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> If humans rely solely on AI to generate content moving forward, any new content generated by AI may just be recycled content from the past. To be honest, I’d

> If humans rely solely on AI to generate content moving forward, any new content generated by AI may just be recycled content from the past. To be honest, I’d struggle to find any human content that is not recycled from the past. I guess we are still better than AI at remixing sufficiently novel combinations of concepts but I think much of this AI content aversion comes from some kind of phobia, or an unwillingness to admit humans are shockingly unoriginal.

brookst 4y ago
Exactly this. The vast majority of art is unoriginal and derivative. That doesn’t mean it’s bad art, just that it is not revolutionary. So what? There are a handful of truly revolutionary artists each generation. Faulting AI for producing merely good and interesting art is missing the point.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  I don't know about other people but I don't "fault" the AI anything, nor am I even particularly bothered by AI-generated content per se. What fills me with dread is the obvious glee over removing human work from sellable products, when there is no viable alternative to working for most people. We've created a world where a lot of jobs can be automated, and that is somehow a bad thing, and it's going to be used to crush people. It's a labor issue not a philosophical one.
  - brookst 4y ago
    Would you be happier if your car / bicycle / city bus was produced entirely by hand, with no tools or automation? Labor will shift. Bemoaning new efficiencies and new empowerment because they reduce the need for meaningless labor consumption is backwards. We should be sensitive to those whose lives will take an unexpected turn (I may be one of them!), but we should do so in the context of celebrating greater individual leverage to create and produce.
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      No, as I was trying to imply I don't particularly care about the use of a given technology per se, I care about the consequences of its application to labor. "Labor will shift" makes it sound like a smooth and automatic process but it is not. People will lose jobs with no equivalent replacements, families will fall into poverty and misery when they hadn't before. In a place like the US with healthcare tied to employment, people will die. And eventually, it will reach a stable equilibrium with fewer jobs that can support a reasonable quality of life. That's what labor shifting looks like, we know because we've seen it over and over again. The changes might ultimately be net positive for a great many people, but that's small consolation to the people whose lives will be made much much worse during the transition. None of this is inevitable, but historically it's the path we've chosen and we seem even more dedicated to this outcome now than at previous times of change in the relation between labor and survival.
    - cyrialize 4y ago
      I think a big issue I take with the removal of humans from art creation, or at least discussions around it, is that art is always talked about as being separate from the creator. As a product the person makes. For many pieces of art, and what draws me to art, is knowing that the creator put a piece of themselves into it. (I'm going to avoid talking about the 'separating art from the artist' discussion, that's separate than what I'm discussing here). An example I've talked about in the past on HN is Raymond Carver. Carver's short stories are often centered around blue-collar men in the mid west. This is because Carver was a blue-collar man from the mid west. I find that interesting. I enjoy reading about Carver's life, and reading about what people had to say about him. Essentially, write what you know. Art made by AI is missing that - and I think the frustrating part for me is that I don't think it's that hard to bring it back. Show me the prompts used for the art. Tell me why you used those specific prompts. What did those prompts mean to you? I want to know all of those things. I also think people stop too soon. Why not take what the AI has made, do something to it yourself, and then feed it back into the AI to see what happens?
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      > Labor will shift. Until it doesn't. I mean until very recently the narrative justification for extreme automation was it would free up our time to create art and stuff. Now that's in question. It's all excuses to avoid thinking about the problems the automation technology will cause. Avoidance worked OK in the past, but as these technologies get more and more extreme, the problems will get more and more pressing, and the old lazy excuses won't cut it anymore. > ...but we should do so in the context of celebrating greater individual leverage to create and produce. And the end point of that is a small cadre of elites who control the machines, and hordes of people left with no economic value (except, perhaps as slaves for elite amusement, like gladiators and prostitutes).
tarkin2 4y ago
I imagine there'll be a lot more talk of the soul from a lot of techies from now on. Or at the least talk of the human touch from people who were erstwhile trying to get machines to automate everything.
- chii 4y ago
  Hand crafted goods have been a thing ever since industrialization of production started. recently, they market it as upmarket boutique to be handcrafted, and i suspect that ai generated content vs hand-crafted content is going to go down the same route.
  - tarkin2 4y ago
    Indeed. A very niche market, of course.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- debacle 4y ago
  "Yes this AI generated forgot password flow is great, but it doesn't have soul." I like it.
  - asdff 4y ago
    The chatbot should feel like it successfully battled inner demons earlier in life
- siva7 4y ago
  Searching Google/SO for some obscure error message? Nah, thanks. I'll take the AI with no soul.
  - tarkin2 4y ago
    It won't only be error messages people will use AI for, but the generation and regeneration of whole applications; that is, your job.
sho_hn 4y ago
You're probably onto something, but then it's also nothing new that we attribute value to handmade goods over industrial goods. Because they're backed by storytelling (real or imagined), rare/exclusive, etc. It's clear that amidst a deluge of AI-generated content, audience urges for authenticity will rise. Attention is in more finite supply than content, has been even before generative AI; only so much will stick out, and it will perhaps be the most authentic or analog content and goods. The real question is whether AI/AGI can make it past the "authenticity threshold" and xenophobia to where we also accept AI storytellers and brands as eligible.
- underyx 4y ago
  Perhaps opening the AI content firehose will force everyone to start carefully curating what they consume. This might actually be an improvement, and might be the way out of today’s limbo where crap content is snuck onto our plates half the time.
  - sho_hn 4y ago
    Don't we already, though? I mean, how many of the hundreds to thousands of mediocre movies that hit Netflix, Hulu & co every year do you watch? If they were AI-generated, would it actually matter to you? As far as I can tell, there's just two interesting things to watch out for: - Personalized AI-generated content. What if the movie were just for you? What if it expired like a Snapchat, never to be seen again by anyone else? Would this tickle us? Would we succumb to new filter bubbles, increasing the distance between us? - Can AI make the movie that's so good that it sticks out and does become the one we watch collectively?
  - vharuck 4y ago
    I wish this would happen. But, looking at the current world where publication and distribution are dirt cheap and simpler than ever with the internet, most people's media curation is "What's free" as opposed to "What's good." If the new torrent from the firehouse is AI-generated content, careful curation will lose more. The time and money cost become harder to justify.
  - 4y ago
gspencley 4y ago
Philosophical food for thought: if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop? In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea", then how did the ideas that we are pulling from, deriving from and combining come into existence? If all we are saying is that existing ideas inspire new ones, or that most human generated content is derivative, then I completely agree with you. I don't see how that proposition could be controversial at all. But it seems to me that some people, at some points in time, somewhere have and will continue to contribute something original at least on occasion. Even if the "original" idea is 1% of the "intellectual product" and 99% is reusing existing concepts. To insist otherwise is to insist that we hit peak human innovation somewhere along the line and there's nowhere left to go.
- blurbleblurble 4y ago
  Combinatoric complexity blows up fast
- decremental 4y ago
  It's just something people say lazily in passing without giving much actual thought to why they're repeating what they saw somewhere else in a similar thread.
- anonyfox 4y ago
  I think this is purely a statistics problem. Like all breakthroughs are actually _discoveries_ of things that already do exist or mechanisms that can be exploited somehow. There is a huge amount of information flowing around us in realtime, and linking some thought/thing to something else, which then might have implications (subsequent discoveries) is statistics. We do have people with a better wetware so they have increased %chance do recognize something in front of them as well as linking it in a "novel way", but this is not really neccessary, it only increases %chances. Even pretty radical things can be explained this exact way, up to having some sort of brain "damage" (or drugs like LSD) that changes mental pathways and have a %chance to be actually right and lead to discoveries, but also the %chance here is very low. (not every trip is a breakthrough in art/science, right?)... a bit like iE people that can smell sounds or link some natural phenomenon with an emotional situation between some people and write about it. > peak human innovation that might simply a nonsense question if you follow my previous argument. there simply is no real "innovation" - only "discoveries" of stuff. and we meatbags with very limitied/unreliable wetware at some point can't "progress" any more, but non-biologically flawed systems might overcome our limitations and do just that for us. with our naked eyes, we cannot see things like infrared light, but it exists and some tools helped us to understand everything around it somewhat. now we're building more advanced tooling to get through the next plateaus - just like we have to build very sophisticated tooling to watch further into space or more closely into fractions of atoms, which in turn lead to more discoveries, and ultimately "innovation" we can feel in our lives. the only thing I will 100% agree to is that a real AGI will be the _last_ discovery/innovation humanity will ever make - and that is a good thing - it means we finally overcome our biological limits somewhat.
lrantf 4y ago
The AI aversion has several reasons: 1) The output, while impressive on the surface, is bland and recycled. It will drag down the general level in the same manner that CGI has destroyed movies. 2) People don't want to consume AI generated content in the same manner that they generally don't watch Stockfish vs. Stockfish. 3) It is not phobia, it is disgust at humans being dehumanized. The phobia seems to be on the side of AI corporations, who quickly step in any discussion that questions their business model.
- tmountain 4y ago
  Regarding point #3. The problem people have with AI is that it is cheapening the things that make us "special". If anything I can draw, paint write, create, and pour my heart and soul into can be acceptably approximated by a "bot" in five seconds or less, then what do I have to offer to the world beyond my "work" output? The things that creatively inspire me have been commoditized in a way where it's exponentially harder for me to generate value doing them. Artists and musicians have famously struggled for centuries. A technology that raises the bar on an already exceedingly difficult path (making money doing creative things) makes that particular situation much worse.
  - zquzra 4y ago
    A painting or story made by artificial intelligence is not human because it does not have a life story behind it. I still enjoy reading the artist's biography, some of his correspondence, trying to understand his creative process. If you pour your heart into your work we can bond through human experience, maybe we can even sit down and talk. An AI does not fear death or loneliness. Sometimes I think that part of this site's audience only considers art from a consumer-product perspective. For me it goes a little further.
    - swordsmith 4y ago
      > Sometimes I think that part of this site's audience only considers art from a consumer-product perspective Imagine you are an artist. You as a patron connect and talk about a piece of art, you walk away happy and feeling connected. He does not sell any art because they are indistinguishable from what the AI can produce with the cost of electricity. Now if you are willing to pay for "bonding over human experience", GPT can probably be trained to do that as well. Generative AI eliminates the livelihood of almost all artists eventually.
beepbooptheory 4y ago
> Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
sharemywin 4y ago
I wonder if people have actually tried prompting chatgpt for lists of creative things. make up a list of fictious creatures and describe them. make sure the names aren't reused.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  These seem pretty creative to me? are they? I'm not a fictional guy so I don't really know? can you be extraordinarily creative and unusual? Sure, here are five highly creative and unusual fictional creatures: Crystalline Leviathan: The Crystalline Leviathan is a massive creature that lives deep in the ocean. Its body is made entirely of iridescent crystals that refract light in all directions, creating a dazzling display. The Crystalline Leviathan feeds on deep-sea creatures and can grow up to hundreds of meters long. Plasmic Shapeshifter: The Plasmic Shapeshifter is a shape-shifting creature that can manipulate its own plasma to take on different forms. It has no fixed appearance, but usually appears as a mass of writhing, translucent tendrils. The Plasmic Shapeshifter is highly intelligent and can mimic the voices and mannerisms of other creatures. Quantum Butterfly: The Quantum Butterfly is a tiny, delicate creature that flits through the fabric of space-time. Its wings are made of pure energy, and it can move at incredible speeds. The Quantum Butterfly is believed to be responsible for some of the most unusual quantum phenomena, such as entanglement and superposition. Cosmic Serpent: The Cosmic Serpent is a serpentine creature that lives in the void of space. Its body is covered in shimmering, rainbow-colored scales that reflect the light of distant stars. The Cosmic Serpent feeds on cosmic radiation and can survive in the most inhospitable environments. Dream Weaver: The Dream Weaver is a mysterious creature that lives in the realm of dreams. Its body is made of ephemeral, mist-like substance that can change shape at will. The Dream Weaver is said to be able to influence the dreams of mortals, and can even enter their dreams to communicate with them. It is rumored that if you catch a Dream Weaver and release it, it will grant you a wish as a reward for sparing its life.
  - blueboo 4y ago
    Plus you can prompt it to take those results and make them more unusual, evocative, creative. Basically use the same kind of creative pumps that human artists do.
DrewADesign 4y ago
The problem isn't art, it's discovery. There's more new original art being made and published right now than ever before in history. I'm in art school so I see a lot of it. Sure, there's a lot more chaff to cut through than there was when publishing was almost exclusively controlled by large corporations, but it's there. Art that isn't recycled is almost always an illusion caused by your not being familiar with the things it was remixing. Nobody pulls things out of thin air. Even whacked-out acid trip visions were molded by our cultural experiences and aesthetic. While there are a few people who make large shifts in their artform-- e.g. Jackson Pollock, Jimi Hendrix, and Antoine Carême-- but a) they were still making incremental progress, and b) you'd have a pretty limited set of things to choose from for your entertainment. PS Edit: Right now AI-generated art is novel, but it has far less potential to meaningfully advance art as time progresses. It will mimic what it sees, but it won't see anything that a creative cultural avant-garde doesn't produce first, and as long as real people are doing it first, there will be eyes that want to see it before an AI algorithm waters it down into some conceptual amalgam of its real form. That probably includes commercial entities who are deliberately trying to make themselves stand out.
deusex_ 4y ago
I can only recommend the fantastic "Everything is a remix" series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ2GuvUWaP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ2GuvUWaP8
YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
Good artists create based on their experiences, not based on the content they have consumed.
- lgas 4y ago
  Are you suggesting that the content they have consumed is not part of their experience?
  - YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
    Yes. Reading about something is not the same as experiencing it.
omnicognate 4y ago
There are many rational reasons for a person to see these questions differently to you and plenty of explanations of those reasons around. You may disagree with them, but to claim that differing views must spring from phobias or other irrational mental states rather from a different assessment of the evidence is baseless ad-hominem. I would strongly recommend avoiding statements of that form in general as they achieve nothing good. I could make a similarly disrepectful and unsupported claim about the mental state of people who believe most human creative activity is simply recycling learned ideas, and we could spend some time flinging insults at each other, but why?
- donatj 4y ago
  Hear me out. In the most basic sense, to believe the mind a box that can output things not based on input is inherently to believe it "irrational" in the truest sense of the word. It is to believe the mind to be non-functionally pure[1] in the programmatic sense. Output based somehow other than purely on input. And if that's the case, the question is where does that irrationality come from? A random number generator? Any developer knows there's no such thing as actual random. It's all either list based or based environmental aspects. I don't see room for an argument to be made that the human mind isn't just mixing ideas/the environment that doesn't rely on some form of magical thinking. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_function
  - omnicognate 4y ago
    This is a profoundly counterproductive way to approach a debate and I won't engage with it.
    - donatj 4y ago
      I don't see how coming at a debate from first principles is somehow counter productive? Shining light on the unsupported parts of the other person's argument is step one of debate. I contend there is no proof of a machine capable of creation purely from the ether.
  - 4y ago
SkyMarshal 4y ago
That’s basically the thesis of Beaudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, that in the postmodern world everything is a signifier, simulation, or remix of something else, nothing is truly original anymore. It’s probably not completely accurate to say there’s nothing truly original anymore, but also probably true that the rate of discovery of truly novel and original concepts and ideas has slowed to the point it may seem that way. Possibly b/c all the low-hanging fruit as been taken, and only the more difficult discoveries remain.
hooverd 4y ago
I think some of it comes from the smug disdain that generative art fans throw at traditional artists.
- snerbles 4y ago
  If anything, that smug disdain is a reflection of the perceived elitism of traditional artists. A small culture war that was smouldering long before the appearance of generative models.
  - hooverd 4y ago
    The elitism of having a Twitter account and a Wacom tablet? I've found traditional artists are very happy to help people out, especially in the digital art world. They just won't draw your anime waifu OC for exposure.
WillAdams 4y ago
"The Greeks invented everything, all else is variation."
super256 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc
cyrialize 4y ago
I've mentioned something like this in other comments across HN. For me, I actually really like that human content is recycled. The discussions around AI, art, and humans always talk about art as a separate product produced by the human. I feel like many pieces of art (not all, for example zombie realism) has a piece of the human inside of it. An example I used in a comment in this post is Raymond Carver. His short stories are about blue-collar men in the mid-west. Carver was a blue-collar man from the mid-west. I find that interesting, and I liked that he pulled from his life experience to write stories. I get very excited when I realize that the work I'm engaging with is recycled in some way. Like a song's chorus sharing lines from a separate artist, or a style that seems similar to a different writer I know. I love that. It makes me feel more connected to the creator and makes me like them more because we share similar interests. An example that comes to mind for me are the manga Hunter x Hunter and Jujutsu Kaisen. The creator of Jujutsu Kaisen loved HxH and it 100% shows. The crazy powers, the complicated fights, the walls of texts explaining what happened in a fight, etc. All of those come from HxH and I love the creator was inspired by it. Sometimes reading Jujutus Kaisen makes me feel like I'm bonding with the creator over our mutual love of HxH. With AI created work, I feel like we're missing the human touch. And as I pointed out in another comment here - I don't think it's hard to bring it back. Show me the prompts and the chat log. Why did you choose those prompts? Why did you ask the AI to write in X style? How does that X style make you feel? On the other hand, maybe the AI prevents some of the human touch from coming through. I imagine much of the recycling that comes from humans is unintentional. The song you wrote on guitar has that riff not because you're copying a band, but because you've listened to so much 90s indie rock that you just make what you love - without realizing it. Maybe in the future this changes. I'd love to see someone spend some time with an AI and mold it to such a way that what it produces can emulate the user's love and interests. Don't forget to show and share the chat log! [EDIT]: To add onto this, I've actually done the above. I've played some text adventure games in the past, and I got ChatGPT to play with me. I told it that I had stat points (Health Points, Magic Points), that I had two types of attacks, and that there are three types of monsters. That experience invigorated me to write paragraphs on world building - just so I can feed it into ChatGPT and live in that world. I seem some instances that are similar like this - but people just end up not sharing the prompts they feed into ChatGPT. I'd love to see those prompts. I've love to see what someone did to get ChatGPT to act a certain way.
tjr 4y ago
I think it's interesting to contemplate the process... when an AI tool "remixes" existing works to make a new work, is it "merely" using statistical processes to do so, or does it "understand" what it's doing? But perhaps the process doesn't matter as much as the end result. Maybe another interesting aspect to consider is: humans create new things (even if by remixing and deriving from old things) all the time, because they want to, because they choose to do so. Thus far, these AI creations have been made at the behest of humans demanding them. Perhaps that will, that desire, to make something new in the first place will remain a differentiating factor.
roywiggins 4y ago
Okay, but if that's true, does that make all figurative art remixes of these? That seems like a stretch. And where did they come from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurine?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurine?wprov=sfla1
dinkumthinkum 4y ago
This is overly reductionist. If you are struggling then your notion of recycled is too broad. But your day humans are shockingly unoriginal, I mean this seems to part of this new fashion to downplay anything done by humans as of it us trivial compared to some imagined alien race Kurzweil singularity thing or something. It’s a bit sad but it is not a very well-founded position.
subpixel 4y ago
This is a longstanding question: see The Anxiety of Influence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxiety_of_Influence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxiety_of_Influence
greenhearth 4y ago
The fear comes from much deeper. It is the fear of the kernel of reality that doesn't have any form, only function, the profound Lovecraftian fear of a mindless force. Although, some people in the story did worship Cthulhu. The argument should be about capacity for creation, and to me AI generation just doesn't seem like true creation, but more of a cheap magic trick.
sandworm101 4y ago
>> I’d struggle to find any human content that is not recycled from the past. "A man with a new horse visited the hardware store in Dagwood last week to try and find a new hitching post for his stable." That simple sentence has enough entropy that I can say, with confidence, that is has never been uttered by anyone in the history of human civilization.
- idle_zealot 4y ago
  Right, and so do many sentences produced by LLMs. I don't think that's the bar anyone is using for originality.
jareklupinski 4y ago
Our language, Tiger, our language, hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of possible legitimate new ideas, so that I can say this sentence and be confident it has never been uttered before in the history of human communication: "Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers." A Bit of Fry & Laurie Concerning Language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg
joseph_grobbles 4y ago
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varispeed 4y ago
The difference is that AI is using pattern matching while humans use reasoning to come up with new things. That means AI is not capable of producing meaningful _new_ content like discovering new mathematical theorems, because AI does not understand maths, whereas humans can come up with something meaningful based on _understanding_ of the content they have learned from. This is why when you ask e.g. ChatGPT about something it has not been trained, it can only come up with garbage, whereas a human would likely be able to provide meaningful answer based on looking at the same training data, if that makes sense.
- famouswaffles 4y ago
  Complete nonsense. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01618-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01618-2 Language models can generate novel functioning protein structures that adhere to a specified purpose. Structures that didn't exist before nevermind found in the dataset. The idea that there's some special distinction between the reasoning LLMs do and what Humans do is unfounded nonsense. A distinction you can't test for (this so called "true understanding" ) is not a distinction
  - varispeed 4y ago
    This is the same as getting ChatGPT to calculate something. It is likely that it can infer a correct result from the training data and give right "new" answer, but it doesn't mean it has any understanding of maths. That's why these models like ChatGPT are trained on massive models, to hide the fact that the AI is actually very dumb pattern matching machine. The only reason they found these "new" protein structures is because AI could match them to a pattern that it learned from the training data. They even claim this: > akin to generating grammatically and semantically correct natural language sentences on diverse topics Just like ChatGPT can generate grammatically and semantically correct natural language, except if the topic is not something it was trained on it will output grammatically and semantically correct nonsense. > ProGen can be further fine-tuned to curated sequences and tags Which suggests there still needs to be a human that can reason to be able to curate the sequences, something AI can't and probably at this stage never be able to do. This is something companies running these models won't openly admit, because that would confuse investors.
luplex 4y ago
Today's AI doesn't learn, but Future AI will for sure be able to learn from novel experiences
radlad 4y ago
What I find amusing is not the statement you quoted, but this one: > The Not By AI badge is created to encourage more humans to produce original content and help users identify human-generated content. How does this encourage humans to produce more original content? It may help users identify human-generated content - if they care. But perhaps more usefully it helps AI identify human-generated content to avoid training on its own garbage.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  AI will just adding the badge to the content it generates.
sorokod 4y ago
> I’d struggle to find any human content that is not recycled from the past. The word "recycled" attempts to carry a lot of weight here, and not successfully. In 1905 Einstein published his famous four papers that could not have existed without recent work done by Planck, Michelson, Morley and Maxwell. It would be ridiculous to describe those papers as recycling.
ihaveajob 4y ago
People have been saying this for millenia. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%201%3A9&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%20...
TootsMagoon 4y ago
Our universe operates under deterministic laws, meaning that all events are the result of cause and effect. As such, all new phenomena and entities arise from the preexisting conditions and interactions within the universe. In other words, nothing can come from nothing, and everything that emerges is a product of what already exists.
zzzeek 4y ago
when human made content is "recycled" from past human content, it is not "recycled" using statistical algorithms, it's recycled based on understanding, meaning, aesthetics, emotions, and a whole list of traits that LLMs will never have.
lumb63 4y ago
Looking for a phobia to describe AI content aversion is an incorrect approach. It yields no explanation other than that “something must be wrong with those people”. Instead, try looking at it from a rational biological standpoint and it makes perfect sense. We biologically have a desire to live. Part of living is confronting threats to our survival, and hopefully defeating them. Our minds are what provided us with the ability to survive despite there being stronger, more vicious competition out there. Why would we want to surrender our one competitive advantage? People aren’t stupid. They know that AI will continue to progress (“technology must progress”, says the technologist) and that it threatens their way of life. Truckers know that AIs will automate their jobs. Artists know it will automate theirs. Everyone knows that AI is coming for them, sooner or later. If not in their career, then maybe in their social life, like video games and social media have decimated in-person communication. Those are things we need in order to survive. Our jobs provide us the money we need to meet our needs, and give some of us meaning in life (no, UBI proponents, receiving a check doesn’t solve all the problems). Our social lives are paramount to our health. What will humans be doing all day when AI has taken all our jobs and we are all talking to chatbots all day which cater to our every proclivity? Maybe that is some folks’ ideal worlds, but certainly not mine. Given the mixed results we’ve seen with technological innovations in the past, rather than giving a negative connotation to the people who are cautious or concerned about AI, why not listen to them? Rather than having a phobia, maybe they have a valid point.
sixothree 4y ago
“Plagiarizing our past to control our future” -Fran Blanche
barrysteve 4y ago
A lightbulb is clearly a new invention when all you have are oil lamps. You can retrospectively say we've always had a device that creates light from heat, like this 'new' lightbulb and metaphysically you'd be correct. But the properties and design of a lightbulb are different to an oil lamp. That's new enough to be called original and Thomas Edison (and whoever else helped him) are the originators of the lightbulb design and they made it real. An original thought? Probably not, an original object, yes. Very much so.
xialvjun 4y ago
AI generate different things, people choose the good one. Opinion is the value, just like Protagoras's "man is the measure of all things".

brookst 4y ago

Exactly this. The vast majority of art is unoriginal and derivative. That doesn’t mean it’s bad art, just that it is not revolutionary. So what? There are a handful of truly revolutionary artists each generation. Faulting AI for producing merely good and interesting art is missing the point.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
I don't know about other people but I don't "fault" the AI anything, nor am I even particularly bothered by AI-generated content per se. What fills me with dread is the obvious glee over removing human work from sellable products, when there is no viable alternative to working for most people. We've created a world where a lot of jobs can be automated, and that is somehow a bad thing, and it's going to be used to crush people. It's a labor issue not a philosophical one.
- brookst 4y ago
  Would you be happier if your car / bicycle / city bus was produced entirely by hand, with no tools or automation? Labor will shift. Bemoaning new efficiencies and new empowerment because they reduce the need for meaningless labor consumption is backwards. We should be sensitive to those whose lives will take an unexpected turn (I may be one of them!), but we should do so in the context of celebrating greater individual leverage to create and produce.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    No, as I was trying to imply I don't particularly care about the use of a given technology per se, I care about the consequences of its application to labor. "Labor will shift" makes it sound like a smooth and automatic process but it is not. People will lose jobs with no equivalent replacements, families will fall into poverty and misery when they hadn't before. In a place like the US with healthcare tied to employment, people will die. And eventually, it will reach a stable equilibrium with fewer jobs that can support a reasonable quality of life. That's what labor shifting looks like, we know because we've seen it over and over again. The changes might ultimately be net positive for a great many people, but that's small consolation to the people whose lives will be made much much worse during the transition. None of this is inevitable, but historically it's the path we've chosen and we seem even more dedicated to this outcome now than at previous times of change in the relation between labor and survival.
  - cyrialize 4y ago
    I think a big issue I take with the removal of humans from art creation, or at least discussions around it, is that art is always talked about as being separate from the creator. As a product the person makes. For many pieces of art, and what draws me to art, is knowing that the creator put a piece of themselves into it. (I'm going to avoid talking about the 'separating art from the artist' discussion, that's separate than what I'm discussing here). An example I've talked about in the past on HN is Raymond Carver. Carver's short stories are often centered around blue-collar men in the mid west. This is because Carver was a blue-collar man from the mid west. I find that interesting. I enjoy reading about Carver's life, and reading about what people had to say about him. Essentially, write what you know. Art made by AI is missing that - and I think the frustrating part for me is that I don't think it's that hard to bring it back. Show me the prompts used for the art. Tell me why you used those specific prompts. What did those prompts mean to you? I want to know all of those things. I also think people stop too soon. Why not take what the AI has made, do something to it yourself, and then feed it back into the AI to see what happens?
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > Labor will shift. Until it doesn't. I mean until very recently the narrative justification for extreme automation was it would free up our time to create art and stuff. Now that's in question. It's all excuses to avoid thinking about the problems the automation technology will cause. Avoidance worked OK in the past, but as these technologies get more and more extreme, the problems will get more and more pressing, and the old lazy excuses won't cut it anymore. > ...but we should do so in the context of celebrating greater individual leverage to create and produce. And the end point of that is a small cadre of elites who control the machines, and hordes of people left with no economic value (except, perhaps as slaves for elite amusement, like gladiators and prostitutes).

tarkin2 4y ago

I imagine there'll be a lot more talk of the soul from a lot of techies from now on. Or at the least talk of the human touch from people who were erstwhile trying to get machines to automate everything.

chii 4y ago
Hand crafted goods have been a thing ever since industrialization of production started. recently, they market it as upmarket boutique to be handcrafted, and i suspect that ai generated content vs hand-crafted content is going to go down the same route.
- tarkin2 4y ago
  Indeed. A very niche market, of course.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
debacle 4y ago
"Yes this AI generated forgot password flow is great, but it doesn't have soul." I like it.
- asdff 4y ago
  The chatbot should feel like it successfully battled inner demons earlier in life
siva7 4y ago
Searching Google/SO for some obscure error message? Nah, thanks. I'll take the AI with no soul.
- tarkin2 4y ago
  It won't only be error messages people will use AI for, but the generation and regeneration of whole applications; that is, your job.

sho_hn 4y ago

You're probably onto something, but then it's also nothing new that we attribute value to handmade goods over industrial goods. Because they're backed by storytelling (real or imagined), rare/exclusive, etc. It's clear that amidst a deluge of AI-generated content, audience urges for authenticity will rise. Attention is in more finite supply than content, has been even before generative AI; only so much will stick out, and it will perhaps be the most authentic or analog content and goods. The real question is whether AI/AGI can make it past the "authenticity threshold" and xenophobia to where we also accept AI storytellers and brands as eligible.

underyx 4y ago
Perhaps opening the AI content firehose will force everyone to start carefully curating what they consume. This might actually be an improvement, and might be the way out of today’s limbo where crap content is snuck onto our plates half the time.
- sho_hn 4y ago
  Don't we already, though? I mean, how many of the hundreds to thousands of mediocre movies that hit Netflix, Hulu & co every year do you watch? If they were AI-generated, would it actually matter to you? As far as I can tell, there's just two interesting things to watch out for: - Personalized AI-generated content. What if the movie were just for you? What if it expired like a Snapchat, never to be seen again by anyone else? Would this tickle us? Would we succumb to new filter bubbles, increasing the distance between us? - Can AI make the movie that's so good that it sticks out and does become the one we watch collectively?
- vharuck 4y ago
  I wish this would happen. But, looking at the current world where publication and distribution are dirt cheap and simpler than ever with the internet, most people's media curation is "What's free" as opposed to "What's good." If the new torrent from the firehouse is AI-generated content, careful curation will lose more. The time and money cost become harder to justify.
- 4y ago

gspencley 4y ago

Philosophical food for thought: if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop? In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea", then how did the ideas that we are pulling from, deriving from and combining come into existence? If all we are saying is that existing ideas inspire new ones, or that most human generated content is derivative, then I completely agree with you. I don't see how that proposition could be controversial at all. But it seems to me that some people, at some points in time, somewhere have and will continue to contribute something original at least on occasion. Even if the "original" idea is 1% of the "intellectual product" and 99% is reusing existing concepts. To insist otherwise is to insist that we hit peak human innovation somewhere along the line and there's nowhere left to go.

blurbleblurble 4y ago
Combinatoric complexity blows up fast
decremental 4y ago
It's just something people say lazily in passing without giving much actual thought to why they're repeating what they saw somewhere else in a similar thread.
anonyfox 4y ago
I think this is purely a statistics problem. Like all breakthroughs are actually _discoveries_ of things that already do exist or mechanisms that can be exploited somehow. There is a huge amount of information flowing around us in realtime, and linking some thought/thing to something else, which then might have implications (subsequent discoveries) is statistics. We do have people with a better wetware so they have increased %chance do recognize something in front of them as well as linking it in a "novel way", but this is not really neccessary, it only increases %chances. Even pretty radical things can be explained this exact way, up to having some sort of brain "damage" (or drugs like LSD) that changes mental pathways and have a %chance to be actually right and lead to discoveries, but also the %chance here is very low. (not every trip is a breakthrough in art/science, right?)... a bit like iE people that can smell sounds or link some natural phenomenon with an emotional situation between some people and write about it. > peak human innovation that might simply a nonsense question if you follow my previous argument. there simply is no real "innovation" - only "discoveries" of stuff. and we meatbags with very limitied/unreliable wetware at some point can't "progress" any more, but non-biologically flawed systems might overcome our limitations and do just that for us. with our naked eyes, we cannot see things like infrared light, but it exists and some tools helped us to understand everything around it somewhat. now we're building more advanced tooling to get through the next plateaus - just like we have to build very sophisticated tooling to watch further into space or more closely into fractions of atoms, which in turn lead to more discoveries, and ultimately "innovation" we can feel in our lives. the only thing I will 100% agree to is that a real AGI will be the _last_ discovery/innovation humanity will ever make - and that is a good thing - it means we finally overcome our biological limits somewhat.

lrantf 4y ago

The AI aversion has several reasons: 1) The output, while impressive on the surface, is bland and recycled. It will drag down the general level in the same manner that CGI has destroyed movies. 2) People don't want to consume AI generated content in the same manner that they generally don't watch Stockfish vs. Stockfish. 3) It is not phobia, it is disgust at humans being dehumanized. The phobia seems to be on the side of AI corporations, who quickly step in any discussion that questions their business model.

tmountain 4y ago
Regarding point #3. The problem people have with AI is that it is cheapening the things that make us "special". If anything I can draw, paint write, create, and pour my heart and soul into can be acceptably approximated by a "bot" in five seconds or less, then what do I have to offer to the world beyond my "work" output? The things that creatively inspire me have been commoditized in a way where it's exponentially harder for me to generate value doing them. Artists and musicians have famously struggled for centuries. A technology that raises the bar on an already exceedingly difficult path (making money doing creative things) makes that particular situation much worse.
- zquzra 4y ago
  A painting or story made by artificial intelligence is not human because it does not have a life story behind it. I still enjoy reading the artist's biography, some of his correspondence, trying to understand his creative process. If you pour your heart into your work we can bond through human experience, maybe we can even sit down and talk. An AI does not fear death or loneliness. Sometimes I think that part of this site's audience only considers art from a consumer-product perspective. For me it goes a little further.
  - swordsmith 4y ago
    > Sometimes I think that part of this site's audience only considers art from a consumer-product perspective Imagine you are an artist. You as a patron connect and talk about a piece of art, you walk away happy and feeling connected. He does not sell any art because they are indistinguishable from what the AI can produce with the cost of electricity. Now if you are willing to pay for "bonding over human experience", GPT can probably be trained to do that as well. Generative AI eliminates the livelihood of almost all artists eventually.

beepbooptheory 4y ago

> Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

sharemywin 4y ago

I wonder if people have actually tried prompting chatgpt for lists of creative things. make up a list of fictious creatures and describe them. make sure the names aren't reused.

sharemywin 4y ago
These seem pretty creative to me? are they? I'm not a fictional guy so I don't really know? can you be extraordinarily creative and unusual? Sure, here are five highly creative and unusual fictional creatures: Crystalline Leviathan: The Crystalline Leviathan is a massive creature that lives deep in the ocean. Its body is made entirely of iridescent crystals that refract light in all directions, creating a dazzling display. The Crystalline Leviathan feeds on deep-sea creatures and can grow up to hundreds of meters long. Plasmic Shapeshifter: The Plasmic Shapeshifter is a shape-shifting creature that can manipulate its own plasma to take on different forms. It has no fixed appearance, but usually appears as a mass of writhing, translucent tendrils. The Plasmic Shapeshifter is highly intelligent and can mimic the voices and mannerisms of other creatures. Quantum Butterfly: The Quantum Butterfly is a tiny, delicate creature that flits through the fabric of space-time. Its wings are made of pure energy, and it can move at incredible speeds. The Quantum Butterfly is believed to be responsible for some of the most unusual quantum phenomena, such as entanglement and superposition. Cosmic Serpent: The Cosmic Serpent is a serpentine creature that lives in the void of space. Its body is covered in shimmering, rainbow-colored scales that reflect the light of distant stars. The Cosmic Serpent feeds on cosmic radiation and can survive in the most inhospitable environments. Dream Weaver: The Dream Weaver is a mysterious creature that lives in the realm of dreams. Its body is made of ephemeral, mist-like substance that can change shape at will. The Dream Weaver is said to be able to influence the dreams of mortals, and can even enter their dreams to communicate with them. It is rumored that if you catch a Dream Weaver and release it, it will grant you a wish as a reward for sparing its life.
- blueboo 4y ago
  Plus you can prompt it to take those results and make them more unusual, evocative, creative. Basically use the same kind of creative pumps that human artists do.

DrewADesign 4y ago

The problem isn't art, it's discovery. There's more new original art being made and published right now than ever before in history. I'm in art school so I see a lot of it. Sure, there's a lot more chaff to cut through than there was when publishing was almost exclusively controlled by large corporations, but it's there. Art that isn't recycled is almost always an illusion caused by your not being familiar with the things it was remixing. Nobody pulls things out of thin air. Even whacked-out acid trip visions were molded by our cultural experiences and aesthetic. While there are a few people who make large shifts in their artform-- e.g. Jackson Pollock, Jimi Hendrix, and Antoine Carême-- but a) they were still making incremental progress, and b) you'd have a pretty limited set of things to choose from for your entertainment. PS Edit: Right now AI-generated art is novel, but it has far less potential to meaningfully advance art as time progresses. It will mimic what it sees, but it won't see anything that a creative cultural avant-garde doesn't produce first, and as long as real people are doing it first, there will be eyes that want to see it before an AI algorithm waters it down into some conceptual amalgam of its real form. That probably includes commercial entities who are deliberately trying to make themselves stand out.

deusex_ 4y ago

I can only recommend the fantastic "Everything is a remix" series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ2GuvUWaP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ2GuvUWaP8

YurgenJurgensen 4y ago

Good artists create based on their experiences, not based on the content they have consumed.

lgas 4y ago
Are you suggesting that the content they have consumed is not part of their experience?
- YurgenJurgensen 4y ago
  Yes. Reading about something is not the same as experiencing it.

omnicognate 4y ago

There are many rational reasons for a person to see these questions differently to you and plenty of explanations of those reasons around. You may disagree with them, but to claim that differing views must spring from phobias or other irrational mental states rather from a different assessment of the evidence is baseless ad-hominem. I would strongly recommend avoiding statements of that form in general as they achieve nothing good. I could make a similarly disrepectful and unsupported claim about the mental state of people who believe most human creative activity is simply recycling learned ideas, and we could spend some time flinging insults at each other, but why?

donatj 4y ago
Hear me out. In the most basic sense, to believe the mind a box that can output things not based on input is inherently to believe it "irrational" in the truest sense of the word. It is to believe the mind to be non-functionally pure[1] in the programmatic sense. Output based somehow other than purely on input. And if that's the case, the question is where does that irrationality come from? A random number generator? Any developer knows there's no such thing as actual random. It's all either list based or based environmental aspects. I don't see room for an argument to be made that the human mind isn't just mixing ideas/the environment that doesn't rely on some form of magical thinking. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_function
- omnicognate 4y ago
  This is a profoundly counterproductive way to approach a debate and I won't engage with it.
  - donatj 4y ago
    I don't see how coming at a debate from first principles is somehow counter productive? Shining light on the unsupported parts of the other person's argument is step one of debate. I contend there is no proof of a machine capable of creation purely from the ether.
- 4y ago

SkyMarshal 4y ago

That’s basically the thesis of Beaudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, that in the postmodern world everything is a signifier, simulation, or remix of something else, nothing is truly original anymore. It’s probably not completely accurate to say there’s nothing truly original anymore, but also probably true that the rate of discovery of truly novel and original concepts and ideas has slowed to the point it may seem that way. Possibly b/c all the low-hanging fruit as been taken, and only the more difficult discoveries remain.

hooverd 4y ago

I think some of it comes from the smug disdain that generative art fans throw at traditional artists.

snerbles 4y ago
If anything, that smug disdain is a reflection of the perceived elitism of traditional artists. A small culture war that was smouldering long before the appearance of generative models.
- hooverd 4y ago
  The elitism of having a Twitter account and a Wacom tablet? I've found traditional artists are very happy to help people out, especially in the digital art world. They just won't draw your anime waifu OC for exposure.

WillAdams 4y ago

"The Greeks invented everything, all else is variation."

super256 4y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc

cyrialize 4y ago

I've mentioned something like this in other comments across HN. For me, I actually really like that human content is recycled. The discussions around AI, art, and humans always talk about art as a separate product produced by the human. I feel like many pieces of art (not all, for example zombie realism) has a piece of the human inside of it. An example I used in a comment in this post is Raymond Carver. His short stories are about blue-collar men in the mid-west. Carver was a blue-collar man from the mid-west. I find that interesting, and I liked that he pulled from his life experience to write stories. I get very excited when I realize that the work I'm engaging with is recycled in some way. Like a song's chorus sharing lines from a separate artist, or a style that seems similar to a different writer I know. I love that. It makes me feel more connected to the creator and makes me like them more because we share similar interests. An example that comes to mind for me are the manga Hunter x Hunter and Jujutsu Kaisen. The creator of Jujutsu Kaisen loved HxH and it 100% shows. The crazy powers, the complicated fights, the walls of texts explaining what happened in a fight, etc. All of those come from HxH and I love the creator was inspired by it. Sometimes reading Jujutus Kaisen makes me feel like I'm bonding with the creator over our mutual love of HxH. With AI created work, I feel like we're missing the human touch. And as I pointed out in another comment here - I don't think it's hard to bring it back. Show me the prompts and the chat log. Why did you choose those prompts? Why did you ask the AI to write in X style? How does that X style make you feel? On the other hand, maybe the AI prevents some of the human touch from coming through. I imagine much of the recycling that comes from humans is unintentional. The song you wrote on guitar has that riff not because you're copying a band, but because you've listened to so much 90s indie rock that you just make what you love - without realizing it. Maybe in the future this changes. I'd love to see someone spend some time with an AI and mold it to such a way that what it produces can emulate the user's love and interests. Don't forget to show and share the chat log! [EDIT]: To add onto this, I've actually done the above. I've played some text adventure games in the past, and I got ChatGPT to play with me. I told it that I had stat points (Health Points, Magic Points), that I had two types of attacks, and that there are three types of monsters. That experience invigorated me to write paragraphs on world building - just so I can feed it into ChatGPT and live in that world. I seem some instances that are similar like this - but people just end up not sharing the prompts they feed into ChatGPT. I'd love to see those prompts. I've love to see what someone did to get ChatGPT to act a certain way.

tjr 4y ago

I think it's interesting to contemplate the process... when an AI tool "remixes" existing works to make a new work, is it "merely" using statistical processes to do so, or does it "understand" what it's doing? But perhaps the process doesn't matter as much as the end result. Maybe another interesting aspect to consider is: humans create new things (even if by remixing and deriving from old things) all the time, because they want to, because they choose to do so. Thus far, these AI creations have been made at the behest of humans demanding them. Perhaps that will, that desire, to make something new in the first place will remain a differentiating factor.

roywiggins 4y ago

Okay, but if that's true, does that make all figurative art remixes of these? That seems like a stretch. And where did they come from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurine?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurine?wprov=sfla1

dinkumthinkum 4y ago

This is overly reductionist. If you are struggling then your notion of recycled is too broad. But your day humans are shockingly unoriginal, I mean this seems to part of this new fashion to downplay anything done by humans as of it us trivial compared to some imagined alien race Kurzweil singularity thing or something. It’s a bit sad but it is not a very well-founded position.

subpixel 4y ago

This is a longstanding question: see The Anxiety of Influence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxiety_of_Influence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxiety_of_Influence

greenhearth 4y ago

The fear comes from much deeper. It is the fear of the kernel of reality that doesn't have any form, only function, the profound Lovecraftian fear of a mindless force. Although, some people in the story did worship Cthulhu. The argument should be about capacity for creation, and to me AI generation just doesn't seem like true creation, but more of a cheap magic trick.

sandworm101 4y ago

>> I’d struggle to find any human content that is not recycled from the past. "A man with a new horse visited the hardware store in Dagwood last week to try and find a new hitching post for his stable." That simple sentence has enough entropy that I can say, with confidence, that is has never been uttered by anyone in the history of human civilization.

idle_zealot 4y ago
Right, and so do many sentences produced by LLMs. I don't think that's the bar anyone is using for originality.

jareklupinski 4y ago

Our language, Tiger, our language, hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of possible legitimate new ideas, so that I can say this sentence and be confident it has never been uttered before in the history of human communication: "Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers." A Bit of Fry & Laurie Concerning Language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg

joseph_grobbles 4y ago

[dead]

varispeed 4y ago

The difference is that AI is using pattern matching while humans use reasoning to come up with new things. That means AI is not capable of producing meaningful _new_ content like discovering new mathematical theorems, because AI does not understand maths, whereas humans can come up with something meaningful based on _understanding_ of the content they have learned from. This is why when you ask e.g. ChatGPT about something it has not been trained, it can only come up with garbage, whereas a human would likely be able to provide meaningful answer based on looking at the same training data, if that makes sense.

famouswaffles 4y ago
Complete nonsense. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01618-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01618-2 Language models can generate novel functioning protein structures that adhere to a specified purpose. Structures that didn't exist before nevermind found in the dataset. The idea that there's some special distinction between the reasoning LLMs do and what Humans do is unfounded nonsense. A distinction you can't test for (this so called "true understanding" ) is not a distinction
- varispeed 4y ago
  This is the same as getting ChatGPT to calculate something. It is likely that it can infer a correct result from the training data and give right "new" answer, but it doesn't mean it has any understanding of maths. That's why these models like ChatGPT are trained on massive models, to hide the fact that the AI is actually very dumb pattern matching machine. The only reason they found these "new" protein structures is because AI could match them to a pattern that it learned from the training data. They even claim this: > akin to generating grammatically and semantically correct natural language sentences on diverse topics Just like ChatGPT can generate grammatically and semantically correct natural language, except if the topic is not something it was trained on it will output grammatically and semantically correct nonsense. > ProGen can be further fine-tuned to curated sequences and tags Which suggests there still needs to be a human that can reason to be able to curate the sequences, something AI can't and probably at this stage never be able to do. This is something companies running these models won't openly admit, because that would confuse investors.

luplex 4y ago

Today's AI doesn't learn, but Future AI will for sure be able to learn from novel experiences

radlad 4y ago

What I find amusing is not the statement you quoted, but this one: > The Not By AI badge is created to encourage more humans to produce original content and help users identify human-generated content. How does this encourage humans to produce more original content? It may help users identify human-generated content - if they care. But perhaps more usefully it helps AI identify human-generated content to avoid training on its own garbage.

jay_kyburz 4y ago
AI will just adding the badge to the content it generates.

sorokod 4y ago

> I’d struggle to find any human content that is not recycled from the past. The word "recycled" attempts to carry a lot of weight here, and not successfully. In 1905 Einstein published his famous four papers that could not have existed without recent work done by Planck, Michelson, Morley and Maxwell. It would be ridiculous to describe those papers as recycling.

ihaveajob 4y ago

People have been saying this for millenia. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%201%3A9&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%20...

TootsMagoon 4y ago

Our universe operates under deterministic laws, meaning that all events are the result of cause and effect. As such, all new phenomena and entities arise from the preexisting conditions and interactions within the universe. In other words, nothing can come from nothing, and everything that emerges is a product of what already exists.

zzzeek 4y ago

when human made content is "recycled" from past human content, it is not "recycled" using statistical algorithms, it's recycled based on understanding, meaning, aesthetics, emotions, and a whole list of traits that LLMs will never have.

lumb63 4y ago

Looking for a phobia to describe AI content aversion is an incorrect approach. It yields no explanation other than that “something must be wrong with those people”. Instead, try looking at it from a rational biological standpoint and it makes perfect sense. We biologically have a desire to live. Part of living is confronting threats to our survival, and hopefully defeating them. Our minds are what provided us with the ability to survive despite there being stronger, more vicious competition out there. Why would we want to surrender our one competitive advantage? People aren’t stupid. They know that AI will continue to progress (“technology must progress”, says the technologist) and that it threatens their way of life. Truckers know that AIs will automate their jobs. Artists know it will automate theirs. Everyone knows that AI is coming for them, sooner or later. If not in their career, then maybe in their social life, like video games and social media have decimated in-person communication. Those are things we need in order to survive. Our jobs provide us the money we need to meet our needs, and give some of us meaning in life (no, UBI proponents, receiving a check doesn’t solve all the problems). Our social lives are paramount to our health. What will humans be doing all day when AI has taken all our jobs and we are all talking to chatbots all day which cater to our every proclivity? Maybe that is some folks’ ideal worlds, but certainly not mine. Given the mixed results we’ve seen with technological innovations in the past, rather than giving a negative connotation to the people who are cautious or concerned about AI, why not listen to them? Rather than having a phobia, maybe they have a valid point.

sixothree 4y ago

“Plagiarizing our past to control our future” -Fran Blanche

barrysteve 4y ago

A lightbulb is clearly a new invention when all you have are oil lamps. You can retrospectively say we've always had a device that creates light from heat, like this 'new' lightbulb and metaphysically you'd be correct. But the properties and design of a lightbulb are different to an oil lamp. That's new enough to be called original and Thomas Edison (and whoever else helped him) are the originators of the lightbulb design and they made it real. An original thought? Probably not, an original object, yes. Very much so.

xialvjun 4y ago

AI generate different things, people choose the good one. Opinion is the value, just like Protagoras's "man is the measure of all things".