There will be some use for such algorithms, anything that processes information in controlled ways is a tool in our arsenal, but the deceit that these are actually "writing" anything is astonishing.
In effect, driven purely by commercial objectives, an entire era of "AI" is selling humanity short.
For art, I see these not as major disruptions but as new tools. There’s no right or wrong answer in art. If anything, abstract expressionism solidified that point. A drunk with a paintbrush can mint a small fortune if people decide it’s capital A Art.
More broadly, ML art models will allow more people to express themselves and more perfectly represent that weird dream they had or that place that doesn’t quite exist. We will all be richer for it.
I have less rosy things to say about ChatGPT. I feel like a broken record here but while statistical language models can be amusing (and that’s what I’d classify most of these posts as: amusing, low-impact text where precision and internal consistency isn’t paramount) but they’re not much more than that. They’re not reliable, they’re not oracles, but yeah if you need a poem about SpongeBob in the style of a 1920s mobster they can do that.
Maybe I’m a little too harsh on ChatGPT. Maybe I expect too much out of it. It can create mental eye candy and that’s awesome. I don’t know.
Chorus: Cause SpongeBob, he's the boss, ain't no one gonna cross This cuddly little crook, with his cartoon looks He's got a pineapple for a pad, and a pet for a pal But don't let that fool ya, he'll still give you a squish or a squelch
Verse 2: He's got a best friend named Patrick, a starfish of sorts Together they're a pair, of criminal sports They'll rob the Krusty Krab, and run from the law But somehow, they always come out on top, without a flaw
I think my favourite bit is
> A few moments later they were rolling on the floor, and Klapaucius was screaming and gesticulating in the hand-to-hand style of the famous master-scout Krool, while Trurl, in spite of his defective voice-box, was giving such excellent imitations of a dingo howling at the rising moon that even the robots—who, of course, must be presumed to have a good deal of sympathy for such primitive forms of expression—gave him an ovation.
"Mutate this code so it adheres to XYZ pattern"
"Factor this code out into a React component and wire it up"
"Tell me what this code does, what do I need to change to make it do XZY"
"I need to programatically access AWS <service>, guide me through AWS console to set up the right IAM policies and generate those for me, then generate the correct boto3 code to call this service"
"Take this email, write a friendly and brief response and ask for setting up an appointment next week"
"Write me a bash script that uses imagemagick to perform a bunch of transformations on image files with the following filenames"
"Take this curl command, turn it into a Python function, add type annotations and comments where necessary"
And many, many more usecases. Does it bullshit? Absolutely, but that's just not always an issue. A lot of the bullshitting can be circumvented by prompting it in the right ways and having the right discourse with it.
It's a room full of employees, and you are the manager. Will you hear plenty of bullshit? Absolutely, but you will also get heaps of useful output that can solve your problem, make you think outside the box etc. It's all about how you interact with it.
It's a significantly more pleasant and productive interaction mode than using a search engine and sifting through the SEO spam. I still do that, if I need to verify something or validate if something I don't have enough domain knowledge of is bullshit or not, but more often than not I don't need to. and that's been incredibly liberating.
I find GPT very useful as well!
Strictly from a rhetorical position, I’ve noticed that the “GPT fails like people fail” argument has not been very convincing in these discussions for whatever reason.
ChatGPT is only a tool, yet a powerful one. There are many uses that are quite reliable and producing no bullshit. If you don't see them, too bad for you.
How should we call the rejection of AI? Intelligism? Artificialism?
No, I don't. Google Search has absolutely NOTHING in common with ChatGPT. The comparison arises often here and elsewhere, and it's absurd. I will keep repeating that as many times as necessary. I guess this is my plight now.
Google Search produces no content at all. Zero. It returns page urls, and snippets of text extracted from those pages. It's always possible to verify where the information comes from, on which page.
ChatGPT speaks in its own name and says "I", and asserts that it's right, even when it obviously has no clue what "right" even means.
I don't reject AI; but ChatGPT isn't "intelligent". Yes, it's a tool. It's a hammer that randomly hits your thumb hard, and then claims it absolutely, positively was a nail.
I see ChatGPT as a student and you as the teacher. The student can be sometimes smart but oftentimes quite stupid. She/he's in a hurry and always try to pretend she/he knows because she/he wants the best graduation. You, as the teacher, you have to detect the bad and the good.
Later, you hire the student. Because, although she/he produces sometimes silly responses, she/he's very quick at collecting information from all kind of sources, and at making nice summaries of it, and can perform many "directed" tasks almost perfectly. And maybe, someday, she/he'll learn and produce less bullshit.
> No, I don't.
Well, I do. Because Google's signal to noise ratio is absolutely terrible.
So are most humans
I'm not so sure. For many human bullshitters, perhaps. But there's plenty of human bullshitters that exhibit the same air of authority you talk about and they're mostly employed as politicians.
ChatGPT did it for me in about 3 minutes. I was intrigued so I asked it to write Swift code to RSA256 encrypt and then decrypt a string. It did that in about 30s. I told my colleagues and someone joked "ask it to do my HealthKit integration haha". I did, and it did. Not perfectly, but instructively.
Yeah there is a lot of noisy hype around this, but for me it's already shown itself capable of massively improving my productivity.
For example - as part of a low code/no code product. The user of these typically doesn't know much about code, but some simple scripting might greatly enhance what they can accomplish with the product. Enter ChatGPT...
AI-generated content is soon going to account for >99.99% of the internet. A significant chunk of that will be propaganda or deliberate misinformation.
We’re on the verge of some massive changes.
Though maybe I’m too optimistic; they should have done this a long time ago. I’m tired of searching for, for eg. “boiling point of X” and I get a poorly written 1500 word article —- clearly aimed at robots and not humans —- instead of my desired answer.
That’s an extremely impressive leap from what we could do a decade ago. Sure, it lies. Sure, it needs improvement. Still if you can’t see why it’s significant and how it has tremendous potential, well, I fear there is not much we can do for you.
* the fundamental algorithm developer is akin to the (usually rare) genious artist that invents a new genre
* the people implementing, training and applying the machinery are like the larger numbers of followers of a particular artistic school that apply the basic principles to a wide range of topics
* the tool itself is like a brush or a new paint. a technology enabler and nothing more
I also generated an absurdist story and was able to feed ChatGPT additional information to direct the plot where I wanted it to go. In that context, I see it being useful as a catalyst to help overcome writer's block.
Finally, I had it write me an "Animated plasma effect using JavaScript and Canvas", which it did albeit one that would have needed a bit of human tweaking to get it animating properly.
Commercial "art" is not fundamentally different than the art of sewing a dress or forging a horseshoe or weaving cloth or making the coachwork of an automobile by hand, in my opinion, so bringing the price down helps poor people to be able to enjoy it too, and would free up a lot of people in the industry to do other things. The wealthy may continue to purchase custom "hand made" art as they might have cobblers make their boutique shoes, but a lot of the industry will die out IMO. A little disruptive for the people involved, but it will likely happen far more slowly than many other automation revolutions because it's far more diverse and subjective there won't be one day that a machine is invented which is more capable at creating art than humans, like Whitney's cotton gin.
I don't think consumption of commercial art has some deep meaning to humanity. It is entertainment, and almost as impersonal and industrialized as it gets already, automating a little more of it is just another step along the way.
If anything I think it could free more people to create their own art for themselves and to share with people they know.
But I think we actually aggree on the broader point that automation becomes just another tool in various professional contexts. What is annoying is that, at least to the "masses" it is not sold like that at all. Software is endowed with agency and miraculous powers, diverting the discussion to bizarre and pointless metaphysical speculation and crowding out the real discussions that we need to have in the public: who gets access to what data, what can they do with them etc. etc.
Yep. The tragedy may be deepening with time. Objectively, the "commons" was never as integrated as in the current digital age. Collective phenomena (reaching the point of mass hysteria) feel like getting worse. There is already a large number of individuals that are experts at inciting viral propagation.
Its not clear how we could institute counterbalances and circuit breakers that would restore some sanity. Traditionally this was the role of academics and journalists but both have been compromised.
That is just a widespread analogy we use. The human brain is not a computer, although obviously some aspects of its function resemble the logical / mathematical model of a computer, which (I gently remind you) is a construction of the brain itself.
> it seems plausible that there's a future where such a distinction is either not meaningful, or perhaps even skewed against humanity.
I would not dispute that at all. The future of humanity is hopefully long and full of wondrous discoveries but arguing that we are "close" to "real AI" flies in the face of what is actually achieved on the ground with current approaches: clever utilization (where the one who is clever is the human) of rather limited algorithms to re-use productively the vast body of human generated information corpus.
Not a useless exercise by any measure, but the mantle under which it is sold does not augur well for the sustainability of those efforts.
The algorithm is doing pretty much the same thing that a brain is doing, except it's a smaller and slower brain, so it's not that smart, and we hardwired some parts to fill the gaps.
It’s clear that computation is one of the brain’s primary functions. Does that make it a computer (albeit one that works very differently from a macbook)? I’d say yes, but it’s essentially a question of semantics.
this is just an idle extrapolation that is not based on any fact.
if the brain was a computer in your sense of the word it would have been decoded by now.
we don't need to get metaphysical (if that is your worry) to accept that we don't know yet exactly what is going on in the brain.
Of course not. Existence of an equivalent computer program doesn't imply that it's easy to infer it.
> we don't know yet exactly what is going on in the brain
That's why it's an unreliable way to judge the distance to human level intelligence.
"In his book In Our Own Image (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence.
In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused with its spirit. That spirit ‘explained’ our intelligence – grammatically, at least.
The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.
By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph."
Instead I mean that humans are logically computers. Physical entities operating on inputs and producing outputs. They share this property with any other physical system. Now there may be some supernatural layer that exists beyond the physics and chemistry operating within the skull that would lead to that position being undermined, but in the absense of that my point is purely that the human brain is just computer in the sense that it's a physcical system producing output.
I don't think those using the gear metaphor, or the telegraph metaphor, and so on, believed the brain actually contains gears or has a real telegraph in the day to day sense either.
The problem was the metaphor, not that they took it literaly.
Don't get me wrong, I do believe there's a place for the philosophy of science. But to give a list of instances where metaphors have been wong in the past as some form of argument against a given metaphor does not seem robust to me.
You're saying it as some counter-argument, but I actually agree with it:
Yes. We should learn our lesson, and try to understand complex things for what they are, and map their complexity - not think that we "get them" when we only have a simplistic reductionistic version of them...
>Perhaps you could give a reason why you think the human brain is not physical system?
First, where does the question come from? Who said that I think "the human brain is not physical system"?
It not being "a computer" doesn't mean that it's not a physical system anymore than it not being "a gear mechanism" means it's not a physical system.
Second, a rock is a physical system too, but a computer can't be a rock. A rock simulation isn't a rock either: it lacks several very important attributes of rockiness.
So, the question is less about whether a brain is a physical system, than about whether modelling some physical interactions its all it takes (as opposed to the actual interactions and their "qualia").
Or even worse, whether loading a big enough statistical model is all it takes...
-- as if we have already discovered the interplays and mechanisms involved in the brain, neurons, chemical pathways, and such, and modelled them, and we're just short of enough scale with GPT.
1. The human brain has outputs (e.g. creative works, or even just movements of limbs etc)
2. The human brain has inputs (e.g. the light landing on retinas, the DNA and processes that gave rise to its structure).
3. The outputs of the human brain are a function of its inputs (probably my most contentious contention :-P ). This is what I mean by it's physical system.
4. The human brain shares these features with a computer. And thus my metaphor is formed.
I'm happy to concede that metaphors like this have been shown to be wrong in the past, and indeed we can learn humility by remembering that. But I'm much more interested in thinking about which of 1 through 4 may be wrong and why.
Well, this needs to be proven. Note that "the outputs of the human brain are influenced by its inputs" is not the same as "the outputs of the human brain are a function of its inputs".
>4. The human brain shares these features with a computer. And thus my metaphor is formed.
Doesn't it also share it with, e.g. a meat processing machine? It too has an input (say, meat and spices) and an output (e.g. sausages), and it's output is a function of its input (e.g. different meat and spices create different kinds of sausages).
At this point GPT is utter garbage at writing lyrics or poetry. Words distilled to their very basics, where sound and meaning intertwine, places the most subtle of emphasis on every minor word choice.
My rhyming dictionary from the 1930s remains a much better writing companion… for now!
For example, humans started making computer games, but there were no computer games before, and now we have all these genres and stuff. Humans are capable of doing creative novel works from nothing. So you personally might be an uncreative automaton who just copies what others said or did, but that isn't normal, other humans can think in novel ways.
If you mention Pong or Spacewar, you've already lost. Table tennis and the Lensman books, respectively.
Literally anything humans do is based on prior influences, referents and data. There's no aether out of which the "spark" of inspiration strikes, nor does anything emerge from the pure vaccuum, creativity is just neurons doing what they will with the information they already have. Therefore the only difference between human genius and the mediocre output of AIs is complexity, and the only question worth asking is how far that gap can reasonably be bridged.
It's understandable that this is upsetting, because it threatens one of the last bastions of human divinity, and no one really wants to believe human beings in all their splendor, subtlety and complexity are just a pile of ad-hoc stochastic wetware algorithms running on a hemisphere of gelatinous goo, no more divine than a stone on the ground, but eventually as this technology matures we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that creativity can be manufactured, just like anything else, and like anything manufactured, its quality will inevitably surpass anything humans are capable of.
Humans are capable of being creative similarly to how the Go AI is capable of being creative, statistical AI's that just copies doesn't seem to be capable of such creativity.
Angry Birds: "a sketch of stylized wingless birds[1]", apparently, and games using that basic physics go back ages, and are inspired by cannon warfare[2]
Snake: all Snake games are based on Blockade, published by Gremlin industries, where I found this[3] on an interesting site HN might like
"[Lane Hauck] While we were designing wall games, I was tinkering in the back room with a video circuit that became our Blockade game board. I kept showing my work to Frank Fogleman and Jerry, pestering them with the “can we get into video now?” question. I made a 32x24 cell frame buffer with graphical characters. I was intrigued by the random walk in Physics…which said a drunk taking steps in random directions around a lamppost would gravitate to the lamppost. I decided to program an arrow to be the drunk, and watched it flit around the screen for about a minute before getting bored. Then I thought, what if the drunk can’t visit the same square twice? I made that adjustment, and watched the arrow move a bit and then get trapped. The step from there to Blockade was a small one. (Hauck 2012)"
[1] https://www.cleverism.com/why-angry-birds-got-successful/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game
[3] http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-ultima...
Which begs the question: why would individuals intentionally diminish the own status when there is nothing much objective to support it?
I guess it is for them to answer this, but what I would volunteer as a possibility is the enormous power of collective mental models / narratives. By adopting the "brain is a computer" narrative you become member (or aspired to become) of a certain social group that, incidentally, has been "winning" in a certain socio-economic context.
We have a very similar algorithm to AI for creating 'new' things, that never really strays from our data sets.
>Both of these things absorb huge data sets
Yes, and this point the AI is probably absorbing more total data, but the human understands structure of that data better. A good new book isn't just some new variation of concept, the author has a structured understanding of the relevant work that came before - and it's emotional and cultural impact, and intelligently builds on that. It may be that the AI is doing the computer equivalent of this process. But AI might never write Lord of the Rings because an AI never served in WW1 as a formative experience in it's youth. That's just one more thing that was in Tolkein's "data set". Is great AI fiction only capable of being appreciated by other AI who have the same shared experience?
Never served in a WW yet
Secodly, humans take only a few examples while AI needs trillions. AI built on a few examples would not have enough data.
The size of the data sets is not so different, humans take millions of examples within millions of examples over decades from birth to produce anything of substance.
Thank you for providing a clear example of what I term "selling humanity short"
None of human art exists outside the extremely complex cultural evolution history where bits and pieces of perceived reality are internalized by individuals (using entirely novel and evolving mental models and representations that we hardly understand) and is then communicated, gets transplanted and recognized as similar experiences in the brains of other humans, in an ever evolving chain of brain to brain interactions via (much more mundane) physical channels.
To make all this extraordinary stuff fit the current AI narrative people opt to wield a dehumanizing sledgehammer to eliminate anything but the in / out information processing concept (ignoring the garbage-in / garbage-out problem).
But just to play along for the sake of the argument, for AI to create "art", it would have to ingest a body of boring mystery whodunit prose and decide to write a poem about it.
What if they're just statistics plus some randomizer?
That's just a description of what the AI is doing with a tacked on group interaction that AI will do when more AI art is available.
>dehumanizing sledgehammer
In other words people tend to be objective, i disagree but i don't see the problem. If our only difference is because we can anthropomorphize humans better than AIs then there is no objective difference.
But just to play along for the sake of the argument, for Humans to create "art", it would have to ingest a body of boring mystery whodunit prose and be guided to write a poem about it.
We're just groups of tubes, you put food in one end and it shits it on the other end, in between these events we mostly run around and do meaningless things, from time to time we find more food to put in our tubes.
And i don't see any difference in human and AI within the context of creating art.
If you are trying to conflate those things, you need to do a better job.
This is just fitting the data to your assumption. It's like saying humans just get in the car and use their eyes to drive. While it might be objectively true to an extent, it is so misleading in what it falls to account for, which is actually relevant, that it's basically a useless statement.