19 ms·

Certified 100% AI-free organic content

293 points by artpi 4y ago

Veuxdo 4y ago
"AI-free" is pretty clear. "Organic" is much more subjective. The same applies to Organic food, if I'm not mistaken.
- artpi 4y ago
  I couldn't resist the metaphor of the "Organic" origin, as produced by wet brain instead of silicon.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Silicon!
    - artpi 4y ago
      Thank you, edited - my toddler did not sleep that well tonight :D
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        Yes, that can eat up your energy like nothing else. Best of luck with that, been there, have a whole bunch of t-shirts ;)
- throwawayhnfpg 4y ago
  Calling others' work product "content" is pretty offensive.
  - daveguy 4y ago
    I disagree. We have called online distribution "content distribution" and the people who contribute stories, videos, and art "content creators" for at least a decade. It's a catch-all generic term for all content that another person would consume via a platform. In a general work setting you're probably not producing content for a platform, but you are certainly producing content for your coworkers and customers. It's so you don't have to say: "stories, blogs, vlogs, photos, digital art, products and any other thing that is consumed by others."
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      Agreed. If anything, word 'content' captured a broader array of work output in the mind of general public than work, which conjures up a lot of things, but rarely artistic endeavors. I do dislike using it as a part of describing my own habits, but it would appear that ship has sailed. In both my tech and non-tech circle, stuff they do is content consumption. I am not sure when it became so prevalent.
- remedan 4y ago
  Is "AI-free" clear? If I google something during the making of my project, is the project AI free? What if I type on a phone keyboard with autosuggestions? There is machine learning involved in all kinds of stuff and AI is a pretty general term.
  - quchen 4y ago
    Edwin Brady often talks about his (digital) lab assistant. I think that’s a good mental image: an AI assistant is what we’ve used so far and I think is fine. They help us bounce ideas back and forth (e.g. searching) and correct typical mistakes (typos, type errors in Edwin’s case). But as soon as they’re running the lab and we become the assistant, I think that’s where most people would draw the line.
- alpos 4y ago
  Actually it's the other way around. Those pushing the concept of "AI-Free" have yet to nail down what amounts and types of automation may be used in the production of a thing before it can no longer be labeled "AI-Free". On the other hand, "Organic" is very well defined at this point. In the US there is a whole legal framework around labeling foods, drugs, and cosmetics. https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/organic-food-labels https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/organic-foo... https://www.ams.usda.gov/about-ams/programs-offices/national-organic-program https://www.ams.usda.gov/about-ams/programs-offices/national... There is even a training and accreditation system in place for qualifying people as certifiers of organic practices as well as an application and review process for farms and manufacturers to be certified to use the label. https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/organic-certification/becoming-certified https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/organic-certification/beco...
swyx 4y ago
> Customers and the audience should be able to know and choose if they are interacting with AI-generated content. More importantly, they need to be able to choose to interact exclusively with artisanal, human-produced ideas. good that automattic is setting this policy for themselves, but as long as this is opt-in there is zero chance this fantasy will be reality also @simonw’s “AI veganism”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639643 its a good term because it will be about as popular and have as loud and passionate and few adherents as actual veganism
- artpi 4y ago
  > good that automattic is setting this policy for themselves To clarify, this not a policy but a design choice and an intent of one PM :D I cannot speak for the actual company policy because we are at an exploration phase. > also @simonw’s “AI veganism”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639643 its a good term because it will be about as popular and have as loud and passionate and few adherents as actual veganism Diets are such a rich metaphor for the approach to content! Fast food on the consumption side, veganism, kosher, paleo etc. on the production side
  - chrisweekly 4y ago
    Agreed! Doomscrolling is binge-eating junk food... and thoughtful engagement on HN is mental floss. ;b
dsign 4y ago
There is so much stuffing for a simple idea that I'm not sure if this piece deserves its own title, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. One thing that I wonder though is how we will draw the line. If I'm writing a piece and do a Google search, and in that way invoke BERT under the hood, is anything that I write afterwards "AI-tainted"? What about the grammar checker? Or the spot removal tool in photoshop or gimp? Or the AI voice that reads back to me my own article so that I can find prose issues? And that brings the other problem: do the general public really know the extent of AI use today, never mind in the future? With all of that out of the way, yes, I would rather read text produced by human beings, not because of its quality--the AI knows, sometimes humans can't help themselves and just keep writing the same thing over and over, specially when it comes to fiction--but just to defend human dominance.
- artpi 4y ago
  > There is so much stuffing for a simple idea that I'm not sure if this piece deserves its own title, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. Frankly I had the same thought writing it :D It's more of a stake in the ground sort of a thing I guess? What I really want is somebody saying "hey, there is an open standard already here" so I can use it.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    The idea has some legs, but they are weak for the many reasons pointed out to me by fair criticism of "digital veganism". The main one is that labelling is one small part of quality. Tijmen Schep in his 2016 "Design My Privacy" [1] proposed some really cool ideas around quality and trustworthiness labelling of IoT/mobile devices, but ran into the same issues. Responsibility ultimately lies with the consumer, and so long as consumers remain uneducated as to why low quality is harmful, and cannot verify the provenance of what they consume or the harmful effects, nothing will change. Right now we seem to be at the stage of "It's just McDonald's/KFC for data - junk food is convenient, cheap and not a problem - therefore mass production generative content won't be a problem". The food analogy is powerful, but has limits, and I urge you to dig into Digital Vegan [2] if you want to take it further. [1] https://www.tijmenschep.com/design-my-privacy/ https://www.tijmenschep.com/design-my-privacy/ [2] https://digitalvegan.net https://digitalvegan.net
moneywoes 4y ago
Will it even be possible to mark what gets generated from AI?
- artpi 4y ago
  When you are the one running the generator, it is.
  - AuthorizedCust 4y ago
    That’s a bold assumption. I don’t see why is unreasonable to think that a generative AI could evade even this.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  Maybe they can fnord add a metasyntactic variable to AI generated content to differentiate?
virtualritz 4y ago
> One of my favorite products is “100% Fat-Free Pickled Cucumbers Fit (Gluten Free), “ which I once saw at the grocery store. On my first fligh to the US, in the 90's, a rather obese lady in the row in front of me asked the flight attendant: "Excuse me. Do you have fat-free water?" The flight attendant hesitated a split second, her face not moving an inch. Then she smiled and replied: "We certainly have fat-free water, madam. I fetch you a bottle straight away."
- heywhatupboys 4y ago
  > in the 90's, a rather obese lady I suppose you wrote the 90's lest our mental image was of a 2020's rather obese lady? The woman probably would be skinny today
- short_sells_poo 4y ago
  A few years ago in a hotel in London I had complementary water bottles on the night stand. The label said "Organic Water from Scotland". I was like: uhh organic water from Scotland is probably cattle piss. I prefer inorganic, non-bio water.
- ghostbrainalpha 4y ago
  Alex, I'll take Things that never happened, for $500.
psychoslave 4y ago
>I don’t think you can stop technological progress. Humanity moves in the direction of better and more sophisticated tools to make life more convenient, and it will be more convenient to introduce more and more AI-produced content into the culture. That is a rather boldly positive perspective. History show us how great technologies can come and go and is never distributed uniformly. Think sewers and drainage systems for example. Obviously sophisticated technologies can be used in odious endeavors, where more efficiency means more atrocity. Think genocides for example.
- AuthorizedCust 4y ago
  > History show us how great technologies can come and go… I don’t see generative AI ever going.
  - tluyben2 4y ago
    It will just get normal.
dale_glass 4y ago
> Published content will be later used to train subsequent models, and being able to distinguish AI from human input may be very valuable going forward I find this to be a particularly interesting problem in this whole debacle. Could we end up having AI quality trend downwards due to AI ingesting its own old outputs and reinforcing bad habits? I think it's a particular risk for text generation. I've already run into scenarios where ChatGPT generated code that looked perfectly plausible, except for that the actual API used didn't really exist. Now imagine a myriad fake blogs using ChatGPT under the hood to generate blog entries explaining how to solve often wanted problems, and that then being spidered and fed into ChatGPT 2.0. Such things could end up creating a downwards trend in quality, as more and more of such junk gets posted, absorbed into the model and amplified further. I think image generation should be less vulnerable to this since all images need tagging to be useful, "ai generated" is a common tag that can be used to exclude reingesting old outputs, and also because with artwork precision doesn't matter so much. If people like the results, then it doesn't matter that much that something isn't drawn realistically.
- r3trohack3r 4y ago
  I feel like we are nearing peak "uncurated" content, both for humans and machines. Humans are still grappling with our novel abundance problems. As we move forward, suspect we will see an increase in curation services and AI models will do more with less. You can bootstrap a productive adult human on an almost infintismal slice of the training sets we are using for the current gen of AI, can't imagine future approaches are going to need such an unbounded input to get better results - but might be wrong! If content is curated for its quality, whether or not it's AI generated (or assisted) doesn't matter.
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    We’d have to adjust capitalism to deal with the “novel abundance” problems. Most of the drive for novel content/audiences is simply to decide which people get a cut of the revenue (and/or audience). If we focused on quality and stopped caring about who gets paid for what I suspect that not only would we have better quality overall but we’d also push the boundaries much faster thus making things even more interesting.
darkerside 4y ago
> do you really want to cry watching a movie that was 100% produced by robots? The fear reminds me of the early days of hip hop, where songs remixed from the past were blasted as unoriginal. I think we've all mostly agreed now that you can build new content that honors the old whole being completely fresh.
- negroni 4y ago
  Coincidentally, I had ChatGpt write a short story about a man going to the beach in they style of Dostoevsky and showed it to my wife. And she cried for a minute before starting to laugh that she was crying from a story made by a bot.
- dwringer 4y ago
  This sums it up perfectly in my mind, the analogy is extremely apt IMHO. As a musician I find it impossible to spontaneously produce melodies, rhythms, etc, that aren't heavily influenced by what I've listened to - perfectly analogous to how AI generated art is heavily influenced by the billions of training images it's ingested. The difficulty in composing is finding a way to transform, combine, and synthesize the influences into something new. I have been approaching generative AI in the same way and can't help but some of the fears are overblown. It takes work to get coherent results. If your own work is incoherent or wholly derivative, your AI outputs will also be. If your work isn't incoherent or highly derivative, then I'd argue you've already done a major part (if not most) of the creative work in your mind - the AI is just another tool to realize it which empowers human artists to be creative like never before. EDIT: Okay, now I'm shocked to see your comment grayed out all the way at the bottom. Interesting times we live in.
  - darkerside 4y ago
    I've only got a single down vote. I assume someone just didn't get it, but I'm glad you did!
jefftk 4y ago
Which of these are AI free? Something written: 1. Before 1970 2. By someone who has consumed AI-generate content 3. With a ~2000-era spellchecker 4. By someone using ~2020-era neural speech-to-text software 5. With a ~2020-era spellchecker 6. By someone with an AI in the traditional editor role (reads it, gives detailed feedback) 7. By a human and an AI working together where the AI generates everything initially but the human fixes things and nothing goes out without human endorsement. I'd probably draw the line at 7, but you could also argue for 6 or even 5. The history of the term "handmade" and discussions about what to allow on Etsy come to mind: https://whileshenaps.com/2013/10/etsy-redefines-handmade-authorship-responsibility-and-transparency.html https://whileshenaps.com/2013/10/etsy-redefines-handmade-aut...
- beej71 4y ago
  I think the line for me is somewhere around where the tool starts passing the Turing test.
- euroderf 4y ago
  I've always maintained that for any food product labeled "Home Style" or "Home-Made Flavor", the product must also feature a photograph of the factory floor where the product is made.
noduerme 4y ago
You know that to certify something as kosher, a rabbi has to be paid to stand there all day next to the kishke stuffing machine or whatever. Makes the consumable a lot more expensive. On the other hand, I see job opportunities. [edit] Actually, just to expand on this a bit, this is effectively an argument for establishing a mark of authenticity that all literate civilizations have always striven to place on their intellectual output. There has never been a single rule uniting these efforts, but civilizations which placed more emphasis on safeguarding and defending the precision of the written word have tended to be rewarded with greater longevity. There's no reason that trend shouldn't accelerate when faced with the threat of inundation by meaningless language models. Just like gold coinage, we're looking at a period of debasement and inflation. You could actually argue that language models themselves are an expression of anti-semitism, in the sense that they're an attempt to undermine the sacredness of the written word, to destroy or wash out the way that the meaning of words ennobles humanity, and to eradicate the special relationship that the law of language and the language of law create between God and Man. I only say it seems anti-semitic because that particular concept, as a high/sacred value, seems unique to Judaism (from my perspective, I can't think of another culture that considers it an inviolable precept) and so this attempted abolishment of the human hand in the written word seems particularly targeted at those who consider the word sacred; maybe this is yet to be threshed out. Maybe Bari Weiss will write about it once some nazis have ChatGPT come up with a totally bunk but plausible corruption of the Talmud. But love of the written word is something that should rightly be a general human value, because we'll live or die with it, Jews and everyone else, whether we want to or not. All civilizations fall when their coin is debased, and our coin today is information. [edit2] also, I'm drunk, and I love y'all. I hope this stimulates debate, not hate.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  I hate to say it, but it does not sound that far fetched. In some weird ways, tech already feels like magic to a lot of people and people surrounding it are today's wizards and priests willing that power into existence. In practical sense, as a society, we do need something to separate good from bad. Technopriest cast does sound like a fun job description to me ( which will inevitably be corrupted and result in its own schism ). Future scares me.
mrtksn 4y ago
Hear me out, the problem is not AI generated content but what this content stands for. Why we use text? Half of it is about getting something from someone else BUT even more importantly we write text to change something in the worlds using our words. The problem with AI pretending being a human only exist when that AI doesn't get anything from us and it's only good for extracting information from. It's utterly futile to discuss with AI generated content here on HN but it's amazing experience on ChatGPT precisely because when we write each other something here on HN, we expect that our words will create some impact somewhere. Some option will change or we will befriend someone. I have 0 problems with having interacting with AI which is an individual machine in Lisbon, and it is learning and evolving as the life happens. On the other hand, I hate the idea that I'm talking with a machine in Palo Alto and the only output of my conversation is some statistics that VC will gaze over and optimize for his own gain. Just think about it how meaning is transferred from human to human: we can compress meaning in few markings and extract it on the other side only because as individuals we have experienced life and some markings saying "bored" is enough to transfer very complex situation from person to person. In the current state of the AI, being bored doesn't mean anything to LLMs but if individual AI machines lived human-like lives, I think it will start having meaning for them too. IMHO, the problem with AI generated content currently is exactly the same with SPAM or other non-genuine content and has nothing to do with it's origins being biological or electronic. We people will put eyes on a ball and call it our friend, we don't have problem with it.
throwaway589275 4y ago
It's not clear that people actually care about and want AI-free OC, at least if you look at what kind of content is being consumed. Right now Google search seems to prioritize non-organic content, with search results often being a stream of blogspam and reddit/quora shill/astroturf crap that if not AI-generated, is close enough in terms of tone, accuracy, and originality, that it might as well be. Meanwhile you never get any results from 4chan or KiwiFarms (sites with much more organic content), unless you go out of your way to specifically ask for it.
- icepat 4y ago
  Google not prioritizing 4chan and KiwiFarms is a terrible example "not wanting organic content". They're not just "organic content", they're cesspools of the worst kind of organic content. 4chan is notoriously filled with questionable to outright illegal content/activity, and KiwiFarms is just a website to organize doxxing and online harassment. I don't understand why that's your standard for "organic content". I would have to heavily question your activity if you're being thwarted by a lack of those sites in your search results. I'm personally very happy with 4chan links not showing up in search results. I also think you're misunderstanding how Google prioritizes content. It's not showing the content people want, as much as content that's optimized with SEO to look appealing.
  - throwaway589275 4y ago
    > KiwiFarms is just a website to organize doxxing and online harassment KF is a gossip site, like Lipstick Alley or DataLounge, but with a focus on e-celebs and internet phenomena. I go there whenever I want to get the dirt (ie. truth) about e-celebs or some weird internet trend or subculture. Its users literally just passively document and discuss this stuff, and there's a policy (and ethos) of "no touch." You and others endorsing its erasure (despite it not breaking any law) would know this (and perhaps secretly do) if you actually lurked there for a while instead of just credulously accepting its critics' characterization. It's also strange how the site is supposedly such a hive of doxxers, harassers, etc., yet nothing seems to happen to the journalists and tech people organizing against it. I think the real reason it's in hot water is precisely because they just passively, permanently document so much, some of which some people with money and influence don't want documented. Maybe they documented something someone (some billionaire?) secretly doesn't want out there?
dopylitty 4y ago
The long term impact of the ease of generating low nutrition digital content using language models may be that people put down their devices and return to the real world. We’re already far down that path with the existing internet where most content is generated for SEO. Anything you’re consuming on the internet or even on a TV may just be random noise generated by some model so why waste your precious time consuming it? On the flip side why waste your time producing content if it’s going to be drowned in a sea of garbage mashed together by some language model?
- TheMaskedCoder 4y ago
  > The long term impact of the ease of generating low nutrition digital content using language models may be that people put down their devices The problem is people don't always make the wise decision. Evidence: the junk food industry is alive and kicking. Some people will disconnect from devices, but others may just say "this is the way things are now" and adjust themselves to the flavor of junk content.
  - alkjsdlkjasd 4y ago
    Why are you assuming that it will make writing worse not better? Just because it can be used by non-experts to create crappy written work, it can also be used by people who work with it to augment and improve their existing writen work. To my mind AI is a general purpose technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_technology I guess using this mental model, what you are worried about is the equivilent to pollution? Did the printing press also increase the amount of crap in circulation?
    - dazc 4y ago
      > Did the printing press also increase the amount of crap in circulation? I think the answer is, undoubtedly, yes.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      << Did the printing press also increase the amount of crap in circulation? << Why are you assuming that it will make writing worse not better? Both of these are fascinating questions and, to me anyway, both can be answered with yes. The sheer amount of writing increased exponentially once more people could read, write and publish their own writings ( and internet only exacerbated this trend ). I accordance with pareto principle, most of it was of poor quality, but the upside was that good output likely did increase in terms of absolute number as well ( few people are bound to write something decent ). I think parent is looking back at history and reasonably infers potential results ( more crap ).
photochemsyn 4y ago
The organic analogy to AI refers to locally-produced crops grown with natural fertilizers and pre-industrial pest and weed control strategies, as an antitode to industrial-fertilizer soaked, herbicide-and-pesticide drenched, antibiotic-and-synthetic-hormone laden, globally-transported heavily-processed foodstuffs. While this does sound good to most people, it's always worth remembering that Old South plantations produced nothing but 100% organic cotton, despite their atrocious practices of human slavery. If we include this perspective, AI has some potentially extremely positive potential. One of the most promising trends in agriculture is the adoption of AI to the problem of weed and pest control, as well as fertilizer use. AI robots crawling over fields can use image recognition to identify weeds (and kill them with IR lasers) as well as pest infestations in their early stages. Application of fertilizer to individual plants on as as-needed basis (rather than just dumping large volumes on the entire field) also becomes possible. This can be done far faster and more efficiently than by human laborers walking up and down rows of crops, weeding by hand. Potentially, this could make organic-style agriculture as cost-effective as the industrial variety. Sure, this means fewer field labor agricultural jobs - which are pretty tough, backbreaking jobs by any measure. Similar arguments apply to a lot of the drudgery in creative and artistic endeavors. Of course, AI could also replace most corporate board positions, and a lot of upper management as well, and hey, why not the shareholders and investors too? Are they of any more value to the operation of a business than the replaceable grunt workers are? Let's make the world's smartest AI and have it make decisions about how capital should be allocated to promising startups, removing fallible humans from the loop. Resource optimization on steroids! Yes, I read too much science fiction. See William Gibson, Iain M. Banks, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Adrian Tchaikovsky for examples of what can go wrong (and maybe right).
hcrisp 4y ago
But how to prove it is AI free? Earlier I found and posted a stackexchange article which listed many answers, some banal and some intriguing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34463535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34463535
sharemywin 4y ago
I feel a more important issue is the answer accurate. than is it AI.
d1algo 4y ago
FWIW I would like to shamelessly plug https://www.humanproved.com https://www.humanproved.com here . The idea is that a human needs to pledge that their content is human generated to get a unique badge , that they can display alongside their content along with a url. Someone can use the url to verify the time stamp that the badge was issued.
- yellow_lead 4y ago
  Of course, a human would never lie about that.
- trompetenaccoun 4y ago
  How does it prevent bots from getting a badge? Is solving a CAPTCHA all they have to do?
trompetenaccoun 4y ago
Not saying there won't be those who do, but caring if something was created by AI instead of a human is about as intelligent as being bothered by your neighbor being a certain nationality, or boycotting a movie because one of the actors has the "wrong" skin color. It matters what we consume, plenty of humans peddle rotten ideas and false narratives. With AI, I'd look into the models and the intentions of those who created/run it. What sort of content it delivers. Just as it makes sense with human authors to look up their biography and publishing history.
- mikeg8 4y ago
  I disagree. I think humans have a higher creative ceiling and so the truly moving, life altering pieces of art will always need that human element; I’d rather not waste my time consuming the AI content when it’s peaks are lower. AI content will be like modern pop songs and super hero movies. They fit a formula and people will still consider them “great” because the bar has been lowered by algorithms and reduced appetite for risk. but deep down we know they are not in the same league as works from The Beatles, Sting, or Martin Scorsese.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  Here [1] is a picture of the Mona Lisa. Even if one isn't really into art, you can't help but be drawn into that smile. What did it mean? What was she thinking? What did Leonardo see, and when painting it did he intend to convey what he saw? Or was it a mystery to himself as well, something unbelievably well conveyed in the painting itself? The reasons these questions are so fun to consider is because we know the answers exist, even if we also know we shall never know them. By contrast had this image just been something output by yet another neural network generator, there would be little to no interest of the same sort, as you would know that anything you infer beyond the most surface level is exactly the same as seeing shapes in the clouds. [1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%2C_from_C2RMF.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Mona_Lis...
  - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
    Being into art, I think your example perfectly demonstrates why we can't get AI soon enough. There is no good reason for thousands of tourists to crowd around the Mona Lisa on a daily basis. They don't even understand what they're looking at. Would people pay millions of dollars for an AI generated black square NFT? Maybe some would too, it really shows the retardation of the entire space. With the mainstream it's not even about art and craftsmanship but about big names and make-believe. And that's not just art but all fields including science to a degree. When we get AI, hopefully more people are going to start focusing on substance instead of marketing and illusion.
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
The problem is -- just like the food products the author uses as analogy -- there is no reasonable agreed-on line between "natural" and "unnatural", "homemade" vs "factory", and "AI" vs "not-AI" because the processes at work are a gradient. Is my spell or grammar check an AI? No, why not? What if I translate a word from another language while writing, using an automatic translation tool? What about the algorithms that boost (or don't boost) my post through various networks, and pick an audience for it? And the analytics tools I use? etc. etc. And all of this will just become murkier and murkier. "AI" is itself a problematic term, since as many of us know many of the things so-marketed are little more than a bundle of heuristics or a complicated statistical model. And many of the "authoring" tools generating texts or images or code are really just copy-and-pasting-and-mutating things without a lot of magic in-between, but in clever ways that "trick" us into seeing it as original authorship. (Ok us humans do this too) Perhaps the most reasonable dividing line is: is there a machine here that is emulating a human, pretending to be one? That is perhaps the thing that bothers me most about the recent wave with ChatGPT, Google's Meena etc -- the authors of these systems didn't have to create systems that presented with a human-like identity with pronouns and the illusion of selfhood. But they did, and now we have the Lemoine incident etc. Reminds me very much of Dune, and its "Orange Catholic Bible"'s “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” I think Herbert was onto something -- the question of whether something is truly human (or human created) or not might become the key important issue of our time and the ambiguity and confusion around that is going to become troublesome.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
This reminds me of the ‘portrait drawings’ to camera transition. LLMs have given us a more interesting corridor in the Library of Babel - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel - but choosing the wheat from the chaff will still be the human endeavor because of the infinite possible BS.
shever73 4y ago
This post reminds me of Samuel Butler's novel, Erewhon. "Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?"
- eloff 4y ago
  That reminds me of the epilogue to HG Wells Time Traveler: “ He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.” That passage has haunted me since. I often wonder if that is the answer to the Fermi paradox. Civilization might be but a brief spark in the long night, separated from others by both time and distance insurmountable.
  - erulabs 4y ago
    You’re not wrong but… “I refute it thus” kicks big pile of old books “it remains for us to live as though it were not so” is a wonderful line.
xwdv 4y ago
We take it for granted these days that most text we read is generated by humans. But imagine a future where it is assumed most text is AI by default, and human text is only as common as computer generated text is today. Imagine 9 out of 10 comments on hackernews being AI authored. This comment, AI authored.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
Funny, just yesterday I asked ChatGTP for some nutritional advise: >can you give me the most common symptom of every vitamin deficiency Sure, here is a list of common symptoms associated with deficiency in certain vitamins: Vitamin A: night blindness, dry skin, and poor immune function Vitamin B1 (thiamine): fatigue, irritability, and muscle weakness Vitamin B2 (riboflavin): cracks and sores at the corners of the mouth, itchy and scaly skin, and light sensitivity Vitamin B3 (niacin): pellagra, which includes symptoms such as skin inflammation, diarrhea, and dementia Vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid): fatigue, insomnia, and muscle cramps Vitamin B6 (pyridoxine): anemia, skin disorders, and depression Vitamin B7 (biotin): hair loss, scaly skin, and brittle nails Vitamin B12: pernicious anemia, which can cause fatigue, muscle weakness, and nerve damage Vitamin C: scurvy, which can lead to bleeding gums, easy bruising, and poor wound healing Vitamin D: rickets in children, and osteomalacia in adults, which can cause muscle weakness, bone pain, and fractures Vitamin E: nerve damage, muscle weakness, and impaired vision Vitamin K: bleeding disorders, easy bruising, and poor blood clotting It's important to note that these symptoms can also be caused by other factors and deficiency in vitamins can manifest differently between people. Consult with a doctor if you suspect a deficiency. >can you list the most recommended food source for each vitamin Sure, here is a list of some food sources that are high in certain vitamins: Vitamin A: sweet potatoes, carrots, kale, spinach, and apricots Vitamin B1 (thiamine): whole grains, nuts, seeds, and legumes Vitamin B2 (riboflavin): almonds, mushrooms, and dairy products Vitamin B3 (niacin): chicken, fish, and peanuts Vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid): mushrooms, avocado, and sweet potatoes Vitamin B6 (pyridoxine): chicken, fish, and chickpeas Vitamin B7 (biotin): eggs, nuts, and sweet potatoes Vitamin B12: fish, meat, and dairy products Vitamin C: oranges, strawberries, kiwi, and bell peppers Vitamin D: fatty fish such as salmon, mackerel and sardines, egg yolks and mushrooms Vitamin E: almonds, sunflower seeds, and spinach Vitamin K: leafy greens like spinach, kale, and broccoli, also found in parsley, Brussels sprouts and even kelp. Hulk Hogan would approve https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-dI4Sl2rzE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-dI4Sl2rzE
swayvil 4y ago
This is a wake-up call. The popular epistemology has been flaming garbage for so long. When you see something for yourself, that delivers one kind of knowledge. When you hear it from a friend, that delivers another kind of knowledge. When you hear it from somebody you don't know, and never actually met, second or third hand, that delivers yet another kind of knowledge. And, in our society, that last kind of knowledge is so often treated as equivalent to the first. Which is messed up.
ipython 4y ago
Sorry, but all I can think of after reading this blog post is the evil bit RFC: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt which has had just as much effect on internet security as this proposal will have on controlling ai generated content.
- fellerts 4y ago
  That RFC was intended as a joke though (look at the date). This isn't, and I agree that it sounds like a feeble attempt at controlling the floodgates.
  - ipython 4y ago
    Yes I know it was a joke - hence my point.
erksa 4y ago
AI tools I believe it will soon become a helpful tool for many people. Just like how smartphones made photography accessible to more people and Javascript made it easier for people to enter the tech field. However, we will have a difficult time when it comes to social media because AI content will become more and more, until it is just. It seems plausible the next social media will remove the social part completely, and just have people as consumers, creators.
zelias 4y ago
I wonder if this sentiment will ultimately lead to a "Butlerian Jihad" culling of "thinking machines" a la Dune
- euroderf 4y ago
  Well, we've got part of the Mentat angle covered already. "It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion."
jonathanstrange 4y ago
You'll need a special AI soon just to read and process the flood of superficially reasonable sounding bullshit AI will be throwing at you from all kinds of directions. On the bright side, the quality of writing style might overall increase with AI paraphrasing and style correction/adaptation tools.
michaelmior 4y ago
> Some of the AI-generated output is factually wrong While this is undoubtedly true and a problem that needs to be addressed, it's worth considering that humans gets things factually wrong too sometimes (intentionally or not). So perhaps a more interesting question is how much more or less correct an AI is than a human on a given task. People talk about this with self-driving cars all the time. Arguably a self-driving car does not need to drive perfectly (not that this is not a good goal), but if it can drive more safely than the average human driver, there's still a significant chance of improving overall road safety.
scotty79 4y ago
Alternatively... Pure, certified 100% AI generated content. No humans or other animals were directly exploited for the purposes of generating this content.
alpos 4y ago
This strikes me as a distinction without a difference. Content creation is not even close to the same as GMO or processed foods. People are justified in being concerned about how food is made precisely because there are meaningful differences in the nutritional value and trace chemical content in the end products. And that matters because we don't fully understand the role those factors play in long term human health. Created content does not share similar distinctions based on how it was produced. At the level of our personal experience of a story, image, or sound it does not matter if the content was human generated or even if the stories are real; they either elicit an emotional response or they don't. This is why we can enjoy fiction and art in the first place. It's also why a given piece of art can mean different things to different people. Deliberately cutting yourself off from the meaning a piece could have for you just because you aren't yet sure that a human produced it is unnecessarily specist and only acts to your own detriment. Should one likewise refuse to engage with works that had assistance from the artist's pets? With regard to news stories and other informational content, if two stories about the same event are both accurate, timely, informative, and/or insightful, it does not matter if one was written by a human on a typewriter and the other written by a bot after having been prompted by a human. The present state of the art still requires some human editing to hit those marks but we're quickly approaching a time where there will not be any detectable differences. This idea that people deserve to invent a new category of things to be prejudiced about seems silly and unhelpful to me. Why bother inventing arbitrary distinctions just so people can play favorites and be judgemental about it? People are already free to judge content based on relative merits. That seems like enough to me. And it's important to account for the fact that the end goal with these tools is that there will be no differences between human and AI generated content. The teams working on these things have already made considerable progress to that end, it's not hard to imagine the next couple of iterations actually achieving that. So anyone trying to create these arbitrary labels is staring an uphill battle for a fundamentally unhelpful end state. We really don't need to put that kind of energy into reinforcing people's desire to feel superior. We have more than enough elitism/triablism/racism/otherism around as it is.
- megous 4y ago
  At the end of the day, good content is good content regardless of who or what produced it. We should focus on recognizing and celebrating the beauty, regardless of its origin.
mxgr 4y ago
I think we should judge content independently of whether it was created by AI or humans. Labeling AI-free content doesn't seem to add much value to me in general (with exceptions).
imranq 4y ago
OpenAI is working on a watermark for their models (if not already there) that would recognize content as AI generated. If its good enough, it should be able to filter out AI content when training new models https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/10/openais-attempts-to-watermark-ai-text-hit-limits/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/10/openais-attempts-to-waterm...
- htrp 4y ago
  The problem is that you can always use something else to watermark it.
kris_wayton 4y ago
"Microsoft now owns a 49% stake in the maker of chatGPT/GPT3 - OpenAI" I didn't know that. Makes the Google <-> OpenAI rivalry more interesting.
beej71 4y ago
The solution that comes to mind is something like the PGP web of trust, except the web would consist of verified humans. This didn't work for PGP because people in general don't care about that. And I think people in general don't care if their content is AI-generated or not. It's not like all human-generated content on the web is tremendously accurate or well-written. Hell, maybe the AI will even be better. :)
thenerdhead 4y ago
The point about emotional response is good. I'm not sure how to best describe it, but every time I interact with AI, there is very little emotional response from it. Rather it's a "good enough" response rather than a sense of awe or horror. I've been experimenting with writing recently and wanting to provide some AI imagery to match the emotions I'm expressing. A painting like "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" evokes many emotions. But when I use the same description such as: "a man standing upon a rocky precipice with his back to the viewer; he is gazing out on a landscape covered in a thick sea of fog through which other ridges, trees, and mountains pierce, which stretches out into the distance indefinitely." I get the store-brand version that doesn't invoke any emotion. It is "good enough" to get the point across, but lacking the response. Similar to the countless recreations of the Mona Lisa, there is just something about organic perfection. I'm sure AI will get there one day, but who knows if we will react to it in this sense of wonderment.
- ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
  We just need to give the AI memories from real people and give them a life span short enough that they won't realize it... and then if they go bananas and start causing harm, make another AI to terminate them... I swear I have heard this strategy used elsewhere.
- luxcem 4y ago
  Do you think your emotional response is related to the external knowledge of who produced the painting or is it only based on the visual impression? We probably can still figure out if a painting is original or AI-generated but I don't think we can much longer as AI improve. The question would be could we feel emotions even if the source material is artificial. I think the answer is yes. Human brain is can easily be tricked.
  - thenerdhead 4y ago
    I guess it is more that AI doesn't struggle to create. Humans go through many emotions in the process of creating art. The outcome isn't as important and the appreciation that artists went through that grueling process and the outcome being what it is I believe is the response I'm trying to express. So more to the human struggle of the production. At least for me.
TuringTest 4y ago
> How much of it will be being certain that you are reading something generated by human before you're willing to commit to having an emotional response, even if the output is identical, right? ... Interesting. Like, do you really want to cry watching a movie that was 100% produced by robots?Maybe not I certainly wouldn't mind. AI-generated content is a statistical summarization of knowledge produced by infinite humans randomly typing on typewriters, after all...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jacobsenscott 4y ago
No droids
calcsam 4y ago
The easiest way to signal that your content is AI free is to publish content that would be very difficult to do with AI, eg conversations between two known personalities on recent news stories.
eruci 4y ago
I was thinking about this exact problem a few days ago when I created a site hosting poems that were either 100% AI written, or 100% Human. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34472478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34472478 Then I asked people to guess the authorship. Amazingly, only 70% of the time the guess people make is correct. https://random-poem.com/ https://random-poem.com/ why : Is this Poem written by or by ? Guess & Click. I'm guessing it will get even harder to tell as the AI improves further down the road.
- everybodyknows 4y ago
  Why is AI introducing a misspelling, one that does not appear to be any sort of deliberate wordplay? https://random-poem.com/Weird https://random-poem.com/Weird "ridicolously"
  - eruci 4y ago
    Good Question. However this is 100% ChatGPT. Perhaps it knows that Weird Al intentionally misspells words in his work, hence it has intentionally introduced this typo. Which makes this type of AI even more awesome. --edit .. weird: I asked ChatGPT if there is a typo in this poem. This is what it responded with: Me: Does this poem have a typo? https://random-poem.com/weird https://random-poem.com/weird ChatGPT: It appears that there is an intentional typo in the first line of the poem "Weird Al, oh Weird Yankovic Al" instead of "Weird Al Yankovic". Yankovic being the surname of the artist, this addition can be seen as a playful and humorous way to refer to the artist, and give the poem a personal touch.
froh 4y ago
.oO( organic food, contaminated with aluminum? ) oh.
ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
Maybe a good step would be figuring out a way to not immediately commodify all human activity and then smugly tell the affected to learn how to do something new when their life's work is rendered obsolete by technology.
asab 4y ago
I think the quality will keep improving, because humans will keep curating the training data to compete for best results. The downside is that "quality" is conflated with "performs best for a particular audience and platform" which could just as easily mean re-ingesting junk and spitting it back out... because that's what people respond to.
johnsutor 4y ago
[dead]
seydor 4y ago
There is a case to be made that talking to a human is the bland one now. Amidst all the censoring and self-sensoring and assumption of bad faith, there is a lot that is not possible to discuss in polite company, even online, but is interesting. AIs seem more willing to give me a straight answer rather than going of moral tangents or ego trips. I have had discussions with the chat that went deeper than the smartasses in reddit . I thought that that was a lost art So, just like with good cheese, maybe i will go with full-fat
BashiBazouk 4y ago
Reminds me of the Dovetail phyle in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age where the rich value purely human made goods in a world of matter compilers that can almost instantly make or duplicate just about anything. On the other hand, I find Stable Diffusion the most interesting thing going on in art at the moment...
rosywoozlechan 4y ago
> do you really want to cry watching a movie that was 100% produced by robots? I've had a lot of fun having ChatGPT write stories for me: I'd ask it make changes, to add a character, add a motivation, etc. I'm just playing around, and it's 100% produced by a robot and I enjoy it. I don't personally mind having an emotional response by a story generated by a "robot". I don't really understand how it being bot generated cheapens the experience. The emotion that I feel are elicited by my thoughts and reflections based on what I've read and experienced, not by the robot.
- LesZedCB 4y ago
  our emotions and desires are mediated by machines literally day in and day out. there is no point whatsoever in making an arbitrary line at a damn movie.
- mdrzn 4y ago
  > do you really want to cry watching a movie that was 100% produced by robots? I didn't really understand this line either. I guess my answer is yes? Who cares?
cwoolfe 4y ago
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
pkdpic 4y ago
Great piece, it seems to have produced a couple of non-ai-augmented thoughts... 1. When ambitious young cooks / farmers etc set out to make a name for themselves in the food industry, I don't get the impression they're rushing towards kosher food development en masse. But I could be wrong. 2. Over the course of my life I've observed (and lived) the response to the dissolution with mass market factory farm food to be a movement towards local, organic, small batch and visibly produced / performed food production. 3. I want to believe a distaste or boredom with ai produced content will lead us all offline and make us more focused on art, music, writing, advice etc produced by people we actually know in real life. Like a farmers market but for everything. 4. If I had to guess though I'd say its more likely in the short term to just increase the popularity of live streaming everything. I should really have had chatGPT proof read this for me and optimize it for upvotes. CERTIFIED ORGANIC AI-FREE POST
- toss1 4y ago
  Yes! I felt reading the article that AI/ML vs "organic" content will become the difference between fine hand-crafted furniture and flat-pack Ikea stuff. Sure, the flat-pack is better than nothing for a temporary apartment, but it is something to move beyond, not what we want to be stuck with for the rest of our lives and in all situations. CERTIFIED ORGANIC AI-FREE POST
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Quality furniture, especially hand-crafted, is expensive and far from being universally affordable. It's quite likely that the same thing will apply here wrt "artisan hand-crafted content", and thus AI-generated stuff will still constitute the vast majority of what the society consumes. That said, if it gets good enough that you have to be an expert to tell AI-generated stuff from human-made, does it really matter? The upper classes will always play the silly "look what I can afford!" status games, and these often don't have an utilitarian component to them - something doesn't need to be actually better, it just needs to be recognized as more refined. Well, and cost more.
i_like_apis 4y ago
The best part is the “gluten free” anti AI crowd will be left in the dust. They may think they’re being classy snobs but being against AI is going to be tantamount to saying you eat crayons and don’t read well.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  Gluten intolerance is a legitimate digestive issue. I suggest picking a different descriptor to make your point.
  - i_like_apis 4y ago
    I think it’s pretty on-point though, because while Celiac disease is real (gluten intolerance), most people saying no to gluten don’t have it. The notion of gluten “sensitivity” or allergy is debated by medical science to say the least. It’s largely hypochondria, mass hysteria, and often a trendy meme for snobs and hipsters.
    - selfhoster11 4y ago
      Respectfully, you’re wrong. Celiac is not the only kind of gluten intolerance, and I’m speaking from personal experience. I eat gluten, and I get severe issues with digestion. I stop eating gluten, the issues magically disappear. I thought my issues were just “normal” until a couple of years ago, and that gluten intolerance was a BS made-up thing. I was wrong on both counts.
theiz 4y ago
Although I like most of the posting, some thoughts: First of all, we think with all inventions we have excluded human beings from being required. In the end we get more efficient, but we still need workers. The trend though is to go to core business and standard following the industrialisation, I see ai as an opportunity to have more custom and service driven business on an industrial scale though, that is the real promise. This can start with service desk providing service rather then unusable rubbish ad they do now. For the art and text: this industry is relatively new, and came with internet and PowerPoint decks. And yes, probably this will be impacted by ai, but do we really have to be sorry for that? We will have the same page filling nonsense created by ai, that is now created by cheap labour. Look at recipe sites, all kind of crap to make recipes into content so the copyright is somewhat addressed, but nobody reads that anyway. As for all other changes we have had before: there will be some impact on business and life as we know it, but not as much as anyone expected upfront.
xpe 4y ago
Proving content to be AI-free content is fraught. It might be practical in narrow contexts, but I think it will be mostly impractical. It will even be theoretically impossible in many cases. So, the article's underlying philosophy is "not there yet". It does not adequately address various real world challenges. 1. How is AI-generated content different from algorithms? I'd suggest drawing a line may be nonsensical. 2. What is the precise ethical motivation for wanting to avoid AI-influenced computation? I don't see a compelling case. Examples: A. Do we want civil engineers to use optimization software? Yes. B. Do we like spelling and grammar checkers? Yes. C. Do we want content generation software to suggest topics and hyperlinks? Yes. D. Do we want to try out AI music? Yes. And we want to remix it. E. Do we want to improve our health by making it more accessible and affordable? Yes. If our goal include protecting human rights, health, dignity, and so on, we better darn well formulate our philosophy and policy goals in a coherent way.
dusted 4y ago
There's already a lot of people whose textual output reads more like a markov chain than a LLM... (this comment included? ;))
7ewis 4y ago
I've started to 'learn' the ChatGPT tone (you can even give ChatGPT some text and ask it if it thinks it was AI written). Now I know the general structure and language it uses I've been spotting it all over Reddit, HN and some blog posts. I have noticed it makes me get bored of reading content, and I start to skim through it assuming it's just AI generated waffle.
gavinhoward 4y ago
This is a good idea. I just changed all of my websites to have "100% AI-free organic content" in the copyright footers. (I didn't say "certified" for obvious reasons.)

293 points by artpi 4y ago

Veuxdo 4y ago

"AI-free" is pretty clear. "Organic" is much more subjective. The same applies to Organic food, if I'm not mistaken.

artpi 4y ago
I couldn't resist the metaphor of the "Organic" origin, as produced by wet brain instead of silicon.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Silicon!
  - artpi 4y ago
    Thank you, edited - my toddler did not sleep that well tonight :D
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Yes, that can eat up your energy like nothing else. Best of luck with that, been there, have a whole bunch of t-shirts ;)
throwawayhnfpg 4y ago
Calling others' work product "content" is pretty offensive.
- daveguy 4y ago
  I disagree. We have called online distribution "content distribution" and the people who contribute stories, videos, and art "content creators" for at least a decade. It's a catch-all generic term for all content that another person would consume via a platform. In a general work setting you're probably not producing content for a platform, but you are certainly producing content for your coworkers and customers. It's so you don't have to say: "stories, blogs, vlogs, photos, digital art, products and any other thing that is consumed by others."
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    Agreed. If anything, word 'content' captured a broader array of work output in the mind of general public than work, which conjures up a lot of things, but rarely artistic endeavors. I do dislike using it as a part of describing my own habits, but it would appear that ship has sailed. In both my tech and non-tech circle, stuff they do is content consumption. I am not sure when it became so prevalent.
remedan 4y ago
Is "AI-free" clear? If I google something during the making of my project, is the project AI free? What if I type on a phone keyboard with autosuggestions? There is machine learning involved in all kinds of stuff and AI is a pretty general term.
- quchen 4y ago
  Edwin Brady often talks about his (digital) lab assistant. I think that’s a good mental image: an AI assistant is what we’ve used so far and I think is fine. They help us bounce ideas back and forth (e.g. searching) and correct typical mistakes (typos, type errors in Edwin’s case). But as soon as they’re running the lab and we become the assistant, I think that’s where most people would draw the line.
alpos 4y ago
Actually it's the other way around. Those pushing the concept of "AI-Free" have yet to nail down what amounts and types of automation may be used in the production of a thing before it can no longer be labeled "AI-Free". On the other hand, "Organic" is very well defined at this point. In the US there is a whole legal framework around labeling foods, drugs, and cosmetics. https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/organic-food-labels https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/organic-foo... https://www.ams.usda.gov/about-ams/programs-offices/national-organic-program https://www.ams.usda.gov/about-ams/programs-offices/national... There is even a training and accreditation system in place for qualifying people as certifiers of organic practices as well as an application and review process for farms and manufacturers to be certified to use the label. https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/organic-certification/becoming-certified https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/organic-certification/beco...

swyx 4y ago

> Customers and the audience should be able to know and choose if they are interacting with AI-generated content. More importantly, they need to be able to choose to interact exclusively with artisanal, human-produced ideas. good that automattic is setting this policy for themselves, but as long as this is opt-in there is zero chance this fantasy will be reality also @simonw’s “AI veganism”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639643 its a good term because it will be about as popular and have as loud and passionate and few adherents as actual veganism

artpi 4y ago
> good that automattic is setting this policy for themselves To clarify, this not a policy but a design choice and an intent of one PM :D I cannot speak for the actual company policy because we are at an exploration phase. > also @simonw’s “AI veganism”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639643 its a good term because it will be about as popular and have as loud and passionate and few adherents as actual veganism Diets are such a rich metaphor for the approach to content! Fast food on the consumption side, veganism, kosher, paleo etc. on the production side
- chrisweekly 4y ago
  Agreed! Doomscrolling is binge-eating junk food... and thoughtful engagement on HN is mental floss. ;b

dsign 4y ago

There is so much stuffing for a simple idea that I'm not sure if this piece deserves its own title, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. One thing that I wonder though is how we will draw the line. If I'm writing a piece and do a Google search, and in that way invoke BERT under the hood, is anything that I write afterwards "AI-tainted"? What about the grammar checker? Or the spot removal tool in photoshop or gimp? Or the AI voice that reads back to me my own article so that I can find prose issues? And that brings the other problem: do the general public really know the extent of AI use today, never mind in the future? With all of that out of the way, yes, I would rather read text produced by human beings, not because of its quality--the AI knows, sometimes humans can't help themselves and just keep writing the same thing over and over, specially when it comes to fiction--but just to defend human dominance.

artpi 4y ago
> There is so much stuffing for a simple idea that I'm not sure if this piece deserves its own title, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. Frankly I had the same thought writing it :D It's more of a stake in the ground sort of a thing I guess? What I really want is somebody saying "hey, there is an open standard already here" so I can use it.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  The idea has some legs, but they are weak for the many reasons pointed out to me by fair criticism of "digital veganism". The main one is that labelling is one small part of quality. Tijmen Schep in his 2016 "Design My Privacy" [1] proposed some really cool ideas around quality and trustworthiness labelling of IoT/mobile devices, but ran into the same issues. Responsibility ultimately lies with the consumer, and so long as consumers remain uneducated as to why low quality is harmful, and cannot verify the provenance of what they consume or the harmful effects, nothing will change. Right now we seem to be at the stage of "It's just McDonald's/KFC for data - junk food is convenient, cheap and not a problem - therefore mass production generative content won't be a problem". The food analogy is powerful, but has limits, and I urge you to dig into Digital Vegan [2] if you want to take it further. [1] https://www.tijmenschep.com/design-my-privacy/ https://www.tijmenschep.com/design-my-privacy/ [2] https://digitalvegan.net https://digitalvegan.net

moneywoes 4y ago

Will it even be possible to mark what gets generated from AI?

artpi 4y ago
When you are the one running the generator, it is.
- AuthorizedCust 4y ago
  That’s a bold assumption. I don’t see why is unreasonable to think that a generative AI could evade even this.
UncleEntity 4y ago
Maybe they can fnord add a metasyntactic variable to AI generated content to differentiate?

virtualritz 4y ago

> One of my favorite products is “100% Fat-Free Pickled Cucumbers Fit (Gluten Free), “ which I once saw at the grocery store. On my first fligh to the US, in the 90's, a rather obese lady in the row in front of me asked the flight attendant: "Excuse me. Do you have fat-free water?" The flight attendant hesitated a split second, her face not moving an inch. Then she smiled and replied: "We certainly have fat-free water, madam. I fetch you a bottle straight away."

heywhatupboys 4y ago
> in the 90's, a rather obese lady I suppose you wrote the 90's lest our mental image was of a 2020's rather obese lady? The woman probably would be skinny today
short_sells_poo 4y ago
A few years ago in a hotel in London I had complementary water bottles on the night stand. The label said "Organic Water from Scotland". I was like: uhh organic water from Scotland is probably cattle piss. I prefer inorganic, non-bio water.
ghostbrainalpha 4y ago
Alex, I'll take Things that never happened, for $500.

psychoslave 4y ago

>I don’t think you can stop technological progress. Humanity moves in the direction of better and more sophisticated tools to make life more convenient, and it will be more convenient to introduce more and more AI-produced content into the culture. That is a rather boldly positive perspective. History show us how great technologies can come and go and is never distributed uniformly. Think sewers and drainage systems for example. Obviously sophisticated technologies can be used in odious endeavors, where more efficiency means more atrocity. Think genocides for example.

AuthorizedCust 4y ago
> History show us how great technologies can come and go… I don’t see generative AI ever going.
- tluyben2 4y ago
  It will just get normal.

dale_glass 4y ago

> Published content will be later used to train subsequent models, and being able to distinguish AI from human input may be very valuable going forward I find this to be a particularly interesting problem in this whole debacle. Could we end up having AI quality trend downwards due to AI ingesting its own old outputs and reinforcing bad habits? I think it's a particular risk for text generation. I've already run into scenarios where ChatGPT generated code that looked perfectly plausible, except for that the actual API used didn't really exist. Now imagine a myriad fake blogs using ChatGPT under the hood to generate blog entries explaining how to solve often wanted problems, and that then being spidered and fed into ChatGPT 2.0. Such things could end up creating a downwards trend in quality, as more and more of such junk gets posted, absorbed into the model and amplified further. I think image generation should be less vulnerable to this since all images need tagging to be useful, "ai generated" is a common tag that can be used to exclude reingesting old outputs, and also because with artwork precision doesn't matter so much. If people like the results, then it doesn't matter that much that something isn't drawn realistically.

r3trohack3r 4y ago
I feel like we are nearing peak "uncurated" content, both for humans and machines. Humans are still grappling with our novel abundance problems. As we move forward, suspect we will see an increase in curation services and AI models will do more with less. You can bootstrap a productive adult human on an almost infintismal slice of the training sets we are using for the current gen of AI, can't imagine future approaches are going to need such an unbounded input to get better results - but might be wrong! If content is curated for its quality, whether or not it's AI generated (or assisted) doesn't matter.
- joshspankit 4y ago
  We’d have to adjust capitalism to deal with the “novel abundance” problems. Most of the drive for novel content/audiences is simply to decide which people get a cut of the revenue (and/or audience). If we focused on quality and stopped caring about who gets paid for what I suspect that not only would we have better quality overall but we’d also push the boundaries much faster thus making things even more interesting.

darkerside 4y ago

> do you really want to cry watching a movie that was 100% produced by robots? The fear reminds me of the early days of hip hop, where songs remixed from the past were blasted as unoriginal. I think we've all mostly agreed now that you can build new content that honors the old whole being completely fresh.

negroni 4y ago
Coincidentally, I had ChatGpt write a short story about a man going to the beach in they style of Dostoevsky and showed it to my wife. And she cried for a minute before starting to laugh that she was crying from a story made by a bot.
dwringer 4y ago
This sums it up perfectly in my mind, the analogy is extremely apt IMHO. As a musician I find it impossible to spontaneously produce melodies, rhythms, etc, that aren't heavily influenced by what I've listened to - perfectly analogous to how AI generated art is heavily influenced by the billions of training images it's ingested. The difficulty in composing is finding a way to transform, combine, and synthesize the influences into something new. I have been approaching generative AI in the same way and can't help but some of the fears are overblown. It takes work to get coherent results. If your own work is incoherent or wholly derivative, your AI outputs will also be. If your work isn't incoherent or highly derivative, then I'd argue you've already done a major part (if not most) of the creative work in your mind - the AI is just another tool to realize it which empowers human artists to be creative like never before. EDIT: Okay, now I'm shocked to see your comment grayed out all the way at the bottom. Interesting times we live in.
- darkerside 4y ago
  I've only got a single down vote. I assume someone just didn't get it, but I'm glad you did!

jefftk 4y ago

Which of these are AI free? Something written: 1. Before 1970 2. By someone who has consumed AI-generate content 3. With a ~2000-era spellchecker 4. By someone using ~2020-era neural speech-to-text software 5. With a ~2020-era spellchecker 6. By someone with an AI in the traditional editor role (reads it, gives detailed feedback) 7. By a human and an AI working together where the AI generates everything initially but the human fixes things and nothing goes out without human endorsement. I'd probably draw the line at 7, but you could also argue for 6 or even 5. The history of the term "handmade" and discussions about what to allow on Etsy come to mind: https://whileshenaps.com/2013/10/etsy-redefines-handmade-authorship-responsibility-and-transparency.html https://whileshenaps.com/2013/10/etsy-redefines-handmade-aut...

beej71 4y ago
I think the line for me is somewhere around where the tool starts passing the Turing test.
euroderf 4y ago
I've always maintained that for any food product labeled "Home Style" or "Home-Made Flavor", the product must also feature a photograph of the factory floor where the product is made.

noduerme 4y ago

You know that to certify something as kosher, a rabbi has to be paid to stand there all day next to the kishke stuffing machine or whatever. Makes the consumable a lot more expensive. On the other hand, I see job opportunities. [edit] Actually, just to expand on this a bit, this is effectively an argument for establishing a mark of authenticity that all literate civilizations have always striven to place on their intellectual output. There has never been a single rule uniting these efforts, but civilizations which placed more emphasis on safeguarding and defending the precision of the written word have tended to be rewarded with greater longevity. There's no reason that trend shouldn't accelerate when faced with the threat of inundation by meaningless language models. Just like gold coinage, we're looking at a period of debasement and inflation. You could actually argue that language models themselves are an expression of anti-semitism, in the sense that they're an attempt to undermine the sacredness of the written word, to destroy or wash out the way that the meaning of words ennobles humanity, and to eradicate the special relationship that the law of language and the language of law create between God and Man. I only say it seems anti-semitic because that particular concept, as a high/sacred value, seems unique to Judaism (from my perspective, I can't think of another culture that considers it an inviolable precept) and so this attempted abolishment of the human hand in the written word seems particularly targeted at those who consider the word sacred; maybe this is yet to be threshed out. Maybe Bari Weiss will write about it once some nazis have ChatGPT come up with a totally bunk but plausible corruption of the Talmud. But love of the written word is something that should rightly be a general human value, because we'll live or die with it, Jews and everyone else, whether we want to or not. All civilizations fall when their coin is debased, and our coin today is information. [edit2] also, I'm drunk, and I love y'all. I hope this stimulates debate, not hate.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
I hate to say it, but it does not sound that far fetched. In some weird ways, tech already feels like magic to a lot of people and people surrounding it are today's wizards and priests willing that power into existence. In practical sense, as a society, we do need something to separate good from bad. Technopriest cast does sound like a fun job description to me ( which will inevitably be corrupted and result in its own schism ). Future scares me.

mrtksn 4y ago

Hear me out, the problem is not AI generated content but what this content stands for. Why we use text? Half of it is about getting something from someone else BUT even more importantly we write text to change something in the worlds using our words. The problem with AI pretending being a human only exist when that AI doesn't get anything from us and it's only good for extracting information from. It's utterly futile to discuss with AI generated content here on HN but it's amazing experience on ChatGPT precisely because when we write each other something here on HN, we expect that our words will create some impact somewhere. Some option will change or we will befriend someone. I have 0 problems with having interacting with AI which is an individual machine in Lisbon, and it is learning and evolving as the life happens. On the other hand, I hate the idea that I'm talking with a machine in Palo Alto and the only output of my conversation is some statistics that VC will gaze over and optimize for his own gain. Just think about it how meaning is transferred from human to human: we can compress meaning in few markings and extract it on the other side only because as individuals we have experienced life and some markings saying "bored" is enough to transfer very complex situation from person to person. In the current state of the AI, being bored doesn't mean anything to LLMs but if individual AI machines lived human-like lives, I think it will start having meaning for them too. IMHO, the problem with AI generated content currently is exactly the same with SPAM or other non-genuine content and has nothing to do with it's origins being biological or electronic. We people will put eyes on a ball and call it our friend, we don't have problem with it.

throwaway589275 4y ago

It's not clear that people actually care about and want AI-free OC, at least if you look at what kind of content is being consumed. Right now Google search seems to prioritize non-organic content, with search results often being a stream of blogspam and reddit/quora shill/astroturf crap that if not AI-generated, is close enough in terms of tone, accuracy, and originality, that it might as well be. Meanwhile you never get any results from 4chan or KiwiFarms (sites with much more organic content), unless you go out of your way to specifically ask for it.

icepat 4y ago
Google not prioritizing 4chan and KiwiFarms is a terrible example "not wanting organic content". They're not just "organic content", they're cesspools of the worst kind of organic content. 4chan is notoriously filled with questionable to outright illegal content/activity, and KiwiFarms is just a website to organize doxxing and online harassment. I don't understand why that's your standard for "organic content". I would have to heavily question your activity if you're being thwarted by a lack of those sites in your search results. I'm personally very happy with 4chan links not showing up in search results. I also think you're misunderstanding how Google prioritizes content. It's not showing the content people want, as much as content that's optimized with SEO to look appealing.
- throwaway589275 4y ago
  > KiwiFarms is just a website to organize doxxing and online harassment KF is a gossip site, like Lipstick Alley or DataLounge, but with a focus on e-celebs and internet phenomena. I go there whenever I want to get the dirt (ie. truth) about e-celebs or some weird internet trend or subculture. Its users literally just passively document and discuss this stuff, and there's a policy (and ethos) of "no touch." You and others endorsing its erasure (despite it not breaking any law) would know this (and perhaps secretly do) if you actually lurked there for a while instead of just credulously accepting its critics' characterization. It's also strange how the site is supposedly such a hive of doxxers, harassers, etc., yet nothing seems to happen to the journalists and tech people organizing against it. I think the real reason it's in hot water is precisely because they just passively, permanently document so much, some of which some people with money and influence don't want documented. Maybe they documented something someone (some billionaire?) secretly doesn't want out there?

dopylitty 4y ago

The long term impact of the ease of generating low nutrition digital content using language models may be that people put down their devices and return to the real world. We’re already far down that path with the existing internet where most content is generated for SEO. Anything you’re consuming on the internet or even on a TV may just be random noise generated by some model so why waste your precious time consuming it? On the flip side why waste your time producing content if it’s going to be drowned in a sea of garbage mashed together by some language model?

TheMaskedCoder 4y ago
> The long term impact of the ease of generating low nutrition digital content using language models may be that people put down their devices The problem is people don't always make the wise decision. Evidence: the junk food industry is alive and kicking. Some people will disconnect from devices, but others may just say "this is the way things are now" and adjust themselves to the flavor of junk content.
- alkjsdlkjasd 4y ago
  Why are you assuming that it will make writing worse not better? Just because it can be used by non-experts to create crappy written work, it can also be used by people who work with it to augment and improve their existing writen work. To my mind AI is a general purpose technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_technology I guess using this mental model, what you are worried about is the equivilent to pollution? Did the printing press also increase the amount of crap in circulation?
  - dazc 4y ago
    > Did the printing press also increase the amount of crap in circulation? I think the answer is, undoubtedly, yes.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    << Did the printing press also increase the amount of crap in circulation? << Why are you assuming that it will make writing worse not better? Both of these are fascinating questions and, to me anyway, both can be answered with yes. The sheer amount of writing increased exponentially once more people could read, write and publish their own writings ( and internet only exacerbated this trend ). I accordance with pareto principle, most of it was of poor quality, but the upside was that good output likely did increase in terms of absolute number as well ( few people are bound to write something decent ). I think parent is looking back at history and reasonably infers potential results ( more crap ).

photochemsyn 4y ago

The organic analogy to AI refers to locally-produced crops grown with natural fertilizers and pre-industrial pest and weed control strategies, as an antitode to industrial-fertilizer soaked, herbicide-and-pesticide drenched, antibiotic-and-synthetic-hormone laden, globally-transported heavily-processed foodstuffs. While this does sound good to most people, it's always worth remembering that Old South plantations produced nothing but 100% organic cotton, despite their atrocious practices of human slavery. If we include this perspective, AI has some potentially extremely positive potential. One of the most promising trends in agriculture is the adoption of AI to the problem of weed and pest control, as well as fertilizer use. AI robots crawling over fields can use image recognition to identify weeds (and kill them with IR lasers) as well as pest infestations in their early stages. Application of fertilizer to individual plants on as as-needed basis (rather than just dumping large volumes on the entire field) also becomes possible. This can be done far faster and more efficiently than by human laborers walking up and down rows of crops, weeding by hand. Potentially, this could make organic-style agriculture as cost-effective as the industrial variety. Sure, this means fewer field labor agricultural jobs - which are pretty tough, backbreaking jobs by any measure. Similar arguments apply to a lot of the drudgery in creative and artistic endeavors. Of course, AI could also replace most corporate board positions, and a lot of upper management as well, and hey, why not the shareholders and investors too? Are they of any more value to the operation of a business than the replaceable grunt workers are? Let's make the world's smartest AI and have it make decisions about how capital should be allocated to promising startups, removing fallible humans from the loop. Resource optimization on steroids! Yes, I read too much science fiction. See William Gibson, Iain M. Banks, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Adrian Tchaikovsky for examples of what can go wrong (and maybe right).

hcrisp 4y ago

But how to prove it is AI free? Earlier I found and posted a stackexchange article which listed many answers, some banal and some intriguing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34463535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34463535

sharemywin 4y ago

I feel a more important issue is the answer accurate. than is it AI.

d1algo 4y ago

FWIW I would like to shamelessly plug https://www.humanproved.com https://www.humanproved.com here . The idea is that a human needs to pledge that their content is human generated to get a unique badge , that they can display alongside their content along with a url. Someone can use the url to verify the time stamp that the badge was issued.

yellow_lead 4y ago
Of course, a human would never lie about that.
trompetenaccoun 4y ago
How does it prevent bots from getting a badge? Is solving a CAPTCHA all they have to do?

trompetenaccoun 4y ago

Not saying there won't be those who do, but caring if something was created by AI instead of a human is about as intelligent as being bothered by your neighbor being a certain nationality, or boycotting a movie because one of the actors has the "wrong" skin color. It matters what we consume, plenty of humans peddle rotten ideas and false narratives. With AI, I'd look into the models and the intentions of those who created/run it. What sort of content it delivers. Just as it makes sense with human authors to look up their biography and publishing history.

mikeg8 4y ago
I disagree. I think humans have a higher creative ceiling and so the truly moving, life altering pieces of art will always need that human element; I’d rather not waste my time consuming the AI content when it’s peaks are lower. AI content will be like modern pop songs and super hero movies. They fit a formula and people will still consider them “great” because the bar has been lowered by algorithms and reduced appetite for risk. but deep down we know they are not in the same league as works from The Beatles, Sting, or Martin Scorsese.
somenameforme 4y ago
Here [1] is a picture of the Mona Lisa. Even if one isn't really into art, you can't help but be drawn into that smile. What did it mean? What was she thinking? What did Leonardo see, and when painting it did he intend to convey what he saw? Or was it a mystery to himself as well, something unbelievably well conveyed in the painting itself? The reasons these questions are so fun to consider is because we know the answers exist, even if we also know we shall never know them. By contrast had this image just been something output by yet another neural network generator, there would be little to no interest of the same sort, as you would know that anything you infer beyond the most surface level is exactly the same as seeing shapes in the clouds. [1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%2C_from_C2RMF.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Mona_Lis...
- trompetenaccoun 4y ago
  Being into art, I think your example perfectly demonstrates why we can't get AI soon enough. There is no good reason for thousands of tourists to crowd around the Mona Lisa on a daily basis. They don't even understand what they're looking at. Would people pay millions of dollars for an AI generated black square NFT? Maybe some would too, it really shows the retardation of the entire space. With the mainstream it's not even about art and craftsmanship but about big names and make-believe. And that's not just art but all fields including science to a degree. When we get AI, hopefully more people are going to start focusing on substance instead of marketing and illusion.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

The problem is -- just like the food products the author uses as analogy -- there is no reasonable agreed-on line between "natural" and "unnatural", "homemade" vs "factory", and "AI" vs "not-AI" because the processes at work are a gradient. Is my spell or grammar check an AI? No, why not? What if I translate a word from another language while writing, using an automatic translation tool? What about the algorithms that boost (or don't boost) my post through various networks, and pick an audience for it? And the analytics tools I use? etc. etc. And all of this will just become murkier and murkier. "AI" is itself a problematic term, since as many of us know many of the things so-marketed are little more than a bundle of heuristics or a complicated statistical model. And many of the "authoring" tools generating texts or images or code are really just copy-and-pasting-and-mutating things without a lot of magic in-between, but in clever ways that "trick" us into seeing it as original authorship. (Ok us humans do this too) Perhaps the most reasonable dividing line is: is there a machine here that is emulating a human, pretending to be one? That is perhaps the thing that bothers me most about the recent wave with ChatGPT, Google's Meena etc -- the authors of these systems didn't have to create systems that presented with a human-like identity with pronouns and the illusion of selfhood. But they did, and now we have the Lemoine incident etc. Reminds me very much of Dune, and its "Orange Catholic Bible"'s “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” I think Herbert was onto something -- the question of whether something is truly human (or human created) or not might become the key important issue of our time and the ambiguity and confusion around that is going to become troublesome.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

This reminds me of the ‘portrait drawings’ to camera transition. LLMs have given us a more interesting corridor in the Library of Babel - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel - but choosing the wheat from the chaff will still be the human endeavor because of the infinite possible BS.

shever73 4y ago

This post reminds me of Samuel Butler's novel, Erewhon. "Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?"

eloff 4y ago
That reminds me of the epilogue to HG Wells Time Traveler: “ He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.” That passage has haunted me since. I often wonder if that is the answer to the Fermi paradox. Civilization might be but a brief spark in the long night, separated from others by both time and distance insurmountable.
- erulabs 4y ago
  You’re not wrong but… “I refute it thus” kicks big pile of old books “it remains for us to live as though it were not so” is a wonderful line.

xwdv 4y ago

We take it for granted these days that most text we read is generated by humans. But imagine a future where it is assumed most text is AI by default, and human text is only as common as computer generated text is today. Imagine 9 out of 10 comments on hackernews being AI authored. This comment, AI authored.

dukeofdoom 4y ago

Funny, just yesterday I asked ChatGTP for some nutritional advise: >can you give me the most common symptom of every vitamin deficiency Sure, here is a list of common symptoms associated with deficiency in certain vitamins: Vitamin A: night blindness, dry skin, and poor immune function Vitamin B1 (thiamine): fatigue, irritability, and muscle weakness Vitamin B2 (riboflavin): cracks and sores at the corners of the mouth, itchy and scaly skin, and light sensitivity Vitamin B3 (niacin): pellagra, which includes symptoms such as skin inflammation, diarrhea, and dementia Vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid): fatigue, insomnia, and muscle cramps Vitamin B6 (pyridoxine): anemia, skin disorders, and depression Vitamin B7 (biotin): hair loss, scaly skin, and brittle nails Vitamin B12: pernicious anemia, which can cause fatigue, muscle weakness, and nerve damage Vitamin C: scurvy, which can lead to bleeding gums, easy bruising, and poor wound healing Vitamin D: rickets in children, and osteomalacia in adults, which can cause muscle weakness, bone pain, and fractures Vitamin E: nerve damage, muscle weakness, and impaired vision Vitamin K: bleeding disorders, easy bruising, and poor blood clotting It's important to note that these symptoms can also be caused by other factors and deficiency in vitamins can manifest differently between people. Consult with a doctor if you suspect a deficiency. >can you list the most recommended food source for each vitamin Sure, here is a list of some food sources that are high in certain vitamins: Vitamin A: sweet potatoes, carrots, kale, spinach, and apricots Vitamin B1 (thiamine): whole grains, nuts, seeds, and legumes Vitamin B2 (riboflavin): almonds, mushrooms, and dairy products Vitamin B3 (niacin): chicken, fish, and peanuts Vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid): mushrooms, avocado, and sweet potatoes Vitamin B6 (pyridoxine): chicken, fish, and chickpeas Vitamin B7 (biotin): eggs, nuts, and sweet potatoes Vitamin B12: fish, meat, and dairy products Vitamin C: oranges, strawberries, kiwi, and bell peppers Vitamin D: fatty fish such as salmon, mackerel and sardines, egg yolks and mushrooms Vitamin E: almonds, sunflower seeds, and spinach Vitamin K: leafy greens like spinach, kale, and broccoli, also found in parsley, Brussels sprouts and even kelp. Hulk Hogan would approve https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-dI4Sl2rzE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-dI4Sl2rzE

swayvil 4y ago

This is a wake-up call. The popular epistemology has been flaming garbage for so long. When you see something for yourself, that delivers one kind of knowledge. When you hear it from a friend, that delivers another kind of knowledge. When you hear it from somebody you don't know, and never actually met, second or third hand, that delivers yet another kind of knowledge. And, in our society, that last kind of knowledge is so often treated as equivalent to the first. Which is messed up.

ipython 4y ago

Sorry, but all I can think of after reading this blog post is the evil bit RFC: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt which has had just as much effect on internet security as this proposal will have on controlling ai generated content.

fellerts 4y ago
That RFC was intended as a joke though (look at the date). This isn't, and I agree that it sounds like a feeble attempt at controlling the floodgates.
- ipython 4y ago
  Yes I know it was a joke - hence my point.

erksa 4y ago

AI tools I believe it will soon become a helpful tool for many people. Just like how smartphones made photography accessible to more people and Javascript made it easier for people to enter the tech field. However, we will have a difficult time when it comes to social media because AI content will become more and more, until it is just. It seems plausible the next social media will remove the social part completely, and just have people as consumers, creators.

zelias 4y ago

I wonder if this sentiment will ultimately lead to a "Butlerian Jihad" culling of "thinking machines" a la Dune

euroderf 4y ago
Well, we've got part of the Mentat angle covered already. "It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion."

jonathanstrange 4y ago

You'll need a special AI soon just to read and process the flood of superficially reasonable sounding bullshit AI will be throwing at you from all kinds of directions. On the bright side, the quality of writing style might overall increase with AI paraphrasing and style correction/adaptation tools.

michaelmior 4y ago

> Some of the AI-generated output is factually wrong While this is undoubtedly true and a problem that needs to be addressed, it's worth considering that humans gets things factually wrong too sometimes (intentionally or not). So perhaps a more interesting question is how much more or less correct an AI is than a human on a given task. People talk about this with self-driving cars all the time. Arguably a self-driving car does not need to drive perfectly (not that this is not a good goal), but if it can drive more safely than the average human driver, there's still a significant chance of improving overall road safety.

scotty79 4y ago

Alternatively... Pure, certified 100% AI generated content. No humans or other animals were directly exploited for the purposes of generating this content.

alpos 4y ago

This strikes me as a distinction without a difference. Content creation is not even close to the same as GMO or processed foods. People are justified in being concerned about how food is made precisely because there are meaningful differences in the nutritional value and trace chemical content in the end products. And that matters because we don't fully understand the role those factors play in long term human health. Created content does not share similar distinctions based on how it was produced. At the level of our personal experience of a story, image, or sound it does not matter if the content was human generated or even if the stories are real; they either elicit an emotional response or they don't. This is why we can enjoy fiction and art in the first place. It's also why a given piece of art can mean different things to different people. Deliberately cutting yourself off from the meaning a piece could have for you just because you aren't yet sure that a human produced it is unnecessarily specist and only acts to your own detriment. Should one likewise refuse to engage with works that had assistance from the artist's pets? With regard to news stories and other informational content, if two stories about the same event are both accurate, timely, informative, and/or insightful, it does not matter if one was written by a human on a typewriter and the other written by a bot after having been prompted by a human. The present state of the art still requires some human editing to hit those marks but we're quickly approaching a time where there will not be any detectable differences. This idea that people deserve to invent a new category of things to be prejudiced about seems silly and unhelpful to me. Why bother inventing arbitrary distinctions just so people can play favorites and be judgemental about it? People are already free to judge content based on relative merits. That seems like enough to me. And it's important to account for the fact that the end goal with these tools is that there will be no differences between human and AI generated content. The teams working on these things have already made considerable progress to that end, it's not hard to imagine the next couple of iterations actually achieving that. So anyone trying to create these arbitrary labels is staring an uphill battle for a fundamentally unhelpful end state. We really don't need to put that kind of energy into reinforcing people's desire to feel superior. We have more than enough elitism/triablism/racism/otherism around as it is.

megous 4y ago
At the end of the day, good content is good content regardless of who or what produced it. We should focus on recognizing and celebrating the beauty, regardless of its origin.

mxgr 4y ago

I think we should judge content independently of whether it was created by AI or humans. Labeling AI-free content doesn't seem to add much value to me in general (with exceptions).

imranq 4y ago

OpenAI is working on a watermark for their models (if not already there) that would recognize content as AI generated. If its good enough, it should be able to filter out AI content when training new models https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/10/openais-attempts-to-watermark-ai-text-hit-limits/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/10/openais-attempts-to-waterm...

htrp 4y ago
The problem is that you can always use something else to watermark it.

kris_wayton 4y ago

"Microsoft now owns a 49% stake in the maker of chatGPT/GPT3 - OpenAI" I didn't know that. Makes the Google <-> OpenAI rivalry more interesting.

beej71 4y ago

The solution that comes to mind is something like the PGP web of trust, except the web would consist of verified humans. This didn't work for PGP because people in general don't care about that. And I think people in general don't care if their content is AI-generated or not. It's not like all human-generated content on the web is tremendously accurate or well-written. Hell, maybe the AI will even be better. :)

thenerdhead 4y ago

The point about emotional response is good. I'm not sure how to best describe it, but every time I interact with AI, there is very little emotional response from it. Rather it's a "good enough" response rather than a sense of awe or horror. I've been experimenting with writing recently and wanting to provide some AI imagery to match the emotions I'm expressing. A painting like "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" evokes many emotions. But when I use the same description such as: "a man standing upon a rocky precipice with his back to the viewer; he is gazing out on a landscape covered in a thick sea of fog through which other ridges, trees, and mountains pierce, which stretches out into the distance indefinitely." I get the store-brand version that doesn't invoke any emotion. It is "good enough" to get the point across, but lacking the response. Similar to the countless recreations of the Mona Lisa, there is just something about organic perfection. I'm sure AI will get there one day, but who knows if we will react to it in this sense of wonderment.

ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
We just need to give the AI memories from real people and give them a life span short enough that they won't realize it... and then if they go bananas and start causing harm, make another AI to terminate them... I swear I have heard this strategy used elsewhere.
luxcem 4y ago
Do you think your emotional response is related to the external knowledge of who produced the painting or is it only based on the visual impression? We probably can still figure out if a painting is original or AI-generated but I don't think we can much longer as AI improve. The question would be could we feel emotions even if the source material is artificial. I think the answer is yes. Human brain is can easily be tricked.
- thenerdhead 4y ago
  I guess it is more that AI doesn't struggle to create. Humans go through many emotions in the process of creating art. The outcome isn't as important and the appreciation that artists went through that grueling process and the outcome being what it is I believe is the response I'm trying to express. So more to the human struggle of the production. At least for me.

TuringTest 4y ago

> How much of it will be being certain that you are reading something generated by human before you're willing to commit to having an emotional response, even if the output is identical, right? ... Interesting. Like, do you really want to cry watching a movie that was 100% produced by robots?Maybe not I certainly wouldn't mind. AI-generated content is a statistical summarization of knowledge produced by infinite humans randomly typing on typewriters, after all...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jacobsenscott 4y ago

No droids

calcsam 4y ago

The easiest way to signal that your content is AI free is to publish content that would be very difficult to do with AI, eg conversations between two known personalities on recent news stories.

eruci 4y ago

I was thinking about this exact problem a few days ago when I created a site hosting poems that were either 100% AI written, or 100% Human. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34472478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34472478 Then I asked people to guess the authorship. Amazingly, only 70% of the time the guess people make is correct. https://random-poem.com/ https://random-poem.com/ why : Is this Poem written by or by ? Guess & Click. I'm guessing it will get even harder to tell as the AI improves further down the road.

everybodyknows 4y ago
Why is AI introducing a misspelling, one that does not appear to be any sort of deliberate wordplay? https://random-poem.com/Weird https://random-poem.com/Weird "ridicolously"
- eruci 4y ago
  Good Question. However this is 100% ChatGPT. Perhaps it knows that Weird Al intentionally misspells words in his work, hence it has intentionally introduced this typo. Which makes this type of AI even more awesome. --edit .. weird: I asked ChatGPT if there is a typo in this poem. This is what it responded with: Me: Does this poem have a typo? https://random-poem.com/weird https://random-poem.com/weird ChatGPT: It appears that there is an intentional typo in the first line of the poem "Weird Al, oh Weird Yankovic Al" instead of "Weird Al Yankovic". Yankovic being the surname of the artist, this addition can be seen as a playful and humorous way to refer to the artist, and give the poem a personal touch.

froh 4y ago

.oO( organic food, contaminated with aluminum? ) oh.

ElemenoPicuares 4y ago

Maybe a good step would be figuring out a way to not immediately commodify all human activity and then smugly tell the affected to learn how to do something new when their life's work is rendered obsolete by technology.

asab 4y ago

I think the quality will keep improving, because humans will keep curating the training data to compete for best results. The downside is that "quality" is conflated with "performs best for a particular audience and platform" which could just as easily mean re-ingesting junk and spitting it back out... because that's what people respond to.

johnsutor 4y ago

[dead]

seydor 4y ago

There is a case to be made that talking to a human is the bland one now. Amidst all the censoring and self-sensoring and assumption of bad faith, there is a lot that is not possible to discuss in polite company, even online, but is interesting. AIs seem more willing to give me a straight answer rather than going of moral tangents or ego trips. I have had discussions with the chat that went deeper than the smartasses in reddit . I thought that that was a lost art So, just like with good cheese, maybe i will go with full-fat

BashiBazouk 4y ago

Reminds me of the Dovetail phyle in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age where the rich value purely human made goods in a world of matter compilers that can almost instantly make or duplicate just about anything. On the other hand, I find Stable Diffusion the most interesting thing going on in art at the moment...

rosywoozlechan 4y ago

> do you really want to cry watching a movie that was 100% produced by robots? I've had a lot of fun having ChatGPT write stories for me: I'd ask it make changes, to add a character, add a motivation, etc. I'm just playing around, and it's 100% produced by a robot and I enjoy it. I don't personally mind having an emotional response by a story generated by a "robot". I don't really understand how it being bot generated cheapens the experience. The emotion that I feel are elicited by my thoughts and reflections based on what I've read and experienced, not by the robot.

LesZedCB 4y ago
our emotions and desires are mediated by machines literally day in and day out. there is no point whatsoever in making an arbitrary line at a damn movie.
mdrzn 4y ago
> do you really want to cry watching a movie that was 100% produced by robots? I didn't really understand this line either. I guess my answer is yes? Who cares?

cwoolfe 4y ago

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

pkdpic 4y ago

Great piece, it seems to have produced a couple of non-ai-augmented thoughts... 1. When ambitious young cooks / farmers etc set out to make a name for themselves in the food industry, I don't get the impression they're rushing towards kosher food development en masse. But I could be wrong. 2. Over the course of my life I've observed (and lived) the response to the dissolution with mass market factory farm food to be a movement towards local, organic, small batch and visibly produced / performed food production. 3. I want to believe a distaste or boredom with ai produced content will lead us all offline and make us more focused on art, music, writing, advice etc produced by people we actually know in real life. Like a farmers market but for everything. 4. If I had to guess though I'd say its more likely in the short term to just increase the popularity of live streaming everything. I should really have had chatGPT proof read this for me and optimize it for upvotes. CERTIFIED ORGANIC AI-FREE POST

toss1 4y ago
Yes! I felt reading the article that AI/ML vs "organic" content will become the difference between fine hand-crafted furniture and flat-pack Ikea stuff. Sure, the flat-pack is better than nothing for a temporary apartment, but it is something to move beyond, not what we want to be stuck with for the rest of our lives and in all situations. CERTIFIED ORGANIC AI-FREE POST
- int_19h 4y ago
  Quality furniture, especially hand-crafted, is expensive and far from being universally affordable. It's quite likely that the same thing will apply here wrt "artisan hand-crafted content", and thus AI-generated stuff will still constitute the vast majority of what the society consumes. That said, if it gets good enough that you have to be an expert to tell AI-generated stuff from human-made, does it really matter? The upper classes will always play the silly "look what I can afford!" status games, and these often don't have an utilitarian component to them - something doesn't need to be actually better, it just needs to be recognized as more refined. Well, and cost more.

i_like_apis 4y ago

The best part is the “gluten free” anti AI crowd will be left in the dust. They may think they’re being classy snobs but being against AI is going to be tantamount to saying you eat crayons and don’t read well.

selfhoster11 4y ago
Gluten intolerance is a legitimate digestive issue. I suggest picking a different descriptor to make your point.
- i_like_apis 4y ago
  I think it’s pretty on-point though, because while Celiac disease is real (gluten intolerance), most people saying no to gluten don’t have it. The notion of gluten “sensitivity” or allergy is debated by medical science to say the least. It’s largely hypochondria, mass hysteria, and often a trendy meme for snobs and hipsters.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    Respectfully, you’re wrong. Celiac is not the only kind of gluten intolerance, and I’m speaking from personal experience. I eat gluten, and I get severe issues with digestion. I stop eating gluten, the issues magically disappear. I thought my issues were just “normal” until a couple of years ago, and that gluten intolerance was a BS made-up thing. I was wrong on both counts.

theiz 4y ago

Although I like most of the posting, some thoughts: First of all, we think with all inventions we have excluded human beings from being required. In the end we get more efficient, but we still need workers. The trend though is to go to core business and standard following the industrialisation, I see ai as an opportunity to have more custom and service driven business on an industrial scale though, that is the real promise. This can start with service desk providing service rather then unusable rubbish ad they do now. For the art and text: this industry is relatively new, and came with internet and PowerPoint decks. And yes, probably this will be impacted by ai, but do we really have to be sorry for that? We will have the same page filling nonsense created by ai, that is now created by cheap labour. Look at recipe sites, all kind of crap to make recipes into content so the copyright is somewhat addressed, but nobody reads that anyway. As for all other changes we have had before: there will be some impact on business and life as we know it, but not as much as anyone expected upfront.

xpe 4y ago

Proving content to be AI-free content is fraught. It might be practical in narrow contexts, but I think it will be mostly impractical. It will even be theoretically impossible in many cases. So, the article's underlying philosophy is "not there yet". It does not adequately address various real world challenges. 1. How is AI-generated content different from algorithms? I'd suggest drawing a line may be nonsensical. 2. What is the precise ethical motivation for wanting to avoid AI-influenced computation? I don't see a compelling case. Examples: A. Do we want civil engineers to use optimization software? Yes. B. Do we like spelling and grammar checkers? Yes. C. Do we want content generation software to suggest topics and hyperlinks? Yes. D. Do we want to try out AI music? Yes. And we want to remix it. E. Do we want to improve our health by making it more accessible and affordable? Yes. If our goal include protecting human rights, health, dignity, and so on, we better darn well formulate our philosophy and policy goals in a coherent way.

dusted 4y ago

There's already a lot of people whose textual output reads more like a markov chain than a LLM... (this comment included? ;))

7ewis 4y ago

I've started to 'learn' the ChatGPT tone (you can even give ChatGPT some text and ask it if it thinks it was AI written). Now I know the general structure and language it uses I've been spotting it all over Reddit, HN and some blog posts. I have noticed it makes me get bored of reading content, and I start to skim through it assuming it's just AI generated waffle.

gavinhoward 4y ago

This is a good idea. I just changed all of my websites to have "100% AI-free organic content" in the copyright footers. (I didn't say "certified" for obvious reasons.)