6 ms·

You don't even have to look at other "fads" like 3D televisions and VR to be skeptical of the claim that recent advancements in ML* represent a major technologi

You don't even have to look at other "fads" like 3D televisions and VR to be skeptical of the claim that recent advancements in ML* represent a major technological revolution that will change society like the Internet or the Printing Press did. Just look at ML's own history. A few years ago we had the "deepfake" scare. People were terrified that now videos are going to surface of politicians saying and doing things that they did not and we would have no way to tell if it was AI generated or not. But we had already been dealing with this for decades with doctored images a la Photoshop. Videos could already be edited by human beings to make it look like someone was communicating a message that they were not. What we have now is a tool that is able to generate text-based content that is indistinguishable from that written by an 8th grader. Even with inevitable improvements that get us to 12th grade level, so what? People will use ChatGPT to write emails and code for them. Personally I don't see the appeal since I am a very creative person and don't want to outsource that work to a human let alone software, but who cares? Currently I can tell when people that I know well are using ChatGPT to "refine" their writing to me, but the content is what matters anyway and I don't know anyone who says they don't "massage" the ChatGPT output for correctness first. Certain people will find creative uses like generating SEO content for websites etc. That's a problem for the search engines. Basically the Internet is about to get noisier .. but it was already so noisy that the older I get the less attention I'm starting to pay to it, in general, anyway. Then again, I am limited by my own imagination. Maybe people will come up with truly "disruptive" ways to use LLMs ... but meh. Same shit different day IMO. * and let's be honest here, ML is a MUCH more accurate term for what we have than AI ... though it's not as good of a marketing term since ML doesn't put "The Matrix" or "The Terminator" in the minds of the lay public like "AI" does.

l5ymep 4y ago
Other fads have the disadvantage of being easily identifiable and avoidable. But AI chips away at what it means to be human. Now imagine if every comment in this thread is not a real person, but made by a LLM. Get any Truman show vibes?
- gspencley 4y ago
  > Get any Truman show vibes? No. It's an interesting thought experiment but it changes nothing. Not for me, anyway. Commenting on these threads is an activity that I do for my own entertainment and "mental flexing." If it turns out that I'm not talking to real people then it doesn't make much of a difference because I don't actually perceive these messages as anything other than pixels on a screen anyway. I hope that doesn't sound "cold" but I come from a generation that was born before the Internet existed. I was about 10 years-old when we got our first modem-equipped computer and that was still early for most people (1992). Having those experiences early on with "early world-wide-web" meant that even though you knew you were talking to "real people" ... there was no real time chat, or video streaming or voice-over-ip etc. ... and so everyone's messages to each other were always pure text all of the time. And no one dared ever give their real name or identity online. You had no idea who you were talking to. So the web forced you to think of communication as just text between anonymous entities. I never got over that mental model, personally. Maybe a little bit with close friends and family on Facebook. But I'm not much of a social media user. When it comes to twitter and forums ... you all might as well be AI bots anyway. Makes no difference to me! EDIT (addendum): It's interesting, the more I think about your comment and my response the more I realize that it is THE INTERNET, still, that has fundamentally changed the nature of what it means to be human and to relate to others. If you see interactions between people online as "real", meaningful human interactions, no different than relating to people in the physical / offline world, then it must be somewhat disturbing to think that you might be caught up in a "meaningful" relationship with someone who is "faking it." But that reminds me of romance scams. For 18 years I ran a high traffic adult website and I would have men email me from time to time to share their stories about scammers luring them into relationships using doctored video, images and false identities etc. These men got completely wrapped up in the fantasy that they were being sold and it cost many of them their life savings before they finally realized it was a lie. I felt awful for them and quite sympathetic but at the same time wondered how lonely I would personally have to be to lose my skepticism of what I was being told if an attractive young woman were to express an interest in me out of nowhere. ML will undoubtedly be used by scammers and ne'er-do-wells as a way to do their misdeeds more efficiently. But I think that the remedy is education. I miss the days when people were a bit weary of what they did, said or uploaded to the interwebs. I don't see the problem with trusting what you read online a little bit less.
smolder 4y ago
> Then again, I am limited by my own imagination. On that note, it seems clear these models will be disruptive in areas where we previously needed human imagination, and wrongness of outputs can be tolerated or iterated past. I'd like to see a transformer trained on a massive dataset of MIDI-like quantized piano performances, so it can be my virtual personal classical/jazz/whatever pianist, or play a real mechanized piano at a club or something. Directed auto-composers (music) in general are most likely being worked on. South Park probably wasn't the first to use some ML to assist in plot development for their show. A nice ML model to do directed building architecture, ("give the kitchen more natural light" or directed interior design ("more playful furniture") would be very useful. I've got a pile of ideas, really, but minimal experience and no means (network, resources) to execute. Now that I think about it, ChatGPT could probably synthesize many more decent ideas for ML applications, if so directed.
SanderNL 4y ago
> What we have now is a tool that is able to generate text-based content that is indistinguishable from that written by an 8th grader. To be fair, this 8th grader passed the bar exam..
- dwaltrip 4y ago
  So many people conveniently disregard facts like this. It's much easier to write it off as "impressive auto-complete", "a writing assistant", "simply regurgitating the training data", etc. It's an alien intelligence that we barely understand. It has many limitations but also possesses insane capabilities that have not been fully explored. What happens when you take gpt-5, give it 100x more context / "memory", the ability to think to itself in-between tokens, chain many of them together in such a way that they have more agent-like behavior, along with ten other enhancements we haven't thought of? No one knows... The biggest limitation of GPT capabilities is our imagination.
- gspencley 4y ago
  Well, lawyers pass the bar exam and they're not human either (ba-dum dum!) In all seriousness, I know of a few lawyers who would tell you that's not as impressive as non-lawyers think it is. And the reality is, it did not technically "pass" the bar exam. That's media spin and hype. It doesn't have personhood, it's not a student, it's not being evaluated under the same strict set of conditions. It was an engineering exercise done specially crafted conditions and that makes all the difference in the world. I'm a magician and this reminds me of ESP tests in the 70s where frauds like Uri Gellar fooled scientists (at NASA no less) into believing they had psychic powers. The scientists were fooled in large part because it's what they wanted to believe, and the conditions were favourable to the fraudster doing parlour tricks. The most interesting part about the results are that it "passed" the essay portion, otherwise we would expect any computer software to be answer questions correctly that have a single correct answer. But who is evaluating those essays? Are they top lawyers who are giving the essays extremely close scrutiny or are they overworked university professors who have a hundred to read and grade and just want to go home to their families? And what is the objective criteria for "passing" those essay questions? Often times the content, in a formal education setting, is not as relevant as the formatting and making sure that certain key points are touched upon. Does it need to be an essay that is full of factually-verifiable data points or is it an opinion piece? Is the point to show that you can argue a particular point of view? I mean when it comes to something open-ended, why wouldn't any LLM be able to "pass" it? It's the subjective evaluation of the person grading the essay that gets to decide on its grade. And at the end of the day it's just words that must conform to certain rules. Of course computers should be "good" at that sort of thing. The only thing that's been historically very challenging has been natural language processing. That's ChatGPT's contribution to advancing the field of ML. So I'm not that that shaken by a chat-bot being able to bullshit it's way through the bar exam since bullshitting is the base job qualification for being a lawyer anyway :P (couldn't help bookending with another lawyer joke .. sorry).
slowmovintarget 4y ago
This is not a fad. This is like the advent of writing. Plato opined that people would lose their facilities for memorization and the passing of oral histories would falter and die. He was correct about that. We don't have the same techniques and same facilities to memorize the Iliad verse for verse, epithet for epithet as the ancients did. He was incorrect about that being as ruinous as he imagined, but it was as dramatic an impact on the human race as agriculture was to hunter-gatherer society. I think we're at one of these societal delineations; before agriculture and after, before writing and after, before generative AI and after.
- ithkuil 4y ago
  I know it sounds silly, but despite all the positives, the invention of writing was indeed ruinous; after all, without writing we couldn't have invented AI which is going to be truly ruinous... (Fast-forward N years) I know it sounds silly, but despite all the positives, the invention of AI was truly ruinous; without AI we couldn't have invented X which is going to be truly ruinous...
- riffraff 4y ago
  > We don't have the same techniques and same facilities to memorize the Iliad verse for verse, epithet for epithet as the ancients did. it's rhymes and metric, and I'm pretty sure in ancient time people got repetitions wrong too, which is why we have stories with variations everywhere in the world. What we miss is dedication, time and a facility with the language. There's plenty of Italian people who have memorized Dante's Divine Comedy, for example.
jabradoodle 4y ago
You start by talking about ML yet your point only touches on LLM's. There is plenty of harm they can provide by automating propoganda and clearly generative models will/can create things we couldn't via e.g. photoshop and most importantly, with a massively lower barrier to entry. ML is a paradigm shift in how we program computers and we're only talking about surface level details of 1 or 2 use cases here. E.g. generative models have already proven very effective at conceiving new nerve agents and toxins, that is not a barrier to entry we want to dramatically lower.
barking_biscuit 4y ago
>Just look at ML's own history. A few years ago we had the "deepfake" scare. People were terrified that now videos are going to surface of politicians saying and doing things that they did not and we would have no way to tell if it was AI generated or not. But we had already been dealing with this for decades with doctored images a la Photoshop. Videos could already be edited by human beings to make it look like someone was communicating a message that they were not The difference is bandwidth. We're making it about 1000x easier and cheaper to do.
- tome 4y ago
  Sure, but how can anyone know that rate of progress will continue?
  - barking_biscuit 4y ago
    In some sense that doesn't even really matter. We're already at an inflexion point now where the effort to reward ratio of certain activities that used to be possible, but difficult has tipped into possible and not difficult. Once you reach that point, further progress is kind of irrelevant. The confetti has left the cannon. We're not going to go back to a world where it was as difficult as it used to be, so even if no further progress were to be made, we are still going to learn in due course what the implications of the current level of progress are. Sam Harris has a straightforward, yet somewhat compelling argument re: your actual question here, and that is "if it's at all possible for us to improve our technology, then we are going to" and iirc he notes that it doesn't necessarily matter how fast that happens, just the fact that it's possible means we're likely to do it.

l5ymep 4y ago

Other fads have the disadvantage of being easily identifiable and avoidable. But AI chips away at what it means to be human. Now imagine if every comment in this thread is not a real person, but made by a LLM. Get any Truman show vibes?

gspencley 4y ago
> Get any Truman show vibes? No. It's an interesting thought experiment but it changes nothing. Not for me, anyway. Commenting on these threads is an activity that I do for my own entertainment and "mental flexing." If it turns out that I'm not talking to real people then it doesn't make much of a difference because I don't actually perceive these messages as anything other than pixels on a screen anyway. I hope that doesn't sound "cold" but I come from a generation that was born before the Internet existed. I was about 10 years-old when we got our first modem-equipped computer and that was still early for most people (1992). Having those experiences early on with "early world-wide-web" meant that even though you knew you were talking to "real people" ... there was no real time chat, or video streaming or voice-over-ip etc. ... and so everyone's messages to each other were always pure text all of the time. And no one dared ever give their real name or identity online. You had no idea who you were talking to. So the web forced you to think of communication as just text between anonymous entities. I never got over that mental model, personally. Maybe a little bit with close friends and family on Facebook. But I'm not much of a social media user. When it comes to twitter and forums ... you all might as well be AI bots anyway. Makes no difference to me! EDIT (addendum): It's interesting, the more I think about your comment and my response the more I realize that it is THE INTERNET, still, that has fundamentally changed the nature of what it means to be human and to relate to others. If you see interactions between people online as "real", meaningful human interactions, no different than relating to people in the physical / offline world, then it must be somewhat disturbing to think that you might be caught up in a "meaningful" relationship with someone who is "faking it." But that reminds me of romance scams. For 18 years I ran a high traffic adult website and I would have men email me from time to time to share their stories about scammers luring them into relationships using doctored video, images and false identities etc. These men got completely wrapped up in the fantasy that they were being sold and it cost many of them their life savings before they finally realized it was a lie. I felt awful for them and quite sympathetic but at the same time wondered how lonely I would personally have to be to lose my skepticism of what I was being told if an attractive young woman were to express an interest in me out of nowhere. ML will undoubtedly be used by scammers and ne'er-do-wells as a way to do their misdeeds more efficiently. But I think that the remedy is education. I miss the days when people were a bit weary of what they did, said or uploaded to the interwebs. I don't see the problem with trusting what you read online a little bit less.

smolder 4y ago

> Then again, I am limited by my own imagination. On that note, it seems clear these models will be disruptive in areas where we previously needed human imagination, and wrongness of outputs can be tolerated or iterated past. I'd like to see a transformer trained on a massive dataset of MIDI-like quantized piano performances, so it can be my virtual personal classical/jazz/whatever pianist, or play a real mechanized piano at a club or something. Directed auto-composers (music) in general are most likely being worked on. South Park probably wasn't the first to use some ML to assist in plot development for their show. A nice ML model to do directed building architecture, ("give the kitchen more natural light" or directed interior design ("more playful furniture") would be very useful. I've got a pile of ideas, really, but minimal experience and no means (network, resources) to execute. Now that I think about it, ChatGPT could probably synthesize many more decent ideas for ML applications, if so directed.

SanderNL 4y ago

> What we have now is a tool that is able to generate text-based content that is indistinguishable from that written by an 8th grader. To be fair, this 8th grader passed the bar exam..

dwaltrip 4y ago
So many people conveniently disregard facts like this. It's much easier to write it off as "impressive auto-complete", "a writing assistant", "simply regurgitating the training data", etc. It's an alien intelligence that we barely understand. It has many limitations but also possesses insane capabilities that have not been fully explored. What happens when you take gpt-5, give it 100x more context / "memory", the ability to think to itself in-between tokens, chain many of them together in such a way that they have more agent-like behavior, along with ten other enhancements we haven't thought of? No one knows... The biggest limitation of GPT capabilities is our imagination.
gspencley 4y ago
Well, lawyers pass the bar exam and they're not human either (ba-dum dum!) In all seriousness, I know of a few lawyers who would tell you that's not as impressive as non-lawyers think it is. And the reality is, it did not technically "pass" the bar exam. That's media spin and hype. It doesn't have personhood, it's not a student, it's not being evaluated under the same strict set of conditions. It was an engineering exercise done specially crafted conditions and that makes all the difference in the world. I'm a magician and this reminds me of ESP tests in the 70s where frauds like Uri Gellar fooled scientists (at NASA no less) into believing they had psychic powers. The scientists were fooled in large part because it's what they wanted to believe, and the conditions were favourable to the fraudster doing parlour tricks. The most interesting part about the results are that it "passed" the essay portion, otherwise we would expect any computer software to be answer questions correctly that have a single correct answer. But who is evaluating those essays? Are they top lawyers who are giving the essays extremely close scrutiny or are they overworked university professors who have a hundred to read and grade and just want to go home to their families? And what is the objective criteria for "passing" those essay questions? Often times the content, in a formal education setting, is not as relevant as the formatting and making sure that certain key points are touched upon. Does it need to be an essay that is full of factually-verifiable data points or is it an opinion piece? Is the point to show that you can argue a particular point of view? I mean when it comes to something open-ended, why wouldn't any LLM be able to "pass" it? It's the subjective evaluation of the person grading the essay that gets to decide on its grade. And at the end of the day it's just words that must conform to certain rules. Of course computers should be "good" at that sort of thing. The only thing that's been historically very challenging has been natural language processing. That's ChatGPT's contribution to advancing the field of ML. So I'm not that that shaken by a chat-bot being able to bullshit it's way through the bar exam since bullshitting is the base job qualification for being a lawyer anyway :P (couldn't help bookending with another lawyer joke .. sorry).

slowmovintarget 4y ago

This is not a fad. This is like the advent of writing. Plato opined that people would lose their facilities for memorization and the passing of oral histories would falter and die. He was correct about that. We don't have the same techniques and same facilities to memorize the Iliad verse for verse, epithet for epithet as the ancients did. He was incorrect about that being as ruinous as he imagined, but it was as dramatic an impact on the human race as agriculture was to hunter-gatherer society. I think we're at one of these societal delineations; before agriculture and after, before writing and after, before generative AI and after.

ithkuil 4y ago
I know it sounds silly, but despite all the positives, the invention of writing was indeed ruinous; after all, without writing we couldn't have invented AI which is going to be truly ruinous... (Fast-forward N years) I know it sounds silly, but despite all the positives, the invention of AI was truly ruinous; without AI we couldn't have invented X which is going to be truly ruinous...
riffraff 4y ago
> We don't have the same techniques and same facilities to memorize the Iliad verse for verse, epithet for epithet as the ancients did. it's rhymes and metric, and I'm pretty sure in ancient time people got repetitions wrong too, which is why we have stories with variations everywhere in the world. What we miss is dedication, time and a facility with the language. There's plenty of Italian people who have memorized Dante's Divine Comedy, for example.

jabradoodle 4y ago

You start by talking about ML yet your point only touches on LLM's. There is plenty of harm they can provide by automating propoganda and clearly generative models will/can create things we couldn't via e.g. photoshop and most importantly, with a massively lower barrier to entry. ML is a paradigm shift in how we program computers and we're only talking about surface level details of 1 or 2 use cases here. E.g. generative models have already proven very effective at conceiving new nerve agents and toxins, that is not a barrier to entry we want to dramatically lower.

barking_biscuit 4y ago

>Just look at ML's own history. A few years ago we had the "deepfake" scare. People were terrified that now videos are going to surface of politicians saying and doing things that they did not and we would have no way to tell if it was AI generated or not. But we had already been dealing with this for decades with doctored images a la Photoshop. Videos could already be edited by human beings to make it look like someone was communicating a message that they were not The difference is bandwidth. We're making it about 1000x easier and cheaper to do.

tome 4y ago
Sure, but how can anyone know that rate of progress will continue?
- barking_biscuit 4y ago
  In some sense that doesn't even really matter. We're already at an inflexion point now where the effort to reward ratio of certain activities that used to be possible, but difficult has tipped into possible and not difficult. Once you reach that point, further progress is kind of irrelevant. The confetti has left the cannon. We're not going to go back to a world where it was as difficult as it used to be, so even if no further progress were to be made, we are still going to learn in due course what the implications of the current level of progress are. Sam Harris has a straightforward, yet somewhat compelling argument re: your actual question here, and that is "if it's at all possible for us to improve our technology, then we are going to" and iirc he notes that it doesn't necessarily matter how fast that happens, just the fact that it's possible means we're likely to do it.