9 ms·

I am of the surprisingly-controversial opinion that ML’s future is going to be as a human empowerment tool — a bicycle for the mind, yet so much more. Listen to

I am of the surprisingly-controversial opinion that ML’s future is going to be as a human empowerment tool — a bicycle for the mind, yet so much more. Listen to how cool my gamedev music sounds: https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame-music https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame... I feel comfortable saying that it’s awesome and being immodest, because I didn’t write it! None of those notes are mine. “Crossing the Channel” has one of the strangest tempos I’ve heard, yet it sounds so cool because I think the model made a mistake early on, and decided it wasn’t a mistake — instead, it came up with the most likely not-mistake it could think of, and it happened to sound great. But I “wrote” all ~20 songs on that list in one night. Took about six hours, aka a standard workday. I don’t think it’s production-grade music - far from it - but it also wasn’t a production grade model. (On the other hand, it was trained by gwern, so I’m skeptical the production models of the future will capture all the little magic that he seems to imbue into his.) I chose the instruments, I decided what sounded good, but I didn’t write a single note. It felt a lot like listening to someone jam out, and asking them to play different things. I was just the fella who was there to listen. That’s where ML is going to shine. The future is going to be so exciting with the things you’ll be able to do. But not in the current direction, I think. Currently, the goal is to factor the human out of the equation entirely. So the answer to your question is: even if the AI has “advanced”, its only because they added this case to the training set. If a human was at the helm, they would have annihilated you, because they’d see what you were doing and pilot the AI over to you. I am skeptical this case is solvable, in a fully automatic way. IMO human empowerment will happen by arming actual humans with these models. (Depressingly, “arming” might have a few meanings depending on how AI war turns out, but that’s a different conversation.)

Rodeoclash 5y ago
Interesting songs. "Crossing the Channel" doesn't seem to have a strange tempo so much as the piano chord on the offbeat (and perhaps some swing on it as well, I can't quite tell). The problem I think AI generate music has to overcome is that it kind of meanders around without coming to any "conclusions". That said, perhaps this is the perfect music for wandering around a town in an RPG!
- XorNot 5y ago
  This is where the human element comes in though I would think: a guiding hand to say "start ramping up to more of that, okay now you want a lull here..."
- FractalHQ 5y ago
  The best music I’ve heard from AI by far is AIVA[0], the “AI Composer” with a YouTube channel uploading a couple new songs every week. I’d argue its the only generated music I’ve heard that could pass as “good”. I don’t think it will be long before AI composers are better than all but the most talented humans. [0] https://youtube.com/channel/UCykVChITx5kqBoGkzfz8iZg https://youtube.com/channel/UCykVChITx5kqBoGkzfz8iZg
Balgair 5y ago
> I am of the surprisingly-controversial opinion that ML’s future is going to be as a human empowerment tool — a bicycle for the mind, yet so much more. In chess, these players are called centaurs. Per my limited knowledge of the current chess meta, they are considered to be much better than either people or AI in isolation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Heck yeah, thank you! It's delightful that there's a name for it, because it seems like the first people to become centaurs in their day to day lives will have a massive advantage over those that want the purity of unguided AI. I was eagerly hoping for a video of a centaur vs centaur tournament, but there seem to be none. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=centaur+chess https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=centaur+chess At least, not yet. Maybe someone could do a tournament with https://www.twitch.tv/gmnaroditsky https://www.twitch.tv/gmnaroditsky or https://www.twitch.tv/gmhikaru https://www.twitch.tv/gmhikaru? Actually, the Gotham Chess guy might: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1b-cuPDBZo&list=PLBRObSmbZluRH5GNp2gBxuxxItplWml17&index=2&ab_channel=GothamChess https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1b-cuPDBZo&list=PLBRObSmbZl... He's always looking for new angles for his Youtube channel. Centaurism isn't applicable to every situation -- Starcraft's AI kicks the butts of every pro player, because you can scale up and overwhelm your opponent. But there are often already humans in the mix, in these models. The humans are just designing the loss functions or deciding what to model, rather than using the results. So it's a "delayed" mechanical turk in that sense. When done right, it's so effective that it feels like cheating^Wthe future: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1182208124117307392 https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1182208124117307392 Those are some of the nicest Stylegan outputs I've ever made. (Uh, do me a favor and ignore the Zeus one...) Each of them were crafted. The process was to start with something, and that "something" often didn't need to be anything close. For example, if the photo is an old man, but stylegan's showing a kid, you turn up the "age" slider. Do that for every feature; it felt like the character creation screen in fallout. Amazed it isn't an app yet. Artbreeder is nice, but it's not the same -- the key component was to have Peter Baylies' (follow him! https://twitter.com/pbaylies https://twitter.com/pbaylies) reverse encoder as a button you can press. Whenever the model gets too far from what you're thinking, you press it, and it morphs the face back closer to the target photo. In the process, it might distort the age slightly, or make the chin a little bigger, but it's an anchor at sea; it's why you can nail your final result, every time. I predict Centaurism might be popularized by gamedev. It's going to be pretty neat when some studio trains an RL algorithm vs someone's heart rate. Higher heart rate = more enjoyment, lots of the time, so you'd end up with either the funnest game or the scariest game you've ever seen. Probably a decade away from that though.
defen 5y ago
Did the model also choose the song names?
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Surprisingly, yes. I want to say “yes” with no caveats, but I am ethically bound to point out that I may have changed a few of them. But if I did, it was inspired directly from what it came up with. The way it works is, there’s something called ABC notation, and Gwern found a big ass-database of Irish folk songs. It has a “title” field along with tempo, ID, etc. I would fill in what key I wanted, give it the first chord, and let it go. (If you don’t give it the chord, it generates ABC songs that are all kind of boring piano pieces with no background chords. It was amazing how much difference that made.) So, not only did it choose the song names, but it couldn’t not choose a song name. It’s the only thing it knew. Its whole world was Irish ABC folk music, and as far as it was concerned, the title was as important as the notes. It couldn’t know it wasn’t. Ah, I figured out what had been bothering me. I’m pretty sure I chose “For Ireland!” and possibly Blackbird, but e.g. Crossing the Channel was a GPT original, I believe. I was aiming to make it feel like an oldschool FF3 type game, so For Ireland was the battle song, Blackbird was the name of the airship you’d make your daring escape on at the end, Marco’s shadow was the assassin team hired by the empire to take Marco out, etc.
JamilD 5y ago
Tom Gruber (one of the cofounders of Siri) had a talk a while back where he spoke about this. https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_gruber_how_ai_can_enhance_our_memory_work_and_social_lives?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_gruber_how_ai_can_enhance_our_... > Tom Gruber, co-creator of Siri, wants to make "humanistic AI" that augments and collaborates with us instead of competing with (or replacing) us. He shares his vision for a future where AI helps us achieve superhuman performance in perception, creativity and cognitive function -- from turbocharging our design skills to helping us remember everything we've ever read and the name of everyone we've ever met. "We are in the middle of a renaissance in AI," Gruber says. "Every time a machine gets smarter, we get smarter." I'm a big believer in Intelligence Augmentation, in the Engelbart tradition, over completely independent agents. I don’t think my ideal AI is one that has its own sense of agency and autonomy, rather I think of technology as an extension of myself, one that enhances my autonomy.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  Kind of like Star Trek AI (besides Lt. Cmd. Data that is).
grawprog 5y ago
>I am of the surprisingly-controversial opinion that ML’s future is going to be as a human empowerment tool After a recent article about an ai driven text adventure game I seen on HN, Aidungeon, I decided to give it a try. The article was about some issues with the company and content filters or something, but my number one impression from trying it out was that it would make a great base for writing short fiction from. At least that was what it seemed like to me. The first few times i tried it, playing it like a game, it was like wandering through a dream that kept changing. After that i figured out the different command modes and realized, it was far more useful as something of an idea generator where it's more like a collaborative writing partner than a dungeon master or something and I found it more enjoyable. I think it would be a great tool for a stuck writer with a vague idea and a concept, but isn't sure where to take it, but as a game by itself, the human element is definitely missing. It seems to works best when you're the one controlling the narrative bouncing ideas off the ai as opposed to human crafted text adventures where the game is more in control.
IQunder130 5y ago
The reason your opinion is controversial is because it assumes an ill-defined transient state as a stable equilibrium. What exactly is it about the human brain that makes it so special? Why couldn't other systems given many, many orders of magnitude more computational resources be arbitrarily better at everything it does?
- GuB-42 5y ago
  Humans do things for humans, an AI, no matter how powerful, is not a human mind. So a human may be required to make is more creative in a way that isn't alien.
  - IQunder130 5y ago
    Suppose I can emulate a human brain neuron for neuron. How exactly is it different in capabilities from an actual human brain? What quantifiable property can you assign to the human mind that makes you so certain a machine can never match it? Your argument is basically good old god of the gaps. You look at what the state of the art in technology cannot do right now, and base assumptions on that without really delving into the issue. 10 years ago you would've included stuff like image classification and natural language generation in the "only humans can do this" bin.
dataduck 5y ago
Nice playlist! Have you written about your process anywhere? I'm sure there are a lot of people who would love to follow in your footsteps here.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  The closest writeup is probably Gwern's: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2-music https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2-music It won't get you quite as far, since I had to discover that you can prompt it with chords, and and how to set the instruments. But it's pretty good, and maybe someone will discover some new way to make it better.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> I am of the surprisingly-controversial opinion that ML’s future is going to be as a human empowerment tool — a bicycle for the mind, yet so much more. I don't think this is controversial at all, rather it's what Donald Michie called Ultra-Strong Machine Learning back in the 1980's [1]. Briefly (and with modern interpretations) Michie defined three "levels" of machine learning system: Weak, Strong and Ultra Strong. A machine learning exhibits Weak machine learning ability when it is only capable of improving its predictive accuracy when trained on data. A machine learning system exhibits Strong machine learning ability when it satisfies the Weak machine learning criterion and can additionally output its model in symbolid form that is readily understandable by humans. And a machine learning system exhibits Ultra Strong machine learning ability when it satisfies the Strong machine learning criterion and can additionally instruct the human user so as to improve the human user's performance. In a sense, not a bicycle, but more like a jetpack, for the mind. Unfortunately we don't have anything like that today. Yes, I'm aware of claims that Go players have learned a lot by observing AlphaGo play. But AlphaGo/Zero/blah is not capable of instructing a human directly. Michie envisioned Ultra Strong Machine learning as a kind of coach basically, or teacher, an AI teacher. _________ [1] Michie, D. (1988). Machine learning in the next five years. In Proceedings of the third European working session on learning (pp. 107–122). Pitman. Online here (but behind a paywall): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3108771.3108781 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3108771.3108781 Full disclosure: I'm one of Donald Michie's grand-students; he was my thesis advisors' thesis advisor. Additionally, Michie was besties with Alan Turing, so I have the privilege of being a grand-nothing of Turing's :P

Rodeoclash 5y ago

Interesting songs. "Crossing the Channel" doesn't seem to have a strange tempo so much as the piano chord on the offbeat (and perhaps some swing on it as well, I can't quite tell). The problem I think AI generate music has to overcome is that it kind of meanders around without coming to any "conclusions". That said, perhaps this is the perfect music for wandering around a town in an RPG!

XorNot 5y ago
This is where the human element comes in though I would think: a guiding hand to say "start ramping up to more of that, okay now you want a lull here..."
FractalHQ 5y ago
The best music I’ve heard from AI by far is AIVA[0], the “AI Composer” with a YouTube channel uploading a couple new songs every week. I’d argue its the only generated music I’ve heard that could pass as “good”. I don’t think it will be long before AI composers are better than all but the most talented humans. [0] https://youtube.com/channel/UCykVChITx5kqBoGkzfz8iZg https://youtube.com/channel/UCykVChITx5kqBoGkzfz8iZg

Balgair 5y ago

> I am of the surprisingly-controversial opinion that ML’s future is going to be as a human empowerment tool — a bicycle for the mind, yet so much more. In chess, these players are called centaurs. Per my limited knowledge of the current chess meta, they are considered to be much better than either people or AI in isolation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sillysaurusx 5y ago
Heck yeah, thank you! It's delightful that there's a name for it, because it seems like the first people to become centaurs in their day to day lives will have a massive advantage over those that want the purity of unguided AI. I was eagerly hoping for a video of a centaur vs centaur tournament, but there seem to be none. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=centaur+chess https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=centaur+chess At least, not yet. Maybe someone could do a tournament with https://www.twitch.tv/gmnaroditsky https://www.twitch.tv/gmnaroditsky or https://www.twitch.tv/gmhikaru https://www.twitch.tv/gmhikaru? Actually, the Gotham Chess guy might: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1b-cuPDBZo&list=PLBRObSmbZluRH5GNp2gBxuxxItplWml17&index=2&ab_channel=GothamChess https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1b-cuPDBZo&list=PLBRObSmbZl... He's always looking for new angles for his Youtube channel. Centaurism isn't applicable to every situation -- Starcraft's AI kicks the butts of every pro player, because you can scale up and overwhelm your opponent. But there are often already humans in the mix, in these models. The humans are just designing the loss functions or deciding what to model, rather than using the results. So it's a "delayed" mechanical turk in that sense. When done right, it's so effective that it feels like cheating^Wthe future: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1182208124117307392 https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1182208124117307392 Those are some of the nicest Stylegan outputs I've ever made. (Uh, do me a favor and ignore the Zeus one...) Each of them were crafted. The process was to start with something, and that "something" often didn't need to be anything close. For example, if the photo is an old man, but stylegan's showing a kid, you turn up the "age" slider. Do that for every feature; it felt like the character creation screen in fallout. Amazed it isn't an app yet. Artbreeder is nice, but it's not the same -- the key component was to have Peter Baylies' (follow him! https://twitter.com/pbaylies https://twitter.com/pbaylies) reverse encoder as a button you can press. Whenever the model gets too far from what you're thinking, you press it, and it morphs the face back closer to the target photo. In the process, it might distort the age slightly, or make the chin a little bigger, but it's an anchor at sea; it's why you can nail your final result, every time. I predict Centaurism might be popularized by gamedev. It's going to be pretty neat when some studio trains an RL algorithm vs someone's heart rate. Higher heart rate = more enjoyment, lots of the time, so you'd end up with either the funnest game or the scariest game you've ever seen. Probably a decade away from that though.

defen 5y ago

Did the model also choose the song names?

sillysaurusx 5y ago
Surprisingly, yes. I want to say “yes” with no caveats, but I am ethically bound to point out that I may have changed a few of them. But if I did, it was inspired directly from what it came up with. The way it works is, there’s something called ABC notation, and Gwern found a big ass-database of Irish folk songs. It has a “title” field along with tempo, ID, etc. I would fill in what key I wanted, give it the first chord, and let it go. (If you don’t give it the chord, it generates ABC songs that are all kind of boring piano pieces with no background chords. It was amazing how much difference that made.) So, not only did it choose the song names, but it couldn’t not choose a song name. It’s the only thing it knew. Its whole world was Irish ABC folk music, and as far as it was concerned, the title was as important as the notes. It couldn’t know it wasn’t. Ah, I figured out what had been bothering me. I’m pretty sure I chose “For Ireland!” and possibly Blackbird, but e.g. Crossing the Channel was a GPT original, I believe. I was aiming to make it feel like an oldschool FF3 type game, so For Ireland was the battle song, Blackbird was the name of the airship you’d make your daring escape on at the end, Marco’s shadow was the assassin team hired by the empire to take Marco out, etc.

JamilD 5y ago

Tom Gruber (one of the cofounders of Siri) had a talk a while back where he spoke about this. https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_gruber_how_ai_can_enhance_our_memory_work_and_social_lives?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_gruber_how_ai_can_enhance_our_... > Tom Gruber, co-creator of Siri, wants to make "humanistic AI" that augments and collaborates with us instead of competing with (or replacing) us. He shares his vision for a future where AI helps us achieve superhuman performance in perception, creativity and cognitive function -- from turbocharging our design skills to helping us remember everything we've ever read and the name of everyone we've ever met. "We are in the middle of a renaissance in AI," Gruber says. "Every time a machine gets smarter, we get smarter." I'm a big believer in Intelligence Augmentation, in the Engelbart tradition, over completely independent agents. I don’t think my ideal AI is one that has its own sense of agency and autonomy, rather I think of technology as an extension of myself, one that enhances my autonomy.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
Kind of like Star Trek AI (besides Lt. Cmd. Data that is).

grawprog 5y ago

>I am of the surprisingly-controversial opinion that ML’s future is going to be as a human empowerment tool After a recent article about an ai driven text adventure game I seen on HN, Aidungeon, I decided to give it a try. The article was about some issues with the company and content filters or something, but my number one impression from trying it out was that it would make a great base for writing short fiction from. At least that was what it seemed like to me. The first few times i tried it, playing it like a game, it was like wandering through a dream that kept changing. After that i figured out the different command modes and realized, it was far more useful as something of an idea generator where it's more like a collaborative writing partner than a dungeon master or something and I found it more enjoyable. I think it would be a great tool for a stuck writer with a vague idea and a concept, but isn't sure where to take it, but as a game by itself, the human element is definitely missing. It seems to works best when you're the one controlling the narrative bouncing ideas off the ai as opposed to human crafted text adventures where the game is more in control.

IQunder130 5y ago

The reason your opinion is controversial is because it assumes an ill-defined transient state as a stable equilibrium. What exactly is it about the human brain that makes it so special? Why couldn't other systems given many, many orders of magnitude more computational resources be arbitrarily better at everything it does?

GuB-42 5y ago
Humans do things for humans, an AI, no matter how powerful, is not a human mind. So a human may be required to make is more creative in a way that isn't alien.
- IQunder130 5y ago
  Suppose I can emulate a human brain neuron for neuron. How exactly is it different in capabilities from an actual human brain? What quantifiable property can you assign to the human mind that makes you so certain a machine can never match it? Your argument is basically good old god of the gaps. You look at what the state of the art in technology cannot do right now, and base assumptions on that without really delving into the issue. 10 years ago you would've included stuff like image classification and natural language generation in the "only humans can do this" bin.

dataduck 5y ago

Nice playlist! Have you written about your process anywhere? I'm sure there are a lot of people who would love to follow in your footsteps here.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
The closest writeup is probably Gwern's: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2-music https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2-music It won't get you quite as far, since I had to discover that you can prompt it with chords, and and how to set the instruments. But it's pretty good, and maybe someone will discover some new way to make it better.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

>> I am of the surprisingly-controversial opinion that ML’s future is going to be as a human empowerment tool — a bicycle for the mind, yet so much more. I don't think this is controversial at all, rather it's what Donald Michie called Ultra-Strong Machine Learning back in the 1980's [1]. Briefly (and with modern interpretations) Michie defined three "levels" of machine learning system: Weak, Strong and Ultra Strong. A machine learning exhibits Weak machine learning ability when it is only capable of improving its predictive accuracy when trained on data. A machine learning system exhibits Strong machine learning ability when it satisfies the Weak machine learning criterion and can additionally output its model in symbolid form that is readily understandable by humans. And a machine learning system exhibits Ultra Strong machine learning ability when it satisfies the Strong machine learning criterion and can additionally instruct the human user so as to improve the human user's performance. In a sense, not a bicycle, but more like a jetpack, for the mind. Unfortunately we don't have anything like that today. Yes, I'm aware of claims that Go players have learned a lot by observing AlphaGo play. But AlphaGo/Zero/blah is not capable of instructing a human directly. Michie envisioned Ultra Strong Machine learning as a kind of coach basically, or teacher, an AI teacher. _________ [1] Michie, D. (1988). Machine learning in the next five years. In Proceedings of the third European working session on learning (pp. 107–122). Pitman. Online here (but behind a paywall): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3108771.3108781 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3108771.3108781 Full disclosure: I'm one of Donald Michie's grand-students; he was my thesis advisors' thesis advisor. Additionally, Michie was besties with Alan Turing, so I have the privilege of being a grand-nothing of Turing's :P