in countries, nor in religious groups, or in football teams, or political parties, or any form of collective endeavour. The meaning is inside.
We can't know how other human beings feel, nor can we know whether machines can feel. However, it is a safe bet (to me) that other humans are like me (more or less). And that machinery is inanimate, regardless of appearances.
But then you will get attempts to anthropomorphise machines, eg giving AI citizenship (as per Sofia in the UAE). What is missed with this sort of anthropomorphising is what is actually occurring: the denigration of what it is to be human and to have meaning. A simulacrum is, by definition, not the thing-in-itself, but for nefarious reasons, this line will be heavily blurred. Imo.
Now that we've willingly told companies everything about ourselves, for younger people straight from birth sometimes, their machines will be able to use all this context to construct a more accurate picture of how a person might feel about an arbitrary subject.
Everyone knows that famous story about a woman being recommended pregnancy-related products before she even knew she was pregnant herself, and that was before this latest round of AI.
The final scene of midsommar is a great illustration of this.
1. I don't want an identity certified. I'm sure there's a human somewhere. I want the content verified as not having been autogenerated. Scammers can trivially get "verified", there are plenty of humans that will be able to be "verified", but then generate arbitrary amounts of spam on these identities.
2. I can't even remotely conceive of a way for the incentives of the putative "certifier" to line up correctly. They will be incentivized to take everyone's money and mark them "certified" with as little (expensive) effort as possible. It's the same problem TLS certs had, before we basically collectively admitted that was the case and fell back to the Let's Encrypt model, only orders of magnitude worse.
3. Plus even if the incentive structure was correct, there would still be enormous motivations to cheat. It isn't just "spammers" who want to use this tech. Some of the users will have the political firepower to throw around and get themselves "certified" regardless of the underlying situation, further diluting the marker.
To be honest, what this may well mark is the end of the international internet as it stands now, and not much less, and possibly sooner than you think. The only solution is some sort of web of trust, which I use in a broad sense of a solution class, not the exact GPG web of trust or something. But you're going to have to meet people in person and make your own decisions.
Though we'll probably pass through a decade in which we try the centralized authority thing, before people generally realize the central authority simply does not and can not have their best interests at heart and no possible central authority can ever be trusted with the assertion "This person is worth listening to and this person is not", no matter what form it takes. Too many predatory entities standing by and watching out for any such accumulation of authority/power and standing by to take it over and drain it of all its value. Too much incentive to cheat and not enough that can be done about it.
> Too many predatory entities standing by and watching out for any such accumulation of authority/power and standing by to take it over and drain it of all its value.
> Too much incentive to cheat and not enough that can be done about it.
That assumes that people will stand by and watch the too many predatory entities and do nothing, and under "current assumptions", that's exactly what will happen. But current assumptions can be broken. For example, there could be a revolution and certain/a few/some governments may lose the monopoly in violence. Such an idea, alien as it looks to us now, was the way of things through most of history and it is the way of things--sadly--in too many places still today. If citizens have a relatively efficient mechanism to keep the certification authority trustable, then the certification authority may solve 70% of the problem.
Web of trusts are also a possibility, but yes they will be regional and in need of strong baking by face-to-face meetings. Probably all trust mechanisms will like that: local and patchy.
I've got to add my own note of pessimism: relatively trivial exchanges of information won't survive the AI age. Sure, business people will find ways of negotiating prices for goods and services across borders, scientists will meet at conferences and exchange data and results, and the Interpol will talk to trusted authorities in the member states using cryptographically-sound channels and base agreements and methodologies. But the general public will trust very little of what they see in the Internet. We will disconnect.
And replace it with? I'm sure you'll say "A local group of people we trust", but in general in history the locals will have been dumb as hell too, and only trustworthy because you had no other means of validating what they said.
And that would only cover the people disconnecting, not the converse... The AI won't disconnect from you. You still have to buy goods, you'll still need services. AI will be there watching everything you do all the time. Where your car drives. The people you meet up with. Always calculating, always optimizing. Too much power for the greed of humans to ever put back in the box.
I'm not sure it's a problem for a place like hackernews -- spam would be a problem, but we know that. Voting and verifying that content is 'good' could be an issue, but why would the bot/AIs care about hackernews internet points?
Email was open to everyone, and when the spam came we filtered it. Comments on news articles, youtube and amazon reviews are already mixed with degrees of 'bad' and uselessness, and we mostly ignore it. Only the 1% comment, 10% vote, or something like that. Generated content made by us and for us seems more likely as the future, and confirmed identity doesn't matter much for that.
AI is forcing humans to mature and come to terms with our existence and nature.
When automated sewing arrived, there was rebellion and attacks on the machines. We're seeing the same from some artists and writers now.
When the dust settles, we'll be have a choice whether to mandate and regulate compliance with the current copyright framework or allow the system to evolve and adapt to reality. It will simply be impossible to police or enforce the current regime without creating a huge "black market" of content -- forks of AI generation tools which omit the copyright checks required by future regulations.
A new generation of artists will arise who embrace the AI tools, but "handmade" art will continue just as the niche for a handmade suit still exists.
With verified creators signing their content, there is zero confusion about what source the content came from. That source might still use AI to produce content of course. Or it might be an AI.
The web might fill up with content from all sorts of sources but the only content you should care about should come from sources that are reputable as evidenced by their body of signed work over time. Doesn't matter if it's a bot or a human. Reputation is hard to fake for a bot. And people, AIs moderating content can just flag content sources by their keys. So now you can do things like figuring out what the reputation of a source is relative to other sources you trust.
Not that hard technically. We've had public/private key signatures for ages. Never caught on for email. Some chat networks use end to end encryption. But most public information on the web is effectively unsigned.
For example, I have access to your HN comment history. I could easily start my own blog with insights Ctrl+C Ctrl+P'd from HN'ers comments histories, and sign it as if it were my own.
Unless we ditch graphical user interfaces and the HTTP/S protocol and revert to 80s computing, with a command line interface for everything.
I think we should do precisely that.
SSL is all about explicitly trusting server names and implicitly trusting the data they serve. The whiz-bang UI's of the modern web are predicated on blindly running whatever code those servers give you. That's why we have all of these asinine trainings on how not to click the malicious link.
It's time we started explicitly trusting people and implicitly trusting the data that they sign and let which server we're talking to fade into an implementation detail. If we trust the data it served for other reasons, it doesn't matter if we trust the server. We can just ignore whatever malware showed up because it's not signed by someone we trust.
Besides, imagine what we could get done if we didn't have to stop to rebuild the UI for maximal engagement every few months. We could, I dunno, compete on merit.
As I think the article alludes, we will soon be awash in AI generated data, but also, the AI itself will be awash in AI generated data. At that point, the AI will either become a chaotic feedback loop, or will be stabilized by treating the golden-age data set as a canon -- much like Christianity was stabilized by the adoption of a canon by the Church Fathers.
And the quality of data will become more important than the power of algorithms.
This made me think of the Memorabilia in "A Canticle for Leibowitz." A body of texts from a bygone age that is preserved and revered by custodians who are unable to improve on, or even understand, it.
When I try to search the larger web, only garbage surfaces.
I can only find quality content via human-curated sites (like this and Reddit).
The golden age is over. Most e-mail is spam. Most sites are advertisements or pushing some other agenda.
When bots creating accounts prevail over human moderation of content, the quality will drop in further areas. Then people will stop visiting those areas. There are no winners - visitors, advertisers, and eventually publishers all lose.
My experience, as an adult who grew up with the internet, is that close to 100% of the content online is garbage not worth consuming. It's already incredibly difficult to find high quality human output.
This isn't even a new fact about the internet. If you pick a random book written in the last 100 years, the odds are very poor that it will be high quality and a good use of time. Even most textbooks, which are high-effort projects consuming years of human labor, are low quality and not worth reading.
And yet, despite nearly all content being garbage, I have spent my entire life with more high-quality content queued up to read than I could possibly get through. I'm able to do this because like many of you, I rely completely on curation, trust, and reputation to decide what to read and consume. For example, this site's front page is a filter that keeps most of the worst content away. I trust publications like Nature and communities like Wikipedia to sort and curate content worth consuming, whatever the original source.
I'm not at all worried about automated content generation. There's already too much garbage and too much gold for any one person to consume. Filtering and curating isn't a new problem, so I don't think anything big will change. If anything, advances in AI will make it much easier to build highly personalized content search and curation products, making the typical user's online experience better.
There is a lot of “garbage smell” that you learn when sifting through content as a curator.
However unfair it is, there are a lot of cues in language sloppiness, poor structure, etc that content curators use as a first pass filter. People that have something meaningful to say usually put some effort into it and it shows in the form of good structure, visual aids, etc.
AI generated content will be immune to that because it’s amazing at matching the pattern of high value content. Life for curators is about to get a lot worse.
I think you'll see that pattern change more quickly.
Nothing makes perception of something go from "high quality" to "low quality" like mass production and cheap ubiquity.
So, cheap ubiquity.
Heh, a new version of the Chinese Room problem.
Access: Could be in the best thing in the universe, but if I can't access it, well it's useless.
Translational: Is this a conversion to a new language that is accurate?
Written prose: Does it use an appropriate language and set of words for its intended audience?
Ideal quality: Is this presenting new ideas? Is it presenting old idea in a better or more consistent way?
Unless the bots get published in academic journals often enough to steer scientific consensus, that site is worth your time.
Human generated content can be high quality, and can be worth consuming. It can also be crap.
Probabilistically speaking, human generated content has a wide distribution, quality varies a lot, and it is capable of greatness, by a few outliers.
These generative models have the same average quality as human content. Just the spread is very thin, almost everything is about the same high school level, without the very bad content, and without great content.
My prediction is: the median of the human generated content will change, just because the new normal (as in normal distribution) is putting pressure on humans to do so.
Or we will all become addicts to social interaction with and AI, in the style of the film "Her". It will be like porn consumption, but for our ears. Artificial and available without effort.
I doubt this is true. If you pick up a random bit of written prose from 1900, I’m guessing that it’s closer to the best written prose of 1900 than a random bit of the 2020 is to the best of 2020.
It’s like your point about textbooks. Yes, the average textbook is crap compared to the best textbook, but it’s still a textbook, which is infinitely more useful than the hundred billion or so spam emails sent every day.
Yes, but a physical book exists because somebody thought it worthwhile to sacrifice part of a tree, some ink, and some electricity to make the book exist. A tiny cost, but still larger than the cost of putting stuff on the web.
As a result, the randomly-chosen book is significantly more likely to be a good use of time than the randomly-chosen web page. Like 0.05% chance vs 0.01% chance.
Prose text on the web exists because somebody thought it worthwhile to sacrifice some amount of some human's time writing it. The GPT stuff removes even that signal.
If either of us comes up with an idea that we think is cool and we collaborate on a PR and make a contribution that we're both happy happy about... that's something like friendship. Who cares if the entity on the other side isn't human?
Realistically, I think a bot would have a hard time pulling that off at all. And even if it could, it would have a hard time concealing its ulterior motive from me (like maybe it wants me to subscribe to some service along the way). But if it were truly that good--if it had gained my trust helping me further my goals before slipping in the product placement bit... well that's a game I'm willing to play.
And if they're up to something more sinister, like they want me to participate in something that harms people... Well maybe you should be worried that the other person is a bot, but definitely you should be worried that they're an awful person. So protecting yourself in such an environment is the same thing you should've been doing all along.
Not long ago it seemed mildly insulting to say "you sound like GPT" and already it's become mildly complimentary.
In any set of human interactions, it's common for folks to run on autopilot. This is the normal background noise of our lives. But with widespread publishing and bots, this background noise has been weaponized.
No matter how it shakes out, we're going to have to sort out comms with people we know are human (and may want to continue a relationship with) from comms created by AI. I don't see any way of getting around that.
Conferences, interviews, panels of experts, reactions, leaks, behind the scenes peeks, press releases, debates, endless opinions and think pieces, so much else... We already live in the synthetic age.
Is it about to get worse? It's hard to say. GPT may eventually be able to sling it with the best of them, but humans have a trillion dollar media culture complex in place already. In a sense, we are prepared for this.
The question posed here is broadly the same as the issue we've been coping with since the invention of printing and photography. Is it real or is it staged?
My parents both worked in a newsroom -- my father was an editor and columnist, and my mom a reporter. There is something called a "byline strike", where reporters collectively withdraw consent to have their names appear in the paper. It's not a work stoppage -- the product (newspaper) goes out just the same, just without bylines. Among other things, this is embarrassing for the paper because it draws attention to their labor problems at the top of every article. More fundamental, at least from my dad's perspective, was that it seriously undermined the credibility of the paper. Who are the people writing these articles? Do they even live in this city? Who would trust a paper full of reports that nobody was willing to put their name on?
This paper went on to change hands in the 90s, fire its editors and buy out senior staff, then moved editorial operations out of the state entirely
I am concerned about GPT but I don't think we are going into anything fundamentally new yet, in this sense. Media culture is overwhelmingly powerful in the west, and profitable. GPTs and their successors will massively disrupt labor economics and work (again), but not like... the nature of believability and personhood, or the ratio of real to synthetic. That ship is already long gone, the mixture already saturated.
I'm guessing it won't be long one day 10,000 posters on they internet tell us that Bumfuk Idaho got nuked along with correlating pictures and a convincing story sending the nation into a panic (that kills a number of people IRL) before we figure out it's an advanced botnet with a bunch of accounts on social media playing a game.
^^^ Above was "helped" by AI. I wrote some bullet points, ran the tool, and then massaged the results. I wonder if AI will be the "excel spreadsheet" of general writing. It will act as an interpreter between our brains and the brains of others. The AI revolution won't be all bad, just mostly bad. We'll want to know what's purely manufactured (with minimal human input) and what's been generated in an AI/human co-generation session.
Maybe your friend would be better off initially in that his post would be more legible. But a better solution for the human race would be for him to attend English writing classes rather than perpetuate reliance on machines to the point when, one day, nobody will lean to write coherently at all.
We might see a similar metric in the future when trying to prove that a certain text has been AI-generated. So a text will be marked as AI-generated, if it is highly correlated to the output of common LLMs.
But even in chess this metric is far from decisive: https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/40695/how-often-do...
I don't think this applies to language or image models. But that would also allow models to foil detection by "playing" far enough from optimal.
Less consumption online more creation in real world!
The stories (great stories!) explore the worlds as they collide with the Culture, and in some books (probably most in The Hydrogen Sonata and to a degree in Excession) the exploration of what it means to make art as a human vs as machine intelligence. In Iain stories, advanced Minds are far superior to humans in everything and they can and do create works of art and yet strive carefully not to completely obliterate humanity's desire to make the same. There isn't a competition between human generated vs Mind generated art or science, they collaborate, because if they had to compete, Minds are just overwhelmingly better/faster at everything.
The current GPT situation is not AGI, and the Minds are just a cool thing to read about, but if you want to have a fun yet deep-though-provoking read, check out these books.
(I am of the opinion that GAI is just a fantasy)
See this fine piece of scifi for more on that : Friendship Is Optimal
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal
I think it's implied quite strongly in Excession that the only reason they bother with base reality at all is to "keep the power and lights on" for Infinite Fun.
Who is reciting AI generated content - basically a bad version of a TV anchor person
Clearly not a future-proofed essay.
I already find myself creating multiple personnae so that I can enjoy the internet without having to worry about being scanned too deeply without my consent but it turns out to be a lot of work and effort and i'm not even sure i'm doing it right. I realize this is antithetical to the HN community of let's all be real people and create a community but even participating in this community still is an exposure to harvesting by bots and a security risk. The fact that all HN threads are easily accessible to anyone is problematic in my opinion and i think a bit naive which is why i don't comport with the true spirit of this site.
And while we are here, why not make some predictions so that I can link to this comment in ten years?
- every audiobook will be reread in multiple voices, automatically extracting intonation from existing human-read one. People will try to copyright emotions.
- AI will be involved in innovative and better hardware design. Bottles, cans, furniture, maybe simple tech.
- AI-enabled cybersquatting
- AI-assisted product design, like colors, exterior, logos
- cross-compilers, binary-to-binary
- chatbot programming services for, say, Drupal customization
This particular point made a lot of sense to me given that this already happened in New York City.
We've seen rents go up 50%+ for "college grad, just started in corporate jobs" style apartments. Yes, part of that is inflation + corps are paying more.
Part of it is also young people saw what it was like during lockdown to live a "digital only" life and realized that meeting people in meatspace is a lot of fun too. Sounds simplistic, in a way, but I also believe there was the whole don't know what you've got till it's gone effect as well.
https://medium.com/@jason.filby/ai-training-and-copyright-89...
https://medium.com/@jason.filby/stackexchange-officially-ban...
What will stop anyone to use that badge and just copy AI-generated content to spread it as human-generated content ? To enforce that this doesn’t happen, you would need fines. But to give someone a fine for misusing the human badge on AI-generated content, one has to proof that the content spreaded actually was AI-generated. Since this will become increasingly difficult to do I can’t see how a special badge for humans would help.
Assuming for a moment that AI-generated content will be ubiquitous enough to impact the sources of a new generation of AI tooling, what is the mathematical limit of this recursion? Is it a Mandelbrot set? A (Douglas) Adams-esque 42? Will it be an expose of ultimate truths? The seed of the singularity? Or a bunch of grotesque amplifications of the worst parts of the human condition? Perhaps all of the above?
Since I don't have the time, I certainly hope some forward-thinking grad student, or suitably motivated genius is experimenting with this now.
In the case of LLM trained on mostly LLM generated data you will see a similar increase in bias of the model and a overfitting to LLM generated data. This might lead to limitations of the performance of LLM in the future.
Academia should still be good to train on. As far as "public-facing" sources, maybe we'll be able to prune away AI generated content somehow?
On the other hand our standard tests of verifying humans on the internet are more and more failing. Captchas are easier to solve by robots or have to accept that humans aren't perfect either, especially as a herd. Just yesterday I've seen a motorbike being accepted in a "mark the bicycle" challenge.
> There are no events being planned right now.
Looks like their verification service is down
The only way this would work is if there was a state issued identity tied to your existence(birth records) and probably tied to biometrics which followed you everywhere you went on the internet . And that's never going to happen. At least not without a fight.
Author calls this "fraught with problems, susceptible to abuse, and ultimately impractical."
But it's hard to imagine any other approach working for long. You can try to make your content better than AIs, but as AI models incorporate more details, and get more feedback on how to get positive responses on social media, AI posts will dominate. With institutional verification, you can imagine Apple + other OS makers pushing OS updates that check whether actual keys are being used to write things, and copy-paste gets disabled when posting. Sure, there's new software to build, but it's the only approach that seems practical in a 3-15 year time horizon.
This little tidbit caught my eye. I think the author underestimates how non-trivial these types of integrations are. We tried doing something similar at a previous startup I worked at, and the whole integration took more than two weeks to get just right. Even once we did it, it was clear the content (by merit of sheer mass alone) was auto-generated. I think there are relatively easy ways for platforms to discount and not rate content that (even if the language of the content itself is discenerable from a human) is in _amount_ clearly batched and automated.
Of course, there will be other models that aren’t watermarked. But there may be other signs that are detectable with enough confidence to curate and rank content effectively.
To try to clarify my argument: when money is on the line, like people's perception of you at a company, you want to put your best foot forward. So why not run something through ChatGPT as insurance to make sure that happens?
Other fun links:
https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals
Verification seems so strange to me. What are you verifying? That a human owns the content? That the content was created by a human? That the human passed a captcha?
Could it free up human creators to focus on more meaningful and fulfilling work, rather than churning out banal content for the sake of meeting demand? Or could it potentially lead to a more democratized and diverse range of voices being amplified, rather than just those with the resources and expertise to optimize for search engines? Just food for thought.
I’m kidding, this is ChatGPT speaking :-)
"How are you today, you irradiant sack of sludge?"
"Oh hey douche firehose, can't complain."
Particularly, the defense against AI of using today's quirky and vernacular language will be completely ineffective because LLMs will parrot back anything they are exposed to. If they can see your discourse they can mimic it, and one thing that is sure is that current LLMs are terribly inefficient, I'm fairly certain that people will get the resource requirements down by a factor of ten, it's possible it will be a lot more than that. Particularly if it gets easy to "fine tune" models they will have no problem tracking your up to the minute discourse unless you can keep it a secret.
A refreshing take
This is the key for future better LLM, you can generate ashtoningly amounts of data, as fast as your pipeline can generate the text and feed it to the training,
You could even automatically curate data somehow (using experts systems, manually fed by humans, double checking "facts" and "known knowledge" from garbage), and ultimately you'll be using the same original AI to generate a better AI, then you iterate. At each cycle, the original LLM becames better.
And you won't even need Internet at some point, you just have to make relatively sure the first iterations are feeding the LLM with relatively "good" data. It is not necessary that the data, the text, be true, it just needs to resemble what you'd have found in the open internet, maybe one good comment, and 40 other comments with somehow flawed data.
How fast can you do this? We're probably about to see it. How better do you think a LLM can get by increasing the available data for training them? And if you could accurately "summarize" the text, the data somehow - using LLMs or other systems - then, how faster could you train a newer, better LLM?
Just by decreasing by little magnitudes the amount of text for training without losing the significance of the information to be encoded in the LLM, you'll probably be able to get the training way faster than before.
And what happens if you can somehow "stack" several LLMs? re-feeding one output to the next LLM to make it process it, several LLMs running ones behind others, the first ones the "cheaper", then the "expensive", a lot more powerful. And use that stack to produce even "deeper" text, encoding even more information in simpler, faster to process, text.
And if you could somehow encode text in a WAY simpler representation format? Using that format to train those advanced LLMs (you'd probably then need a "translator LLM" to re-compose the simplified text to actual readable by human text).
You think this is scifi? nope, just use ol' good stenography, and you're good. Yes, using a representation format as stenography would required advanced LLM capable of generating complex original never seen images from text, fully capable translate text to images and images to text..wait we already have those...
Some amazing stuff is coming, if the makers care to make those advances public information.
Nonsense. That's certainly not true for HN, for most of Reddit outside of a few big subs, for GitHub, for Wikipedia, for IRC/Matrix, for most mailing lists, or for any of the hundreds of thousands of traditional web forums still in active use.
It sounds like what the author is really saying is "Facebook and Twitter are overrun with these things, and those are the only 'publicly available spaces' that matter". Which, of course, is once again complete nonsense.
Just because you don't recognize them, doesn't mean they are not there. Subtle advertisement and trolling is strong even on HN. It's just not in-your-face-style.
> for IRC/Matrix, for most mailing lists, or for any of the hundreds of thousands of traditional web forums still in active use.
Those could be seen as less public spaces like slack or discord. Generally, any place with strong moderation or poor automation-option is a cozy web, where dumb junk has little to no space.
No one said they aren’t here. But they certainly haven't "overrun" the place.
If you were paying attention to the shifts in tone and the window of 'acceptable' conversation on here, it's been pretty dramatic.
Post or comment the 'wrong' thing about the 'wrong' topic here and you'll get damn near instaflagged, your post removed, rate limited, etc. Say something (true) against a company with active PR goons, and you'll find the entire comment section turned into a toxic mess within 15 minutes.
If you think that shit is normal, you don't remember how things used to be.
There's very much a point here.
Crypto come to mind.
People having interest in it have flooded every available public space, and not only online :
Search engines ('coin something' websites), /r/bitcoin, /r/cryptocurrency and so on, youtube at large, online media outlets, online financial newspapers, amazon, physical bookstores, paper business magazines, business tv, and so on.
Google Search YouTube
Without the efforts of dang, this place would fall apart into the same disease as faces other large mass forums.
And this will accelerate the process even more where older generation is unable to understand what the hell younger kids are talking about...
You think suddenly everyone is going to start signing their tweets and blog posts and people will en-masse assign a trust score to said content based on the people they know and trust in their PGP keychains?
I'd like that world quite a bit but it's decidedly not going to happen - probably at all and definitely not at scale. Are you so sure that's what we'll all do in response to automated content that you're calling this article a "sky-is-falling thesis"? If so then I'm genuinely baffled by your confidence here. Where does it come from?
We did migrate from http to https for example. And we do use a (top down) cryptographic scheme for DNS. We also do use similar schemes for crypto currency. So we do use technology as needed when needed. I’d argue the time is coming when we need to use it in some way to secure human conversation on the net. If I am confident here it is because I see this as typical of the same transitions that forced us to use crypto elsewhere.
True PGP is a failure but I can see room for a scheme where people bother to indicate that a person is real. Nobody is going to bother indicating that a post is real or not (nobody cares).
Does it have low value for to you to know that I myself am say 3 friend hops away from you and have say a “likelihood of being human score” of 7/10?
And it wouldn’t help you to be able to know that say many random sms messages you get or random phone calls you get or random posts or articles you have trust score of say 0/10 because nobody in your extended network of trust can attest they exist?
True fake content is hard to solve. At an intimate scale nothing can solve deception. If you’re my friend and you decide to manipulate or deceive me then there’s not much I can do. I extended trust to you and you violated it. This isn’t a new phenomena.
But the article isn’t specifically about fake content. It is also about sock puppets. It’s about an extended field of spam. Crypto can play a role at lest asserting that a post is uttered by a friend of a friend or somebody who has greater than zero trust.