5 ms·

IMO, the main difference between AI and humans right now, is that humans can do human things with far fewer examples. AI has the speed advantage that lets them

IMO, the main difference between AI and humans right now, is that humans can do human things with far fewer examples. AI has the speed advantage that lets them read all the words in the world, listen to all the music ever recorder, watch all the videos ever filmed… but are so stupid[1] that they need to, too. I mean, if humans need to listen to far fewer examples to create music than an LLM needs to parse sound files, they're obviously not doing the same thing, are they? Similarly, it's unambiguously false that a human blues is the weighted average of the sound files of other blues. There are structures which are essentially identical to those used by other artists for reasons of easy improvisation, there are selections of notes played over the top which are a function of fundamental musical properties of consonance and dissonance, scale runs the instrument is suited to as well as licks that may have been directly borrowed, but the final output is dependent heavily on the actual capabilities of the artist to play and singer, which obviously aren't simply lifted from their favourite artists' recordings. Even if it's highly derivative which it almost certainly is, it's not remotely the same progress as a matrix generating a sound file from a combination of other tagged sound files and the input "12 bar blues with Stevie Ray Vaughan guitar work and BB King vocals"

ben_w 3y ago
> I mean, if humans need to listen to far fewer examples to create music than an LLM needs to parse sound files, they're obviously not doing the same thing, are they? If I need much longer to run a marathon than an athlete, is that because my body is not doing the same things as the athlete, or just because it's doing all the same things but doing them worse? If a (clinical) moron tries to learn a song, and it takes a lifetime, why? (Do we even understand human brains well enough to answer that? Not my field). > there are selections of notes played over the top which are a function of fundamental musical properties of consonance and dissonance, scale runs the instrument is suited to as well as licks that may have been directly borrowed How do you learn what these things are? What do "consonance and dissonance" mean in terms of why they make you feel the way they do, and why can't an AI learn those things from examples? The qualia, that AI hopefully doesn't have but we can't tell because we don't have a test for that? Danse Macabre (Camille Saint-Saëns) was rejected at the time for how it sounded. The early cultural rejection of Blues seems to me like it was more probably racist excuses than artistic preferences, which is why I'm picking a non-Blues example. > reasons of easy improvisation … [all the other things in the previous quote, I hope this is a fair cut] … the final output is dependent heavily on the actual capabilities of the artist to play and singer, which obviously aren't simply lifted from their favourite artists' recordings. If I put the AI into a robot (or simulated) body, and the limits of that body constrained the capabilities of the output, those limit themselves make it OK? Constrain it to MIDI rather than a full waveform? This doesn't seem like it would change the answer, to me.
- notahacker 3y ago
  > If I need much longer to run a marathon than an athlete, is that because my body is not doing the same things as the athlete, or just because it's doing all the same things but doing them worse? If it's because you have to generate the concept of legs from observing other people run marathons before emitting a digital facismile of a race, I think we can be confident you're not doing the same thing as the other athletes. How do you learn what these things are? What do "consonance and dissonance" mean in terms of why they make you feel the way they do, and why can't an AI learn those things from examples? The qualia, that AI hopefully doesn't have but we can't tell because we don't have a test for that? Consonance and dissonance are physical properties of sound resonating in our ears, our emotional reactions involve observable physiological reactions like dopamine release and I think we can confidently reject the premise that a static model of relationships between wav files which instantaneously generates another wav file is doing the same thing Nobody is arguing musical fashions don't exist, because they do, they're arguing that AI unambiguously does not "listen" to music and a human performer unambiguously isn't even capable of outputting a mathematical translation of all the sound files they've absorbed, never mind solely doing that like a large model trained on other people's music [and text]
  - ben_w 3y ago
    So, for you, it would change the answer if I put the AI into a robot (or simulated) body, and the limits of that body constrained the capabilities of the output? > Consonance and dissonance are physical properties of sound resonating in our ears, If a duff chord is played out of hours in a full morgue where no living person can hear it, is it still dissonant? > our emotional reactions involve observable physiological reactions like dopamine release and I think we can confidently reject the premise that a static model of relationships between wav files which instantaneously generates another wav file is doing the same thing I'm not so sure. Observable physiological reactions are the easy part, but they don't solve the "hard problem of consciousness"[0]. Various chemicals, including dopamine, modulate various neural activities and let our brains focus on things and learn in certain ways. Attention heads allow a big confusing pile of linear algebra to "focus" on particular things and learn in certain ways — what's that like on the inside? Is there even an inside for it to be like something? Nobody knows. I've only heard one suggestion for how to test it that isn't immediately obviously flawed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWf3szP6L80 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWf3szP6L80 (I don't know if Ilya Sutskever came up with this test, but he's who I first heard promoting it). We're made of atoms. The chemistry of life led to us having feelings as the result of evolution, a process that has no intentionality. An AI may, or may not, reproduce that. In the absence of a test (without which we can't even determine the presence or absence of qualia in mammals with brains of similar complexity as SotA AI models), I'd be just as skeptical of anyone who says some AI does have it as anyone who says that AI doesn't have it. At the same time, given how we got it, I think our human brain chemistry is far less magical and more "mess that works" than our egos want to believe. I'm happy to call current AI "fast but stupid". Anything else, including future AI, I'm not so sure about. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

ben_w 3y ago

> I mean, if humans need to listen to far fewer examples to create music than an LLM needs to parse sound files, they're obviously not doing the same thing, are they? If I need much longer to run a marathon than an athlete, is that because my body is not doing the same things as the athlete, or just because it's doing all the same things but doing them worse? If a (clinical) moron tries to learn a song, and it takes a lifetime, why? (Do we even understand human brains well enough to answer that? Not my field). > there are selections of notes played over the top which are a function of fundamental musical properties of consonance and dissonance, scale runs the instrument is suited to as well as licks that may have been directly borrowed How do you learn what these things are? What do "consonance and dissonance" mean in terms of why they make you feel the way they do, and why can't an AI learn those things from examples? The qualia, that AI hopefully doesn't have but we can't tell because we don't have a test for that? Danse Macabre (Camille Saint-Saëns) was rejected at the time for how it sounded. The early cultural rejection of Blues seems to me like it was more probably racist excuses than artistic preferences, which is why I'm picking a non-Blues example. > reasons of easy improvisation … [all the other things in the previous quote, I hope this is a fair cut] … the final output is dependent heavily on the actual capabilities of the artist to play and singer, which obviously aren't simply lifted from their favourite artists' recordings. If I put the AI into a robot (or simulated) body, and the limits of that body constrained the capabilities of the output, those limit themselves make it OK? Constrain it to MIDI rather than a full waveform? This doesn't seem like it would change the answer, to me.

notahacker 3y ago
> If I need much longer to run a marathon than an athlete, is that because my body is not doing the same things as the athlete, or just because it's doing all the same things but doing them worse? If it's because you have to generate the concept of legs from observing other people run marathons before emitting a digital facismile of a race, I think we can be confident you're not doing the same thing as the other athletes. How do you learn what these things are? What do "consonance and dissonance" mean in terms of why they make you feel the way they do, and why can't an AI learn those things from examples? The qualia, that AI hopefully doesn't have but we can't tell because we don't have a test for that? Consonance and dissonance are physical properties of sound resonating in our ears, our emotional reactions involve observable physiological reactions like dopamine release and I think we can confidently reject the premise that a static model of relationships between wav files which instantaneously generates another wav file is doing the same thing Nobody is arguing musical fashions don't exist, because they do, they're arguing that AI unambiguously does not "listen" to music and a human performer unambiguously isn't even capable of outputting a mathematical translation of all the sound files they've absorbed, never mind solely doing that like a large model trained on other people's music [and text]
- ben_w 3y ago
  So, for you, it would change the answer if I put the AI into a robot (or simulated) body, and the limits of that body constrained the capabilities of the output? > Consonance and dissonance are physical properties of sound resonating in our ears, If a duff chord is played out of hours in a full morgue where no living person can hear it, is it still dissonant? > our emotional reactions involve observable physiological reactions like dopamine release and I think we can confidently reject the premise that a static model of relationships between wav files which instantaneously generates another wav file is doing the same thing I'm not so sure. Observable physiological reactions are the easy part, but they don't solve the "hard problem of consciousness"[0]. Various chemicals, including dopamine, modulate various neural activities and let our brains focus on things and learn in certain ways. Attention heads allow a big confusing pile of linear algebra to "focus" on particular things and learn in certain ways — what's that like on the inside? Is there even an inside for it to be like something? Nobody knows. I've only heard one suggestion for how to test it that isn't immediately obviously flawed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWf3szP6L80 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWf3szP6L80 (I don't know if Ilya Sutskever came up with this test, but he's who I first heard promoting it). We're made of atoms. The chemistry of life led to us having feelings as the result of evolution, a process that has no intentionality. An AI may, or may not, reproduce that. In the absence of a test (without which we can't even determine the presence or absence of qualia in mammals with brains of similar complexity as SotA AI models), I'd be just as skeptical of anyone who says some AI does have it as anyone who says that AI doesn't have it. At the same time, given how we got it, I think our human brain chemistry is far less magical and more "mess that works" than our egos want to believe. I'm happy to call current AI "fast but stupid". Anything else, including future AI, I'm not so sure about. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness