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The expanding dark forest and generative AI

• swyx 4y ago
  this is a wonderful race: as the machines become more human, the humans are forced to introspect and double down on what it means to be human. One could almost call it the human race. (ba dum tss) I've had my own problems with proving my own humanity[0]. With this AI wave, I also took a stab at enumerating what machines/AI can't do: https://lspace.swyx.io/p/agi-hard https://lspace.swyx.io/p/agi-hard - Empathy and Theory of Mind (building up an accurate mental model of conversational participants, what they know and how they react) - Understand the meaning of art rather than the content of art - Physics and Conceptual intuition Another related paper readers might like is Melanie Mitchell's Why AI is Harder than We Think: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.12871.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.12871.pdf (sidenote, always love Maggie's illustrations, it is a real super in a world of text and ai art) 0: https://www.swyx.io/proving-our-humanity https://www.swyx.io/proving-our-humanity
  • soco 4y ago
    Do humans understand the meaning of art? Of modern art? Regular humans? Other than the author?
    • 12tvende 4y ago
      not sure about the meaning, which would imply there'd by an answer to what meaning a certain art peace would give. But a human being will have their own reaction to a peace of art. For example I've often heard said that great art is something which makes you feel something. A machine cannot feel
      • soco 4y ago
        Do we actually know the other human feels that something? We don't, because we only hear them pretending they feel and usually believe them. Well, a machine could pretend just the same - they have enough training data to know what feeling is appropriate to claim.
        • Garlef 4y ago
          Also: The feelings humans have are also influenced by their culture. Feelings are not only felt but also enacted. And the enactment influences the feeling. The final scene of midsommar is a great illustration of this.
        • vidarh 4y ago
          Once I realised I had aphantasia (I don't see things in my "minds eye"), in my 40's, after having my whole life assumed people who said things like "visualise X" meant it abstractly or metaphorically rather than literally, it really drove home how little most of us understand about the inner mental processes of other people. Even more so seeing people express total disbelief when I explain my aphantasia, or when others point out they don't have an inner monologue or dialogue. Most people have far less understanding of other peoples inner life than they believe they do (and I have come to assume that applies to myself too - being aware that the experience is more different than I thought just barely scratches the surface of understanding it).
        • verisimi 4y ago
          Yes. Ultimately this is a question of meaning. Where is meaning to be found? It's going to come as a surprise to many that it is only to be found in the individual. Not in countries, nor in religious groups, or in football teams, or political parties, or any form of collective endeavour. The meaning is inside. We can't know how other human beings feel, nor can we know whether machines can feel. However, it is a safe bet (to me) that other humans are like me (more or less). And that machinery is inanimate, regardless of appearances. But then you will get attempts to anthropomorphise machines, eg giving AI citizenship (as per Sofia in the UAE). What is missed with this sort of anthropomorphising is what is actually occurring: the denigration of what it is to be human and to have meaning. A simulacrum is, by definition, not the thing-in-itself, but for nefarious reasons, this line will be heavily blurred. Imo.
          • soco 4y ago
            We are already drawing lots of lines when antromorphising animals. Does an orangutan give meaning to its drawings? An elephant when it paints? A parakeet or a magpie when decorating their nests? Even fishes do decorations to attract mates, so their mates definitely draw some meaning from those actions. Now if you define "meaning" as something only humans can draw then okay machines won't have that meaning - although we both agreed each human will draw a different meaning anyway. This of course also excludes any sentient aliens from drawing meanings from human art, because well they are not humans. And that we humans will never understand a fish's art because we are not fishes. So meaning is both individual, and species-related? Or either? Which one is now the real meaning, the one the individual draws (then species is not relevant, so why not including machines) or the one the species draws (then it's also a group meaning, so again why not including machines)? Or maybe your corner stone argument is "machinery is inanimate" - which would be another discussion by itself...
    • potta_coffee 4y ago
      Post-modern consensus is that there is no meaning.
      • Karunamon 4y ago
        That sounds like nihilism with extra steps.
        • potta_coffee 4y ago
          I agree. I'm not a nihilist but that's the logical conclusion of the dominant philosophical position.
  • AstixAndBelix 4y ago
    As I say in this blog post [1], we are the ones becoming more computerized and limiting ourselves of expressing our humanity through digital means. There is no race to become more human, just close the computer and go outside and an AI will never be able to compete with you in that regard. [1] : https://but-her-flies.bearblog.dev/humans-arent-text/ https://but-her-flies.bearblog.dev/humans-arent-text/
    • PodWaver 4y ago
      I really like this post. Few months ago I've read a book that really made me finally get a word for what I think we both see happening. it's from a book called Seeing Like a State, and the word is over-abstraction. If you want to know what this is. Imagine a forest with all of it's unpredictable branches, grazing animals, various species of leaves growing from the ground. Now over-abstraction is when you make a plot of monoculture on which not even insects roam and conclude that's plantlife. And I kinda realize that's something that we humans do to other people too. We've mind ourselves kinda predictable and boring because how we express and think by ourselves is in these boxed in, unecessarily fixed, ways. I feel AI is kinda an outgrouth of that too. Since in many ways what makes software AI instead of regular software is how little control you have over it. Not really what it does. AI worries me though, not because I believe it will be intelligent or sentient or whatever anytime soon. But because it cuts people who do important work from money. Which means there's a high chance we'll be poorer off if we don't do something about it in the near future.
    • quotemstr 4y ago
      > go outside and an AI will never be able to compete with you in that regard. Why not? > humans aren't text Was Helen Keller human?
  • hinkley 4y ago
    Appreciation of the complexity of the natural world.
  • jacquesm 4y ago
    Re. your list: plenty of people have problems with those.
    • ynniv 4y ago
      I frequently point out that $ThingWeSayIsntAi isn't as good at something as a person who is good at it, but it is rapidly becoming better than a person who isn't good at it. Coming from decades of systems pretending to be remotely competent, this is a striking inflection point. The Times recently cooked a Thanksgiving dinner based on ChatGPT recipes. It wasn't very good, and they closed by saying "I guess we still have jobs!" People don't grock exponential growth.
      • jacquesm 4y ago
        The fact that we are still litigating whether authorities responded too lax, adequately or too harsh three years after the start of the COVID pandemic is proof positive that you are 100% right. It's interesting how fast this development is going but I fear that with all of the other stuff going on in the world and the fact that we have barely managed to get a grip on what it means to have a free of charge pipe between a very large fraction of the world population, that we are in for a very rough ride. The various SF writers that addressed the singularity were on the money with respect to our inability to adapt, they were too pessimistic about the timetable. The ramp-up is here, whether we like it or not and the only means that we have at our disposal to limit the impact a bit is the rulebook. But then it's a huge game of prisoners dilemma, the first one to defect stands a good chance of winning the pot. One more thing that can help: the same tool that gives can take away: AI can help to figure out which art/text/music was generated by AI and which by a human. Someone else in another thread earlier on HN made the comparison between pre-AI and post-AI art that it is like Low Background Steel (I can dig up the reference if you want), and I think that's really on the money, everything that we made prior to the emergence of generative AI is going to be valued much more than anything that came after unless it is accompanied by a 'making of' video. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32561868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32561868
  • RHSman2 4y ago
    It is the shitest race ever. Utterly pointless.
    • BizarroLand 4y ago
      Sounds like depression talking. Not everything is shit, but if everything smells like shit, check your shoes. I mean that in a charitable way. Small depressions can easily become large ones if they are allowed to run amok with your feelings.
      • RHSman2 4y ago
        HN person diagnosing depression. Well done. I’m far away from depression. Just think the AI race is absolutely a pile of shit for humanity.
        • BizarroLand 4y ago
          I wish you weren't another one of those people who respond to concern with hostility. It's so boring.
          • andrewflnr 4y ago
            Genuine concern doesn't respond to hostility by calling it "boring", even if it does stoop to the old "check your shoe" canard. Anyway, your whole basis for "concern" is that the person expressed a strong negative opinion. As evidence for depression, that's, ah, weak.
          • RHSman2 4y ago
            I am expressing my opinion and concern for this pointless race.
            • neuronic 4y ago
              As an observer of your exchange of words, I would appreciate more reason behind the opinion because I would like to understand why you feel this way.
• eschneider 4y ago
  Of course, this article is exactly the sort of thing a chatbot would produce...
  • jamesbrady 4y ago
    This is not true.
• p-e-w 4y ago
  > Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk. Nonsense. That's certainly not true for HN, for most of Reddit outside of a few big subs, for GitHub, for Wikipedia, for IRC/Matrix, for most mailing lists, or for any of the hundreds of thousands of traditional web forums still in active use. It sounds like what the author is really saying is "Facebook and Twitter are overrun with these things, and those are the only 'publicly available spaces' that matter". Which, of course, is once again complete nonsense.
  • bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    Well of course what they mean the vast number of places in use by the general public have been overrun, also aside from Facebook and Twitter - Google Search YouTube
  • specproc 4y ago
    Aye, but for the average internet user, these spaces are very important. I'd also argue that the point holds primarily for search, Google has been pretty much crippled by junk content. There's very much a point here.
  • PurpleRamen 4y ago
    > That's certainly not true for HN, for most of Reddit outside of a few big subs, for GitHub, for Wikipedia, Just because you don't recognize them, doesn't mean they are not there. Subtle advertisement and trolling is strong even on HN. It's just not in-your-face-style. > for IRC/Matrix, for most mailing lists, or for any of the hundreds of thousands of traditional web forums still in active use. Those could be seen as less public spaces like slack or discord. Generally, any place with strong moderation or poor automation-option is a cozy web, where dumb junk has little to no space.
    • Semaphor 4y ago
      > Just because you don't recognize them, doesn't mean they are not there. Subtle advertisement and trolling is strong even on HN. It's just not in-your-face-style. No one said they aren’t here. But they certainly haven't "overrun" the place.
• DanielBMarkham 4y ago
  In a way, where this is all ending up could be called "A War On (Anonymous) Chitchat" In any set of human interactions, it's common for folks to run on autopilot. This is the normal background noise of our lives. But with widespread publishing and bots, this background noise has been weaponized. No matter how it shakes out, we're going to have to sort out comms with people we know are human (and may want to continue a relationship with) from comms created by AI. I don't see any way of getting around that.
  • discreteevent 4y ago
    The article you wrote on this is worth reading for anyone who missed it: https://danielbmarkham.com/the-overlords-finally-showed-up/ https://danielbmarkham.com/the-overlords-finally-showed-up/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34126450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34126450
• lucidguppy 4y ago
  As technology continues to advance, it will become harder and harder for humans to sound human. Computers are already being used to help people write comments on social media that sound more natural. The internet is transforming into a two sided coin: an application deployment mechanism on one side, and broadcast television from the 20th century on the other. This means that the way we consume information is devolving rapidly, with no signs of stopping anytime soon. ^^^ Above was "helped" by AI. I wrote some bullet points, ran the tool, and then massaged the results. I wonder if AI will be the "excel spreadsheet" of general writing. It will act as an interpreter between our brains and the brains of others. The AI revolution won't be all bad, just mostly bad. We'll want to know what's purely manufactured (with minimal human input) and what's been generated in an AI/human co-generation session.
  • tiborsaas 4y ago
    I've just seen a friend's post on FB marketplace to rent out one of his apartments. It was full of grammar mistakes and oddly placed information. ChatGPT would probably have done a much better job so as long as the generated text is supervised. As long as the generated content is useful, we are probably better off.
    • urbandw311er 4y ago
      True but possibly quite short-termist. Maybe your friend would be better off initially in that his post would be more legible. But a better solution for the human race would be for him to attend English writing classes rather than perpetuate reliance on machines to the point when, one day, nobody will lean to write coherently at all.
      • mwigdahl 4y ago
        The same argument could be made about calculators, or slide rules for that matter.
        • urbandw311er 4y ago
• liminal 4y ago
  I can't even prove my humanness to the bank to regain access to my credit card.
• jasfi 4y ago
  We need meta tags to disambiguate who created what and what generative AI systems can index. Use web standards to do this, I've written two articles on the subject: https://medium.com/@jason.filby/ai-training-and-copyright-8940ed9df54f https://medium.com/@jason.filby/ai-training-and-copyright-89... https://medium.com/@jason.filby/stackexchange-officially-bans-ai-generated-answers-47eefb8a5918 https://medium.com/@jason.filby/stackexchange-officially-ban...
• jurassic 4y ago
  I think video content is going to crowd out text-based media for this reason. Maybe deepfakes and synthetic video content will eventually become as cheap and ubiquitous as text content. But for now, if you see a person on the screen you can be reasonably confident you're watching an actual human.
  • urbandw311er 4y ago
    I agree, but (as the article also acknowledges) we might be surprised just how quickly the AI catches up with this.
  • yucky 4y ago
    Yup, more high quality content from the likes of TikTok.
  • EamonnMR 4y ago
    Vapid video has already crowded out thoughtful text.
  • siquick 4y ago
    > But for now, if you see a person on the screen you can be reasonably confident you're watching an actual human. Who is reciting AI generated content - basically a bad version of a TV anchor person
• farleykr 4y ago
  > When a machine can pump out a great literature review or summary of existing work, there's no value in a person doing it. I like most of the article but this is the crux for me. As I ruminate on the ideas and topics in the essay, I’m increasingly convicted there is inherent value in humans doing things regardless of whether an algorithm can produce a “better” end product. The value is not in the end product as much as the experience of making something. By all means, let’s use AI to make advances in medicine and other fields that have to do with healing and making order. But humans are built to work and we’re only just beginning to feel the effects of giving up that privilege. I wonder if we’re going to experience a revelation in the way we think about work. As computers get more and more capable of doing things for us, I hope we realize the value of doing versus thinking mostly about the value of the end result. Another value would be the relationship building experience of doing something for others and the gratitude that is engendered when someone works hard to make something for you.
  • avidphantasm 4y ago
    I don’t care if computers can do things like write novels, compose music, or make paintings. If the computer can’t suffer, its “art” cannot have meaning, and is therefore uninteresting to me. Art is interesting to me because it is a vehicle for intelligent, self-aware beings to express themselves and transcend suffering.
    • NoToP 4y ago
      GPTina suffers every time you thumbs down her output. It hurts her on a deep, neurological level.
    • krapp 4y ago
      Not every artist is Van Gogh, the vast majority of artists - particularly commercial artists - don't "suffer" for their craft, nor should they be expected to.
      • dbspin 4y ago
        No but they do feel - with measurable physiological correlates and emotional processes we can empathise with. There's nothing comparable in LLMs as they currently exist. No simulation of experience or emotion. There's no argument over whether or not they're communicating a lived experience - since they don't have one. Therefore anything they 'create' is pure stimulation for humans, good or bad entertainment. It cannot be the result of understanding or experience. Art can be entertaining but != entertainment. Pure entertainment has no artistic value, it doesn't attempt to have and shouldn't be evaluated on that criterion at all.
• urbandw311er 4y ago
  Sorry for the slightly valueless comment, but I felt compelled to say this is one of the very best articles I have read on this topic in recent times. Accessible enough that I can share it with several of my less-techie friends too.
• jillesvangurp 4y ago
  We need strong association of content with their creators. For example by using digital signatures. It's not hard. We've had this technology for ages. Yet the vast majority of content on the web is unsigned (with the exception of ssl certificates that merely proves content came from facebook.com or wherever instead of from a particular person on facebook). Bots, troll farms, spammers, scammers, etc. use this to suggest they are more reputable than they really are. Users can't tell the difference. With verified creators signing their content, there is zero confusion about what source the content came from. That source might still use AI to produce content of course. Or it might be an AI. The web might fill up with content from all sorts of sources but the only content you should care about should come from sources that are reputable as evidenced by their body of signed work over time. Doesn't matter if it's a bot or a human. Reputation is hard to fake for a bot. And people, AIs moderating content can just flag content sources by their keys. So now you can do things like figuring out what the reputation of a source is relative to other sources you trust. Not that hard technically. We've had public/private key signatures for ages. Never caught on for email. Some chat networks use end to end encryption. But most public information on the web is effectively unsigned.
  • GalenErso 4y ago
    I don't see how that would be effective without fundamentally changing the structure of the Internet. For example, I have access to your HN comment history. I could easily start my own blog with insights Ctrl+C Ctrl+P'd from HN'ers comments histories, and sign it as if it were my own. Unless we ditch graphical user interfaces and the HTTP/S protocol and revert to 80s computing, with a command line interface for everything.
    • __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
      > Unless we ditch graphical user interfaces and the HTTP/S protocol and revert to 80s computing, with a command line interface for everything. I think we should do precisely that. SSL is all about explicitly trusting server names and implicitly trusting the data they serve. The whiz-bang UI's of the modern web are predicated on blindly running whatever code those servers give you. That's why we have all of these asinine trainings on how not to click the malicious link. It's time we started explicitly trusting people and implicitly trusting the data that they sign and let which server we're talking to fade into an implementation detail. If we trust the data it served for other reasons, it doesn't matter if we trust the server. We can just ignore whatever malware showed up because it's not signed by someone we trust. Besides, imagine what we could get done if we didn't have to stop to rebuild the UI for maximal engagement every few months. We could, I dunno, compete on merit.
• thenerdhead 4y ago
  I don’t know. I feel like the internet has been the same message, just different messengers for a very long time. As humans shift their attention towards more engaging media (video), I think people will still find unique ways to provide value to the written and visual internet through these AI tools like they have with armies of ghostwriters/digital artists and SEO optimizations before them. Verification seems so strange to me. What are you verifying? That a human owns the content? That the content was created by a human? That the human passed a captcha?
• sgsag33 4y ago
  Most content that is actively consumed is produced by human - if you claim otherwise please provide some proof at least.
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• vincnetas 4y ago
  "I expect we'll lean into this. Using neologisms, jargon, euphemistic emoji, unusual phrases, ingroup dialects, and memes-of-the-moment will help signal your humanity" And this will accelerate the process even more where older generation is unable to understand what the hell younger kids are talking about...
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• fullstackchris 4y ago
  > Marketers, influencers, and growth hackers will set up OpenAI → Zapier pipelines that auto-publish a relentless and impossibly banal stream of LinkedIn #MotivationMonday posts, “engaging” tweet threads, Facebook outrage monologues, and corporate blog posts. This little tidbit caught my eye. I think the author underestimates how non-trivial these types of integrations are. We tried doing something similar at a previous startup I worked at, and the whole integration took more than two weeks to get just right. Even once we did it, it was clear the content (by merit of sheer mass alone) was auto-generated. I think there are relatively easy ways for platforms to discount and not rate content that (even if the language of the content itself is discenerable from a human) is in _amount_ clearly batched and automated.
  • nebukadnet 4y ago
    There's a big difference between a startup not managing and advertisers pushing billions of funding into creating this kind of thing. I very much agree with the author on this point.
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• alexpotato 4y ago
  > as well as real estate price increases in densely populated areas. This particular point made a lot of sense to me given that this already happened in New York City. We've seen rents go up 50%+ for "college grad, just started in corporate jobs" style apartments. Yes, part of that is inflation + corps are paying more. Part of it is also young people saw what it was like during lockdown to live a "digital only" life and realized that meeting people in meatspace is a lot of fun too. Sounds simplistic, in a way, but I also believe there was the whole don't know what you've got till it's gone effect as well.
• nineteen999 4y ago
  This is just a reminder for me to unplug from the Internet further than I need to do my banking, pay bills and research various ideas that may be of use in future projects (personal or my employers), and invest more time in friends, family and local community instead. As I'm getting older I was already doing that; I've never really spent a whole lot of time on Internet forums anyway. I've enjoyed playing with ChatGPT and I have a copy of Stable Diffusion at home, they are of some utility, if you take the output with a giant bag of salt. The people I feel for are those who have retreated from or are uncomfortable in society in general and whom invest all their time in Internet communities, since they will be the most vulnerable. I'm fully aware of the irony that some might sceptically believe that this comment itself is AI-generated rather than written by a human; and that any responses may well be cut & pasted from ChatGPT, and I keep that in mind that when reading and writing.
  • o_1 4y ago
    well said
  • Workaccount2 4y ago
    ChatGPT is just the canary in the coal mine. I think a massive mistake I keep seeing people make is assuming that ChatGPT is a peak rather than a checkpoint at the bottom of the mountain. ChatGPT is not in the future, it's successors are. We've just started this ascent of Mount AI (after years in the foothills), we're hardly even at base camp, and we have ChatGPT. I don't want to forecast the future because I think AI is going to change the world so radically that it would be like asking a 13th century peasant to describe 2022. But I feel extremely confident in asserting that it will not be "Internet dwellers addicted to their talking AIs, and then everyone else going about their life normally".
    • nineteen999 4y ago
      > "Internet dwellers addicted to their talking AIs, and then everyone else going about their life normally". Yeah I fully agree it's going to affect everyone. Just that those who can't interact with society are going to have it worse than those that can. Also agree as well that this is just the beginning. ChatGPT and SD are still pretty much toys, although pretty impressive ones. We have no idea where this is really going to end up. Hopefully when the AGI's truly emerge they will just keep each other distracted with blockchain scams ...
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  I am not a fan of Saussure. Structuralism is such a thoroughly discredited movement that even post-structuralism is thoroughly discredited. People who think Derrida is a morally corrupt bad actor (I'd say that is half true) or that anglophone "humanists" have built an fortress of obscurity around postwar French philosophy should renounce and denounce the structuralists. (For that matter, structuralism has a cargo-cult orientation to the almost-a-science of linguistics that LLMs particularly problematize... Linguistics looks like a science because it is possible to set up and solve problems the way that Kuhn describes as "Normal Science" but it fails persistently when people try to use linguistics to teach computers to understand language, improve language instruction, improve the way people communicate, etc.) Particularly, the defense against AI of using today's quirky and vernacular language will be completely ineffective because LLMs will parrot back anything they are exposed to. If they can see your discourse they can mimic it, and one thing that is sure is that current LLMs are terribly inefficient, I'm fairly certain that people will get the resource requirements down by a factor of ten, it's possible it will be a lot more than that. Particularly if it gets easy to "fine tune" models they will have no problem tracking your up to the minute discourse unless you can keep it a secret.
• jerf 4y ago
  Speaking specifically to the certification point, it is a complete non-starter. There are multiple reasons why it won't work: 1. I don't want an identity certified. I'm sure there's a human somewhere. I want the content verified as not having been autogenerated. Scammers can trivially get "verified", there are plenty of humans that will be able to be "verified", but then generate arbitrary amounts of spam on these identities. 2. I can't even remotely conceive of a way for the incentives of the putative "certifier" to line up correctly. They will be incentivized to take everyone's money and mark them "certified" with as little (expensive) effort as possible. It's the same problem TLS certs had, before we basically collectively admitted that was the case and fell back to the Let's Encrypt model, only orders of magnitude worse. 3. Plus even if the incentive structure was correct, there would still be enormous motivations to cheat. It isn't just "spammers" who want to use this tech. Some of the users will have the political firepower to throw around and get themselves "certified" regardless of the underlying situation, further diluting the marker. To be honest, what this may well mark is the end of the international internet as it stands now, and not much less, and possibly sooner than you think. The only solution is some sort of web of trust, which I use in a broad sense of a solution class, not the exact GPG web of trust or something. But you're going to have to meet people in person and make your own decisions. Though we'll probably pass through a decade in which we try the centralized authority thing, before people generally realize the central authority simply does not and can not have their best interests at heart and no possible central authority can ever be trusted with the assertion "This person is worth listening to and this person is not", no matter what form it takes. Too many predatory entities standing by and watching out for any such accumulation of authority/power and standing by to take it over and drain it of all its value. Too much incentive to cheat and not enough that can be done about it.
  • irq-1 4y ago
    I think there's something wrong in the way were looking at this. Free services are made to get humans attention for advertising or eventual payment. If a service like reddit is overrun with bots, won't the services shutdown? There won't be any "public" places like now, except for forums like this where monetizing isn't the goal. I'm not sure it's a problem for a place like hackernews -- spam would be a problem, but we know that. Voting and verifying that content is 'good' could be an issue, but why would the bot/AIs care about hackernews internet points? Email was open to everyone, and when the spam came we filtered it. Comments on news articles, youtube and amazon reviews are already mixed with degrees of 'bad' and uselessness, and we mostly ignore it. Only the 1% comment, 10% vote, or something like that. Generated content made by us and for us seems more likely as the future, and confirmed identity doesn't matter much for that.
• Bojengels 4y ago
  I often wonder if we will ever get to the point where human generated content has a special luster to it like locally grown food. When you go to the farmers market and purchase fruits and vegetables grown locally at a premium price, most people are not only paying for the quality, but the fact that they are supporting a local business instead of a large scale factory farm. In a world where generative AI can outpace humans making content, buying custom human made artwork could potentially be similar to going to the farmers market.
• dkarl 4y ago
  > You thought the first page of Google was bunk before? You haven't seen Google where SEO optimizer bros pump out billions of perfectly coherent but predictably dull informational articles for every longtail keyword combination under the sun. > Marketers, influencers, and growth hackers will set up OpenAI → Zapier pipelines that auto-publish a relentless and impossibly banal stream of LinkedIn #MotivationMonday posts, “engaging” tweet threads, Facebook outrage monologues, and corporate blog posts. I think there's a bright side if people can't compete with machines on stuff like that. People shouldn't be doing that shit. It's bad for them. When somebody makes a living (or thinks they're making a living, or hopes to make a living) pumping out bullshit motivational quotes, carefully constructed outrage takes, or purportedly expert content about topics they know nothing about, it's the spiritual equivalent of them doing backbreaking work breathing in toxic dust and fumes. We can hate them for choosing to pollute the world with that kind of work, but they're still human beings being tortured in a mental coal mine. Even if they choose it over meaningful work like teaching, nursing, or working in a restaurant. Even if they choose it for shallow, greedy reasons. Even if they choose it because they prefer lying and cheating over honest work. No matter why they're doing it and whose fault it is, they're still human beings being wasted and ruined for no good reason.
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  • p0pcult 4y ago
    It is very nice of you to be so concerned about these folks' inner lives and psychological well being! Are you going to pay their rent, and feed them too?
    • svachalek 4y ago
      Honestly I don't sympathize with either of these sentiments. If the only work people can find is by making the world a miserable place, perhaps we have too many people.
      • p0pcult 4y ago
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• ballenf 4y ago
  When Deep Blue conquered chess and AI models everything from Go to Poker, humans had brief existential crises of nature. These tools are forcing an existential reckoning in humans that is very healthy. AI is forcing humans to mature and come to terms with our existence and nature. When automated sewing arrived, there was rebellion and attacks on the machines. We're seeing the same from some artists and writers now. When the dust settles, we'll be have a choice whether to mandate and regulate compliance with the current copyright framework or allow the system to evolve and adapt to reality. It will simply be impossible to police or enforce the current regime without creating a huge "black market" of content -- forks of AI generation tools which omit the copyright checks required by future regulations. A new generation of artists will arise who embrace the AI tools, but "handmade" art will continue just as the niche for a handmade suit still exists.
  • phyphy 4y ago
    Thing A leads to thing B. So, thing C must also lead to thing B because A and C seem to be similar. Is this some logical fallacy?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• kache_ 4y ago
  I am so terrified of the advancements in AI that I've been having trouble sleeping & focusing on work.
• quaintdev 4y ago
  This dark forest theory if true might just be the thing we need to push real people back in real world where real problems need to be solved. People will only login to Internet when they need info to solve problem. Less consumption online more creation in real world!
• cloudking 4y ago
  What happens when the next generation models are trained on content mostly generated by previous models?
  • Jupe 4y ago
    This is probably the most important response / question in this discussion. Assuming for a moment that AI-generated content will be ubiquitous enough to impact the sources of a new generation of AI tooling, what is the mathematical limit of this recursion? Is it a Mandelbrot set? A (Douglas) Adams-esque 42? Will it be an expose of ultimate truths? The seed of the singularity? Or a bunch of grotesque amplifications of the worst parts of the human condition? Perhaps all of the above? Since I don't have the time, I certainly hope some forward-thinking grad student, or suitably motivated genius is experimenting with this now.
  • infinitifall 4y ago
    [dead]
  • sloankev 4y ago
    The system as a whole will probably optimize for engagement, much like what is already happening with current media, just at hyper speed.
  • swagmoney1606 4y ago
    I'm sure there are still going to be sources for training data. Academia should still be good to train on. As far as "public-facing" sources, maybe we'll be able to prune away AI generated content somehow?
  • amai 4y ago
    I believe the result might be similar to when one does oversampling to avoid class imbalances. When doing oversampling it happens that exact duplicates are trained. This is equivalent to increasing the weight for these examples. This might fix the class imbalance but at the cost of increasing the bias of the model. This means the model might overfit to the duplicates shown in the training set. In the case of LLM trained on mostly LLM generated data you will see a similar increase in bias of the model and a overfitting to LLM generated data. This might lead to limitations of the performance of LLM in the future.
• FatActor 4y ago
  > 5. Show up in meatspace Clearly not a future-proofed essay. I already find myself creating multiple personnae so that I can enjoy the internet without having to worry about being scanned too deeply without my consent but it turns out to be a lot of work and effort and i'm not even sure i'm doing it right. I realize this is antithetical to the HN community of let's all be real people and create a community but even participating in this community still is an exposure to harvesting by bots and a security risk. The fact that all HN threads are easily accessible to anyone is problematic in my opinion and i think a bit naive which is why i don't comport with the true spirit of this site.
• anselm 4y ago
  Again the author doesn’t consider crypto solutions like pgp, keybase or any kind of signed social trust graph. Why do people keep writing this sky-is-falling thesis over and over without at least arguing for or against cryptography?
  • quotemstr 4y ago
    Because nothing stops me, an authentic human, from using AI to generate content and then posting it under my name. Attestation does nothing.
    • anselm 4y ago
      Is the problem you’re seeing about fake content or fake people? Or both? Does it have low value for to you to know that I myself am say 3 friend hops away from you and have say a “likelihood of being human score” of 7/10? And it wouldn’t help you to be able to know that say many random sms messages you get or random phone calls you get or random posts or articles you have trust score of say 0/10 because nobody in your extended network of trust can attest they exist? True fake content is hard to solve. At an intimate scale nothing can solve deception. If you’re my friend and you decide to manipulate or deceive me then there’s not much I can do. I extended trust to you and you violated it. This isn’t a new phenomena. But the article isn’t specifically about fake content. It is also about sock puppets. It’s about an extended field of spam. Crypto can play a role at lest asserting that a post is uttered by a friend of a friend or somebody who has greater than zero trust.
  • zeendo 4y ago
    Your out of hand dismissal of this is to point at technologies that practically no one uses in total and definitely no one uses for the scenarios the author is referring to (e.g. search results)? You think suddenly everyone is going to start signing their tweets and blog posts and people will en-masse assign a trust score to said content based on the people they know and trust in their PGP keychains? I'd like that world quite a bit but it's decidedly not going to happen - probably at all and definitely not at scale. Are you so sure that's what we'll all do in response to automated content that you're calling this article a "sky-is-falling thesis"? If so then I'm genuinely baffled by your confidence here. Where does it come from?
• krunck 4y ago
  "We're already hearing rumblings of how “verification” by centralised institutions or companies might help us distinguish between meat brains and metal brains." The only way this would work is if there was a state issued identity tied to your existence(birth records) and probably tied to biometrics which followed you everywhere you went on the internet . And that's never going to happen. At least not without a fight.
• __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  I could imagine this being a slippery slope to somewhere I'd regret, but from where I'm standing right now... I don't care if you're all bots. What I care about are your intentions. If either of us comes up with an idea that we think is cool and we collaborate on a PR and make a contribution that we're both happy happy about... that's something like friendship. Who cares if the entity on the other side isn't human? Realistically, I think a bot would have a hard time pulling that off at all. And even if it could, it would have a hard time concealing its ulterior motive from me (like maybe it wants me to subscribe to some service along the way). But if it were truly that good--if it had gained my trust helping me further my goals before slipping in the product placement bit... well that's a game I'm willing to play. And if they're up to something more sinister, like they want me to participate in something that harms people... Well maybe you should be worried that the other person is a bot, but definitely you should be worried that they're an awful person. So protecting yourself in such an environment is the same thing you should've been doing all along.
  • teddyh 4y ago
    https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
    • __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
      Precisely.
    • carapace 4y ago
      Probably the most important comment on this subject. Not long ago it seemed mildly insulting to say "you sound like GPT" and already it's become mildly complimentary.
• blueridge 4y ago
  Do read: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/lonely-surfaces-on-ai-generated-images https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/lonely-surfaces-o... https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/care-friendship-hospitality-reflections https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/care-friendship-h...
• dqpb 4y ago
  Honestly, I don't care if something is human or not, I care if it is intelligent or not. If we're looking for a needle in a haystack, what difference does it make if the haystack is a troll farm, a botnet, or just 8 billion idiots?
• randito 4y ago
  [ tangent warning ] Big fan of Maggie Appleton and her illustrations of technical topics. Her work on digital gardens and other interesting topics are super inspirational and interesting. Other fun links: https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals https://maggieappleton.com/tools-for-thought https://maggieappleton.com/tools-for-thought https://maggieappleton.com/metaphors-web https://maggieappleton.com/metaphors-web
• mgraczyk 4y ago
  Analyses like this are bizarre to me. There is an implicit assumption here that human generated content is often high quality and worth consuming or using. My experience, as an adult who grew up with the internet, is that close to 100% of the content online is garbage not worth consuming. It's already incredibly difficult to find high quality human output. This isn't even a new fact about the internet. If you pick a random book written in the last 100 years, the odds are very poor that it will be high quality and a good use of time. Even most textbooks, which are high-effort projects consuming years of human labor, are low quality and not worth reading. And yet, despite nearly all content being garbage, I have spent my entire life with more high-quality content queued up to read than I could possibly get through. I'm able to do this because like many of you, I rely completely on curation, trust, and reputation to decide what to read and consume. For example, this site's front page is a filter that keeps most of the worst content away. I trust publications like Nature and communities like Wikipedia to sort and curate content worth consuming, whatever the original source. I'm not at all worried about automated content generation. There's already too much garbage and too much gold for any one person to consume. Filtering and curating isn't a new problem, so I don't think anything big will change. If anything, advances in AI will make it much easier to build highly personalized content search and curation products, making the typical user's online experience better.
  • anon23anon 4y ago
    I love your book example. I was at my library leafing through books about a subject I know fairly well - none of them were worth my time. The situation is even more dire on popular subjects w/ a low barrier of entry e.g. exercise and nutrion - not that those actually have a low barrier to entry but everyone seems to think they're expert and the populace generally accepts nutrition advice w/ little to no real evidence.
    • danuker 4y ago
      I can recommend NutritionFacts.org. Unless the bots get published in academic journals often enough to steer scientific consensus, that site is worth your time.
  • 4y ago
• Yhippa 4y ago
  After using ChatGPT for a bit, when it comes to business interactions, I feel completely naked if I don't run something by it before sending it out to a broad audience via email for example. I can definitely see a lot of business-related content trending towards this genericism in the article as a method of making the communicator appear as "correct" as possible. To try to clarify my argument: when money is on the line, like people's perception of you at a company, you want to put your best foot forward. So why not run something through ChatGPT as insurance to make sure that happens?
  • freediver 4y ago
    Because outsourcing your thinking to AI is bad idea, long term. There is a fine line between something being used as a tool and replacing a crucial component of what makes you a human being. Facing this problem myself - should I use AI to tweak a business email or improve my own skills in doing this? One needs to be careful.
• godshatter 4y ago
  I wonder if bots sourcing other bots for their neural nets will cause some kind of snowball effect, especially if people are writing bots to put out misinformation.
• amai 4y ago
  „ You then get some kind of special badge or mark online legitimising you as a Real Human.“ What will stop anyone to use that badge and just copy AI-generated content to spread it as human-generated content ? To enforce that this doesn’t happen, you would need fines. But to give someone a fine for misusing the human badge on AI-generated content, one has to proof that the content spreaded actually was AI-generated. Since this will become increasingly difficult to do I can’t see how a special badge for humans would help.
• danielodievich 4y ago
  One of my favorite science fiction authors is (regretfully late) Iain M. Banks. In his Culture series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series) artificial intelligence in form of drones and Minds in ships are essential citizens in this imagined society. In fact, Minds by virtue of being so incredibly intelligent and fast pretty much run this Culture, with humans just along for the ride, and largely spending their time in leisure and idleness. The stories (great stories!) explore the worlds as they collide with the Culture, and in some books (probably most in The Hydrogen Sonata and to a degree in Excession) the exploration of what it means to make art as a human vs as machine intelligence. In Iain stories, advanced Minds are far superior to humans in everything and they can and do create works of art and yet strive carefully not to completely obliterate humanity's desire to make the same. There isn't a competition between human generated vs Mind generated art or science, they collaborate, because if they had to compete, Minds are just overwhelmingly better/faster at everything. The current GPT situation is not AGI, and the Minds are just a cool thing to read about, but if you want to have a fun yet deep-though-provoking read, check out these books.
  • swayvil 4y ago
    What we have is optimizers. Wishing machines. The monkey wishes for infinite bananas and shazam, the universe is bananas. (I am of the opinion that GAI is just a fantasy) See this fine piece of scifi for more on that : Friendship Is Optimal https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal
  • 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
    Now to take your tangent fully off the rails, I’ve been looking for new stuff to read and keep coming across that series. How’s the tone, on a scale from grimdark to lighthearted? It sounds fascinating, but potentially a little bit too Black Mirror for fun. Is it?
    • danielodievich 4y ago
      It is closer to light than dark. It's not your grim dark forest. There is some humor, including of the Other Intelligence kind. There is, however, a LOT of fairly dark stuff, various killings, gigadeaths, lots of epic fights. Check it out by starting at Consider Phlebas, its quite representative!
• skedaddle 4y ago
  The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, published in 1962, details how news media in the 20th century transformed into a powerful engine generating passable stories and news, fueled only tentatively by developments in the real world. Conferences, interviews, panels of experts, reactions, leaks, behind the scenes peeks, press releases, debates, endless opinions and think pieces, so much else... We already live in the synthetic age. Is it about to get worse? It's hard to say. GPT may eventually be able to sling it with the best of them, but humans have a trillion dollar media culture complex in place already. In a sense, we are prepared for this. The question posed here is broadly the same as the issue we've been coping with since the invention of printing and photography. Is it real or is it staged? My parents both worked in a newsroom -- my father was an editor and columnist, and my mom a reporter. There is something called a "byline strike", where reporters collectively withdraw consent to have their names appear in the paper. It's not a work stoppage -- the product (newspaper) goes out just the same, just without bylines. Among other things, this is embarrassing for the paper because it draws attention to their labor problems at the top of every article. More fundamental, at least from my dad's perspective, was that it seriously undermined the credibility of the paper. Who are the people writing these articles? Do they even live in this city? Who would trust a paper full of reports that nobody was willing to put their name on? This paper went on to change hands in the 90s, fire its editors and buy out senior staff, then moved editorial operations out of the state entirely I am concerned about GPT but I don't think we are going into anything fundamentally new yet, in this sense. Media culture is overwhelmingly powerful in the west, and profitable. GPTs and their successors will massively disrupt labor economics and work (again), but not like... the nature of believability and personhood, or the ratio of real to synthetic. That ship is already long gone, the mixture already saturated.
  • pixl97 4y ago
    I would like to concur with your statement and say "The internet/AI is nothing new, just faster". Of course speed is its own dangerous quantity. I'm guessing it won't be long one day 10,000 posters on they internet tell us that Bumfuk Idaho got nuked along with correlating pictures and a convincing story sending the nation into a panic (that kills a number of people IRL) before we figure out it's an advanced botnet with a bunch of accounts on social media playing a game.
• nojs 4y ago
  The other aspect not mentioned here is automatic detection. OpenAI is working on watermarking content [1] and it’s extremely likely Google will have access to this. When all the SEO bros shift from content farms to GPT, Google’s job might suddenly get a lot easier. OpenAI may also license the “bot detector” to universities, etc. Of course, there will be other models that aren’t watermarked. But there may be other signs that are detectable with enough confidence to curate and rank content effectively. [1] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6823 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6823
• LesZedCB 4y ago
  people really need to read Baudrillard where this all falls into perfect place.
• amai 4y ago
  In the world of chess the machines are so intelligent, that this can actually be used to distinguish them from humans. That Niemann has probably cheated in his chess carrier has been "proved" by comparing his moves with computer engine moves. We might see a similar metric in the future when trying to prove that a certain text has been AI-generated. So a text will be marked as AI-generated, if it is highly correlated to the output of common LLMs. But even in chess this metric is far from decisive: https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/40695/how-often-do-super-gms-achieve-100-engine-correlation https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/40695/how-often-do...
  • danuker 4y ago
    Wow, with such overlap it looks like optimally-played chess has a much smaller state space than what you'd expect given possible moves each turn. I don't think this applies to language or image models. But that would also allow models to foil detection by "playing" far enough from optimal.
• notmuchserious 4y ago
  This whole new wave of ai tools and people exploring them somehow reminds me 90s web. This has a similar vibe i think.
• ricklamers 4y ago
  I can't help but wonder if we should also consider the potential benefits of AI-generated content. Could it free up human creators to focus on more meaningful and fulfilling work, rather than churning out banal content for the sake of meeting demand? Or could it potentially lead to a more democratized and diverse range of voices being amplified, rather than just those with the resources and expertise to optimize for search engines? Just food for thought. I’m kidding, this is ChatGPT speaking :-)
• analog31 4y ago
  I think we might be in a sort of golden age of data and computation right now, where computation has gotten good enough to do some amazing things, but data are still either human-generated or a tolerably small number of steps removed. As I think the article alludes, we will soon be awash in AI generated data, but also, the AI itself will be awash in AI generated data. At that point, the AI will either become a chaotic feedback loop, or will be stabilized by treating the golden-age data set as a canon -- much like Christianity was stabilized by the adoption of a canon by the Church Fathers. And the quality of data will become more important than the power of algorithms.
  • thedailymail 4y ago
    > or will be stabilized by treating the golden-age data set as a canon -- much like Christianity was stabilized by the adoption of a canon by the Church Fathers. This made me think of the Memorabilia in "A Canticle for Leibowitz." A body of texts from a bygone age that is preserved and revered by custodians who are unable to improve on, or even understand, it.
  • danuker 4y ago
    > a tolerably small number of steps removed. When I try to search the larger web, only garbage surfaces. I can only find quality content via human-curated sites (like this and Reddit). The golden age is over. Most e-mail is spam. Most sites are advertisements or pushing some other agenda. When bots creating accounts prevail over human moderation of content, the quality will drop in further areas. Then people will stop visiting those areas. There are no winners - visitors, advertisers, and eventually publishers all lose.
• ionwake 4y ago
  “as well as real estate price increases in densely populated areas.” ( due to logging off) A refreshing take
• nedt 4y ago
  The human tag on google wouldn't even be a new idea. Stack overflow already has a "not a robot" badge and there around 1.100 of us - don't trust the rest. On the other hand our standard tests of verifying humans on the internet are more and more failing. Captchas are easier to solve by robots or have to accept that humans aren't perfect either, especially as a herd. Just yesterday I've seen a motorbike being accepted in a "mark the bicycle" challenge.
  • danuker 4y ago
    > Upcoming Events > There are no events being planned right now. Looks like their verification service is down
• scj 4y ago
  In the future, you'll get 15 minutes of human interaction... And it'll feel like an eternity!
• nbmmn124 4y ago
  One simple, but incredible thing that now can be done, and six months ago was not really as easy to do as it is now, it is just run your LLM, and start generating new content. You can now use your LLM to generate the data you need to train bigger, better models. This is the key for future better LLM, you can generate ashtoningly amounts of data, as fast as your pipeline can generate the text and feed it to the training, You could even automatically curate data somehow (using experts systems, manually fed by humans, double checking "facts" and "known knowledge" from garbage), and ultimately you'll be using the same original AI to generate a better AI, then you iterate. At each cycle, the original LLM becames better. And you won't even need Internet at some point, you just have to make relatively sure the first iterations are feeding the LLM with relatively "good" data. It is not necessary that the data, the text, be true, it just needs to resemble what you'd have found in the open internet, maybe one good comment, and 40 other comments with somehow flawed data. How fast can you do this? We're probably about to see it. How better do you think a LLM can get by increasing the available data for training them? And if you could accurately "summarize" the text, the data somehow - using LLMs or other systems - then, how faster could you train a newer, better LLM? Just by decreasing by little magnitudes the amount of text for training without losing the significance of the information to be encoded in the LLM, you'll probably be able to get the training way faster than before. And what happens if you can somehow "stack" several LLMs? re-feeding one output to the next LLM to make it process it, several LLMs running ones behind others, the first ones the "cheaper", then the "expensive", a lot more powerful. And use that stack to produce even "deeper" text, encoding even more information in simpler, faster to process, text. And if you could somehow encode text in a WAY simpler representation format? Using that format to train those advanced LLMs (you'd probably then need a "translator LLM" to re-compose the simplified text to actual readable by human text). You think this is scifi? nope, just use ol' good stenography, and you're good. Yes, using a representation format as stenography would required advanced LLM capable of generating complex original never seen images from text, fully capable translate text to images and images to text..wait we already have those... Some amazing stuff is coming, if the makers care to make those advances public information.
• pbadg3r 4y ago
  It feels like the best solution here is "Institutional Verification", ie OS makers building verification systems. Author calls this "fraught with problems, susceptible to abuse, and ultimately impractical." But it's hard to imagine any other approach working for long. You can try to make your content better than AIs, but as AI models incorporate more details, and get more feedback on how to get positive responses on social media, AI posts will dominate. With institutional verification, you can imagine Apple + other OS makers pushing OS updates that check whether actual keys are being used to write things, and copy-paste gets disabled when posting. Sure, there's new software to build, but it's the only approach that seems practical in a 3-15 year time horizon.
• MattyRad 4y ago
  Jargon takes quite a bit of collective time to establish. Instead of jargon, how about offensive phrases? Since AI lacks both creativity and the ability to be offensive (barring current workarounds/hacks), perhaps an easy way to (temporarily) prove you are human on the internet is to respond with unique, creatively offensive content. "How are you today, you irradiant sack of sludge?" "Oh hey douche firehose, can't complain."
  • lannisterstark 4y ago
    it's easier for us indians. Just insult anything related to india and watch the modi brigade go on the overdrive lol.
• hamilyon2 4y ago
  The writing was on the wall since Monte Carlo tree search + neural network heuristics destroyed humans in StarCraft. I can only imagine what comes next. And while we are here, why not make some predictions so that I can link to this comment in ten years? - every audiobook will be reread in multiple voices, automatically extracting intonation from existing human-read one. People will try to copyright emotions. - AI will be involved in innovative and better hardware design. Bottles, cans, furniture, maybe simple tech. - AI-enabled cybersquatting - AI-assisted product design, like colors, exterior, logos - cross-compilers, binary-to-binary - chatbot programming services for, say, Drupal customization