4 ms·

It’s amazing to my mind that AI can now help write textbooks on niche topics. I see that as tremendous progress for humanity. Of course, with capitalistic ince

by clnq 3y ago

It’s amazing to my mind that AI can now help write textbooks on niche topics. I see that as tremendous progress for humanity. Of course, with capitalistic incentives, we will use it for spam and garbage.

readthenotes1 3y ago
Of course, without capitalism or the threat of capitalism, we wouldn't have to worry about this sort of thing.
- clnq 3y ago
  What would be the incentive to pump out garbage? It’s unproductive work that’s sadly rewarded with pay, which pays the rent. Spending resources on things like this is one of the worst aspects of capitalism. Capitalism is just growing capital at any ethical and moral cost.
  - sclarisse 3y ago
    At the small scale, what are the desirable properties of a non capitalist book system? Would all reward and compensation for writing books (physically published or ebook) be dictated by a central authority? Would individual authors be assigned the topics they would be compensated for? Would they be audited for unauthorized use of AI? Would popularity of the books play a role at all, and if so by what means would authors be protected from effort-stealing? If not, why would we believe the right books would be produced and approved?
    - clnq 3y ago
      It does not have to be centrally controlled. You are talking more about planned economy than non-capitalist incentives. Perhaps you jumped to the conclusion that I am talking about the failed Soviet Union experiment when I say that capitalistic incentives harm literature and knowledge sharing? I am not referring to that, at all. Many people already write amazing works for non-capitalist incentives. Most research is done without them and they are often seen as a conflict of interest in producing good quality papers. A lot of textbooks are also written from need by teachers and professors rather than from capitalistic incentives. Many people just want to share their knowledge, this has been the case since before printed press. The main desirable property in a non-capitalistic economy of literature would be that literature would not be seen as means of growing capital. We have had such an approach to literature for a long time in history — a time with remarkably fewer garbage writings than today.
      - sclarisse 3y ago
        Okay. That sounds reasonable, with the difficulty of being radically underfunded (especially while locked in competition with the other world.)
    - imtringued 3y ago
      The mechanism is quite simple. Humans get paid enough to not need to write bad quality books in the name of "economic growth" to begin with. A lot of people want free time so they can do uncompensated work that they like doing.
  - KETHERCORTEX 3y ago
    > What would be the incentive to pump out garbage? It made me remember about the guy who, for a few years, edited Wikipedia in Scottish without actually knowing the language. Absence of monetary incentive doesn't necessarily lead to the absence of garbage.
ska 3y ago
So far the sweet spot of LLM's seems to be quickly producing mediocre to bad content with factual errors. Assuming you have a talented & knowledgeable person in the loop to improve and fix it, I could see it speeding up the process. But the incentives are already pretty broken here, and I don't know if people will want to do it. The incentives are a bit easier to see if you just churn out bad content across a bunch of areas you don't understand, which is what we are more likely to get, no?
- clnq 3y ago
  The incentives are also there for people who produce quality content. I write a blog on niche tech topics and rely on GPT-4 to edit it, fact-check it, grammar-check it, find weaknesses, offer alternative views and so on. It used to take me 16 hours to write an article, now it takes 4. I ask peers to review my articles, and the number of inaccuracies that would get flagged went down from a couple to nearly zero per article. The same applies to textbooks. LLMs are a fantastic tool that can be used for a lot of good. If people use it for spam, that’s a use case problem, not an AI problem. And money is definitely an incentive to abuse this tool. As you say, it’s very easy to imagine how massive quantities of spam earning small revenues per ad view, click, or book purchase can become a sustainable business. Not sure why people don’t see the capitalistic incentives playing a big role in the abuse. They definitely do.
  - ska 3y ago
    I find it interesting . I know a lot of people who have written textbooks, but approximately none of them have made reasonable money at it. So if you could halve the time to produce a good one it would help, even better if you quarter it. But you are still probably losing money on your time relative to other things you could do. So why do it ? Mostly because it (the book) doesn’t exist. If 3 crap versions exist , I don’t know if you would bother .
  - CurleighBraces 3y ago
    Do you genuinely find it good enough to fact check? My experience so far is it will lie horribly, a lot. I still find it useful enough that I subscribe to the pro version, but I would never rely on it to be able to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
ar_lan 3y ago
The optimist (which is really my real stance) in me says "AI was always bound to happen, and why shouldn't it? It literally can make so many mundane parts of our lives easier, to let us continue to focus on greater things." Unfortunately, all technology is exploitable - and therefore will be exploited.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
I think this can be solved by human organizations tasked with compiling a large range of human content before it gets muddied by low quality LLMs. It would be a good job for cathedral-builder like humans who work on multi-century time scales (like the monks who saved western civilization during the “dark” ages by spending their lives slowly copying and curating texts).

by clnq 3y ago

readthenotes1 3y ago

Of course, without capitalism or the threat of capitalism, we wouldn't have to worry about this sort of thing.

clnq 3y ago
What would be the incentive to pump out garbage? It’s unproductive work that’s sadly rewarded with pay, which pays the rent. Spending resources on things like this is one of the worst aspects of capitalism. Capitalism is just growing capital at any ethical and moral cost.
- sclarisse 3y ago
  At the small scale, what are the desirable properties of a non capitalist book system? Would all reward and compensation for writing books (physically published or ebook) be dictated by a central authority? Would individual authors be assigned the topics they would be compensated for? Would they be audited for unauthorized use of AI? Would popularity of the books play a role at all, and if so by what means would authors be protected from effort-stealing? If not, why would we believe the right books would be produced and approved?
  - clnq 3y ago
    It does not have to be centrally controlled. You are talking more about planned economy than non-capitalist incentives. Perhaps you jumped to the conclusion that I am talking about the failed Soviet Union experiment when I say that capitalistic incentives harm literature and knowledge sharing? I am not referring to that, at all. Many people already write amazing works for non-capitalist incentives. Most research is done without them and they are often seen as a conflict of interest in producing good quality papers. A lot of textbooks are also written from need by teachers and professors rather than from capitalistic incentives. Many people just want to share their knowledge, this has been the case since before printed press. The main desirable property in a non-capitalistic economy of literature would be that literature would not be seen as means of growing capital. We have had such an approach to literature for a long time in history — a time with remarkably fewer garbage writings than today.
    - sclarisse 3y ago
      Okay. That sounds reasonable, with the difficulty of being radically underfunded (especially while locked in competition with the other world.)
  - imtringued 3y ago
    The mechanism is quite simple. Humans get paid enough to not need to write bad quality books in the name of "economic growth" to begin with. A lot of people want free time so they can do uncompensated work that they like doing.
- KETHERCORTEX 3y ago
  > What would be the incentive to pump out garbage? It made me remember about the guy who, for a few years, edited Wikipedia in Scottish without actually knowing the language. Absence of monetary incentive doesn't necessarily lead to the absence of garbage.

ska 3y ago

So far the sweet spot of LLM's seems to be quickly producing mediocre to bad content with factual errors. Assuming you have a talented & knowledgeable person in the loop to improve and fix it, I could see it speeding up the process. But the incentives are already pretty broken here, and I don't know if people will want to do it. The incentives are a bit easier to see if you just churn out bad content across a bunch of areas you don't understand, which is what we are more likely to get, no?

clnq 3y ago
The incentives are also there for people who produce quality content. I write a blog on niche tech topics and rely on GPT-4 to edit it, fact-check it, grammar-check it, find weaknesses, offer alternative views and so on. It used to take me 16 hours to write an article, now it takes 4. I ask peers to review my articles, and the number of inaccuracies that would get flagged went down from a couple to nearly zero per article. The same applies to textbooks. LLMs are a fantastic tool that can be used for a lot of good. If people use it for spam, that’s a use case problem, not an AI problem. And money is definitely an incentive to abuse this tool. As you say, it’s very easy to imagine how massive quantities of spam earning small revenues per ad view, click, or book purchase can become a sustainable business. Not sure why people don’t see the capitalistic incentives playing a big role in the abuse. They definitely do.
- ska 3y ago
  I find it interesting . I know a lot of people who have written textbooks, but approximately none of them have made reasonable money at it. So if you could halve the time to produce a good one it would help, even better if you quarter it. But you are still probably losing money on your time relative to other things you could do. So why do it ? Mostly because it (the book) doesn’t exist. If 3 crap versions exist , I don’t know if you would bother .
- CurleighBraces 3y ago
  Do you genuinely find it good enough to fact check? My experience so far is it will lie horribly, a lot. I still find it useful enough that I subscribe to the pro version, but I would never rely on it to be able to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

ar_lan 3y ago

The optimist (which is really my real stance) in me says "AI was always bound to happen, and why shouldn't it? It literally can make so many mundane parts of our lives easier, to let us continue to focus on greater things." Unfortunately, all technology is exploitable - and therefore will be exploited.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

I think this can be solved by human organizations tasked with compiling a large range of human content before it gets muddied by low quality LLMs. It would be a good job for cathedral-builder like humans who work on multi-century time scales (like the monks who saved western civilization during the “dark” ages by spending their lives slowly copying and curating texts).