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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 whic

by 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.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
As has been discussed here, the more AI generates the content the less humans generate content. Further AI generated content is much faster and cheaper to produce so it’s quantity will dwarf human generated content. This then feeds into the training set and becomes self reinforcing. There will be no collective human cognitive labor to source for free. I suspect to mitigate that AI companies will hire lots of people to simply write. This writing will be tailored to address shortcomings in the model and provide human mediated training material that’s targeted at training areas of difficulty for the models. The goal won’t be moderation, or editorialism, or producing original content. No one other than the machines will see the content written. The goal will be to improve the ability of the models to produce compelling content in volume for a marginally low cost - which may become dominated by the content creators feeding the machine. But it’ll be much less cost on the margin with a more predictable quality result than hiring individually unique humans to make hit or miss content at scale. (N.b., I’m only focusing on the free cognitive labor statement)
- fleddr 4y ago
  Sure, for a while people are needed to tune the machine, but it's not a sustainable model. I would expect that to generate only a fraction of the employment that AI will make obsolete. Further, if fine-tuning AI is a cognitive task, it has no future. That's the point I'm getting at: no cognitive task has any future, at all.
Nathanba 4y ago
I think you are right, AI content will not be distinguishable from human content. What we really need to figure out is the direction that we are going as humanity. This planet must quickly become too small for us, human beings will not be needed anymore which means we need to find bigger challenges or we will self destruct out of pure laziness and self indulgence. Personally I don't think AI will only destroy creative and cognitive sectors, it will destroy absolutely every single sector in existence. There won't be a single job left that a human can do better than a robot. And humans will also pick the robot worker over the human worker every time. This is what happened during the industrialization, it's not like a few factories said: "hey you know what guys, let's be a bit quirky and still use 100% humans for this factory just because we can.". No, nobody is going the human route. It would be objectively slower and worse and therefore you go with the robot. There isn't a single area in life where you wouldn't pick the robot over the human and the question is solely how fast we can get to implant some good AI into mechanical bodies.
- woojoo666 4y ago
  The solution is to integrate with AI. Why do people think Elon is working on Neuralink?
rcarr 4y ago
Alternative take: No-one likes being lied to. AI is the ultimate deception. People will stop using the internet for anything other than information retrieval for problems. Artists will create on digital tools and then return to analogue publishing formats and distribution networks. People will follow them because artists are cool and tech bros aren’t. There will be an emphasis on becoming a local success story rather than a global one. You can already see this happening some what. Vinyl records are increasing sales every year. People are getting tired of Spotify and are buying on bandcamp. Typewriters are growing in use. Digital book sales have stalled and people are buying paper books again. I think this will become a new social identifier, particularly for those on the left of the political spectrum.
- lovehashbrowns 4y ago
  The vast majority of people don't care. Netflix's recommendation algorithm helped take down physical video rental stores and TikTok's algorithm is taking out Instagram, Facebook, and even YouTube. Vinyl is particularly annoying to deal with. Even a small collection gets unwieldy quickly. I prefer physical books to ebooks but physical books are annoying to deal with, too. I've just given up on physical books for the most part. Typewriters are a joke; surely nobody believes they will come back to use in significant numbers. The real problem is that AI art will be faster to produce and be completely indistinguishable from human art. People for the most part prefer the path of least resistance.
  - rcarr 4y ago
    People prefer the path of least resistance until the price becomes too high. When people realise they are obese, they generally try and lose weight. I strongly suspect that with the next wave of AI, more and more people are going to come to the conclusion that the price is too high. There is significant tech pushback already, I can only see that growing as it erodes even more people’s values and livelihoods.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
EamonnMR 4y ago
But you out the solution right there in your prediction. We need updated licenses that forbid the use in AI training and real teeth if it can be shown that content was illegally used in a training set. It might be too late with the amount of data already ingested, but, hell, second best time to plant a tree and all that.
- luxcem 4y ago
  I'm not even sure how copyright will work with AI generated content. How is the copyright distributed amongst the program, the programmer, the company distributing the program, the user that enters the input, the author that wrote the input, the authors of content ingested by the program, etc.

by fleddr 4y ago

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.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

As has been discussed here, the more AI generates the content the less humans generate content. Further AI generated content is much faster and cheaper to produce so it’s quantity will dwarf human generated content. This then feeds into the training set and becomes self reinforcing. There will be no collective human cognitive labor to source for free. I suspect to mitigate that AI companies will hire lots of people to simply write. This writing will be tailored to address shortcomings in the model and provide human mediated training material that’s targeted at training areas of difficulty for the models. The goal won’t be moderation, or editorialism, or producing original content. No one other than the machines will see the content written. The goal will be to improve the ability of the models to produce compelling content in volume for a marginally low cost - which may become dominated by the content creators feeding the machine. But it’ll be much less cost on the margin with a more predictable quality result than hiring individually unique humans to make hit or miss content at scale. (N.b., I’m only focusing on the free cognitive labor statement)

fleddr 4y ago
Sure, for a while people are needed to tune the machine, but it's not a sustainable model. I would expect that to generate only a fraction of the employment that AI will make obsolete. Further, if fine-tuning AI is a cognitive task, it has no future. That's the point I'm getting at: no cognitive task has any future, at all.

Nathanba 4y ago

I think you are right, AI content will not be distinguishable from human content. What we really need to figure out is the direction that we are going as humanity. This planet must quickly become too small for us, human beings will not be needed anymore which means we need to find bigger challenges or we will self destruct out of pure laziness and self indulgence. Personally I don't think AI will only destroy creative and cognitive sectors, it will destroy absolutely every single sector in existence. There won't be a single job left that a human can do better than a robot. And humans will also pick the robot worker over the human worker every time. This is what happened during the industrialization, it's not like a few factories said: "hey you know what guys, let's be a bit quirky and still use 100% humans for this factory just because we can.". No, nobody is going the human route. It would be objectively slower and worse and therefore you go with the robot. There isn't a single area in life where you wouldn't pick the robot over the human and the question is solely how fast we can get to implant some good AI into mechanical bodies.

woojoo666 4y ago
The solution is to integrate with AI. Why do people think Elon is working on Neuralink?

rcarr 4y ago

Alternative take: No-one likes being lied to. AI is the ultimate deception. People will stop using the internet for anything other than information retrieval for problems. Artists will create on digital tools and then return to analogue publishing formats and distribution networks. People will follow them because artists are cool and tech bros aren’t. There will be an emphasis on becoming a local success story rather than a global one. You can already see this happening some what. Vinyl records are increasing sales every year. People are getting tired of Spotify and are buying on bandcamp. Typewriters are growing in use. Digital book sales have stalled and people are buying paper books again. I think this will become a new social identifier, particularly for those on the left of the political spectrum.

lovehashbrowns 4y ago
The vast majority of people don't care. Netflix's recommendation algorithm helped take down physical video rental stores and TikTok's algorithm is taking out Instagram, Facebook, and even YouTube. Vinyl is particularly annoying to deal with. Even a small collection gets unwieldy quickly. I prefer physical books to ebooks but physical books are annoying to deal with, too. I've just given up on physical books for the most part. Typewriters are a joke; surely nobody believes they will come back to use in significant numbers. The real problem is that AI art will be faster to produce and be completely indistinguishable from human art. People for the most part prefer the path of least resistance.
- rcarr 4y ago
  People prefer the path of least resistance until the price becomes too high. When people realise they are obese, they generally try and lose weight. I strongly suspect that with the next wave of AI, more and more people are going to come to the conclusion that the price is too high. There is significant tech pushback already, I can only see that growing as it erodes even more people’s values and livelihoods.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

EamonnMR 4y ago

But you out the solution right there in your prediction. We need updated licenses that forbid the use in AI training and real teeth if it can be shown that content was illegally used in a training set. It might be too late with the amount of data already ingested, but, hell, second best time to plant a tree and all that.

luxcem 4y ago
I'm not even sure how copyright will work with AI generated content. How is the copyright distributed amongst the program, the programmer, the company distributing the program, the user that enters the input, the author that wrote the input, the authors of content ingested by the program, etc.