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The Turing Syndrome speeds up! Turing Syndrome (Like the Kessler syndrome) is when the amount of AI generated data on the internet surpasses human generated co

The Turing Syndrome speeds up! Turing Syndrome (Like the Kessler syndrome) is when the amount of AI generated data on the internet surpasses human generated content to the extent that it will eventually make it impossible to distinguish between the two

adventured 3y ago
That's not how it's actually going to play out. As the AI generated content becomes dramatically overwhelming in scale, the human content will become increasingly easy to spot (and there will be multiple cues to the human content that make it fairly obvious). There will be a crossing of the two along the way, in regards to the amount of content generated, a relatively brief time where it will be difficult to tell which is which. The more AI content there is, and the more it advances, the easier it's going to be to play spot the human. The time in which it'll be hardest to tell them apart, will be in the middle frames rather than in the later stages.
- 317070 3y ago
  Because the human data will become "stupid" in comparison, is that the reason? I don't understand why spot-the-human will become easier otherwise.
  - HideousKojima 3y ago
    The human content will contain the n-word or other shibboleths.
    - chaxor 3y ago
      This also doesn't make any sense, as it would be much cheaper to use local LLMs to generate text, making it likely to see generated toxic language.
    - jerf 3y ago
      The "n-word" or any arbitrary other shibboleths may guarantee you didn't use OpenAI services, but they don't have any sort of lock on LLM technology and it's trivial to ask non-controlled ones to use any you like.
    - sorokod 3y ago
      AI generated text is still that even with human shibboleth decorations added
    - George83728 3y ago
      Deep irony to use such a dehumanizing word as evidence of humanity.
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
      Its easy to sprinkle a few n. or other words onto AI generated content.
- tjoff 3y ago
  Like Kessler though the problem isn't to detect it but to get anything through. We might not see human content for a few decades before we've sorted it out.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Exactly! I just point to the root lack of differentiation as intractable As in you can’t sort it out…just like so far there’s nobody that really knows how to clean up space long term
- jerf 3y ago
  "As the AI generated content becomes dramatically overwhelming in scale, the human content will become increasingly easy to spot (and there will be multiple cues to the human content that make it fairly obvious)" I feel like you're not accounting for the amount of that AI content that will be deliberately and intelligently intended to masquerade as human. Every signal you can think of and may start using is a signal that intelligent humans can and will forge. And they'll get the ones you didn't think of either, because that's their job. I don't even have to hedge or qualify this prediction, because we have decades of experience with people already forging every signal that is technically possible to forge, and pouring very substantial effort into doing so, right up to having dark businesses that provide these things as a service. "Forge all the signals that are technically possible to forge" is a product you can buy right now. For example, from 13 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151140 I don't know what signals you think you're going to see, but I'll guarantee A: yes, you will indeed see them because there's a lot of degrees of competence in the use of these systems (I still periodically get spams where the sender sent out their template rather than filling it in with a mail merge), but B: those will just be the ones you notice, not the entire population. Rather than a binary decision, I like to measure with "how much information does it take for me to detect a forgery". For instance, things like modern architecture renders can absolutely fool me as being real at standard definition, but at 4K they still struggle (too precise, too clean, even when they try to muss it up on purpose). I need a few paragraphs of GPT text to identify it conclusively, and that's just the default tone it takes. Ask it to give you some text in a specific style and I don't know how much it would take. For all I know I'm already missing things. You're probably already missing things you didn't realize.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    ChatGTP has a number of topics it will refuse to discuss so any writing on those topics will be more often than not human generated.
    - jerf 3y ago
      As I mentioned in another post, OpenAI does not have any sort of lock on LLMs. There's already plenty in the wild and they're only going to get better. Already the commercial AI companies are expressing concern about how much faster the truly open stuff is developing than their stuff. The companies can still throw better hardware at the problem somewhat more reliably but that's not much of a moat; it's still commodity hardware, it's just a bit much to drop on just being able to LLM better if you're not being paid to LLM.
z3c0 3y ago
Or maybe the complete opposite, as it will only be learning patterns created by AI, producing less variance at higher temperatures, ultimately overfitting onto the same bland jargon.
shmatt 3y ago
This is more like cousins having a baby with 3 nostrils
- gibolt 3y ago
  And a few extra fingers
koochi10 3y ago
^^ This comment was generated by A.I.
Rebelgecko 3y ago
Neal Stephenson made some interesting predictions about this ~a decade ago Edit: Anathem actually came out 15 years ago
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  Side topic: Anathem is actually my favorite book of his. I feel like it's under-represented in a list of top NS books.
- kipple 3y ago
  I forget, how does this come up in Anathem? I remember similar notions in his novel Fall — where the internet is so full of fake news and sponsored content that people need additional services to filter out useful information
  - omnicognate 3y ago
    (Syndev = computer (syntactic device), reticulum = internet) > Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,’ Sammann said. > ‘Crap, you once called it,’ I reminded him. > ‘Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.’ > ‘What is good crap?’ Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone. > ‘Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors—swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.’ > ‘As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,’ Osa said. ‘This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium…’”
somenameforme 3y ago
I think this is probably a poor metric for it. Mechanical Turk is full of people trying to race their way through surveys to make a few pennies. So there's a motivation to just create some output that can't be automatically filtered out, like missing a 'please select D as the answer for this question' attention test, while otherwise just going as quickly as possible. It's a dream scenario for any sort of automation, no matter how crude. It's one step above MMO gold farming. Tangentially related, Mechanical Turk and its various less well known clones which come down to the exact same thing, are increasingly the status quo for social science studies. They keep making really shocking discoveries with like 99.99999% statistical certainty given the huge sample sizes these services enable. Kind of weird how often they fail to replicate.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  The fact that MTurkers are paid makes them unreliable for reflecting genuine human responses. That they can’t replicate indicates that the sampling population isn’t consistent representation of population demographics and so there’s no real signal there that can be applied to a general population like most failure to replicate studies
  - incrudible 3y ago
    Not paying would be a heavy bias, too. Do we need something like jury duty?
  - mahathu 3y ago
    The person you replied to was being sarcastic, but you're still right.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  Sociology's reliance on MTurk is absurd but most professionally run polls are now the same thing, just dressed up to look nicer. This is why polls keep reporting lots of weird results which are then taken as absolute fact by researchers and pundits. I saw one the other day from a professional polling firm in which exactly 7% of "the public" said they had attended a protest, no matter what the protest was about. They asked about six or seven things people might protest about, and for every single one, 7% of the panel said they'd been on such a protest. Taken at face value it led to nonsense like concluding millions of people had attended protest marches about CDBC and 15 minute cities. Unfortunately, the panels these firms use are extremely unrepresentative of the public but are advertised as perfect proxies. People then accept this claim unthinkingly. It's a problem.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kristianp 3y ago
Did you just coin that? Looks like previous instances on google were trying to say tourettes syndrome. I like the phrase, I have been wondering about this problem. Future web crawls are going to contain ever increasing amounts of gpt generated content. A similar problem is who is going to use stack overflow when an llm can do a better job for simple problems?
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Yes I did, though I thought I originally posted it on Twitter or HN long ago. It’s on the internet somewhere from me at some point previously

adventured 3y ago

That's not how it's actually going to play out. As the AI generated content becomes dramatically overwhelming in scale, the human content will become increasingly easy to spot (and there will be multiple cues to the human content that make it fairly obvious). There will be a crossing of the two along the way, in regards to the amount of content generated, a relatively brief time where it will be difficult to tell which is which. The more AI content there is, and the more it advances, the easier it's going to be to play spot the human. The time in which it'll be hardest to tell them apart, will be in the middle frames rather than in the later stages.

317070 3y ago
Because the human data will become "stupid" in comparison, is that the reason? I don't understand why spot-the-human will become easier otherwise.
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  The human content will contain the n-word or other shibboleths.
  - chaxor 3y ago
    This also doesn't make any sense, as it would be much cheaper to use local LLMs to generate text, making it likely to see generated toxic language.
  - jerf 3y ago
    The "n-word" or any arbitrary other shibboleths may guarantee you didn't use OpenAI services, but they don't have any sort of lock on LLM technology and it's trivial to ask non-controlled ones to use any you like.
  - sorokod 3y ago
    AI generated text is still that even with human shibboleth decorations added
  - George83728 3y ago
    Deep irony to use such a dehumanizing word as evidence of humanity.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
    Its easy to sprinkle a few n. or other words onto AI generated content.
tjoff 3y ago
Like Kessler though the problem isn't to detect it but to get anything through. We might not see human content for a few decades before we've sorted it out.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  Exactly! I just point to the root lack of differentiation as intractable As in you can’t sort it out…just like so far there’s nobody that really knows how to clean up space long term
jerf 3y ago
"As the AI generated content becomes dramatically overwhelming in scale, the human content will become increasingly easy to spot (and there will be multiple cues to the human content that make it fairly obvious)" I feel like you're not accounting for the amount of that AI content that will be deliberately and intelligently intended to masquerade as human. Every signal you can think of and may start using is a signal that intelligent humans can and will forge. And they'll get the ones you didn't think of either, because that's their job. I don't even have to hedge or qualify this prediction, because we have decades of experience with people already forging every signal that is technically possible to forge, and pouring very substantial effort into doing so, right up to having dark businesses that provide these things as a service. "Forge all the signals that are technically possible to forge" is a product you can buy right now. For example, from 13 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151140 I don't know what signals you think you're going to see, but I'll guarantee A: yes, you will indeed see them because there's a lot of degrees of competence in the use of these systems (I still periodically get spams where the sender sent out their template rather than filling it in with a mail merge), but B: those will just be the ones you notice, not the entire population. Rather than a binary decision, I like to measure with "how much information does it take for me to detect a forgery". For instance, things like modern architecture renders can absolutely fool me as being real at standard definition, but at 4K they still struggle (too precise, too clean, even when they try to muss it up on purpose). I need a few paragraphs of GPT text to identify it conclusively, and that's just the default tone it takes. Ask it to give you some text in a specific style and I don't know how much it would take. For all I know I'm already missing things. You're probably already missing things you didn't realize.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  ChatGTP has a number of topics it will refuse to discuss so any writing on those topics will be more often than not human generated.
  - jerf 3y ago
    As I mentioned in another post, OpenAI does not have any sort of lock on LLMs. There's already plenty in the wild and they're only going to get better. Already the commercial AI companies are expressing concern about how much faster the truly open stuff is developing than their stuff. The companies can still throw better hardware at the problem somewhat more reliably but that's not much of a moat; it's still commodity hardware, it's just a bit much to drop on just being able to LLM better if you're not being paid to LLM.

z3c0 3y ago

Or maybe the complete opposite, as it will only be learning patterns created by AI, producing less variance at higher temperatures, ultimately overfitting onto the same bland jargon.

shmatt 3y ago

This is more like cousins having a baby with 3 nostrils

gibolt 3y ago
And a few extra fingers

koochi10 3y ago

^^ This comment was generated by A.I.

Rebelgecko 3y ago

Neal Stephenson made some interesting predictions about this ~a decade ago Edit: Anathem actually came out 15 years ago

jvanderbot 3y ago
Side topic: Anathem is actually my favorite book of his. I feel like it's under-represented in a list of top NS books.
kipple 3y ago
I forget, how does this come up in Anathem? I remember similar notions in his novel Fall — where the internet is so full of fake news and sponsored content that people need additional services to filter out useful information
- omnicognate 3y ago
  (Syndev = computer (syntactic device), reticulum = internet) > Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,’ Sammann said. > ‘Crap, you once called it,’ I reminded him. > ‘Yes—a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.’ > ‘What is good crap?’ Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone. > ‘Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors—swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.’ > ‘As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,’ Osa said. ‘This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium…’”

somenameforme 3y ago

I think this is probably a poor metric for it. Mechanical Turk is full of people trying to race their way through surveys to make a few pennies. So there's a motivation to just create some output that can't be automatically filtered out, like missing a 'please select D as the answer for this question' attention test, while otherwise just going as quickly as possible. It's a dream scenario for any sort of automation, no matter how crude. It's one step above MMO gold farming. Tangentially related, Mechanical Turk and its various less well known clones which come down to the exact same thing, are increasingly the status quo for social science studies. They keep making really shocking discoveries with like 99.99999% statistical certainty given the huge sample sizes these services enable. Kind of weird how often they fail to replicate.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
The fact that MTurkers are paid makes them unreliable for reflecting genuine human responses. That they can’t replicate indicates that the sampling population isn’t consistent representation of population demographics and so there’s no real signal there that can be applied to a general population like most failure to replicate studies
- incrudible 3y ago
  Not paying would be a heavy bias, too. Do we need something like jury duty?
- mahathu 3y ago
  The person you replied to was being sarcastic, but you're still right.
mike_hearn 3y ago
Sociology's reliance on MTurk is absurd but most professionally run polls are now the same thing, just dressed up to look nicer. This is why polls keep reporting lots of weird results which are then taken as absolute fact by researchers and pundits. I saw one the other day from a professional polling firm in which exactly 7% of "the public" said they had attended a protest, no matter what the protest was about. They asked about six or seven things people might protest about, and for every single one, 7% of the panel said they'd been on such a protest. Taken at face value it led to nonsense like concluding millions of people had attended protest marches about CDBC and 15 minute cities. Unfortunately, the panels these firms use are extremely unrepresentative of the public but are advertised as perfect proxies. People then accept this claim unthinkingly. It's a problem.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kristianp 3y ago

Did you just coin that? Looks like previous instances on google were trying to say tourettes syndrome. I like the phrase, I have been wondering about this problem. Future web crawls are going to contain ever increasing amounts of gpt generated content. A similar problem is who is going to use stack overflow when an llm can do a better job for simple problems?

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Yes I did, though I thought I originally posted it on Twitter or HN long ago. It’s on the internet somewhere from me at some point previously