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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 c

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.
  - sarahlwalks 4y ago
    You can only say that if you also say that the creativity of human beings themselves is just a way to launder copyright.
    - ducktective 4y ago
      "Good artists copy; great artists steal" -Pablo Picasso
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      There's this magic phrase that makes all the difference: at scale.
      - visarga 4y ago
        People scale. There's billions of us. And we compete.
        TeMPOraL 4y ago
        AIs scale faster. Just one instance can do the work of billions of people, and have its owner profit off it.
        visarga 4y ago
        How can the owner profit off something that is "free" to make for anyone? Mass spamming is hard to achieve with current day social networks.
        TeMPOraL 4y ago
        Mass spamming is the very raison d'etre for social network companies. It goes by different names though - "sponsored content", "fanpages", "influencers", etc. The spam did not disappear with people moving away from e-mail. On the contrary, it's just been given legitimacy by the platform owners - who all happen to make money from spam.
      - 4y ago
  - paulmd 4y ago
    Well, the uncomfortable truth is that our copyright regime doesn't really make sense. An AI is sort of the equivalent of a junior coder or an art student - it can look at existing work and mash it up and produce something in the same style that's novel (inspired by a prompt - which is like your teacher giving you an assignment). That's copyrightable when it's a human being doing it, and there is no inherent protection for art style, I can make all the Picasso-style artwork I want even if I'm blatantly ripping off his style, and I would own the copyright on the resulting works. Like, if I do a painting in the style of Picasso, should Picasso get the resulting copyright? Why? And programmers are not without sin either - how many people here run to stackoverflow and copy some answer, or mash it up and produce something similar-but-cleaned-up? That's going to get a lot more powerful in not too many years too... and the thing is, is your little DTO file with blocks of fields and setters and getters really novel and worthy of a government license to cultural exclusivity, or is it a relatively obvious implementation of an API? Which (per Oracle v. Google) are also not really copyrightable... Humanity hasn't squared the reality of most content being low-value generative trash already (despite being human-generated!) with the reality of a system that automatically awards up to ~150 years of exclusivity (lifetime of the author +75 years). Like, that's the long and short of it. A lot of what we do as humans is just building up a squishy water-filled neural net ("how to make a painting in the style of Picasso") and running random prompts and goal-seeking through it and cleaning up the generative output. Now AIs have gotten to the level of "average college student" and it turns out that's not actually all that difficult or interesting anymore, but we're still working in this model where that's supposed to be worth ~150 years of cultural exclusivity and protection automatically. If you only get copyright on the things that are truly novel and have no previous creative basis or cultural/stylistic heritage... that's a pretty big change to the copyright system for humans too! Especially in light of the fact that there's only a few ways to implement most configurations/functions... does Spring own all the copyright to your config classes because they're basically doing the same thing as the spring demo projects? hard to see much novelty in that sort of thing pretty much ever, so those probably should not be copyrightable at all under a "totally novel" requirement, but if they do surely Spring owns the copyright. As mentioned in a sibling comment, the "at scale" bit is surely relevant in a practical sense, but, it doesn't change the underlying-principles basis. This is a situation where "at scale" has just thrown the underlying problem into stark relief. A 2-lifetime (life of author +75 years) governmental grant of cultural exclusivity doesn't really make sense in a world where humans are constantly and trivially mashing up each others' ideas even within a single lifetime, it just doesn't fit the way we exchange ideas in general. And now you have the college-student-bot that can generate a million shitty DTO classes or artworks-in-the-style per day that makes that plain. But ultimately it's just doing the same thing as an art student but faster... if you put an art student in a Mechanical Turk box and made them draw whatever you demanded, would they not own the copyright? And would it be a problem if India had an art school that set up an "industrial art" process and employed a million students in boxes drawing whatever you said to draw? It would probably be problematic for DeviantArt commissioners, but would it violate the principle of copyright? We just haven't managed to square that reality where most human works are fairly trivial derivatives of other works (your deviantart commissions really don't mash up any similar works or styles that came before? really?) and yet worthy of 150 years of license to cultural exclusivity. And the college-student-bot is blowing that model up. People still need to eat, of course, but that's an orthogonal problem to the societal framework we've set up not really making sense. We can solve the copyright problem and not the eating problem (as we have many times before - buggy whip manufacturers adapted too), or we can solve the eating problem and not the copyright problem, or solve both or neither. People not being able to eat and shelter themselves is a capitalism problem, not a GPT problem, and we will probably have to address the idea that everybody needs to work to survive as machines continue to displace the last strongholds of human labor (as I'd argue creative work has become). We should not be restricting our ideas on collaboration and cultural generation just because it produces inconvenient outcomes for the current copyright regime and capitalistic model, the model needs to bend to fit humans and not the other way around. This isn't the only place the inherent contradictions and problems of copyright come up either. The idea that a nighttime photograph of the Paris skyline could be copyrighted by someone else other than the photographer who created it is pretty janky too. Is a photographer not adding significant creative value with composition/etc? Literally just having that one element makes my photo derivative? Maybe that's the analogy to GPT/stable-diffusion I guess - but the thing is, it still works the same with a human as with a robot, an AI-generated Paris skyline still would be copyrighted by the architect too. And if the argument is that the code owner or original artist owns the style, then, Pablo Picasso owns the copyright to all my paintings too, just like the architect of the Eiffel Tower owns the copyright to my photographs of the Paris nighttime skyline. And Spring (or Oracle!) owns the copyright to a great deal of your Java code. So that probably is not going to work out great for you either.
- visarga 4y ago
  Generative models do have a contribution - they adapt what is on the internet to a specific task or request. In the case of Copilot, it will use your variable names in the generated code. And not everything generated by a model should be saved. Some are just for one time use, for fun, therapy, brainstorming, etc.
coldpie 4y ago
I agree with everything you wrote, but I really dislike contributing to the negative spin on GMOs. GMOs are super important for our future and a really amazing technology, they really do not deserve the bad wrap they've gotten from science ignorants and marketing departments. Please don't disparage GMOs :)
- colordrops 4y ago
  Many of us can agree to disagree on GMOs.
- jmount 4y ago
  It isn't so much the "G" of GMOs, but that they are mono-crops usually licensed by near monopolies like Monsanto. Things are going to be bad when something goes wrong with one these, and there is no replacement and no way out of the licensing fees.
  - alexb_ 4y ago
    Monsanto is great, because you can immediately know that someone is just regurgitating points when they mention the company. Monsanto hasn't existed for years. And patents run out. Being concerned about patents is a very weak argument against technology which saves lives around the world (using non patented crops, no less!) and is responsible for allowing more people to eat healthier food.
    - acdha 4y ago
      Monsanto was acquired by Bayer, yes, but did their business practices change? This feels like trying to play gotcha when someone says Comcast instead of Xfinity when they were referring to the reputation built under the earlier name.
    - misto 4y ago
      First, Monsanto and its way of operating very much still exist. Just because it was purchased by another company (which of course resulted in an even greater monopoly), does not make its impact to the world disappear. Second, everytime this topic comes up, pro-GMOist make it sound like the technology is making some great strides with providing 'healthier food for everyone' with no downside. Why is it that the current model for GMO aims to increase resistance to pesticides instead of simply growing the yield? It probably has nothing to do with the fact that the company that provides you the seeds, also sells the pesticide. And how about the said pesticides tendency to destroy the micro-organisms in the soil, in effect making it harder to grow crops, and ultimately starting a loop for "more GMO, more pesticide, more land, repeat". Figure a less disruptive business model, and I might be more pro-GMO myself.
brookst 4y ago
You’ve illustrated two things, one spot on and one true but in the opposite direction. 100% agreed that AI is like early industrialization in that we don’t even know the messes we’re creating, and wild excess is likely to haunt us. But GMO foods are the opposite: people feeling “uneasy” is not an indication of harm. All foods are GMO. People are just uncomfortable with the modifications being in a lab rather than over thousands of generations of selective breeding. The side effects of GMOs are the same as side effects of selectively bred food. There is no magic.
- bloak 4y ago
  Genetic modification in a laboratory is not exactly the same as selective breeding as it can easily bring in a gene from a different species causing unexpected allergic reactions to the corresponding protein. This has caused at least one death of a human. I'm not opposed to all genetic modification, in fact I think it's generally a good thing, but the business has to be carefully regulated. Industry claims that it's totally safe are clearly inaccurate when someone has already been killed by it. There's no point in having strict rules on food ingredients and labelling if manufacturers are allowed to, in effect, include any chemical whatsoever that can be built biologically: all they have to do is genetically engineer it into wheat (say) and write "wheat" in the ingredients. And the consumer has no idea what they're getting.
  - ejensler 4y ago
    You've been misled about GMO causing an allergic reaction death: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gmoverdose/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gmoverdose/. I suggest you do more research on the benefits and risks of GMOs from more reputable sources. From my understanding, the primary risks of GMOs are less to do with human health and more about environmental risks, such as creating superweeds that can outcompete native plants or negeative effects on soil microbes.
  - brookst 4y ago
    I'm skeptical of the claim that a protein included by GMO was both 1) the cause of a death, and 2) could not have been produced with traditional selective breeding. Can you source those claims?
fatneckbeardz 4y ago
another food analogy would be how farmers started grinding up dead animal carcasses and feeding the results back to live animals (i.e. making cannibals out of vegetarian ruminants), which resulted in an outbreak of prion diseases like Mad Cow / CJ.
inciampati 4y ago
"Makes me uneasy" stands for "makes me want to be careful", and imo this is an essential motif in engineering practice. The key is to remind ourselves that food is engineering, and with inputs and outputs which could have vast ramifications for human health and safety. GMO should be regulated and systematically evaluated by an array of public oversight systems. The concern is that it requires PhD levels of knowledge and scientific mindedness to understand and evaluate GMO in a pragmatic, effective way (that doesn't dive into religious pseudoscience---I'm looking at you DNA-free bottled water). An even huger problem is that understanding this issue in a broad sense requires renaissance person levels of capabilities and personal sensitivity. (Does it matter that food is complex, interesting, driving unique sensory experiences? Let's make it sweet baby, that hits in the taste tests.) The same is true, perhaps even more so, for our information diet. It defines our reality.
onepointsixC 4y ago
GMO's are a completely different thing though. A crop which who's gene's were hand picked by a human to be more drought resistant instead of naturally are completely different conversation and different morality. Vaccines make people uneasy, just like GMO's, but that doesn't mean that unease particularly equivalent to AI or the same moral issues. AI already is drowning out human made content on websites for creatives. Aided in no small part with their curator's malicious insistence to not label their posts as AI generated. It's only going to get worse as AI art becomes better.
archon1410 4y ago
> 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. a very apt analogy perhaps in a way you didn't intend. it makes people uneasy, there's a natural reaction towards the unnatural, maybe for emotional reasons. it's the same way with GMO crops and AI poems—they will not be able to tell the difference between actual creativity and "artificial artefacts"/"random statistical noise", but they're supposed to have mystical difference. One authentic, the other inauthentic. One that is actually good, and one that merely tricks you into thinking it is good. But don't attempt to scientifically determine if there's any difference... you'll be disappointed.
- avereveard 4y ago
  GMO difference is not mystical. GMO allows for massive quantities of weed killer to enter our environment with not well understood effects. It has been recently linked to the bee collapse for example. And that's before considering monocultivar risks which are well understood and the underhanded ways gmos are handled by corporations, which are well documented.
  - archon1410 4y ago
    I had not there was as much non-mystical opposition to GM crops. A cursory Google search seems to suggest the evidence for GMs contributing to colony collapse disorder is very weak (and the amount of pesticides in the environment might not have much relation to GM crops). But going forward I will keep in mind that it's not as simple as I had imagined it to be.
- hoosieree 4y ago
  Australian Cane Toads and Kudzu are why GMOs make me uneasy. People have a poor track record of predicting the consequences of releasing life forms into new environments. As a human, my reaction may still be emotional, but it's based on evidence.
forgetfulness 4y ago
The food analogy would probably be more along the lines of the mass availability of foods fashioned from refined ingredients designed for long shelf lives, i.e. "processed foods". Produced at scale, durable, easily distributed, enticing flavor, if it's actually any good for eating is far down the list of priorities when devising these things, as its effects are noticed far after purchase.
tejohnso 4y ago
> GMO food supporters point out that GMOs help us feed more people That seems like an odd thing to point out to me. More people is not an obviously positive thing for us or the planet. And we have enough food and wealth for everyone as it is. If feeding more people were the priority, it could be addressed in other ways. I think the primary motive behind GMO is increased control and profit. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there's a whitewashed motive as well.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
  This is overly simplistic and conspiratory. Yes, Monsanto is evil, but that doesn't mean everyone involved in GMOs is, or that's the only motivation. Look up the argument over golden rice. It's also ridiculous to just hand wave away crop productivity improvements with "but we already have enough food." We aren't going to revolutionize global food distribution any time soon, but we can do things that have concrete impact right now. We're also losing land to agriculture far too fast, particularly in the amazon. We need to be decreasing the amount of land used by agriculture, and GMOs are a very powerful tool in that interest. GMOs need to be regulated, and I think the IP regime that Monsanto is protected by should be struct down (not that I expect that any time soon). But please don't wave away the entire discussion with strawman arguments.
  - tejohnso 4y ago
    > But please don't wave away the entire discussion with strawman arguments. What strawman argument? I was responding specifically to the point I quoted that feeding more people is important. And I made a couple of points specifically against that position. So where's the straw?
version_five 4y ago
We already do as you're saying with "content". The throwaway paperback novels are already predictable cheap trash (I still read them, not judging, but they're providing a different type of stimulation for which that bar is lower than something that makes you think). These are already written in a formulaic way that is equivalent to being computer generated, it just took a bit more human effort until now. Same for TV programming, art, I assume video games, etc...
TeMPOraL 4y ago
Everyone is (rightfully) picking on your GMO example, but I want to address something else: > Today, it's self-evident to us as consumers when a product is cheap, low-quality, manufactured garbage from China. Correct. > In many cases we can choose to spend more and buy a handmade or custom version of the product we want. Not quite. It's increasingly hard to find a version of a product that's not low-quality garbage - the expensive option is often just the cheap option with extra markup for those who got fooled by marketing, or naively believe companies still care about their brands. That's the unexpected side effect that, I feel, people still mostly failed to realize: because running a company and manufacturing anything has nontrivial costs, letting the market race to the bottom hollows out the middle. You're left with a bunch of specialty vendors who make quality goods for other businesses or governments, at ridiculous prices, and the low-quality throwaway garbage for everyone else. The "more expensive, reasonable quality" product group disappears - the vendors move either into low-quality crap or too-expensive-for-individuals specialty items (or sometimes both), as the middle can't compete with either end. I imagine the threat of AI-generated content to be similar: as it completely blows the bottom across creative industry, it will hollow it out. Skilled creators will, when they can, move to the high-end Big Art, where you pay more for the work's provenance than for the enjoyment itself, because they won't be able to afford competing with somewhat worse but much cheaper AI-generated shovel-art. (Also relevant is that regular people are usually as good at distinguishing between crap and good products as they're at distinguishing between crap and good art.)
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  I feel this so much in my life. I used to be a mid price buyer but eventually what I bought ended up in the "expensive, but still crap" category far too many times. Now I just buy crap all the time, it lasts just as long, and at least I know I'm getting what I pay for.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    Right. I still try to look for mid-prace quality goods, but in the recent years, I've started to realize it often had bad ROI. What's extra annoying is that companies are burning brands on this, and as they're transitioning from selling quality goods to peddling cheap crap, they of course don't tell you about it. Instead, you see metal being swapped for plastics, screws for glue, assembly being worse and worse - while their marketing departments double down on highlighting how pretty, modern, quality and smart this years' model is.
di456 4y ago
I've thought about spending $8 towards a local paper subscription, inspired by Twitter's paid version.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
> 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? The analogy to GMOs seems more connected to the self-replicating nature than to any potential health side effects.
moe091 4y ago
That's a great parallel, especially since it supposes a possibility of a good(or at least acceptable) ending to all this, rather than just spiraling into chaos. I only fear that there won't be enough profit motive for such gatekeeping/curation, which would only happen if very few people were willing to spend more money for human generated content. I can see this potentially not happening, either because the tech advances to quickly for people to even tell the difference, or people do realize but don't care because the AI learns to feed them exactly what they want(exactly what's happening with a lot of BS "news" already). Or maybe a decent group of people do see the value in real content, and pay for it, but the majority still remains oblivious or indifferent, and the effect it has on this majority is still enough to influence the direction of the world negatively enough that even those groups who avoid it will be forced to accept the consequences of living in a world created by AI and the majority of other people

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.
- sarahlwalks 4y ago
  You can only say that if you also say that the creativity of human beings themselves is just a way to launder copyright.
  - ducktective 4y ago
    "Good artists copy; great artists steal" -Pablo Picasso
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    There's this magic phrase that makes all the difference: at scale.
    - visarga 4y ago
      People scale. There's billions of us. And we compete.
      - TeMPOraL 4y ago
        AIs scale faster. Just one instance can do the work of billions of people, and have its owner profit off it.
        visarga 4y ago
        How can the owner profit off something that is "free" to make for anyone? Mass spamming is hard to achieve with current day social networks.
        TeMPOraL 4y ago
        Mass spamming is the very raison d'etre for social network companies. It goes by different names though - "sponsored content", "fanpages", "influencers", etc. The spam did not disappear with people moving away from e-mail. On the contrary, it's just been given legitimacy by the platform owners - who all happen to make money from spam.
    - 4y ago
- paulmd 4y ago
  Well, the uncomfortable truth is that our copyright regime doesn't really make sense. An AI is sort of the equivalent of a junior coder or an art student - it can look at existing work and mash it up and produce something in the same style that's novel (inspired by a prompt - which is like your teacher giving you an assignment). That's copyrightable when it's a human being doing it, and there is no inherent protection for art style, I can make all the Picasso-style artwork I want even if I'm blatantly ripping off his style, and I would own the copyright on the resulting works. Like, if I do a painting in the style of Picasso, should Picasso get the resulting copyright? Why? And programmers are not without sin either - how many people here run to stackoverflow and copy some answer, or mash it up and produce something similar-but-cleaned-up? That's going to get a lot more powerful in not too many years too... and the thing is, is your little DTO file with blocks of fields and setters and getters really novel and worthy of a government license to cultural exclusivity, or is it a relatively obvious implementation of an API? Which (per Oracle v. Google) are also not really copyrightable... Humanity hasn't squared the reality of most content being low-value generative trash already (despite being human-generated!) with the reality of a system that automatically awards up to ~150 years of exclusivity (lifetime of the author +75 years). Like, that's the long and short of it. A lot of what we do as humans is just building up a squishy water-filled neural net ("how to make a painting in the style of Picasso") and running random prompts and goal-seeking through it and cleaning up the generative output. Now AIs have gotten to the level of "average college student" and it turns out that's not actually all that difficult or interesting anymore, but we're still working in this model where that's supposed to be worth ~150 years of cultural exclusivity and protection automatically. If you only get copyright on the things that are truly novel and have no previous creative basis or cultural/stylistic heritage... that's a pretty big change to the copyright system for humans too! Especially in light of the fact that there's only a few ways to implement most configurations/functions... does Spring own all the copyright to your config classes because they're basically doing the same thing as the spring demo projects? hard to see much novelty in that sort of thing pretty much ever, so those probably should not be copyrightable at all under a "totally novel" requirement, but if they do surely Spring owns the copyright. As mentioned in a sibling comment, the "at scale" bit is surely relevant in a practical sense, but, it doesn't change the underlying-principles basis. This is a situation where "at scale" has just thrown the underlying problem into stark relief. A 2-lifetime (life of author +75 years) governmental grant of cultural exclusivity doesn't really make sense in a world where humans are constantly and trivially mashing up each others' ideas even within a single lifetime, it just doesn't fit the way we exchange ideas in general. And now you have the college-student-bot that can generate a million shitty DTO classes or artworks-in-the-style per day that makes that plain. But ultimately it's just doing the same thing as an art student but faster... if you put an art student in a Mechanical Turk box and made them draw whatever you demanded, would they not own the copyright? And would it be a problem if India had an art school that set up an "industrial art" process and employed a million students in boxes drawing whatever you said to draw? It would probably be problematic for DeviantArt commissioners, but would it violate the principle of copyright? We just haven't managed to square that reality where most human works are fairly trivial derivatives of other works (your deviantart commissions really don't mash up any similar works or styles that came before? really?) and yet worthy of 150 years of license to cultural exclusivity. And the college-student-bot is blowing that model up. People still need to eat, of course, but that's an orthogonal problem to the societal framework we've set up not really making sense. We can solve the copyright problem and not the eating problem (as we have many times before - buggy whip manufacturers adapted too), or we can solve the eating problem and not the copyright problem, or solve both or neither. People not being able to eat and shelter themselves is a capitalism problem, not a GPT problem, and we will probably have to address the idea that everybody needs to work to survive as machines continue to displace the last strongholds of human labor (as I'd argue creative work has become). We should not be restricting our ideas on collaboration and cultural generation just because it produces inconvenient outcomes for the current copyright regime and capitalistic model, the model needs to bend to fit humans and not the other way around. This isn't the only place the inherent contradictions and problems of copyright come up either. The idea that a nighttime photograph of the Paris skyline could be copyrighted by someone else other than the photographer who created it is pretty janky too. Is a photographer not adding significant creative value with composition/etc? Literally just having that one element makes my photo derivative? Maybe that's the analogy to GPT/stable-diffusion I guess - but the thing is, it still works the same with a human as with a robot, an AI-generated Paris skyline still would be copyrighted by the architect too. And if the argument is that the code owner or original artist owns the style, then, Pablo Picasso owns the copyright to all my paintings too, just like the architect of the Eiffel Tower owns the copyright to my photographs of the Paris nighttime skyline. And Spring (or Oracle!) owns the copyright to a great deal of your Java code. So that probably is not going to work out great for you either.
visarga 4y ago
Generative models do have a contribution - they adapt what is on the internet to a specific task or request. In the case of Copilot, it will use your variable names in the generated code. And not everything generated by a model should be saved. Some are just for one time use, for fun, therapy, brainstorming, etc.

coldpie 4y ago

I agree with everything you wrote, but I really dislike contributing to the negative spin on GMOs. GMOs are super important for our future and a really amazing technology, they really do not deserve the bad wrap they've gotten from science ignorants and marketing departments. Please don't disparage GMOs :)

colordrops 4y ago
Many of us can agree to disagree on GMOs.
jmount 4y ago
It isn't so much the "G" of GMOs, but that they are mono-crops usually licensed by near monopolies like Monsanto. Things are going to be bad when something goes wrong with one these, and there is no replacement and no way out of the licensing fees.
- alexb_ 4y ago
  Monsanto is great, because you can immediately know that someone is just regurgitating points when they mention the company. Monsanto hasn't existed for years. And patents run out. Being concerned about patents is a very weak argument against technology which saves lives around the world (using non patented crops, no less!) and is responsible for allowing more people to eat healthier food.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Monsanto was acquired by Bayer, yes, but did their business practices change? This feels like trying to play gotcha when someone says Comcast instead of Xfinity when they were referring to the reputation built under the earlier name.
  - misto 4y ago
    First, Monsanto and its way of operating very much still exist. Just because it was purchased by another company (which of course resulted in an even greater monopoly), does not make its impact to the world disappear. Second, everytime this topic comes up, pro-GMOist make it sound like the technology is making some great strides with providing 'healthier food for everyone' with no downside. Why is it that the current model for GMO aims to increase resistance to pesticides instead of simply growing the yield? It probably has nothing to do with the fact that the company that provides you the seeds, also sells the pesticide. And how about the said pesticides tendency to destroy the micro-organisms in the soil, in effect making it harder to grow crops, and ultimately starting a loop for "more GMO, more pesticide, more land, repeat". Figure a less disruptive business model, and I might be more pro-GMO myself.

brookst 4y ago

You’ve illustrated two things, one spot on and one true but in the opposite direction. 100% agreed that AI is like early industrialization in that we don’t even know the messes we’re creating, and wild excess is likely to haunt us. But GMO foods are the opposite: people feeling “uneasy” is not an indication of harm. All foods are GMO. People are just uncomfortable with the modifications being in a lab rather than over thousands of generations of selective breeding. The side effects of GMOs are the same as side effects of selectively bred food. There is no magic.

bloak 4y ago
Genetic modification in a laboratory is not exactly the same as selective breeding as it can easily bring in a gene from a different species causing unexpected allergic reactions to the corresponding protein. This has caused at least one death of a human. I'm not opposed to all genetic modification, in fact I think it's generally a good thing, but the business has to be carefully regulated. Industry claims that it's totally safe are clearly inaccurate when someone has already been killed by it. There's no point in having strict rules on food ingredients and labelling if manufacturers are allowed to, in effect, include any chemical whatsoever that can be built biologically: all they have to do is genetically engineer it into wheat (say) and write "wheat" in the ingredients. And the consumer has no idea what they're getting.
- ejensler 4y ago
  You've been misled about GMO causing an allergic reaction death: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gmoverdose/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gmoverdose/. I suggest you do more research on the benefits and risks of GMOs from more reputable sources. From my understanding, the primary risks of GMOs are less to do with human health and more about environmental risks, such as creating superweeds that can outcompete native plants or negeative effects on soil microbes.
- brookst 4y ago
  I'm skeptical of the claim that a protein included by GMO was both 1) the cause of a death, and 2) could not have been produced with traditional selective breeding. Can you source those claims?

fatneckbeardz 4y ago

another food analogy would be how farmers started grinding up dead animal carcasses and feeding the results back to live animals (i.e. making cannibals out of vegetarian ruminants), which resulted in an outbreak of prion diseases like Mad Cow / CJ.

inciampati 4y ago

"Makes me uneasy" stands for "makes me want to be careful", and imo this is an essential motif in engineering practice. The key is to remind ourselves that food is engineering, and with inputs and outputs which could have vast ramifications for human health and safety. GMO should be regulated and systematically evaluated by an array of public oversight systems. The concern is that it requires PhD levels of knowledge and scientific mindedness to understand and evaluate GMO in a pragmatic, effective way (that doesn't dive into religious pseudoscience---I'm looking at you DNA-free bottled water). An even huger problem is that understanding this issue in a broad sense requires renaissance person levels of capabilities and personal sensitivity. (Does it matter that food is complex, interesting, driving unique sensory experiences? Let's make it sweet baby, that hits in the taste tests.) The same is true, perhaps even more so, for our information diet. It defines our reality.

onepointsixC 4y ago

GMO's are a completely different thing though. A crop which who's gene's were hand picked by a human to be more drought resistant instead of naturally are completely different conversation and different morality. Vaccines make people uneasy, just like GMO's, but that doesn't mean that unease particularly equivalent to AI or the same moral issues. AI already is drowning out human made content on websites for creatives. Aided in no small part with their curator's malicious insistence to not label their posts as AI generated. It's only going to get worse as AI art becomes better.

archon1410 4y ago

> 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. a very apt analogy perhaps in a way you didn't intend. it makes people uneasy, there's a natural reaction towards the unnatural, maybe for emotional reasons. it's the same way with GMO crops and AI poems—they will not be able to tell the difference between actual creativity and "artificial artefacts"/"random statistical noise", but they're supposed to have mystical difference. One authentic, the other inauthentic. One that is actually good, and one that merely tricks you into thinking it is good. But don't attempt to scientifically determine if there's any difference... you'll be disappointed.

avereveard 4y ago
GMO difference is not mystical. GMO allows for massive quantities of weed killer to enter our environment with not well understood effects. It has been recently linked to the bee collapse for example. And that's before considering monocultivar risks which are well understood and the underhanded ways gmos are handled by corporations, which are well documented.
- archon1410 4y ago
  I had not there was as much non-mystical opposition to GM crops. A cursory Google search seems to suggest the evidence for GMs contributing to colony collapse disorder is very weak (and the amount of pesticides in the environment might not have much relation to GM crops). But going forward I will keep in mind that it's not as simple as I had imagined it to be.
hoosieree 4y ago
Australian Cane Toads and Kudzu are why GMOs make me uneasy. People have a poor track record of predicting the consequences of releasing life forms into new environments. As a human, my reaction may still be emotional, but it's based on evidence.

forgetfulness 4y ago

The food analogy would probably be more along the lines of the mass availability of foods fashioned from refined ingredients designed for long shelf lives, i.e. "processed foods". Produced at scale, durable, easily distributed, enticing flavor, if it's actually any good for eating is far down the list of priorities when devising these things, as its effects are noticed far after purchase.

tejohnso 4y ago

> GMO food supporters point out that GMOs help us feed more people That seems like an odd thing to point out to me. More people is not an obviously positive thing for us or the planet. And we have enough food and wealth for everyone as it is. If feeding more people were the priority, it could be addressed in other ways. I think the primary motive behind GMO is increased control and profit. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there's a whitewashed motive as well.

jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
This is overly simplistic and conspiratory. Yes, Monsanto is evil, but that doesn't mean everyone involved in GMOs is, or that's the only motivation. Look up the argument over golden rice. It's also ridiculous to just hand wave away crop productivity improvements with "but we already have enough food." We aren't going to revolutionize global food distribution any time soon, but we can do things that have concrete impact right now. We're also losing land to agriculture far too fast, particularly in the amazon. We need to be decreasing the amount of land used by agriculture, and GMOs are a very powerful tool in that interest. GMOs need to be regulated, and I think the IP regime that Monsanto is protected by should be struct down (not that I expect that any time soon). But please don't wave away the entire discussion with strawman arguments.
- tejohnso 4y ago
  > But please don't wave away the entire discussion with strawman arguments. What strawman argument? I was responding specifically to the point I quoted that feeding more people is important. And I made a couple of points specifically against that position. So where's the straw?

version_five 4y ago

We already do as you're saying with "content". The throwaway paperback novels are already predictable cheap trash (I still read them, not judging, but they're providing a different type of stimulation for which that bar is lower than something that makes you think). These are already written in a formulaic way that is equivalent to being computer generated, it just took a bit more human effort until now. Same for TV programming, art, I assume video games, etc...

TeMPOraL 4y ago

Everyone is (rightfully) picking on your GMO example, but I want to address something else: > Today, it's self-evident to us as consumers when a product is cheap, low-quality, manufactured garbage from China. Correct. > In many cases we can choose to spend more and buy a handmade or custom version of the product we want. Not quite. It's increasingly hard to find a version of a product that's not low-quality garbage - the expensive option is often just the cheap option with extra markup for those who got fooled by marketing, or naively believe companies still care about their brands. That's the unexpected side effect that, I feel, people still mostly failed to realize: because running a company and manufacturing anything has nontrivial costs, letting the market race to the bottom hollows out the middle. You're left with a bunch of specialty vendors who make quality goods for other businesses or governments, at ridiculous prices, and the low-quality throwaway garbage for everyone else. The "more expensive, reasonable quality" product group disappears - the vendors move either into low-quality crap or too-expensive-for-individuals specialty items (or sometimes both), as the middle can't compete with either end. I imagine the threat of AI-generated content to be similar: as it completely blows the bottom across creative industry, it will hollow it out. Skilled creators will, when they can, move to the high-end Big Art, where you pay more for the work's provenance than for the enjoyment itself, because they won't be able to afford competing with somewhat worse but much cheaper AI-generated shovel-art. (Also relevant is that regular people are usually as good at distinguishing between crap and good products as they're at distinguishing between crap and good art.)

bcrosby95 4y ago
I feel this so much in my life. I used to be a mid price buyer but eventually what I bought ended up in the "expensive, but still crap" category far too many times. Now I just buy crap all the time, it lasts just as long, and at least I know I'm getting what I pay for.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Right. I still try to look for mid-prace quality goods, but in the recent years, I've started to realize it often had bad ROI. What's extra annoying is that companies are burning brands on this, and as they're transitioning from selling quality goods to peddling cheap crap, they of course don't tell you about it. Instead, you see metal being swapped for plastics, screws for glue, assembly being worse and worse - while their marketing departments double down on highlighting how pretty, modern, quality and smart this years' model is.

di456 4y ago

I've thought about spending $8 towards a local paper subscription, inspired by Twitter's paid version.

UncleOxidant 4y ago

> 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? The analogy to GMOs seems more connected to the self-replicating nature than to any potential health side effects.

moe091 4y ago

That's a great parallel, especially since it supposes a possibility of a good(or at least acceptable) ending to all this, rather than just spiraling into chaos. I only fear that there won't be enough profit motive for such gatekeeping/curation, which would only happen if very few people were willing to spend more money for human generated content. I can see this potentially not happening, either because the tech advances to quickly for people to even tell the difference, or people do realize but don't care because the AI learns to feed them exactly what they want(exactly what's happening with a lot of BS "news" already). Or maybe a decent group of people do see the value in real content, and pay for it, but the majority still remains oblivious or indifferent, and the effect it has on this majority is still enough to influence the direction of the world negatively enough that even those groups who avoid it will be forced to accept the consequences of living in a world created by AI and the majority of other people