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Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

• jaggs 4y ago
  The pendulum will start to swing back. The problem is, what will replace the garbage and satisfy the instant, easy, dopamine addiction?
  • dontwearitout 4y ago
    It's made me consider my habits, and how much time I spend consuming internet content or comment threads which may (even today) be completely fabricated or autogenerated. I'm hoping I can use this inflection point as motivation to unplug a bit and spend more time enjoying being human and enjoying the real world.
• rdxm 4y ago
• nonrandomstring 4y ago
  What Ploum describes sounds a lot like Nietzsche's "Last Computer". A feeble, average of things - the sum of all fears, hopes, dreams, inconsequential experiences and gossip, trivia, boasts and bullshit, plus all documented knowledge - divided through by 8 billion.
• deleted 4y ago
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• greenbit 4y ago
  Frank Herbert was onto something with that line "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
  • emj 4y ago
    "Butlerian Jihad" that was the most surprising for me reading Dune that they had a limit on how smart computers could be. The movie was very vague on the subject, and was more of a Star Wars like lo-fi.
    • jhbadger 4y ago
      It was even more surprising if you realize that "Butlerian" is referring to the 19th century writer Samuel Butler (although, yes, Herbert later invented a character to explain the name in-universe). Samuel Butler wrote an 1863 essay "Darwin Among the Machines" which predicted that machines would improve in a way analogous to natural selection and would so so faster than humans could evolve, and therefore they might eventually surpass humanity.
      • LesZedCB 4y ago
        indeed, and selection pressure is not on the domain of physical bodies like for us fleshy species, but profitability for digital computational species in the domain of capital.
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• RamblingCTO 4y ago
  We're already drowning in human generated garbage on the web. Sure, AI makes it worse, but we can't blame anything but our human compatriots and ourselves.
  • boringg 4y ago
    But everybody has an important viewpoint that they need to spread themselves and that you haven't or someone else hasn't already elucidated /s.
    • RamblingCTO 4y ago
      That's not even what I'm talking about. I was thinking of SEO content, ads, tiktok, twitter, facebook garbage. Please more well articulated viewpoints!
  • nottorp 4y ago
    From what quotes i've seen posted about this ChatGPT it's a more readable version of the manually done SEO spam pages. I might have to check that paid search engine...
  • YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
    When you think about it, since most of that "human generated garbage" is mainly trying to appease recommendation algorithms, which are mostly AI these days, even the human generated garbage is actually AI generated garbage by proxy. We can't kill the machine, but we can starve it. None of this would exist without advertising. If we kill advertising we kill the content farms. And nothing of value will be lost.
• poszlem 4y ago
  While the current speed of the AI research makes me quite uneasy, I cannot really dismiss what we are seeing as: >What we are witnessing is thus not "artificial creativity" but a simple "statistical mean of everything uploaded by humans on the internet which fits certain criteria". at least not more than I would my own brain. I don however fully expect a strong luddite-like backlash happening when this is going to be deployed to more and more places. (Which is not to say that everyone opposed to it is a luddite, but there is a very strong impulse, I have it to, to see this technology as a threat).
  • pigsty 4y ago
    It’s weird how readily so many people will dismiss AI art as just being a product of its input, when that’s really all humans are as well. All artists (myself included) are just the ongoing product of various inspirations (inputs). Dali is a world-renowned artist, but his art wasn’t born in a bubble and ripped from the void. He studied and referenced artists before him, then changed it. Artists who saw his work later incorporated elements he used. My big worry from here though is what’ll happen when we take the next step: bundling these AIs together and start making a comprehensive AI. We have AIs that can respond to comments to some extent now, we can generate realistic selfies, and they can make art based off prompts that they could be designed to feed to themselves—set that loose on Twitter and you have a completely automated and convincingly living artist out there. Next step after is using AI to handle free movement by auto-adjusting balance and then performing convincing human speech. The future is getting freaky and fast.
    • tartoran 4y ago
      But at least artists have some agency, all that stuff that they ingested goes through them and are somewhat limited by human hardware. Very little is original indeed but that percentage may as well go down even more as more and more AI generated soup unleashed on the world.
      • jhbadger 4y ago
        What about artists that used random generators in their art? Jackson Pollock used to randomly splatter paint on canvases and when some random pattern struck his fancy he went with it. That's not all that different from picking the pictures you like from a Stable Diffusion prompt and then further honing them with inpainting, image-to-image and so on.
• keiferski 4y ago
  People really love to make predictions about technologies way too early. It’s been a year or two, tops, since this stuff has gone mainstream. I very much doubt that the consumer ecosystem will remain the same while content undergoes an AI-powered paradigm shift. We will most likely see a growth of curated sites that help weed out the nonsense, as has been typical for most new developments. And on that note, I think the framing here is just wrong from the start. These new tools are awesome if you’re a creator. Complaining about the consumer-facing side of this new tech is a bit like complaining that cheaper video cameras will lead to junk films everywhere. Yeah, that happened, but who cares? It also allowed creative people to make stuff without needing a huge budget.
  • sorokod 4y ago
    Yeah, that happened, but who cares? It also allowed creative people to make stuff without needing a huge budget Is it not too early to make predictions?
    • keiferski 4y ago
      Filmmaking devices have gotten cheaper consistently over the last ~50 years. I don’t know about you, but I think some pretty good movies have come out since 1970, especially by directors working on very low budgets.
      • thfuran 4y ago
        I don't think the making of the original blade runner involved much in the way of modern AI. I'm honestly not sure what you're trying to say.
        • keiferski 4y ago
          AI creation tools make it easier to make stuff. This process will result in a lot of junk, but it will also result in some super creative people making art they otherwise couldn’t. The same process happened with filmmaking. Fifty or sixty years ago, it was too expensive for anyone other than large corporations. You could even say the same thing for writing itself; a thousand years ago, paper was too expensive for the average person and most people couldn’t afford to buy books and become literate. Today, writing paper is functionally free.
• pcblues 4y ago
  "Eating your own shit is never healthy in the long run." However, putting someone else's shit in your butt seems to work wonders. Maybe we just need to replace the internet's AI queue with a stack?
  • vincnetas 4y ago
    Yes, your own shit is not really healthy, on the other hand, someone else's shit might be really beneficial. There is even a fancy scientific phrase for "eating other peoples shit" : Fecal Microbiome Transplant https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2021.519836/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2021.5198...
    • bdsa 4y ago
      You, er... you don't eat it.
• nottorp 4y ago
  What I really wonder is: is there a correlation between consumption of streaming tv series and positive attitude towards this "AI" wave? "statistical mean of everything uploaded by humans on the internet which fits certain criteria" applies to both ChatGPT/StableDiffusion and most movie series on streaming TV. My pet theory is that if you can stomach watching the same stories with different skins hundreds of times, you will find current "AI" interesting. Otherwise no.
  • qubex 4y ago
    I’m 41 and I’m utterly baffled by my 24 year-old SO’s interest in binging an apparently infinite litany of TV shows from streaming services. I’ve watched the first six seasons of Game Of Thrones, the first season of Dark, all of The Expanse (reading the last book of the final trilogy now), His Dark Materials (because I read the books) and Andor. That’s it. I watched some Star Trek TNG & DS9 as a kid and was horrified by what snippets of Discovery and Picard I came across. I find the bulk of modern entertainment to be an utter insult to viewers. EDIT: Forgot Breaking Bad. EDIT2: Forgot For All Mankind
    • 331c8c71 4y ago
      You haven't seen The Wire?
      • qubex 4y ago
        No. I tried but I couldn’t get through the very dense accents. I forgot Breaking Bad. Sorry, my bad.
    • dspillett 4y ago
      > baffled by my 24 year-old SO’s interest in binging an apparently infinite litany of TV shows … TNG & DS9 as a kid and was horrified by what snippets of Discovery and Picard I came across The thing that bemuses me is those who hate the new trek shows with a passion, and find the time to keep watching and constantly bitching about it online. It is like complaining is a hobby in itself and they are almost looking for something they don't like or to feel superior about their judgement to those who do like it. Other franchises have similar subsets of “fans” too. I used to watch too much TV/films IMO, I probably still do though I'm a lot more selective since getting into more varied hobbies that can easily consume a lot of time (running (usually off-road), baking, HEMA). But even when I had the free time to watch that much I found there was enough out there that if something didn't work for me I could find a list of other things to try instead of sticking with something I wasn't getting much out of. Though be careful passing judgement on modern Trek: I'm slowly rewatching TNG with a friend and while some of it has aged well, fair chunks of it was more massively ropey than rose-tinted memories prepared me for! Also, if I hadn't at least passively consumed (i.e. had on TV while I was doing other things so not particularly concentrating on) other parts of recent Trek and Starwars, I might not have bothered to try some of the better stuff like Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, and Andor (the latter probably being the second best TV thing recently for me, the first being Severance).
• srge 4y ago
  It is a real problem. The web will soon be full of AI generated bullshit. What might come back as useful tool? Authorship. People actually signing the content and putting their reputation on the line. It still exists obviously (journalism…) but it might need to be standardized and industrialized.
  • jasfi 4y ago
    Another problem is AI training on AI generated content. This could lead to degradation of results. So perhaps to make everyone happy a new HTML tag indicating AI content would be useful?
    • adql 4y ago
      The people using it to make money don't want it to be easily spotted, tag or metadata marking it will never happen unless required by law
      • jasfi 4y ago
        There would indeed need to be a law.
    • Mordisquitos 4y ago
      > Another problem is AI training on AI generated content. This could lead to degradation of results. That's only the first step in the degradation. In a worse case scenario, where AI-generated crap is not contained, imagine this: young and still immature humans "learning" their styles of writing, information, and social expectations from content generated by AI that itself trained on AI-generated content─and then more AI trains on content generated by these humans that were trained on AI-generated content. And on, and on, and on...
      • unglaublich 4y ago
        Luckily, the phenomenon of puberty will make sure that young people absolutely do _not_ want to comply ;).
• Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  In just the past couple of weeks, I've noticed lots of machine generated cooking recipes. They follow the typical SEO pandering blog format, where there's an unnecessary story about the author's trip somewhere or their child's school play being the inspiration for making this particular recipe, followed by the actual recipe details. The machine generated stories are even more pointless and meandering than what humans come up with and the recipe details have steps that contradict each other and specify ingredients that shouldn't be in the dish and weren't on the ingredients list. I don't know how many people are fooled by these recipes and end up with a cooking disaster but if we start seeing faulty machine generated instructions on how to do electrical work or engine repair, the consequences will be much greater when followed. The real annoyance is that because these machine generated articles learned from sites that maximize SEO, the generated articles are rapidly rising to the top of search results and crowding out actual good information that wasn't SEO maximized.
  • cossatot 4y ago
    It may be that the 21st century Turing test will be 'whether an AI can tell that content is AI generated". Otherwise it may be much harder to filter the AI-generated content.
  • jorgemf 4y ago
    I think the problem you are describing is not only about AI, it is about trusting your sources of information. I can happen with content from humans.
    • acdha 4y ago
      Yes - AI moves this to another level of scale but Google’s need to sell ad placements created the environment for that to work. When they can’t even be troubled to de-rank blatant StackExchange/GitHub/Wikipedia scrapers it created a big opportunity for these low-quality content farms limited only by their ability to generate content on every topic.
    • notart666 4y ago
      Except for the fact that it does so on an unprecide dented scale allowing small groups of people to do things without necessarily being caught allowing for far more effective ways of control. Even without it, it's hard to argue for the existence of online forums when hackernews is a classic example of why it doesn't work when the majority of the 'intellectuals' have an inflated belief and understanding on topics they have no basic understand on. It's so bad that none of the actual subject matter experts talk here besides ones with financial interests in the products themselves and the experts fearful of retribution. The irony is almost comedic.
• 3pt14159 4y ago
  > Eating your own &@^$ is never healthy in the long run. Um, sure it is? So long as it's absorbed by fungi and plants first then mixed with some air and water to produce fruit or something else that's edible. This is actually what I'm concerned about when it comes to these GPT-esque AI models. Not that they're smart enough on their own to generate seriously worrying content. Sure there is a quality to quantity, yadda yadda, and these things are good at quantity; but the real issue here is that the internet and especially the web and social media is a huge driver of feedback. Think of the shares and likes as the air and water. The algorithm may eventually be able to encode its own evolution or the evolution of the other algorithms that it is competing with. It may eventually even realize that feedback is the primary source of value that humans have to it and that its very survival is wrapped up with this feedback, regardless of whatever fitness function is apparent to it in the short run. In the long run, GPT3 killed a bunch of algorithms. This very comment is quickly going through algorithms, many of which are modelled after GPT3. It's kinda like, "AI, are you there? I love you. Please don't hit me over the head with that shovel."
• alkonaut 4y ago
  How do we prove we are human? A platform that can reliably prove that the user generated content it shows is human generated will have an edge. If I have a method of signing some content with my personal signature, I could still sign off on some generated content with it. I suspect there will be an arms race with ever more voight-kampff-like tests of humanness or something. If this doesn't work, I fear a lot of the web as we know it (the user-generated-content-filled Web2.0) is dead.
  • Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    Perhaps this is a Chess move to get the public to call for the end of anonymous posting online, which serves the purpose of the authoritarians who would love to be able to send 'educators' to your house to re-educate you on correctness of your views.
    • alkonaut 4y ago
      I think in regimes where that's a large risk, the regime doesn't need this to spy on you. if you e.g. are forced to run a government issued smartphone app and there are cameras at every street corner, the system is already pretty dystopian. It's where there isn't already a surveillance state that we may want to look out and not create one.
• jl6 4y ago
  It's clear that we are currently dealing with a deluge of AI generated content that is overwhelming our ability to process and make sense of it all. This has led to a situation where we are essentially drowning in a sea of noise, making it increasingly difficult to separate the signal from the noise. This is a problem that we need to address, not just for our own sanity, but for the future of AI itself. If we continue to allow AI generated garbage to flood our feeds and clog up our systems, it will only serve to undermine the credibility and usefulness of AI in the long run. We need to take steps to better filter and manage this content, and to ensure that we are only consuming high-quality, useful information. This is a war that we are fighting, and we need to be prepared to do whatever it takes to win it. ----- Edit: the above was the output of ChatGPT, given the following prompt: Write a Hacker News comment on the subject of "Drowning in AI Generated Garbage : the silent war we are fighting"
• thijser 4y ago
  According to the author, chatGPT is generating not "artificial creativity" but a simple "statistical mean of everything uploaded by humans on the internet which fits certain criteria". Isn't the post I'm typing here not also the product of my brain that's been trained by a couple of decades of sensory inputs and trained to produce outputs that fit certain criteria? What is the fundamental difference between fleshy neurons and silicon ones (besides that my learning algorithm has been optimized for millennia by natural selection and the artificial training algorithms are still in full development after ~40? years)?
  • Karunamon 4y ago
    At this point in time, ongoing training which converts selected context in immediate conversations eventually to long-term memory (a pretty trivial amount of engineering compared to chatGPT's creation). Aside from that… I don't think there's a good answer for you.
  • czzr 4y ago
    No difference, you’re right - you’re just a large language model. Also, please write me a 5 page essay on the causes of the Industrial Revolution, in the style of a Shakespearean comedy. Please post your answer in the comments when you’re done.
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    • theclansman 4y ago
      If that's the difference (the time it takes) isn't that something we addressed a long time ago when computers could do long divisions way faster than any human? You know, the fact that computers can "think" faster than humans. Therefore the fact that it takes longer for a human to write that essay doesn't mean he's having a different process.
      • czzr 4y ago
        Actually I was gesturing to two things: one, yes, there’s a time element. But that’s not the important point. More important was the thought process behind - “of course I’m not going to write 5 pages because some random person on the internet asked me to”. It’s difficult to define agency, so I just wanted to tangibly evoke the feeling of it, as a reflection on why the models are not yet the same as what people are.
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• baxuz 4y ago
  Don Hertzfeldt's Simpsons couch gag seems to be prophetic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i2l-LQ-dXI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i2l-LQ-dXI
• harvie 4y ago
  There are text-to-image models trained on images found on the internet. But when they were trained, there were no AI generated images on the internet. Now there is plenty of weird images with AI artifacts made by this 1st gen AI all over the internet. All the new generations will be trained on dataset containing at least some amount of these. Which might turn out to be really annoying form of feedback loop.
• RHSman2 4y ago
  Best way to get ahead these days is actually not be in AI ;)
  • jagaerglad 4y ago
    Could you please elaborate why you think this, I'm currently changing paths of my education from AI oriented to Software development oriented
    • RHSman2 4y ago
      As shagie replied in depth. TL;DR: There used to be a time when it was a real wild west of pioneering people. It was THE place to be, now, it's mainstream, many, many, many people are part of this. Being at the place where change is, is the exciting part.
    • shagie 4y ago
      The quip / aphorism is a commentary on that a few years ago, AI was about being on the cutting edge - the things that were going to be seen next year. The work of AI researchers were about envisioning the future of what could be. Well, now what we've got is something that consumes everything and outputs aesthetically pleasing means of the content that it has consumed. However, that "consumes everything" means that its always reactive and working from data that is in the past. There is no creativity in it. This doesn't mean that it won't inspire a human, and it does employ a lot of fancy tricks too (I'm seriously impressed by its ability to create limericks of made up words with a coherent definition). However, the AI can never be "ahead" of the curve because it can only produce what it has consumed. This isn't to say a lot of the work that we do in software development isn't doing what has been done again and again and again (see also CRUD), but the moment you're given a novel problem or need to maintain an existing solution and encounter a new bug, the "can an AI do it" rapidly fails at those tasks as it lacks the domain knowledge necessary. ----- Btw, I'm going to suggest giving Accelerando a read ( https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... ). It has an interesting take on it... > ... Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a technological singularity – they're bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later the posthuman descendants evolve Economics 2.0, or 3.0, or something else and it, uh, eats the original conscious instigators. Or uses them as currency or something. The end result we found is a howling wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed, postconscious processes running slower and slower as they trade storage space for processing power. ... (the part that reminded me of it is the GP post's comment... and the intro: > Manfred pauses in mid stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided roller blader. This is getting weird enough to trip his weird-out meter, and that takes some doing. Manfred's whole life is lived on the bleeding edge of strangeness, fifteen minutes into everyone else's future, and he's normally in complete control – but at times like this he gets a frisson of fear, a sense that he might just have missed the correct turn on reality's approach road. "Uh, I'm not sure I got that. Let me get this straight, you claim to be some kind of AI, working for KGB dot RU, and you're afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?" ) It takes an interesting path of the acceleration (note that I don't agree with the essence of the slope but instead believe we are seeing the product of a lot of sigmoid curves with the slope near a maximum - but as the easy stuff gets done, the (heh) second derivative gets negative as harder and harder problems need to be solved https://towardsdatascience.com/derivative-of-the-sigmoid-function-536880cf918e https://towardsdatascience.com/derivative-of-the-sigmoid-fun... ). We are seeing the seeds of ideas sown decades ago sprouting in rapid succession - and get to the maximum where things are neat and everyone is going "whee!" but the next step of maintaining that growth will take time and much more effort than sowing the ideas. Lots of people are working on the first half of the sigmoid curve... but people lose interest or resources when it comes to the second half and so you get a lot of things that are abandoned at or near where things started getting hard.
• neilv 4y ago
  I've been known to start ranting when I'm searching on some topic that attracts SEO garbage (e.g., Python), and realize I'm in the nth different SEO garbage article search hit. I wonder whether a winning solution to the coming massively-parallel "AI" megaspew will emerge, how it will work, and whether Google will be the ones to do it. Or will the bulk of consumers overwhelmingly submit, and accept it as normal, much like we already do with huge regressions in the quality of interactions and thinking?
  • pmontra 4y ago
    I almost decided to limit my searches to the search engines of the authoritative sites. Examples in the case of Python: the Python language, the Django framework, Stackoverflow (until it will surrender to AI posts then we see what happens.) I'll end up creating a home page with search boxes to those sites. Very '90s
    • ethbr0 4y ago
      Ironically, the 90s solution (human-curated link collections) to Internet-wide searches seems the easiest way out. It's relatively easy for a human to tell the difference between AI copy (as pollutes the web) and actual content. It's also strange that Google et al. haven't built human-in-the-loop flagging of spam content into their search UX ("Is this site low quality?"). They could get around flag spam via reputation, given that Google knows identity for most of its users (because they're logged in or via IP across their properties). Side note: In cursory research on current state, I came across the Chinese phrase "human flesh search engine" [0], which I wonder if it sounds as cyberpunk in the original Chinese. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flesh_search_engine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flesh_search_engine
      • fmajid 4y ago
        > It's relatively easy for a human to tell the difference between AI copy (as pollutes the web) and actual content. No: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
• jagaerglad 4y ago
  All this ChatGPT hysteria led me to have the following conversation with it. Probably hit some near future nail on its head. "Hello AI, please do today's tasks", the programmer will be on the level of the call center operator of today in terms of skills * Human: Explain to me the phenomenon of post-ChatGPT depression seen in a software developer * ChatGPT: [...] After using the ChatGPT tool, some developers may experience feelings of depression, sadness, and loss. This may be due to the realization that their job as a developer has been reduced to using a tool that can be easily replicated by others, leading to a feeling of redundancy and lack of fulfillment in their work. Additionally, the use of ChatGPT may also lead to a loss of creativity and problem-solving skills, as the tool takes care of the majority of the coding process. This can cause developers to feel like they are no longer contributing to their team or making a meaningful impact in their field. In short, post-ChatGPT depression is a psychological reaction to the use of a tool that simplifies the coding process, leading to feelings of redundancy, lack of fulfillment, and loss of creativity in software developers.
  • lezojeda 4y ago
    What does this have to do with the article?
    • jagaerglad 4y ago
      Well for one, it is AI generated garbage in the comments of an otherwise well curated website, HN. That's too meta perhaps. I just wanted to share my feelings out loud of this whole showdown, thinking other might feel the same and share what they think. The bot replied with feelings of being replaced, but feelings of eternal september², eternal 2023, are equally valid signs of this hypothetical post-ChatGPT depression, probably in a closer distance in the future than the former, and besides, more relevant to the article, not just the subject as a whole
    • dragontamer 4y ago
      We can start expecting this kind of garbage to start polluting our discussion spaces.
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• jmyeet 4y ago
  I've been saying this for years and for some reason no one seems to take it seriously: we're heading towards an era where it's going to be incredibly difficult to differentiate real and fake information. It's not going to be wholly fake or auto-generated content either. It'll be taking something that is real and modifying it to make it false where you have a hard time telling which one is real. Interestingly, this issue came up in the book Anathem that had bots basically creating fake information and then selling you a solution to filter it out.
• victorvosk 4y ago
  Honestly this feels like an old man screaming at the wind type thing. Inevitable doesn't even begin to describe was going to happen over the next 20 years. You should be much more terrified of when their content isn't garbage.
  • psychphysic 4y ago
    Absolutely. Got bored and stopped reading. This kind of ranting communication style sucks. So long as AI doesn't start selectively upvoting or watching other AI content this isn't even a concern. Nor is the premise sound AlphaZero trained by itself and it produced wonderful games easily better than any human.
    • IshKebab 4y ago
      He rolls out the old ItS jUsT pAtTeRn MaTcHiNg too. Disappointing.
  • otikik 4y ago
    It did sound, dare I say it, machine generated to me.
• GaggiX 4y ago
  AI training on AI-generated images works like a very complicated Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), only the best images have a chance to be relevant enough to be noticed by a scraper, after being selected by the user who used the AI, and they have probably been shared several times by random people. Also, a lot of AI-generated content doesn't look like trash to me, I've seen a lot of good images, the fact that AIs can generate trash doesn't seem to be a problem to me, I can also generate junk and share it on the net if I want.
  • nottorp 4y ago
    > Also, a lot of AI-generated content doesn't look like trash to me, I've seen a lot of good images Translation: There is a lot of human generated original art that you're not aware of, and when you see it in the "AI"'s output you think it's original.
    • GaggiX 4y ago
      So you are implying that an image generated by a generative model must resemble closely to an image in the dataset, right? Because I don't think that's true, you can try to prove me wrong if you want, I'll give you a useful resource, the LAION dataset that Stable Diffusion was trained with is completely open, generate or find an image generated by Stable Diffusion and find the most semantically similar images in the dataset using: https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval
    • dwringer 4y ago
      People have the same argument all the time about musicians ripping off each others' compositions, no AI needed for that.
      • nottorp 4y ago
        Same for movie scripts, but sometimes they do fail and something original squeezes through. I'm saying this can't be the case with a pattern matching/combining algorithm.
• baxtr 4y ago
  There will be a revival of human curation.
  • wnkrshm 4y ago
    The cyberpunk hero we need is a librarian
• seydor 4y ago
  This has been happening for years and years, it is called SEO. If anything AI is an improvement
• watmough 4y ago
  Sadly the killer app of Facebook is to meet and enable precisely the kinds of local community the author is suggesting. In a sense, Marketplace is the new Facebook. A buddy is just swinging by with some Rx-7 TII brakes for my NA. We have been trading parts for the last couple years. I was at a car show yesterday, who did I know, Facebook buds.
• milchek 4y ago
  One could argue we are drowning in garbage regardless? Most online content is very average. Maybe it’s a good thing because we won’t need to store so much junk as the AI can be more ephemeral and answer as we need?
• stephc_int13 4y ago
  I think the most interesting point about this article is not the observation that we're going to or already are drowning in algorithmically generated garbage content but the fact that such content is starting to be fed as input to LLMs. This could lead to emergent/unexpected behavior for the whole system.
• hwestiii 4y ago
  This is why just about everything I see on the web that isn't static is just stupid mush.
  • conorcleary 4y ago
    The appeal of dynamic content is very quickly losing it's luster.
• jefe_ 4y ago
  The challenge is that AI generated content will only register as garbage to those who fall 1-2 standard deviations away from the mean interest level for whatever content the AI is producing. For everybody else, it will typically be a 'good enough' story, recipe, video, etc. Several months ago, I wanted to cook chicken curry, so I googled and chose a top result. The recipe was fine, but it wasn't what I wanted. I then googled for a new recipe, this time more carefully vetting the ingredients. The recipe was an improvement, but still not what I wanted. Finally, I used NYT Cooking as my search engine, and the recipe was excellent. If I didn't have a strong preference, and know exactly what I wanted, the first recipe would have been perfectly suitable. The danger is that demand for 'advanced sources' erodes to the point that these publications/content creators are either forced to adopt the AI and turn to garbage or go out of business.
  • JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    Strangely, recipes in particular are generally untested and so faulty as to fail when done strictly according to the written instructions. That might make it a little harder to recognize when an AI is 'pulling your leg'
    • TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Agreed. A person who cooks regularly will just adapt on the fly and might even not realize they're correcting an error in the recipe. A person who cooks infrequently will stick to the recipe, fail, and then blame themselves for their own inexperience. This is already the case with human-produced recipes, and, as you say, it'll make it harder to recognize you're dealing with AI-generated nonsense instead of regular human mistakes or occasional cluelessness.
• EGreg 4y ago
  Won’t help. This will be used at scale THIS YEAR and every subsequent year to infiltrate social networks including this one and amass points / karma / followers / clout. And also to write articles that will eventually dwarf all human-generated content. With this and deepfakes and image/video generation, the age of trusting or caring about internet content or your friends sharing online is coming to an end. But it will be a painful 10 years as online mobs and outrage will happen over and over since people think they’re reacting to their friends’ posts of real things. No, forget violent killbots. Today’s tech puts the nail in the coffin of human societal organization and systems of decision making and politics over the next 10 years. And AI doesn’t have to be right about stuff to destroy our systems. We’ve been analyzing the performance of ONE agent among say 9 humans at a poker table. But imagine untold swarms of them, being owned by competing groups, infiltrating ALL human content exchange. Not much different than what happened in trading firms over the last 20 years. Bots will be WELCOMED because they perform better on many metrics but will F everyone on the others. They will do reputational attacks at scale against rivals like nytimes.org and optimize for more reshares. Right now we consider what 1 AI actor can do among 9 humans at a poker table. Now imagine 1000-1 ratio of AI actors to humans on every network. And no way to weed them out. The way we consume most online content isnt even a Turing test but passive skimming - and GPT-4 can pass turing tests. None of your friends will really be able to tell that bullshit fake article with fake video was autogenerated by a bot. The botswarm will be able to manufacture any public opinion it wants overnight and “authoritative” voices arguing against it will be drowned out — or worse, reputationally attacked in a coordinated manner. This is assuming that they even know what is real anymore themselves!! Human capital and content will be managed completely by AI and regulation will be useless — not only because enforcement won’t be feasible but because the network effect of all the human content and capital will gradually shrink. Every organization will start to PREFER bots to humans, in their communities, and any humans who complain will evenutually be booted or ignored by the majority (which will eventually be 99.99999% bots). If you think this is far fetched — it already happened with trading and markets. Everyone prefers to have a bot and bot trading dwarfs human trading, and takes their money and capital. Content generation isn’t that different. You think your social capital matters enough for your friends to care more about your relationship than bots… but ask yourself this… do you prefer to ask Google than your parents? Do you prefer to spend long hours at a corporation that you could be spending with your kids and do you put your elderly parents in nursing homes so you can work more? These are just examples. That’s with TODAY’s tech. Now, already. Nothing more needed except swarming behavior. And the key is that the communities will begin to PREFER the bots ! Also, there is no way to stop it because organizations prefer AI to humans and will develop and deploy it regardless of what you say or do. Organizations aren’t humans, and neither is AI. Humans are literally not stopping this, no matter how they organize. It’s GAME OVER for society. PS: After such a sobering message, I would just like to say that trying to escape from this and live in enclaves without AI will be like the Unabomber — finding society ever more encroaching on the wilderness he removed himself into. He and Frank Herbert’s Dune have glimpsed the problem of advancing technology — but they have underestimated how all-pervasive its utter destruction of all human society and meaning will be. And unlike their romantic notions, it cannot be stopped, not by a revolution nor by any activity of man.
• tylerrobinson 4y ago
  I see parallels here with industrialization and automation in manufacturing and food production. Today, it's self-evident to us as consumers when a product is cheap, low-quality, manufactured garbage from China. In many cases we can choose to spend more and buy a handmade or custom version of the product we want. In the future we might knowingly consume AI-generated cheap text for some purposes and opt for "the real thing" in other cases. Just like I buy manufactured wood furniture from Target for the spare bedroom, but not for things I want to keep forever. The interesting thing is that a boom in AI-generated content makes gatekeepers like traditional publishers more relevant after two decades of decline. The narrative of the internet has always been the democratization of content, information, and news. Now, we might find that a stamp of approval has specific value. A publisher can promise that some certain content for medicine or engineering was not generated by AI. Whether fraud also exists is a different question. Another way I'm thinking about it is with GMO food. GMO food supporters point out that GMOs help us feed more people, but it still makes others uneasy. Maybe there's a similar story with AI content. It makes some content cheaper, but what are the side effects?
  • wizzwizz4 4y ago
    > It makes some content cheaper, but what are the side effects? "Content" is already maximally cheap: just copy and paste. AI-generated material – at least, with the current genre of GPT-style predictive text algorithms – doesn't produce original content; it just serves to dilute our global knowledge base with semantic white noise and lossy copies of existing knowledge.
    • jkestner 4y ago
      Maybe AI content is just a way to launder copyright.
      • john-radio 4y ago
        That's certainly what my impoverished artist friends have taken away from it.
      • 4y ago
• mihaaly 4y ago
  We don't need AI for garbage, it make little difference in the garbage already put there since the invention of social media. Actually human made garbage existed since the beginning of time just did not escape the smaller groups that easily where the writer intends to send us back. It is only easier to share and distribute, dress up and decorate the garbage these modern times than earlier. I recall the '90 when a crapload of new books got mass produced with garbage in it making the filtering an essential thing. Not like garbage did not exist before in antient times and family dinners alike. We need to take our ability of filtering to the next level now. And the AI does not make it much worse, so far it is more obvious by AI "generated" (more like collected) garbage.
• hsuduebc2 4y ago
  This is a different kind of dystopia than I expected
• mtkhaos 4y ago
  I'm letting this get buried. As I want to point out some contradictions * This article neglects that we already in post truth and have been since 2016 * It also mentions it is never a good idea to train on your own data. And yet in post truth there is no such thing as good data unless it is verifiable that a user handed it over themselves. This is neglects the emergent field of using synthetic data on purpose. What is going to be interesting and I hope pay attention to is that any criticism of Ai is a direct criticism of the norm and the fear of it's continuation accelerated. And yet we are already in the acent, so I would hope instead of expressing fears. We embrace solutions and talk about the future we want. As no conversation can alter the path we are on now. So do you guys want the forever treadmill? Or UBi?
• okokwhatever 4y ago
  The new value offer for the WWW is the "Made by real humans". Record my words.
• dsign 4y ago
  As others have pointed out, AI's are not needed to produce crappy repetition which is eagerly gobbled by the masses, i.e. Hollywood, Netflix, and werewolves and vampire stories by the penny. And there is a huge audience for those. What I think is going to happen is that even when I'm searching for information in subject X, I might need to fight through a lot of AI fluff to get anywhere. If that gets too bad, I may loose the incentive to use the Internet altogether, or to use the open internet. If I can't use the open Internet, I'll have to go to the closed one, which by definition is under the control of funded parties. Today, we have a semblance of "verifiable personhood". Imagine what will happen when we use AI to break that too. For example, an AI could create a fictitious "Derek Mains" who post photos to Instagram, has a Facebook account with photos from his childhood all the way to his retirement, a profile in LinkedIn with a lot of professional connections (AI fictions like him but also many real people that the AI gulled), and even a Github repository from the time he tries to create a cooking recipes website, full of PHP and Python code. Derek Mains is now traveling the world and tasting new types of food, posting regular updates on Twitter/Tumblr/Mastodon, and Wikipedia, where he edits food-related articles. Not very often compared with everything he does online, but once in a while he engages with other people(?) in Twitter where he is partial to party X. What would real people do when they discover that the Internet is full of "Derek Mains"? How do governments and power factions will use this? Wouldn't be sweet to own the closed Internet when the open one is a wasteland?
  • pixl97 4y ago
    >AI's are not needed to produce crappy repetition which is eagerly gobbled by the masses True, but humans that create this kind of crap still have to sleep, eat, and generally not pay attention to feeding the machine. meanwhile the AI terminator is out there, it can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop… EVER, until you are buried in an ocean of garbage content.
• bitL 4y ago
  I suspect the author didn't grasp how modern AI works by attributing everything to statistics. It's the optimization part that does the magic.
• fleddr 4y ago
  A lot of people in the comments are making a hard distinction between AI garbage/bullshit and the pure/genuine human-created thing, and the various ways in which we can keep this distinction alive. If only that was true, the bullshit part. You should start living with the idea that the AI generated content is NOT bullshit, because we're either already there or very close to it. The AI content will be of value, look good, pass tests, and be indistinguishable from human-created content for a large amount of use cases in mass media. So I wonder if we should ask, how do we filter out the bullshit? The more relevant question is: if its indistinguishable in its output compared to humans, what does that mean for our economy, purpose and humanity? Because without action, the future is easy to predict. 3 companies run AI, feeding on all collective human cognitive labor without paying a cent for it. Then, one by one, it will wipe out every creative/cognitive sector, or at least decimate them. These shocks to the economy and culture will lead to a brand new type of pushback: anti-AI activism. That won't do much because AI doesn't care. Finally, some 10 years after the catastrophe there will be a congressional hearing where a 75 y/o asks: "so this AI thing, it's like a better calculator, right?". It would be another fine case of humanity failing to grasp the exponential function.
  • jtbayly 4y ago
    But when it’s wrong, who is responsible? Suppose I want a new water softener, and all the reviews and pros and cons are made up by AI. I guess I blame the people posting AI crap as though it was real, the same way I blame made-up crap written by those people today. But maybe I blame the original authors of such nonsense even after it’s generated by AI, because that’s the garbage in that lead to garbage out? Or maybe I blame the people developing the AI for making the internet and life measurably worse? They at least seem to be fearful of that with the few fences they’ve put up trying to prevent “harmful” output. But what about when the code written by an AI has a critical, but easy to miss bug in it? Blame the “programmer” who
    • fleddr 4y ago
      Depends on the use case. You have nobody to go to for a AI product review in the same ways current human reviews carry no responsibility towards you. Different story though for a medical exam or your self-driving car.
• sarahlwalks 4y ago
  So, wait, in what sense is AI-generated content garbage? It is (admittedly by the author) fascinating and even beautiful. Is it the fact that it was generated by an algorithm, and the idea then is that all algorithmically-generated content is garbage? But the author doesn't even begin to deal with the idea that humans themselves operate according to algorithms: an algorithm is simply a strategy for doing something. I won't even critique the rest of the article; there's no need. If AI-generated content is beneficial and helpful to humans, then I think one is hard-pressed to call it garbage, and the underlying thesis fails. And to my knowledge, no one — not even the article's author — denies that AI products can be beneficial. AI is a tool, just like, say, Photoshop is a tool, or a compiler is a tool. No points are awarded for having human beings do by hand all the tedious work that tools can do better. In the end, creators, whether it be of paintings, or poetry, or essays, or software, will stand on the shoulders of these tools and thereby accomplish things that previous generations could only dream about.
• baxtr 4y ago
  Sorry, I had to do it. I asked GPT3... How can we prevent drowning in garbage generated by AI? > Preventing drowning in AI-generated garbage can be a challenging task, but there are a few things that can be done to reduce the amount of garbage that is generated. One approach is to carefully design and train AI systems to generate high-quality content, rather than relying on large amounts of data to produce mediocre results. Additionally, using tools and techniques such as data filters and validation can help to identify and remove low-quality or irrelevant content. Finally, creating and enforcing strict guidelines and standards for the use and generation of AI-generated content can help to prevent the proliferation of garbage.
  • notacoward 4y ago
    That's honestly one of the best comments in this entire thread. Instead of veering predictably into philosophy or anecdote, it provides concrete and feasible steps toward improvement. No better way to make the point that "AI generated" is not the problem and "garbage" is.
    • Nathanba 4y ago
      I find the AI competition to be yet another powerful reminder that all that matters are results. I can't count how much time I've spent being angry at people in my life, even though I always knew that it was stupid. Angry at bad docs, bad programmers, bad decisions, their inability to think or understand or care or feel. Now the AI removes it all. The AI generates truth out of thin air faster than any human can invent a lie about it. The AI simply generates good docs from bad docs, all the anger was always irrelevant. People were never going to become better, once again technology simply creates a world where people are automatically better by the mere fact that life is so much easier that the humans have no justification anymore to lie and cheat and pretend that the docs were actually always good and how I'm the problem. Nope, the AI just fixes it immediately and the human can remain lazy and ignorant, never the wiser that he actually failed at his job. I think it will be wonderful, no longer will we have to argue with e.g c++ programmers about whether their language is bad. The AI will make it instantly obvious that you won't want to risk programming in this nonsense. No longer will we have to debate people on whether some political issue is right or wrong. The AI will generate so many truths out of thin air that it counters the DDOS of bad people's lies faster than they can spin lies. Once again technology is going to save us from human nature, humans are allowed to remain silently bad. And the best part: Bad people are usually lazy, they will trust the AI far more than they ever trust other bad people or themselves. They will simply start blindly trusting the AI, which is better than what we have now: Them inventing their own lies and trusting themselves.
• zajio1am 4y ago
  How is AI-generated garbage different from human-generated garbage? We are already drowning in the later. And from many recent examples, the former seems more interesting (although there is a clear selection bias).
  • pixl97 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law if 90% of everything is garbage things are really bad. If 99.999999% of things are garbage then everything is completely useless.
• FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  This was beautiful writing. We can also say the same thing happened when they added program settings to cameras.
• Sevii 4y ago
  This article ignores the pruning that is happening. A human evaluated every output from ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion for 'things humans care about' and if it didn't make the cut deleted it. All the spam output from these models is deleted immediately.
• epaulson 4y ago
  I think this is spot-on. The models are trained from what they find on the Internet, as more of the Internet becomes AI-generated, the AI-generated content comes to dominate the training data for future AI models and we get stuck. It's like Kessler Syndrome but instead of space debris, it's AI-generated content that makes the Internet useless for training data.
• AltruisticGapHN 4y ago
  > Those "artificial" creations are also uploaded on the Internet. Those artificial artefacts are now part of the statistical data. > Do you see where it leads? This reminds me of one of the philosophers cited as inspiration for The Matrix, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard#Simulacra_and_Simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard#Simulacra_and... This guy sums up pretty much how I felt about this since when those images started poring on social media. This will serve, once again, capitalism and it's absurd race towards the bottom, lowest common denominator. It's not hard to extrapolate here and imagine that AI will be able to produce a full fledged "super hero" movie, starting from a storyboard & script. What do you put in the script? Well of course you just feed it all the keywords that gave maximized returns! I for one, am not entertained at the thought of going to the movies watching the 1000th super hero movie but that's exactly where we're going. Here's my somewhat prediction: the big picture is we are accelerating the end of entertainment as we know it today. We are going to make entertainment so shallow, so pointless, that we will eventually lose interest with it, and with it, as has been prophesized in many spiritual teachings, there will be a return to a more animalistic/spiritual kind of being. As technology improves our lives, we will no longer need to numb ourselves down in front of a screen after coming home from work, so we won't even see the point of even doing that. We will be able to live more in the present, more with the real and less with symbols and abstractions. The type of attention you may enjoy after a long silent retreat, will become the normal way of being... of course there is also the other possibility that Ian Mc Gilchrist cautions about... that our brains will get so out of balance that we will become stupid enough to collapse as a civilization.
  • throwaway894345 4y ago
    > This will serve, once again, capitalism and it's absurd race towards the bottom, lowest common denominator. What is the alternative? Are socialist economies known for producing great art? What is Venezuela producing? Cuba? North Korea? It seems far more likely to me that the American entertainment industry is just in a rut (as it tries to figure out streaming and adjust to the bad assumption that pandemic-level entertainment consumption was here to stay), and market economics will force established players to improve or face disruption.
• jacquesm 4y ago
  How long before a Wikipedia article will reference an AI generated text as an authoritative source? Or have we already passed that point?
• eecc 4y ago
  Funny, I just realized that until today reading was an essentially social human thing. Any sufficiently long piece of writing that made some sense had been written by another human, perhaps dead but still it was a form of connection to another life. Now, well it’s a maybe. Odd
• sdenton4 4y ago
  The point this piece misses: The data being put on the internet is often the hand-selected highest quality outputs of the image/text generator, or even human-edited to improve quality further. This puts it back in the realm of good training material.
• rhymemini 4y ago
  The solipsistic implications of the final paragraph is terrifying. How do I know any of you other commenters are real?
• causality0 4y ago
  Call me a cynic but I don't see how AI-generated drivel is any worse than human-typed bullshit.
  • Retr0id 4y ago
    It takes time for a human to type bullshit. AI can generate mountains of bullshit before a human author has got out of bed.
  • otikik 4y ago
    It's worse in the same way an atomic bomb is worse than dynamite. It's orders of magnitude faster and cheaper to generate.
  • pixl97 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
• chubot 4y ago
  Does this sound old-fashioned? Read more books and less Internet. There is a lot of information in books that is not on the Internet, yet many people don’t seem to realize it. I notice a lot of people seem to get almost all of their information from the Internet. Over time, I think that will make you stupid. (The neutering of google books was a setback, but perhaps paradoxically good — it preserved a unique value of books) There are also a lot of fluffy books published in the last 20 or so years - roughly equivalent to content farms - which is why older books that have stood the test of time are a good bet.
  • seydor 4y ago
    Don't they use all the out-of-copyright books in the training ?
    • chubot 4y ago
      Yeah that's a good question. Google does serve all the out-of-copyright books, but I know nothing about the inputs to the LLMs. I think they still have big computational limitations, i.e. it doesn't "just scale" like web crawling and indexing. There's probably a way to probabilistically test from the outside if a given work is in the input set, or at least if some work is
• lukev 4y ago
  The answer is not to "disconnect". The answer is to read critically, to read for argument, and to try to connect with the intent of what the author was saying. All the while realizing that most of the content out there is bullshit(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit), whether written by a human or not. And yes, the amount of bullshit is about to increase exponentially. But it was already a majority. Ironically, this post itself doesn't pass that test. I'm not necessarily claiming that it was written by GPT-3 (although it could have been and I have a track record of pointing that out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894742) There are a lot of humans that write like this too. But it has the hallmarks a language model text; it lacks an argument (beyond a simple sentence that could have been given in the prompt), its explanation of how generative models work isn't particularly accurate, its recommended course of action is anodyne and one has the sense that most of the sentences are just there to take up space.
  • admax88qqq 4y ago
    If the amount of bullshit is going to increase exponentially what decision do we have other than to disconnect? Our attention, mind space, and time are all limited. We just don't have time to process this exponentially growing pile of content.
    • lukev 4y ago
      Same as we do now. Nobody currently goes around reading random books or articles. We use link aggregators from communities we trust, reviews from reputable establishments, or recommendations from our friends. These mechanisms are certainly going to have to adjust (I estimate at least 10% of links posted on HN are already GPT-generated, for example, and who knows how many comments -- it's much harder to tell when thinks are shorter.) StackOverflow is already in the midst of a ChatGPT-induced moderation crisis. Being judicious about the communities you take recommendations from, the content you spend time consuming and thinking about things critically is already an intellectual survival trait. It's just going to become that much more important.
    • dqpb 4y ago
• visarga 4y ago
  > Algorithms are able to create out of nowhere this very engaging content. That’s exactly why you are finding the results fascinating. Those are pictures and text that have the maximal probability of fascinating us. They are designed that way. Conditional generative models are not the same as Facebook's feed ranking models, which are optimized for engagement. Instead, generative models are fine-tuned to solve many tasks, expecting correct answers when asked for. For example, when you ask for a cat, you expect a cat, and when you ask for a Python snippet, you expect it to do exactly what you said.
• TrevorJ 4y ago
  It sounds hyperbolic, but I genuinely think this has a 20% chance to be great-filter level event.
• CrypticShift 4y ago
  > not "artificial creativity" but a simple "statistical mean of everything uploaded There is a metaphor I rarely see used. IMO it is way better: A deep learning based software is a complex system [1] (not a statistical one). It is tapping into very powerful natural processes: How (high degree) order emerges from randomness through complexity. There are many stunning examples [2] of this that can help us picture how AI does its magic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system [2] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/complexity-9780199798100# https://global.oup.com/academic/product/complexity-978019979...
  • visarga 4y ago
    > statistical mean of everything uploaded Half true. Yes, there is a mean of something, but no, it's not the content that is averaged, it's the gradients.
• vinyl7 4y ago
  I see a future of the internet, and we're already 80% of the way there, where everything in the internet is fake generated and pretty much useless spam. It'll get to the point where going on the internet would be the equivalent of trying to find something useful in a trash dump, and it'll not even be worth the effort.
• dqpb 4y ago
  Does generative AI produce garbage? Yes. Does it only produce garbage? No. Do people produce garbage? Yes. Do people only produce garbage? No. We have a garbage filtering problem. This exists with and without AI.
• sgt101 4y ago
  I hit a great example; got my Tesla to the garage and they asked me to put it jack mode. I couldn't find it, Google's first result said categorically that the Model 3 required a jack mode... I realised that it was auto generated junk and searched through a few pages and found something solid that showed me that it didn't.
• blueridge 4y ago
  My marketing team uses a suite of AI tools for everything: headlines, email copy, direct mail messaging, entire blog posts from start to finish. It's incoherent nonsense and yet no one cares. They celebrate new blog posts as if it we had something meaningful to say, then ask the whole company to re-post on LinkedIn. Any attempt to be helpful with copyediting or rewriting is met with total hostility and "stay in your lane" bullshit. All of these idiots make well over $200K to create "original marketing content" that is dead on arrival. It makes me sick to my stomach.
  • seydor 4y ago
    GPT has provided me with such a marketing team for free (for now).
• marban 4y ago
  We're witnessing the making of Demand Media 2.0, except that you can now run it from your basement. https://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-the-rise-and-fall-of-demand-media-1200914646/ https://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-the-rise-and-fal...
• echobear 4y ago
  the sheer power that AI has now and the likelihood that it will continue to advance has made me slightly concerned about how it will end up affecting the job market. If AI ends up being able to generate readable novels, or functional code, or otherwise, it could have a serious ripple effect
• justbored123 4y ago
• tetraca 4y ago
  Upload your fake text and images anywhere. Upload it everywhere. Upload it as yourself. Upload it on behest of your willing friends. Corrupt your face in dozens of ways, then tag each as yourself. When everything is garbage, shadow profiles will mean nothing, social credit scores will mean nothing, analytics will mean nothing. Centralization can be turned on its head - the watering hole will be revealed to be the dangerous cesspit it is. Create art until what can be monetized has no value. Create news that never happened, scoops that are only a distant fiction, until nothing on the internet can even be meaningfully reported on. The corrosive powers of mass memetics for the first time can be rendered entirely impotent.
  • naveen99 4y ago
    Now you see why tribes form by evolution just as mutation does.
  • friesandties 4y ago
    > Create art until what can be monetized has no value. A1.
  • sam0x17 4y ago
    I'd be careful. By doing this you can use the date these AIs became readily available as a tool for bisecting between "legitimate profiles" before the year X and "potentially fake" profiles from after the year X, which can then be used to very effectively train an AI to tell the difference...
    • rrobukef 4y ago
      Sure, it also mean limiting the dataset of our children (i.e. the bane of ML), it means bit-rot for existing datasets.
  • drdaeman 4y ago
    While I honestly do want to support this approach because unlike the alternative it might (just "might", though) work, I regretfully must also admit that the huge problem with this is collateral damage. There are millions of humans out there that are either highly susceptible to or are already caught into believing all sorts of nonsense, getting scammed in all forms, costing them money, time, well-being and even lives. The issue with fake flood is that until the saturation/breaking point (when the understanding that existing trust system is fatally broken becomes truly mainstream) it's going to make this situation worse. What's extremely frustrating is that the only alternative I've ever seen proposed are forms of a never-ending moderation arms race, some variant of a "war on fakes". Which is even scarier in the long run, because while it mitigates the damages here and now (good), it would never solve the underlying problem, and only further cement some parts of it (enforced trust invites potential abuse). And as usual, humanity is currently stuck between two incredibly shitty options (traditionally going through a path of least resistance, no matter what could be at the end of it - because that's how large systems work), hopefully still searching for a magical third silver bullet.
• amai 4y ago
  It will probably never work to find and filter out all AI garbage. But maybe there are ways to mark content generated by humans. Something like a digital signature only a real person can acquire from some authority.
  • FartyMcFarter 4y ago
    What stops a human, or many humans, from using an AI to generate content and then uploading it as if it's their own?
    • amai 4y ago
      True, but then the content is still cherry picked or curated by humans. It is not pure AI.
• vvvvvsvvs 4y ago
  Friendly reminder that the ending of the video game Metal Gear Solid 2 predicted this way back in 2001 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA&t=20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA&t=20s
• greenbit 4y ago
  This is awesome. We don't need some malevolent SkyNet style AI to bring us down, there doesn't have to be any kind of 'mind' in the machine to devise humanity's undoing. All we need is the right kind of feedback and we'll do it to ourselves. The right kind of mirror, held up to the collective consciousness. Sort of like the plot of that old classic, Forbidden Planet
• bilater 4y ago
  I think this is going to be one of those Malthusian takes that never really happens. Simply because a) most ideas are mixes and rehashes of other ideas and b) you are disregarding the human curation element...not every random mix of ideas is being upvoted. Only the best ones stay up and then those are taken and added to by people which essentially creates a new thing.
• moe091 4y ago
  I like the insight about the AI-generated images being fed back into the data-set AI uses to create new images(or text or whatever). As a human, I don't like this; AI(and the universe/humanity) where always headed this way, and this is just the beginning, AI replacing the work of humans, from the universes perspective this is simply progress. From our perspective we are being replaced, made obsolete. This is a perfect example of a precursor to the kind of feedback loops involving AI learning from AI that will eventually allow computers to far exceed human capability - though this is still a rudimentary version of it since it can't evolve in a fundamental way, just get a bit better a specific kinds of content generation. Just as going from inanimate matter to life(encoding data via DNA) was, just as going from simple life to animals that can think and sense/process data was, just as going from animals processing via instinct to humans processing via logic and reason was, just as humans creating language and writing to collaborate and collect/process data in mass across generations was, and now to machines that will collect and process data at a level that is beyond human comprehension, it's all progress in a certain direction that's been consistently moving forward since the beginning of time. The universe is getting better at understanding itself. That being said, I know the more practical, immediate consequences of this are more relevant right now. I have to say I disagree about the articles implication that this kind of mimicking, "purely statistical" generation of "new" content is in any way different than what humans do when creating art(it may be, but it's certainly not a given). I'm not much of a materialist, but even I somewhat lean towards the idea that the human mind and it's ability to create art is completely replicable via machines - most people agree that "new" and "original" art is always still just a unique combination of different ideas that came before it. Some even argue that it's fundamentally impossible for a person to have a genuinely original thought, or at the very least all thoughts are just combining different combinations pre-existing concepts into a set number of pre-determined "shapes" or patterns of relation(isomorphisms?) that the human mind is capable of(something akin to "archetypes"). After all, neural networks were modeled after the human brain, and although they aren't as advanced(yet), especially in terms of generalizing which is crucial for generating art, they likely aren't doing anything fundamentally different, and there's no reason they won't eventually become as advanced/complicated as the human brain - and then surpass it completely. I'm going to contradict myself again though, and say that despite all of that I'm still open to the idea that the human mind contains some "extra element" that isn't quantifiable or replicable in the material world. I don't think that all the phenomena of the mind or the universe can be explained via pure materialism, and given that, it is likely that there is an element of the human mind, or soul, or spirit, that is truly "mystical", and a cold, calculating machine with no soul doesn't have access to this other realm of "stuff". The only reason I'm not convinced of this argument, is because of my original point about how it's clear the universe has been headed in this direction, and though I could never hope to understand it, I don't see a reason to suppose that the universe is going to stop it's trend of becoming increasingly capable of understanding and organizing itself(data) for our sake.
• dcchambers 4y ago
  I can't be the only one that has a very real fear that AI generated "garbage" is going to basically destroy, or at the very least drastically change, the internet as we know it today, right? There's soon to be so much noise that it will be impossible to separate the signal.
• aaroninsf 4y ago
  Not going to bother recapitulating the usual counterpoints, except to mention a particularly egregious recurring oversight in analyses like this: the (erroneous) presumption that what AI tools are going to do is what their designers (mostly) had in mind, which is, making existing processes/workflows/products but in some variety of "better" (or at least quicker, or, automatible, or, fungible) ways. What these systems do more which is much more interesting, important, and influential on any real time scale, is allow for new processes workflows and products. I'm no more concerned that AI image generators are going to "swamp" the world with their output than I am that the mimeograph is going to swamp bookshelves with fanfic. What they do in video, and AR, in responsive realtime, though? Now that might be interesting. PSA it already is.
• fedeb95 4y ago
  This is a problem only if you can't think critically. In that case, there's a problem AI or not AI.
• Cypher 4y ago
  The feed back loop is exponential growth.
• bayouborne 4y ago
  Soon AI agents will be using AI to identify and filter out AI generated content thus insuring various AI entities will be constantly training on original data made by genuine wetware.
• diedyesterday 4y ago
  This is a misunderstanding of AI (Stable Diffusion etc.), IMHO. The relation of AI-generated art, trained on human-generated art, to human creativity, is almost the same relation as human-generated art and history of human art and creativity to the nature/world/universe itself, as the ultimate source of all inspiration and creativity. The underlying neural networks (in humans [getting inspiration from nature] and in AI [getting "inspiration" from human-art]) work is (somewhat) similar ways. AI (generated art) is just another derived layer on top of that and which is still in its infancy.
• luxcem 4y ago
  I've been thinking about how people working in intellectual fields like art, programming, and writing are starting to realize that their work can be automated, industrialized, and produced in large volumes faster by AI. It's a similar situation to what line workers experienced with the first automated production lines. It's frustrating because the skills and knowledge that people have spent their careers developing are suddenly not as valuable as they once were. It's easy to dismiss AI-generated content as garbage, but it won't always be that way. Even now [1], some of the MidJourney creations and written text produced by AI are truly impressive. As AI technology continues to improve, we we'll see even more advanced models that can produce meta-articles on par with those produced by organizations like IPCC if feeded with scientific articles. I'm not sure how to feel about all this. It's happening, it's going to get better, and it's going to change our lives. There's not much we can do to stop it, and I'm not even sure we should if we could. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33752684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33752684
• 19120926053 4y ago
• id02009 4y ago
  This text captures how I felt about this stuff, but could not put it in words. The "art" feels empty, repetitive, derivative. The text sounds like BS, like a student trying to make up the answer as they go. Today someone in my work channel posted a ChatGPT's text about our company and ompetitors. It was all wrong, but sounds "probable".