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Our Society Is Not Prepared for This Much AI Awesome

53 points by imartin2k 4y ago

aaronbrethorst 4y ago
On a couple occasions, I've forwarded AI-related news articles to friends with the note "the next year is going to be f'ing weird." I stand by this assessment.
- moremetadata 4y ago
  First there was the mirror, then technology like camera's & tv's, smart phones and social media, and then there was AI.
college_physics 4y ago
Is there anything for which our society is prepared for? There is not much evidence we can handle shocks, whether these are self-generated or external The 'AI' might be 'learning' from all the publicly available information. We certainly dont.
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
I really dislike this narrative about AI helping people learn. Learning is the act of actively reaching for something you didn't know before and making it yours. You do not learn by simply reading information that has been given to you. You learn by playing with the concepts and elaborating them yourself (other than memorizing them). If the elaboration is done by an AI your brain is doing zero work and thus not learning properly. Asking an AI to "explain this concept differently" and reading its output is entirely different from thinking about the stuff and coming up with the results yourself. AI is terrible for learning, but it's terrific for getting good grades. But ask yourself, what is the point of school then? Do you want to cheat your way out and find yourself without a sliver of knowledge when you're 25? Sure, it's romantic to think that "I'm just gonna let the AI write all those boring essays while I learn how to program in Python in my newly found free time! that'll show those boring professors!" but we know that's just a fantasy
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  We already have tons of schools were people defactor "cruise" and the levels there will plumet even more. Education in some countries consists mainly of bribing the teachers to sign the magic "you know now" paper. I think we will actually see a paper spam in the "bad" academic sector, and the emergence of a good academic sector. Publishing something refined and condensed once a year. Rejecting to even look at the "filler".
- Barrin92 4y ago
  >. If the elaboration is done by an AI your brain is doing zero work and thus not learning properly. yup, it's basically stackoverflow copy-pasting on steroids. There's a reason John Carmack's ideal learning environment is to literally go to a cabin in the woods, read a bunch of papers and reimplement what he wants to learn from scratch. I think there's two aspects to it. One is that you can't genuinely learn something until you really dig in. But also psychologically, tool assisted learning promotes a sort of learned-helplessness. It's sad how often I hear people say nowadays that they think they're not capable of sitting down with a foundational book and starting from the bottom up.
- zone411 4y ago
  If you don't learn anything from reading, I think you're in the minority. I agree that active doing, writing, thinking are often better but those aren't the only ways people learn.
  - rob74 4y ago
    You don't learn anything from reading, you learn from understanding what you have read. Memorizing what you have read will only get you so far...
    - zone411 4y ago
      You're splitting hairs and being too literal. We're comparing learning from a lecture, a book or a video to learning from an AI. The amount of thinking is the same (or more if the AI is personalized).
prox 4y ago
There is something awesome about the end of shortage. We are hardwired for scarcity and capitalism itself thrives on it to create value. Perhaps for the first time in history we need to rethink the whole model of production, needs, wants and consuming. A full blown Star Trek society is not “communism” as I saw it sometimes described, it’s “all-needs-are-met-ism” at zero cost. The question is how to bridge the gap from where we are now to there.
- kvgr 4y ago
  For “all-needs-are-met-ism“ we need almost free energy. We are far from that. The problem will be how to handle people who are bored and do not go to work for a lot of time to waste "bad" energy.
  - prox 4y ago
    In “all-needs-met-ism” there is no wasted “bad” energy. People who don’t want to work go on permanent holiday. That’s where it gets psychologically interesting. How long do you holiday before you want to do something again? I do concur we are far from it, but the moment we can do free energy print-on-demand anything, it will be possible. Every day the sun outputs energy we use in a year.
    - kvgr 4y ago
      a lot of people would just drink and do drugs, because they are unable to self direct. I think that right amnount of struggle keeps people sane.
      - prox 4y ago
        Your comment suddenly reminds me of Agent Smith paraphrased “we designed the perfect world for you, but your primitive minds tried to wake up from it. Whole harvests where lost.” I think there can be a lot of neurological imbalance from complete freedom and absence of scarcity. I think on the whole (or at least myself) I could live like that. And nobody in this post scarcity world is barred from doing work if they need it I guess. That’s also a form of post scarcity.
edrxty 4y ago
None of these LLM type systems are really providing anything in the realm of fact checking so I'm not sure how the author is coming up with this? They predict words, they don't do context or logic...
- blurbleblurble 4y ago
  That's such an oversimplification.
  - edrxty 4y ago
    How is it wrong?
    - danielbln 4y ago
      They literally "do context", as they do in-context learning. Also, factuality can effectively be solved by chain-of-thought prompting[0] and the use of external tools[1], also see toolformerzero[2] for a simple example. [0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761 https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761 [2]: https://toolformerzero.com/ https://toolformerzero.com/ [2]: https://toolformerzero.com/ https://toolformerzero.com/
    - blurbleblurble 4y ago
      The "predicting words" part of the language models is a building block, but the actual applications being built around the LLMs are using that predictive ability in very dynamic ways along with external memory, feedback and sophisticated control methods to attenuate and channel their behavior. And anyhow: > Memory Augmented Large Language Models are Computationally Universal https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.04589 https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.04589
- mtrycz2 4y ago
  I agree that some of this can be exciting to some, but (novelty aside) AIs promote mediocrity, not awesomeness.
- 4y ago
aaron695 4y ago
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airza 4y ago
I think rather than a world described here where “creators” (what a nauseating term) are terrified of being upstaged by AI, most are terrified by a world where AI can produce images that are 80% as good as a human but cost 99.999% less. It seems easy to imagine a world where almost all _economic_ gain from artistic endeavors is captured by a few companies, which would be both dangerous from a material perspective and frightening to imagine from a cultural perspective. What would our world look like if almost all art was compressed into sensibilities and values that flatter software engineers?
- Kiro 4y ago
  Most people making art do not need a financial incentive to do so.
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    I say this in a parallel comment but there’s both commercial art and creative art and they’re separate things. Commercial art will be significantly affected by AI but creative art won’t be, or AI will be used as just another tool in the toolbox for creative artists.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Kiro 4y ago
      Absolutely. I also think there's a big sleeper group (the biggest) with people who make generic art but for themselves and only show it to their friends and family, or doesn't show it at all. I'm one of those. I make it for myself and this doesn't deter me the slightest. However, if you're only in it for the money I think you're in for a rough time.
    - krapp 4y ago
      >I say this in a parallel comment but there’s both commercial art and creative art and they’re separate things. They aren't separate things. Plenty of artists - even in purely commercial fields - are creative and passionate about their work. This bias is unfortunate and nearly omnipresent on Hacker News. It's assumed that to be a "true" artist, one must be willing to suffer, and any artist who makes any money must only be in it for the money. Meanwhile a lot of people here wouldn't so much as get out of bed for a salary with less than six figures, catered lunches, a gym membership, unlimited PTO and a pony, and yet they still consider themselves "knowledge workers" for whom only the purity of information and craftsmanship of code are priorities. But everyone else has be a slave to supply and demand and if that means they can't make a living, tough shit. Like as not, we live in a capitalist society and passion and talent are commodities like everything else. Good art takes time to learn, time to maintain, time to execute, materials, licenses, etc - all of which cost money. Artists need to eat, they need a roof over their heads, they need to pay taxes. That money can either be made doing what one is passionate about, which means being tainted by capitalism, or doing something else. In which case the art suffers.
padjo 4y ago
“the prospect of unprecedented cultural abundance” More is not better.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Other things being equal, cheaper and more widely available is better.
  - walt74 4y ago
    Reminds me of social media utopianism at the beginning of the blog era. More communication is better, more connections are better, and it gave is this world. So no, cheaper and more widely available is not always better.
imtringued 4y ago
>There’s a consistent theme in all of the above examples, Yeah, the people are passing of other people's or AI's work as their own. Imagine if they all had to attribute ChatGPT. The value of the AI would plummet to zero in those cases.
lynx23 4y ago
I feel the AI-angst is a product of inadequate education. Be it "creators" who expect monetary compensation for low hanging visual fruits, or people doing manual work who are about to be replaced by robots. The bar has just been pushed upwards, and those who previously thought they might wing it and take the shortcut through life, now pay the price for gambing on the lazy side.
- barking_biscuit 4y ago
  At this pace it would seem like flipping burgers is almost going to be a better career choice than software engineer in a few years time. Cognitive labour is going to be massively devalued.
ajb 4y ago
Where it will start to ring alarm bells will be at the next election, when we start to get a flood of plausible AI generated political material: * Ads targeted at the individual based of your social media history * Replies on social media and forums targeted to the audience Last election the bots were really dumb and obvious. Next election, or at best the one after, you won't be able to trust that something is by a human unless you met them or they are a public figure.
- e2le 4y ago
  Perhaps instead we should hold people to a higher standard rather than tolerating bullshit and nonsense. Using AI as a tool for identifying and explaining logical fallacies (among other things) could be very valuable. In the same way that ChatGPT can explain code and identify bugs. If it were well-used, then it would have the effect of making individuals less vulnerable to professional bullshitters and the armies of bots that already pervade online discourse. It could even be integrated into moderation tools (and browsers) to reduce the tide of nonsense spewed by AI and humans alike. If bullshit generators are such a threat, then perhaps we should seek to make them less effective.
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
This article is really crap. It's trying to convince you that AI is "awesome" and that we are just banning it on the basis of lacking a Human-Stamp-Of-Approval (TM), but actually the sources are not saying that. The sources are saying that these ML models generate "questionable" work that at best some of it may pass a filter (erring on the side of caution), but overall it is either direct plagiarism or of "unconvincing" quality. E.g. , * Short fiction: "I’m not going to detail how I know these stories are 'AI' spam. There are some very obvious patterns [...] While rejecting and banning these submissions has been simple," * College essays: "I probably couldn’t detect the AI authorship, but that I also wouldn’t label the essays as convincing." "I found both essays to resemble cliché essays, with neither answering the prompt in a convincing way. They also didn’t sound like an essay a teenager would write [...]" "New York City schools cited 'negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content,'" "Word by word it was a well-written essay," he said, but on closer inspection, one claim about the prolific philosopher, David Hume "made no sense" and was "just flatly wrong." "Really well-written wrong was the biggest red flag," "while the grammar in AI-generated essays is almost perfect, the substance tends to lack detail" None of this seems to justify TFA's point that ML-generated stuff "it’s not bad — it’s just not human". ML-generated stuff _is_ bad. Most definitely not awesome. Maybe it will improve in the future.
- chx 4y ago
  > Maybe it will improve in the future. To be fair, I find this entertaining. Very entertaining. The early 80s, another wave of exciting AI happened (from Japanese and US government funding) but there was a question which shocked Douglas Lenat so badly he dedicated himself since then to build a system of basic facts, that being Cyc. The question is: if Susan goes shopping does her head go with her? ( sorry if I do not quote it word-by-word by correct, it's been over a quarter century when I had my exam on this topic :) ) You can generate any amount of such questions which a two year old human would have no trouble answering but no AI -- so far -- could possibly answer unless of course that question and answer already occurred in some text. ChatGPT was called a stochastic parrot and it's not that ChatGPT is that, the entire model can not possibly produce anything else. Reasoning doesn't enter into this picture. So, not only it will not improve in the future, it can not improve.
blurbleblurble 4y ago
The massive deflation seems to be kicking off right at the source, software development is a lot easier with GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT. How can demand possibly keep up with the 100x + productivity that's about to hit the tech industry?
skor 4y ago
> Students ... gain a deeper understanding of the subject matter than students who don’t use any of the new tools. My first assumption is that if you are using these tools, it is primarily for saving time. All other benefits are quite less important.
- kazinator 4y ago
  I take it as uncontroversial that those who work with an accurate, silver-tongued bullshit generator will see better success in bullshit subjects; i.e most of the humanities.
- tomjen3 4y ago
  It may be so for now, but if you can research 1 article an hour with the old method, 10 minutes with an AI and need 4 articles for your essay, then you can either spend 4 hours with no AI, spend 40 minutes with an AI or spend the same 4 hours, go through 24 articles and create a much better essay. Likely those who are willing to work hard will see the potential of the AI tools, will still spend 4 hours and will break the curve. This isn't much of a problem, except for those who aren't able to use AI tools, who are now hopelessly behind (and will only be more so in the future).
nzoschke 4y ago
AI plus distance learning is a one-two punch. Surely universities can use timed in-person tests with no internet or phones if they want to guarantee human results. Reminds me of university maths after the advent of the TI-89. The calculator could pretty much do all the math as long as you entered the equation the right way verbatim. But you still had to take some tests with no calculators allowed.
Syntheticate 4y ago
Creators aren't worried about others getting the ability to produce. It would be fantastic if everyone could paint, sculpt, carve -- or any number of skills that must be painstakingly built. The fear is that so many things will be produced without thought that, rather than entering a period of cultural abundance, we will enter a cultural stagnation. This is not because AI tools cannot be used to generate good art! In fact we'll likely see artists adjust their process to take advantage of its strengths. Rather, it's because these tools are used to generate art (whether good, or mediocre) completely automatically, rendering art as a commodity rather than something special to treasure. If you see art as a means to an end then this might seem good. But part of the sheer power of art is in its scarcity; in the rarity encouraging us to take the time to investigate something more deeply, to build up relationships with art and artists, to find meaning and emotion and connection, which takes time and intention. Imagine an AI-produced endless stream of music that takes all of its cues from your favorite songs and produces high-quality audio tuned exactly to what you like hearing. How long does this remain interesting? How difficult is it to tell this noise from new music which might later shape your tastes? Part of the stagnation this AI revolution represents is an added difficulty of cultural evolution, because instead of there being room for the truly new, we are swamped by imitations of everything that came before.
- prohobo 4y ago
  A few points: - Culture is already stagnant. In the last 10 years I can't think of a single movement or trend that isn't about politics, and certainly nothing "refreshing". More than that, we have a calcified hubris towards new technology that means we don't even bother figuring out how it might impact us, nor how to use it properly. - We will get swamped with garbage content, and we will personalize all content (like generated music streams). We will stop hiring models, photographers, concept artists, musicians, writers, domain expert consultants, actors, etc. - This will trigger an existential crisis for many people (I know, do we really need more of that?). I don't want to be snarky or mean, but I also think putting it this way might get the point across as a proverb: "Artists" who thought they could get away with drawing anime waifus and uploading them to DeviantArt or social media for likes and commissions will have to face the fact that they're not wanted or needed. That goes for almost the entire creator and influencer economy. That brand of narcissism and delusion will get punched in the face repeatedly by AI, because everyone will be generating their own special waifus without them. Artists who want to create something new will be able to use AI to find the negative space where they can differentiate themselves. This dynamic of despair and searching might lead to a kind of renaissance. The potential for renaissance is there, but it'll probably be very painful, and I don't think anyone currently even knows what it would look like.
Xcelerate 4y ago
The human mind doesn't really grok exponential curves very well. We tend to perceive them more as flat and then suddenly they go vertical. In that regard, society's response to recent progress in AI appears clumsy and ineffective to me. Surely people don't think banning generated essays or art is going to fix whatever problem they perceive? This stuff is improving quicker than we can adapt, and any response that attempts to halt, delay, or ignore this progress is destined to fail. There are a lot of things we need to be prepared for, and since our current approach is reactive rather than proactive, I'm worried AI is going to arrive more like an earthquake than a smooth transition into what could potentially be a utopia for humanity. For instance, if we don't acknowledge that many types of jobs are going to be eliminated within a timespan of a few years (as opposed to the multigenerational timescale of the industrial revolution), then we are essentially condemning a large number of people to a sudden loss of income that is likely to be irreversible for those who are unable to retrain into a different profession quickly enough. Regardless of one's philosophy on universal basic income, I think most of us can agree that a society that stands by silently as millions of people who are willing to work lose their livelihood is not a moral society. To prevent this outcome requires a significant deal of foresight and proactivity that we don't currently seem to have. The other major problem I see (and one that is quite prevalent on HN) is an inappropriately symmetrical "penalty function" for forecasts in AI development—i.e., one that gives equal weight to the predictions "AI is arriving soon; the singularity is near" and "we're nowhere close to AGI; LLMs are just fancy high-dimensional interpolators and we may never reach true intelligence". The cost of erroneously preparing for the former outcome is mild: we wasted time on another AI winter, some unnecessary policies were created, and there was an annoying media hype cycle. But the consequences of a type II error are massive: most people cannot provide a meaningful contribution to the economy so all wealth rapidly funnels to a few people, the general population loses the ability to discern truth (well... beyond the extent to which this has occurred already), rapid existential change destabilizes the human psyche, and so on... not to mention any risk posed by AI directly (e.g., war, hacking, manipulation).
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  > The human mind doesn't really grok exponential curves very well. We tend to perceive them more as flat and then suddenly they go vertical. > In that regard, society's response to recent progress in AI appears clumsy and ineffective to me. Surely people don't think banning generated essays or art is going to fix whatever problem they perceive? This stuff is improving quicker than we can adapt, and any response that attempts to halt, delay, or ignore this progress is destined to fail. The singularity is one thing, I think might sneak up on us way faster than we think, and I don't think one can be prepared for a doubling of info every second of every day. It's incomprehensible that everything will just double faster and faster until a decade of progress takes place in 10 minutes, not 10 years.

53 points by imartin2k 4y ago

On a couple occasions, I've forwarded AI-related news articles to friends with the note "the next year is going to be f'ing weird." I stand by this assessment.

moremetadata 4y ago
First there was the mirror, then technology like camera's & tv's, smart phones and social media, and then there was AI.

college_physics 4y ago

Is there anything for which our society is prepared for? There is not much evidence we can handle shocks, whether these are self-generated or external The 'AI' might be 'learning' from all the publicly available information. We certainly dont.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago

I really dislike this narrative about AI helping people learn. Learning is the act of actively reaching for something you didn't know before and making it yours. You do not learn by simply reading information that has been given to you. You learn by playing with the concepts and elaborating them yourself (other than memorizing them). If the elaboration is done by an AI your brain is doing zero work and thus not learning properly. Asking an AI to "explain this concept differently" and reading its output is entirely different from thinking about the stuff and coming up with the results yourself. AI is terrible for learning, but it's terrific for getting good grades. But ask yourself, what is the point of school then? Do you want to cheat your way out and find yourself without a sliver of knowledge when you're 25? Sure, it's romantic to think that "I'm just gonna let the AI write all those boring essays while I learn how to program in Python in my newly found free time! that'll show those boring professors!" but we know that's just a fantasy

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
We already have tons of schools were people defactor "cruise" and the levels there will plumet even more. Education in some countries consists mainly of bribing the teachers to sign the magic "you know now" paper. I think we will actually see a paper spam in the "bad" academic sector, and the emergence of a good academic sector. Publishing something refined and condensed once a year. Rejecting to even look at the "filler".
Barrin92 4y ago
>. If the elaboration is done by an AI your brain is doing zero work and thus not learning properly. yup, it's basically stackoverflow copy-pasting on steroids. There's a reason John Carmack's ideal learning environment is to literally go to a cabin in the woods, read a bunch of papers and reimplement what he wants to learn from scratch. I think there's two aspects to it. One is that you can't genuinely learn something until you really dig in. But also psychologically, tool assisted learning promotes a sort of learned-helplessness. It's sad how often I hear people say nowadays that they think they're not capable of sitting down with a foundational book and starting from the bottom up.
zone411 4y ago
If you don't learn anything from reading, I think you're in the minority. I agree that active doing, writing, thinking are often better but those aren't the only ways people learn.
- rob74 4y ago
  You don't learn anything from reading, you learn from understanding what you have read. Memorizing what you have read will only get you so far...
  - zone411 4y ago
    You're splitting hairs and being too literal. We're comparing learning from a lecture, a book or a video to learning from an AI. The amount of thinking is the same (or more if the AI is personalized).

prox 4y ago

There is something awesome about the end of shortage. We are hardwired for scarcity and capitalism itself thrives on it to create value. Perhaps for the first time in history we need to rethink the whole model of production, needs, wants and consuming. A full blown Star Trek society is not “communism” as I saw it sometimes described, it’s “all-needs-are-met-ism” at zero cost. The question is how to bridge the gap from where we are now to there.

kvgr 4y ago
For “all-needs-are-met-ism“ we need almost free energy. We are far from that. The problem will be how to handle people who are bored and do not go to work for a lot of time to waste "bad" energy.
- prox 4y ago
  In “all-needs-met-ism” there is no wasted “bad” energy. People who don’t want to work go on permanent holiday. That’s where it gets psychologically interesting. How long do you holiday before you want to do something again? I do concur we are far from it, but the moment we can do free energy print-on-demand anything, it will be possible. Every day the sun outputs energy we use in a year.
  - kvgr 4y ago
    a lot of people would just drink and do drugs, because they are unable to self direct. I think that right amnount of struggle keeps people sane.
    - prox 4y ago
      Your comment suddenly reminds me of Agent Smith paraphrased “we designed the perfect world for you, but your primitive minds tried to wake up from it. Whole harvests where lost.” I think there can be a lot of neurological imbalance from complete freedom and absence of scarcity. I think on the whole (or at least myself) I could live like that. And nobody in this post scarcity world is barred from doing work if they need it I guess. That’s also a form of post scarcity.

edrxty 4y ago

None of these LLM type systems are really providing anything in the realm of fact checking so I'm not sure how the author is coming up with this? They predict words, they don't do context or logic...

blurbleblurble 4y ago
That's such an oversimplification.
- edrxty 4y ago
  How is it wrong?
  - danielbln 4y ago
    They literally "do context", as they do in-context learning. Also, factuality can effectively be solved by chain-of-thought prompting[0] and the use of external tools[1], also see toolformerzero[2] for a simple example. [0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761 https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761 [2]: https://toolformerzero.com/ https://toolformerzero.com/ [2]: https://toolformerzero.com/ https://toolformerzero.com/
  - blurbleblurble 4y ago
    The "predicting words" part of the language models is a building block, but the actual applications being built around the LLMs are using that predictive ability in very dynamic ways along with external memory, feedback and sophisticated control methods to attenuate and channel their behavior. And anyhow: > Memory Augmented Large Language Models are Computationally Universal https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.04589 https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.04589
mtrycz2 4y ago
I agree that some of this can be exciting to some, but (novelty aside) AIs promote mediocrity, not awesomeness.
4y ago

aaron695 4y ago

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airza 4y ago

I think rather than a world described here where “creators” (what a nauseating term) are terrified of being upstaged by AI, most are terrified by a world where AI can produce images that are 80% as good as a human but cost 99.999% less. It seems easy to imagine a world where almost all _economic_ gain from artistic endeavors is captured by a few companies, which would be both dangerous from a material perspective and frightening to imagine from a cultural perspective. What would our world look like if almost all art was compressed into sensibilities and values that flatter software engineers?

Kiro 4y ago
Most people making art do not need a financial incentive to do so.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  I say this in a parallel comment but there’s both commercial art and creative art and they’re separate things. Commercial art will be significantly affected by AI but creative art won’t be, or AI will be used as just another tool in the toolbox for creative artists.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Kiro 4y ago
    Absolutely. I also think there's a big sleeper group (the biggest) with people who make generic art but for themselves and only show it to their friends and family, or doesn't show it at all. I'm one of those. I make it for myself and this doesn't deter me the slightest. However, if you're only in it for the money I think you're in for a rough time.
  - krapp 4y ago
    >I say this in a parallel comment but there’s both commercial art and creative art and they’re separate things. They aren't separate things. Plenty of artists - even in purely commercial fields - are creative and passionate about their work. This bias is unfortunate and nearly omnipresent on Hacker News. It's assumed that to be a "true" artist, one must be willing to suffer, and any artist who makes any money must only be in it for the money. Meanwhile a lot of people here wouldn't so much as get out of bed for a salary with less than six figures, catered lunches, a gym membership, unlimited PTO and a pony, and yet they still consider themselves "knowledge workers" for whom only the purity of information and craftsmanship of code are priorities. But everyone else has be a slave to supply and demand and if that means they can't make a living, tough shit. Like as not, we live in a capitalist society and passion and talent are commodities like everything else. Good art takes time to learn, time to maintain, time to execute, materials, licenses, etc - all of which cost money. Artists need to eat, they need a roof over their heads, they need to pay taxes. That money can either be made doing what one is passionate about, which means being tainted by capitalism, or doing something else. In which case the art suffers.

padjo 4y ago

“the prospect of unprecedented cultural abundance” More is not better.

PeterisP 4y ago
Other things being equal, cheaper and more widely available is better.
- walt74 4y ago
  Reminds me of social media utopianism at the beginning of the blog era. More communication is better, more connections are better, and it gave is this world. So no, cheaper and more widely available is not always better.

imtringued 4y ago

>There’s a consistent theme in all of the above examples, Yeah, the people are passing of other people's or AI's work as their own. Imagine if they all had to attribute ChatGPT. The value of the AI would plummet to zero in those cases.

lynx23 4y ago

I feel the AI-angst is a product of inadequate education. Be it "creators" who expect monetary compensation for low hanging visual fruits, or people doing manual work who are about to be replaced by robots. The bar has just been pushed upwards, and those who previously thought they might wing it and take the shortcut through life, now pay the price for gambing on the lazy side.

barking_biscuit 4y ago
At this pace it would seem like flipping burgers is almost going to be a better career choice than software engineer in a few years time. Cognitive labour is going to be massively devalued.

ajb 4y ago

Where it will start to ring alarm bells will be at the next election, when we start to get a flood of plausible AI generated political material: * Ads targeted at the individual based of your social media history * Replies on social media and forums targeted to the audience Last election the bots were really dumb and obvious. Next election, or at best the one after, you won't be able to trust that something is by a human unless you met them or they are a public figure.

e2le 4y ago
Perhaps instead we should hold people to a higher standard rather than tolerating bullshit and nonsense. Using AI as a tool for identifying and explaining logical fallacies (among other things) could be very valuable. In the same way that ChatGPT can explain code and identify bugs. If it were well-used, then it would have the effect of making individuals less vulnerable to professional bullshitters and the armies of bots that already pervade online discourse. It could even be integrated into moderation tools (and browsers) to reduce the tide of nonsense spewed by AI and humans alike. If bullshit generators are such a threat, then perhaps we should seek to make them less effective.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago

This article is really crap. It's trying to convince you that AI is "awesome" and that we are just banning it on the basis of lacking a Human-Stamp-Of-Approval (TM), but actually the sources are not saying that. The sources are saying that these ML models generate "questionable" work that at best some of it may pass a filter (erring on the side of caution), but overall it is either direct plagiarism or of "unconvincing" quality. E.g. , * Short fiction: "I’m not going to detail how I know these stories are 'AI' spam. There are some very obvious patterns [...] While rejecting and banning these submissions has been simple," * College essays: "I probably couldn’t detect the AI authorship, but that I also wouldn’t label the essays as convincing." "I found both essays to resemble cliché essays, with neither answering the prompt in a convincing way. They also didn’t sound like an essay a teenager would write [...]" "New York City schools cited 'negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content,'" "Word by word it was a well-written essay," he said, but on closer inspection, one claim about the prolific philosopher, David Hume "made no sense" and was "just flatly wrong." "Really well-written wrong was the biggest red flag," "while the grammar in AI-generated essays is almost perfect, the substance tends to lack detail" None of this seems to justify TFA's point that ML-generated stuff "it’s not bad — it’s just not human". ML-generated stuff _is_ bad. Most definitely not awesome. Maybe it will improve in the future.

chx 4y ago
> Maybe it will improve in the future. To be fair, I find this entertaining. Very entertaining. The early 80s, another wave of exciting AI happened (from Japanese and US government funding) but there was a question which shocked Douglas Lenat so badly he dedicated himself since then to build a system of basic facts, that being Cyc. The question is: if Susan goes shopping does her head go with her? ( sorry if I do not quote it word-by-word by correct, it's been over a quarter century when I had my exam on this topic :) ) You can generate any amount of such questions which a two year old human would have no trouble answering but no AI -- so far -- could possibly answer unless of course that question and answer already occurred in some text. ChatGPT was called a stochastic parrot and it's not that ChatGPT is that, the entire model can not possibly produce anything else. Reasoning doesn't enter into this picture. So, not only it will not improve in the future, it can not improve.

blurbleblurble 4y ago

The massive deflation seems to be kicking off right at the source, software development is a lot easier with GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT. How can demand possibly keep up with the 100x + productivity that's about to hit the tech industry?

skor 4y ago

> Students ... gain a deeper understanding of the subject matter than students who don’t use any of the new tools. My first assumption is that if you are using these tools, it is primarily for saving time. All other benefits are quite less important.

kazinator 4y ago
I take it as uncontroversial that those who work with an accurate, silver-tongued bullshit generator will see better success in bullshit subjects; i.e most of the humanities.
tomjen3 4y ago
It may be so for now, but if you can research 1 article an hour with the old method, 10 minutes with an AI and need 4 articles for your essay, then you can either spend 4 hours with no AI, spend 40 minutes with an AI or spend the same 4 hours, go through 24 articles and create a much better essay. Likely those who are willing to work hard will see the potential of the AI tools, will still spend 4 hours and will break the curve. This isn't much of a problem, except for those who aren't able to use AI tools, who are now hopelessly behind (and will only be more so in the future).

nzoschke 4y ago

AI plus distance learning is a one-two punch. Surely universities can use timed in-person tests with no internet or phones if they want to guarantee human results. Reminds me of university maths after the advent of the TI-89. The calculator could pretty much do all the math as long as you entered the equation the right way verbatim. But you still had to take some tests with no calculators allowed.

Syntheticate 4y ago

Creators aren't worried about others getting the ability to produce. It would be fantastic if everyone could paint, sculpt, carve -- or any number of skills that must be painstakingly built. The fear is that so many things will be produced without thought that, rather than entering a period of cultural abundance, we will enter a cultural stagnation. This is not because AI tools cannot be used to generate good art! In fact we'll likely see artists adjust their process to take advantage of its strengths. Rather, it's because these tools are used to generate art (whether good, or mediocre) completely automatically, rendering art as a commodity rather than something special to treasure. If you see art as a means to an end then this might seem good. But part of the sheer power of art is in its scarcity; in the rarity encouraging us to take the time to investigate something more deeply, to build up relationships with art and artists, to find meaning and emotion and connection, which takes time and intention. Imagine an AI-produced endless stream of music that takes all of its cues from your favorite songs and produces high-quality audio tuned exactly to what you like hearing. How long does this remain interesting? How difficult is it to tell this noise from new music which might later shape your tastes? Part of the stagnation this AI revolution represents is an added difficulty of cultural evolution, because instead of there being room for the truly new, we are swamped by imitations of everything that came before.

prohobo 4y ago
A few points: - Culture is already stagnant. In the last 10 years I can't think of a single movement or trend that isn't about politics, and certainly nothing "refreshing". More than that, we have a calcified hubris towards new technology that means we don't even bother figuring out how it might impact us, nor how to use it properly. - We will get swamped with garbage content, and we will personalize all content (like generated music streams). We will stop hiring models, photographers, concept artists, musicians, writers, domain expert consultants, actors, etc. - This will trigger an existential crisis for many people (I know, do we really need more of that?). I don't want to be snarky or mean, but I also think putting it this way might get the point across as a proverb: "Artists" who thought they could get away with drawing anime waifus and uploading them to DeviantArt or social media for likes and commissions will have to face the fact that they're not wanted or needed. That goes for almost the entire creator and influencer economy. That brand of narcissism and delusion will get punched in the face repeatedly by AI, because everyone will be generating their own special waifus without them. Artists who want to create something new will be able to use AI to find the negative space where they can differentiate themselves. This dynamic of despair and searching might lead to a kind of renaissance. The potential for renaissance is there, but it'll probably be very painful, and I don't think anyone currently even knows what it would look like.

Xcelerate 4y ago

The human mind doesn't really grok exponential curves very well. We tend to perceive them more as flat and then suddenly they go vertical. In that regard, society's response to recent progress in AI appears clumsy and ineffective to me. Surely people don't think banning generated essays or art is going to fix whatever problem they perceive? This stuff is improving quicker than we can adapt, and any response that attempts to halt, delay, or ignore this progress is destined to fail. There are a lot of things we need to be prepared for, and since our current approach is reactive rather than proactive, I'm worried AI is going to arrive more like an earthquake than a smooth transition into what could potentially be a utopia for humanity. For instance, if we don't acknowledge that many types of jobs are going to be eliminated within a timespan of a few years (as opposed to the multigenerational timescale of the industrial revolution), then we are essentially condemning a large number of people to a sudden loss of income that is likely to be irreversible for those who are unable to retrain into a different profession quickly enough. Regardless of one's philosophy on universal basic income, I think most of us can agree that a society that stands by silently as millions of people who are willing to work lose their livelihood is not a moral society. To prevent this outcome requires a significant deal of foresight and proactivity that we don't currently seem to have. The other major problem I see (and one that is quite prevalent on HN) is an inappropriately symmetrical "penalty function" for forecasts in AI development—i.e., one that gives equal weight to the predictions "AI is arriving soon; the singularity is near" and "we're nowhere close to AGI; LLMs are just fancy high-dimensional interpolators and we may never reach true intelligence". The cost of erroneously preparing for the former outcome is mild: we wasted time on another AI winter, some unnecessary policies were created, and there was an annoying media hype cycle. But the consequences of a type II error are massive: most people cannot provide a meaningful contribution to the economy so all wealth rapidly funnels to a few people, the general population loses the ability to discern truth (well... beyond the extent to which this has occurred already), rapid existential change destabilizes the human psyche, and so on... not to mention any risk posed by AI directly (e.g., war, hacking, manipulation).

gremlinsinc 4y ago
> The human mind doesn't really grok exponential curves very well. We tend to perceive them more as flat and then suddenly they go vertical. > In that regard, society's response to recent progress in AI appears clumsy and ineffective to me. Surely people don't think banning generated essays or art is going to fix whatever problem they perceive? This stuff is improving quicker than we can adapt, and any response that attempts to halt, delay, or ignore this progress is destined to fail. The singularity is one thing, I think might sneak up on us way faster than we think, and I don't think one can be prepared for a doubling of info every second of every day. It's incomprehensible that everything will just double faster and faster until a decade of progress takes place in 10 minutes, not 10 years.