Model collapse doomers are such an odd bunch. It's as if they think that the humans training the models have no agency over the data they use, or how that data is processed/weighted/etc.
1. The damage in the form of the destruction of news sources and replacement of writers with AI has happened and continues to happen. Writers are already jobless. News sources are already dead. But sure, these jobless people with no hope for their industry are "doomers". The article doesn't mention artists, but they are also getting hammered.
2. The worst players already have agency over their data choices, they are using that to build silos and destroy their competitors who don't have that ability.
3. Some social places have already become unusable. Twitter for instance. Threads may be able to push back on this, but they are already a dangerous silo.
Due to the volume of half-arsed news the current AIs can generate your average reader might not notice that some is missing, though I questions that. People are starting to notice that their newspapers doesn't actually have news anymore (and that's just do to cost optimization and competition from ad supported online news).
I fear that we're entering a world where some of us pay for news written by real journalists, while the masses consume garbage "news" which is more tailored to them clicking ads, rather that learning about the world.
We’re all copying other people’s homework, especially in social media. How much of what you know about the world comes from personal observation? Most people haven’t traveled to most places.
The news business are almost entirely an ad business now. Only a few sites do real investigative journalism and only with a few journalists.
Many news businesses are now owned or majority controlled by billionaires and have the expected editorial biases that also don't really support hard hitting journalism.
2. Open source data sets can have curation too, this seems like a silly strawman to make.
3. Twitter isn't just unusable because of AI. It was never more than barely useable to begin with, and many of users didn't help the situation.
I got it from your original post: you don't give a shit. I was just calling you out on it. At least you own it.
> 2. Open source data sets can have curation too, this seems like a silly strawman to make.
It's not a strawman, but "curated open source data sets" are a red herring: those data sets are not what is going to be controlling the online experience of the vast majority of those online.
News is going to break, and people who break it accurately with personality and a unique take are going to do well regardless if whether newspapers and other bastions of old world journalism continue to exist.
From a reader’s point of view, it seems like there’s plenty to read.
If Big Tech can't even catch pornography or explicit uses of the n-word, there's no way they'll be able to filter subtle LLM / art generator hallucinations.
Obviously generalizing over pictures of humans and pictures of porn will enable CSAM generation ...
Plus a LOT of things have been declared illegal pornographic material in various places: all porn (China), drawn CSAM, any kind of drawn porn with unclear ages, ...
If someone is going to suggest that there is "illegal child pornography in DALL-E's training data" I think it needs to be backed up - that's a pretty big accusation.
Your attitude is naive and competely at odds with (honest) AI safety research. The rational thing for users is to assume DALL-E 2 is contaminated by CSAM unless OpenAI can publicly demonstrate otherwise. Their leadership is too stupid and dishonest for people to take their word.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9423393
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.01963.pdf?trk=public_post_comment...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbo...
I find OpenAI's refusal to document what's in the training data infuriating, but I that doesn't lead me to assume they weren't able to filter out CSAM from it.
If they don't care about this issue at all, why are they exposing low paid workers in Kenya to these conditions?
For people writing on the internet for motivations other than ad-driven monetization, and those who read their stuff, there is basically no issue.
I doubt these users will not experience a drop in quality as most authorship will roll out LLM laden content which will add more noise to the signal.
This is the key, I think. But it's small--The Small Web. I think we'll be better off, though.
Have a day job and produce quality content in your spare time, is my motto. A few billion people producing content in their spare time is still more than we can ever hope to consume.
That seems like it might make the training process untenable.
Information production seems to be on an exponential curve, so it won't be that long before you're training on a minority of all data.
If you were to teach a LLM to play chess today - wouldn’t you use fully AI generated data because that’s by far the best data ?
The notion that you could just grab data off the internet completely unvetted, and then train a useful model off that data seems very unrealistic. To get anything useful out of real world crawl data, you need a lot of filtering and processing to select the good bits. This is true if you're training an AI or building a search engine.
In an ironic twist the gatekeepers of the semi-walled gardens/islands of email that arose are now harvesting it for training content. I do so despise those weekly machine generated synopses telling me how I am doing.