6 ms·

I guess we should count our blessings and be grateful that literacy, the printing press, computers and the internet became normalised before this notion of "har

by 4bpp 3y ago

I guess we should count our blessings and be grateful that literacy, the printing press, computers and the internet became normalised before this notion of "harm" and harm prevention was. Going forward, it's hard to imagine how any new technology that is unconditionally intellectually empowering to the individual will be tolerated; after all, just think of the harms someone thus empowered could be enabled to perpetrate. Perhaps eventually, once every forum has been assigned a trust-and-safety team and word processor has been aligned and most normal people have no need for communication outside the Metaverse (TM) in their daily lives, we will also come around to reviewing the necessity of teaching kids to write, considering the epidemic of hateful graffiti and children being caught with handwritten sexualised depictions of their classmates.

xanderlewis 3y ago
> unconditionally intellectually empowering What makes you think those who’ve worked hard over a lifetime to provide (with no compensation) the vast amounts of data required for these — inferior by every metric other than quantity — stochastic approximations of human thought should feel empowered? I think the genAI / printing press analogy is wearing rather thin now.
- graphe 3y ago
  WHO exactly worked hard over a lifetime with no compensation?
  - xanderlewis 3y ago
    By compensation I mean from the companies creating the models, like OpenAI.
    - graphe 3y ago
      Computers and drafters had their work taken by machines. IBM did not pay off the computers and drafters. In this case you could make a steady decent wage. My grandfather was trained in a classic drawing style (yes it was his main job). He did not get into the profession to make money. He did it out of passion and died poor. Artists are not being tricked by the promise of wealth. You will get a cloned style if you can't afford the real artist making it and if the commission goes to a computer how is that not the same as plagerism by a human? Artists were not being paid well before. The anime industry has proven the endpoint of what happens to artists as a profession despite their skills. Chess still exists despite better play by machines. Art as a commercial medium has always been tainted by outside influences such as government, religion and pedophilia. In the end, drawing wasn't going to survive in the age of vector art and computers. They are mainly forgettable jpgs you scroll past in a vast array like DeviantArt.
      - xanderlewis 3y ago
        Sorry, but every one of your talking points — ‘computers were replaced’ , ‘chess is still being played’, etc. — and good counterarguments to them have been covered ad nauseam (and practically verbatim) by now. Anyway, my point isn’t that ‘AI is evil and must be stopped’; it’s that it doesn’t feel ‘intellectually empowering’. I (in my personal work) can’t get anything done with ChatGPT that I can’t on my own, and with less frustration. We’ve created machines that can superficially mimic real work, and the world is going bonkers over it. The only magic power these systems have is sheer speed: they can output reams and reams of twaddle in the time it takes me to make a cup of tea. And no doubt those in bullshit jobs are soon going to find out. My argument might not be what you expect from someone who is sad to see the way artists’ lives are going: if your work is truly capable of being replaced by a large language model or a diffusion model, maybe it wasn’t very original to begin with. The sad thing is, artists who create genuinely superior work will still lose out because those financially enabling them will think (wrongly) that they can be replaced. And we’ll all be worse off.
        graphe 3y ago
        I definitely feel more empowered, and making imperfect art and generating code that doesn't work and proofreading it is definitely changing people's lives. Which specific artist are you talking about who will suffer? Many of the ones I talk to are excited about using it. You keep going back to value and finances. The less money is in it the better. Art isn't good because it's valuable, unless you were only interested in it commercially.
        xanderlewis 3y ago
        > Art isn't good because it's valuable, unless you were only interested in it commercially. Of course not; I’m certainly not suggesting so. But I do think money is important because it is what has enabled artists to do what they do. Without any prospect of monetising one’s art, most of us (and I’m not an artist) would be out working in the potato fields, with very little time to develop skills.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - samstave 3y ago
    Slaves.
    - xanderlewis 3y ago
      Yes, but that’s clearly not what I’m getting at.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > inferior by every metric other than quantity And the metric of "beating most of our existing metrics so we had to rewrite the metrics to keep feeling special, but don't worry we can justify this rewriting by pointing at Goodhart's law". The only reason the question of compensating people for their input into these models even matters is specifically because the models are, in actual fact, good. The bad models don't replace anyone.
  - xanderlewis 3y ago
    > beating most of our existing metrics so we had to rewrite the metrics to keep feeling special This is needlessly provocative, and also wrong. My metrics have been the same from the very beginning (i.e. ‘can it even come close to doing my work for me?’). This question may yet come to evaluate to ‘yes’, but I think you seriously underestimate the real power of these models. > The only reason the question of compensating people for their input into these models even matters is specifically because the models are, in actual fact, good. No. They don’t need to be good, they simply need to fool people into thinking they’re good. And before you reflexively rebut with ‘what’s the difference?’, let me ask you this: is the quality of a piece of work or the importance of a job and all of its indirect effects always immediately apparent? Is it possible for managers to short term cost-cut at the expense of the long term? Is it conceivable that we could at some point slip into a world in which there is no funding for genuinely interesting media anymore because 90% of the population can’t distinguish it? The real danger of genAI is that it convinces non-experts that the experts are replaceable when the reality is utterly different. In some cases this will lead to serious blowups and the real experts will be called back in, but in more ambiguous cases we’ll just quietly lose something of real value.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      > This is needlessly provocative, Perhaps; this is something I find annoying enough that my responses may be unnecessarily sharp… > and also wrong. My metrics have been the same from the very beginning (i.e. ‘can it even come close to doing my work for me?’). This question may yet come to evaluate to ‘yes’, but I think you seriously underestimate the real power of these models. Okay then. (1) your definition is equivalent to "permanent mass unemployment" because if it can do your work for you, it can also do your work for someone else, (2) you mean either "over-estimate" or "real limits of these models", and the only reason I even bring up what's obviously a minor editing issue that I fall foul of myself on many comments is that this is the kind of mistake that people pick up on as evidence of the limits of AI — treating small inversions like this as evidence of uselessness. > Is it conceivable that we could at some point slip into a world in which there is no funding for genuinely interesting media anymore because 90% of the population can’t distinguish it? As written, what you describe is tautologically impossible. However, assuming you mean something more like "genuinely novel" rather than "interesting", absolutely! 100% yes. There's also loads of ways this could permanently end all human flourishing (even when used as a mere tool e.g. by dictators for propaganda), and some plausible ways it can permanently end all human existence (it's a safe bet someone will ask it to and try to empower it to this end, the question is how far they get with this). > The real danger of genAI is that it convinces non-experts that the experts are replaceable when the reality is utterly different. Despite the fact that the best models ace tests in medicine and law, the international mathematical olympiad, leetcode, etc., the fact there are no real tests for how good someone is after a few years of employment means both your point and mine can be true simultaneously. I'm thinking the real threat current LLMs pose to newspapers is that they fully automate the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, even though they beat humans on every measure I had of intelligence when I was growing up, and depending on which measure exactly either all of humanity together by many orders of magnitude, or at worst putting them somewhere near the level of "rather good student taking the same test". > In some cases this will lead to serious blowups and the real experts will be called back in, but in more ambiguous cases we’ll just quietly lose something of real value. Hard disagree about "quiet loss". To the extent that value can be quantified, even if only by surveying humans, models can learn it. Indeed, this is already baked into the way ChatGPT asks you for feedback about the quality of the answers it generates. To the extent we lose things, it will be a very loud and noisy loss, possibly literally in the form of a nuke going off.
- Vetch 3y ago
  > thought should feel empowered? This is a strange question since augmentation can be objectively measured even as its utility is contextual. With MidJourney I do not feel augmented because while it makes pretty images, it does not make precisely the pretty images I want. I find this useless, but for the odd person who is satisfied only with looking at pretty pictures, it might be enough. Their ability to produce pretty pictures to satisfaction is thus augmented. With GPT4 and Copilot, I am augmented in a speed instead of capabilities sense. The set of problems I can solve is not meaningfully enhanced, but my ability to close knowledge gaps is. While LLMs are limited in their global ability to help design, architect or structure the approach to a novel problem or its breakdown, they can tell local tricks and implementation approaches I do not know but can verify as correct. And even when wrong, I can often work out how to fix their approach (this is still a speed up since I likely would not have arrived at this solution concept on my own). This is a significant augmentation even if not to the level I'd like. The reason capabilities are not much enhanced is to get the most out of LLMs, you need to be able to verify solutions due to their unreliability. If a solution contains concepts you do not know, the effort to gain the knowledge required to verify the approach (which the LLM itself can help with) needs to be manageable in reasonable time.
  - xanderlewis 3y ago
    > With GPT4 and Copilot… I am not a programmer, so none of this applies to me. I can only speak for myself, and I’m not claiming that no one can feel empowered by these tools - in fact it seems obvious that they can. I think programmers tend to assume that all other technical jobs can be attacked in the same way, which is not necessarily true. Writing code seems to be an ideal use case for LLMs, especially given the volume of data available on the open web.
    - Vetch 3y ago
      Which is why I say it is contextual and depends on the task. I'll note that it's not only programming ability that is empowered but learning math, electronics, history, physics and so on up to the university level. As long as you take small enough steps such that you are able to verify with external sources, you will move faster with than without. Writing it as "feel empowered" made it come across as if you meant the empowerment was illusory. My argument was that it is not merely a feeling but a real measurable difference.
- 4bpp 3y ago
  Empowering to their users. A lot of things that empower their users necessarily disempower others, especially if we define power in a way that is zero-sum - the printing press disempowered monasteries and monks that spent a lifetime perfecting their book-copying craft (and copied books that no doubt were used in the training of would-be printing press operators in the process, too). It seems to me that the standard use of "empowering" implies in particular that you get more power for less effort - which in many cases tends to be democratizing, as hard-earned power tends to be accrued by a handful of people who dedicate most of their lives to pursuit of power in one form or another. With public schooling and printing, a lot of average people were empowered at the expense of nobles and clerics, who put in a lifetime of effort for the power literacy conveys in a world without widespread literacy. With AI, likewise, average people will be empowered at the expense of those who dedicated their life to learn to (draw, write good copy, program) - this looks bad because we hold those people in high esteem in a world where their talents are rare, but consider that following that appearance is analogously fallacious to loathing democratization of writing because of how noble the nobles and monks looked relative to the illiterate masses.
  - xanderlewis 3y ago
    I get why you might describe these tools as ‘democratising’, but it also seems rather strange when you consider that the future of creativity is now going to be dependent on huge datasets and amounts of computation only billion-dollar companies can afford. Isn’t that anything but democratic? Sure, you can ignore the zeitgeist and carry on with traditional dumb tools if you like, but you’ll be utterly left behind.
    - 4bpp 3y ago
      Datasets can still be curated by crowds of volunteers just fine. I would likewise expect a crowdsourceable solution to compute to emerge eventually - unless the safetyists move to prevent this by way of legislation. When writing and printing emerged, they too depended on supply chains (for paper, iron, machining) and in the case of printing capital that were far out of the reach of the individual. Their utility and overlap with other mass markets resulted in those being commoditized in short order.
gjulianm 3y ago
I feel like this analogy is not very appropriate. The main problem with AI generated images and videos is that, with every improvement, it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish what's real and what's not. That's not something that happened with literacy or printing press or computers. Think about it: the saturation of content on the Internet has become so bad that people are having a hard time knowing what's true or not, to the point that we're having again outbreaks of preventable diseases such as measles because people can't identify what's real scientific information and what's not. Imagine what will happen when anyone can create an image of whatever they want that looks just like any other picture, or worse, video. We are not at all equipped to deal with that. We are risking a lot just for the ability to spend massive amounts of compute power on generating images. It's not curing cancer, not solving world hunger, not making space travel free, no: it's generating images.
- gpderetta 3y ago
  I don't understand. Are you saying that before AI there was a reliable way to distinguish fiction from factual?
  - gjulianm 3y ago
    It definitely is easier without AI. Before, if you saw a photo you could be fairly confident that most of it was real (yes, photo manipulation exists but you can't really create a photo out of nothing). Videos, far more trustworthy (and yes, I know that there's some amazing 3D renders out there but they're not really accessible). With these technologies and the rate at which they're improving, I feel like that's going out of the window. Not to mention that the more content that is generated, the easier it is that something slips by despite being fake.
  - UberFly 3y ago
    "it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish what's real and what's not" - Is literally what they said.
laminatedsmore 3y ago
"grateful that literacy, the printing press, computers and the internet became normalised before this notion of "harm" and harm prevention was" Printing Press -> Reformation -> Thirty Years' War -> Millions Dead I'm sure that there were lots of different opinions at the time about what kind of harm was introduced by the printing press and what to do about it, and attempts to control information by the Catholic church etc. The current fad for 'safe' 'AI' is corporate and naive. But there's no simple way to navigate a revolutionary change in the way information is accessed / communicated.
- light_hue_1 3y ago
  Way to blame the printing press for the actions of religious extremists. The lesson isn't. printing press bad, it's extremist irrational belief in any entity is bad (whether it's religion, Trump, etc.).
  - samstave 3y ago
    The printing press is the leading cause of tpyos!
    - samstave 3y ago
      tpyos??? TPYOS!? What are you a DAFT??? er.. I mean DRAFT!!! - it was just a thought, sir..,
  - freedomben 3y ago
    > Way to blame the printing press for the actions of religious extremists. I don't see GP blaming the printing press for that, they're merely pointing out that one enabled the other, which is absolutely true. I'm damn near a free speech absolutist, and I think the heavy "safety" push by AI is well-meaning but will have unintended consequences that cause more harm than they are meant to prevent, but it seems obvious to me that they can be used much the same as printing presses were by the extremists. > The lesson isn't. printing press bad, it's extremist irrational belief in any entity is bad (whether it's religion, Trump, etc.). Could not agree more
miohtama 3y ago
British banned printing press in 1662 in the name of the harm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1662 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1...
- freedomben 3y ago
  Yes, and fortunately that banning was the end of hateful printed content. Since that ban, the only way to print objectionable material has been to do it by hand with pen and ink. (For clarity, I'm joking, and I know you're also not implying any such thing. I appreciate your comment/link)
someuser2345 3y ago
Harm prevention is definitely not new; books have been subject to censorship for centuries. Just look at the U.S., where we had the Hays code and the Comic Code Authority. The only difference is that now, Harm is defined by California tech companies rather than the Church or the Monarchy.
ben_w 3y ago
I don't think your golden age ever truly existed — the Overton Window for acceptable discourse has always been narrow, we've just changed who the in-group and out-groups are. The out group used to be atheists, or gays, or witches, or republicans (in the British sense of the word), or people who want to drink. And each of Catholics and Protestants made the other unwelcome across Europe for a century or two. When I was a kid, it was anyone who wanted to smoke weed, or (because UK) any normalised depiction of gay male relationships as being at all equivalent to heterosexual ones[0]. I met someone who was embarrassed to admit they named their son "Hussein"[1], and absolutely any attempt to suggest that ecstasy was anything other than evil. I know at least one trans person who started out of the closet, but was very eager to go into the closet. [0] "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussein
_ea1k 3y ago
The core problem is centralization of control. If everyone uses their own desktop computer, then everyone is responsible for their own behavior. If everyone uses Hosting Service F, then at some point people will blur the lines and expect "Hosting Service F" to remove vulgar or offensive content. The lines themselves will be a zeitgeist of sorts with inevitable decisions that are acceptable to some but not all. Can you even blame them? There are lots of ways for this to go wrong and noone wants to be on the wrong side of a PR blast. So heavy guardrails are effectively inevitable.
__loam 3y ago
I'm sure the millions of people they stole the data from feel very empowered.

by 4bpp 3y ago

xanderlewis 3y ago

> unconditionally intellectually empowering What makes you think those who’ve worked hard over a lifetime to provide (with no compensation) the vast amounts of data required for these — inferior by every metric other than quantity — stochastic approximations of human thought should feel empowered? I think the genAI / printing press analogy is wearing rather thin now.

graphe 3y ago
WHO exactly worked hard over a lifetime with no compensation?
- xanderlewis 3y ago
  By compensation I mean from the companies creating the models, like OpenAI.
  - graphe 3y ago
    Computers and drafters had their work taken by machines. IBM did not pay off the computers and drafters. In this case you could make a steady decent wage. My grandfather was trained in a classic drawing style (yes it was his main job). He did not get into the profession to make money. He did it out of passion and died poor. Artists are not being tricked by the promise of wealth. You will get a cloned style if you can't afford the real artist making it and if the commission goes to a computer how is that not the same as plagerism by a human? Artists were not being paid well before. The anime industry has proven the endpoint of what happens to artists as a profession despite their skills. Chess still exists despite better play by machines. Art as a commercial medium has always been tainted by outside influences such as government, religion and pedophilia. In the end, drawing wasn't going to survive in the age of vector art and computers. They are mainly forgettable jpgs you scroll past in a vast array like DeviantArt.
    - xanderlewis 3y ago
      Sorry, but every one of your talking points — ‘computers were replaced’ , ‘chess is still being played’, etc. — and good counterarguments to them have been covered ad nauseam (and practically verbatim) by now. Anyway, my point isn’t that ‘AI is evil and must be stopped’; it’s that it doesn’t feel ‘intellectually empowering’. I (in my personal work) can’t get anything done with ChatGPT that I can’t on my own, and with less frustration. We’ve created machines that can superficially mimic real work, and the world is going bonkers over it. The only magic power these systems have is sheer speed: they can output reams and reams of twaddle in the time it takes me to make a cup of tea. And no doubt those in bullshit jobs are soon going to find out. My argument might not be what you expect from someone who is sad to see the way artists’ lives are going: if your work is truly capable of being replaced by a large language model or a diffusion model, maybe it wasn’t very original to begin with. The sad thing is, artists who create genuinely superior work will still lose out because those financially enabling them will think (wrongly) that they can be replaced. And we’ll all be worse off.
      - graphe 3y ago
        I definitely feel more empowered, and making imperfect art and generating code that doesn't work and proofreading it is definitely changing people's lives. Which specific artist are you talking about who will suffer? Many of the ones I talk to are excited about using it. You keep going back to value and finances. The less money is in it the better. Art isn't good because it's valuable, unless you were only interested in it commercially.
        xanderlewis 3y ago
        > Art isn't good because it's valuable, unless you were only interested in it commercially. Of course not; I’m certainly not suggesting so. But I do think money is important because it is what has enabled artists to do what they do. Without any prospect of monetising one’s art, most of us (and I’m not an artist) would be out working in the potato fields, with very little time to develop skills.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- samstave 3y ago
  Slaves.
  - xanderlewis 3y ago
    Yes, but that’s clearly not what I’m getting at.
ben_w 3y ago
> inferior by every metric other than quantity And the metric of "beating most of our existing metrics so we had to rewrite the metrics to keep feeling special, but don't worry we can justify this rewriting by pointing at Goodhart's law". The only reason the question of compensating people for their input into these models even matters is specifically because the models are, in actual fact, good. The bad models don't replace anyone.
- xanderlewis 3y ago
  > beating most of our existing metrics so we had to rewrite the metrics to keep feeling special This is needlessly provocative, and also wrong. My metrics have been the same from the very beginning (i.e. ‘can it even come close to doing my work for me?’). This question may yet come to evaluate to ‘yes’, but I think you seriously underestimate the real power of these models. > The only reason the question of compensating people for their input into these models even matters is specifically because the models are, in actual fact, good. No. They don’t need to be good, they simply need to fool people into thinking they’re good. And before you reflexively rebut with ‘what’s the difference?’, let me ask you this: is the quality of a piece of work or the importance of a job and all of its indirect effects always immediately apparent? Is it possible for managers to short term cost-cut at the expense of the long term? Is it conceivable that we could at some point slip into a world in which there is no funding for genuinely interesting media anymore because 90% of the population can’t distinguish it? The real danger of genAI is that it convinces non-experts that the experts are replaceable when the reality is utterly different. In some cases this will lead to serious blowups and the real experts will be called back in, but in more ambiguous cases we’ll just quietly lose something of real value.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > This is needlessly provocative, Perhaps; this is something I find annoying enough that my responses may be unnecessarily sharp… > and also wrong. My metrics have been the same from the very beginning (i.e. ‘can it even come close to doing my work for me?’). This question may yet come to evaluate to ‘yes’, but I think you seriously underestimate the real power of these models. Okay then. (1) your definition is equivalent to "permanent mass unemployment" because if it can do your work for you, it can also do your work for someone else, (2) you mean either "over-estimate" or "real limits of these models", and the only reason I even bring up what's obviously a minor editing issue that I fall foul of myself on many comments is that this is the kind of mistake that people pick up on as evidence of the limits of AI — treating small inversions like this as evidence of uselessness. > Is it conceivable that we could at some point slip into a world in which there is no funding for genuinely interesting media anymore because 90% of the population can’t distinguish it? As written, what you describe is tautologically impossible. However, assuming you mean something more like "genuinely novel" rather than "interesting", absolutely! 100% yes. There's also loads of ways this could permanently end all human flourishing (even when used as a mere tool e.g. by dictators for propaganda), and some plausible ways it can permanently end all human existence (it's a safe bet someone will ask it to and try to empower it to this end, the question is how far they get with this). > The real danger of genAI is that it convinces non-experts that the experts are replaceable when the reality is utterly different. Despite the fact that the best models ace tests in medicine and law, the international mathematical olympiad, leetcode, etc., the fact there are no real tests for how good someone is after a few years of employment means both your point and mine can be true simultaneously. I'm thinking the real threat current LLMs pose to newspapers is that they fully automate the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, even though they beat humans on every measure I had of intelligence when I was growing up, and depending on which measure exactly either all of humanity together by many orders of magnitude, or at worst putting them somewhere near the level of "rather good student taking the same test". > In some cases this will lead to serious blowups and the real experts will be called back in, but in more ambiguous cases we’ll just quietly lose something of real value. Hard disagree about "quiet loss". To the extent that value can be quantified, even if only by surveying humans, models can learn it. Indeed, this is already baked into the way ChatGPT asks you for feedback about the quality of the answers it generates. To the extent we lose things, it will be a very loud and noisy loss, possibly literally in the form of a nuke going off.
Vetch 3y ago
> thought should feel empowered? This is a strange question since augmentation can be objectively measured even as its utility is contextual. With MidJourney I do not feel augmented because while it makes pretty images, it does not make precisely the pretty images I want. I find this useless, but for the odd person who is satisfied only with looking at pretty pictures, it might be enough. Their ability to produce pretty pictures to satisfaction is thus augmented. With GPT4 and Copilot, I am augmented in a speed instead of capabilities sense. The set of problems I can solve is not meaningfully enhanced, but my ability to close knowledge gaps is. While LLMs are limited in their global ability to help design, architect or structure the approach to a novel problem or its breakdown, they can tell local tricks and implementation approaches I do not know but can verify as correct. And even when wrong, I can often work out how to fix their approach (this is still a speed up since I likely would not have arrived at this solution concept on my own). This is a significant augmentation even if not to the level I'd like. The reason capabilities are not much enhanced is to get the most out of LLMs, you need to be able to verify solutions due to their unreliability. If a solution contains concepts you do not know, the effort to gain the knowledge required to verify the approach (which the LLM itself can help with) needs to be manageable in reasonable time.
- xanderlewis 3y ago
  > With GPT4 and Copilot… I am not a programmer, so none of this applies to me. I can only speak for myself, and I’m not claiming that no one can feel empowered by these tools - in fact it seems obvious that they can. I think programmers tend to assume that all other technical jobs can be attacked in the same way, which is not necessarily true. Writing code seems to be an ideal use case for LLMs, especially given the volume of data available on the open web.
  - Vetch 3y ago
    Which is why I say it is contextual and depends on the task. I'll note that it's not only programming ability that is empowered but learning math, electronics, history, physics and so on up to the university level. As long as you take small enough steps such that you are able to verify with external sources, you will move faster with than without. Writing it as "feel empowered" made it come across as if you meant the empowerment was illusory. My argument was that it is not merely a feeling but a real measurable difference.
4bpp 3y ago
Empowering to their users. A lot of things that empower their users necessarily disempower others, especially if we define power in a way that is zero-sum - the printing press disempowered monasteries and monks that spent a lifetime perfecting their book-copying craft (and copied books that no doubt were used in the training of would-be printing press operators in the process, too). It seems to me that the standard use of "empowering" implies in particular that you get more power for less effort - which in many cases tends to be democratizing, as hard-earned power tends to be accrued by a handful of people who dedicate most of their lives to pursuit of power in one form or another. With public schooling and printing, a lot of average people were empowered at the expense of nobles and clerics, who put in a lifetime of effort for the power literacy conveys in a world without widespread literacy. With AI, likewise, average people will be empowered at the expense of those who dedicated their life to learn to (draw, write good copy, program) - this looks bad because we hold those people in high esteem in a world where their talents are rare, but consider that following that appearance is analogously fallacious to loathing democratization of writing because of how noble the nobles and monks looked relative to the illiterate masses.
- xanderlewis 3y ago
  I get why you might describe these tools as ‘democratising’, but it also seems rather strange when you consider that the future of creativity is now going to be dependent on huge datasets and amounts of computation only billion-dollar companies can afford. Isn’t that anything but democratic? Sure, you can ignore the zeitgeist and carry on with traditional dumb tools if you like, but you’ll be utterly left behind.
  - 4bpp 3y ago
    Datasets can still be curated by crowds of volunteers just fine. I would likewise expect a crowdsourceable solution to compute to emerge eventually - unless the safetyists move to prevent this by way of legislation. When writing and printing emerged, they too depended on supply chains (for paper, iron, machining) and in the case of printing capital that were far out of the reach of the individual. Their utility and overlap with other mass markets resulted in those being commoditized in short order.

gjulianm 3y ago

I feel like this analogy is not very appropriate. The main problem with AI generated images and videos is that, with every improvement, it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish what's real and what's not. That's not something that happened with literacy or printing press or computers. Think about it: the saturation of content on the Internet has become so bad that people are having a hard time knowing what's true or not, to the point that we're having again outbreaks of preventable diseases such as measles because people can't identify what's real scientific information and what's not. Imagine what will happen when anyone can create an image of whatever they want that looks just like any other picture, or worse, video. We are not at all equipped to deal with that. We are risking a lot just for the ability to spend massive amounts of compute power on generating images. It's not curing cancer, not solving world hunger, not making space travel free, no: it's generating images.

gpderetta 3y ago
I don't understand. Are you saying that before AI there was a reliable way to distinguish fiction from factual?
- gjulianm 3y ago
  It definitely is easier without AI. Before, if you saw a photo you could be fairly confident that most of it was real (yes, photo manipulation exists but you can't really create a photo out of nothing). Videos, far more trustworthy (and yes, I know that there's some amazing 3D renders out there but they're not really accessible). With these technologies and the rate at which they're improving, I feel like that's going out of the window. Not to mention that the more content that is generated, the easier it is that something slips by despite being fake.
- UberFly 3y ago
  "it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish what's real and what's not" - Is literally what they said.

laminatedsmore 3y ago

"grateful that literacy, the printing press, computers and the internet became normalised before this notion of "harm" and harm prevention was" Printing Press -> Reformation -> Thirty Years' War -> Millions Dead I'm sure that there were lots of different opinions at the time about what kind of harm was introduced by the printing press and what to do about it, and attempts to control information by the Catholic church etc. The current fad for 'safe' 'AI' is corporate and naive. But there's no simple way to navigate a revolutionary change in the way information is accessed / communicated.

light_hue_1 3y ago
Way to blame the printing press for the actions of religious extremists. The lesson isn't. printing press bad, it's extremist irrational belief in any entity is bad (whether it's religion, Trump, etc.).
- samstave 3y ago
  The printing press is the leading cause of tpyos!
  - samstave 3y ago
    tpyos??? TPYOS!? What are you a DAFT??? er.. I mean DRAFT!!! - it was just a thought, sir..,
- freedomben 3y ago
  > Way to blame the printing press for the actions of religious extremists. I don't see GP blaming the printing press for that, they're merely pointing out that one enabled the other, which is absolutely true. I'm damn near a free speech absolutist, and I think the heavy "safety" push by AI is well-meaning but will have unintended consequences that cause more harm than they are meant to prevent, but it seems obvious to me that they can be used much the same as printing presses were by the extremists. > The lesson isn't. printing press bad, it's extremist irrational belief in any entity is bad (whether it's religion, Trump, etc.). Could not agree more

miohtama 3y ago

British banned printing press in 1662 in the name of the harm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1662 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1...

freedomben 3y ago
Yes, and fortunately that banning was the end of hateful printed content. Since that ban, the only way to print objectionable material has been to do it by hand with pen and ink. (For clarity, I'm joking, and I know you're also not implying any such thing. I appreciate your comment/link)

someuser2345 3y ago

Harm prevention is definitely not new; books have been subject to censorship for centuries. Just look at the U.S., where we had the Hays code and the Comic Code Authority. The only difference is that now, Harm is defined by California tech companies rather than the Church or the Monarchy.

ben_w 3y ago

I don't think your golden age ever truly existed — the Overton Window for acceptable discourse has always been narrow, we've just changed who the in-group and out-groups are. The out group used to be atheists, or gays, or witches, or republicans (in the British sense of the word), or people who want to drink. And each of Catholics and Protestants made the other unwelcome across Europe for a century or two. When I was a kid, it was anyone who wanted to smoke weed, or (because UK) any normalised depiction of gay male relationships as being at all equivalent to heterosexual ones[0]. I met someone who was embarrassed to admit they named their son "Hussein"[1], and absolutely any attempt to suggest that ecstasy was anything other than evil. I know at least one trans person who started out of the closet, but was very eager to go into the closet. [0] "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussein

_ea1k 3y ago

The core problem is centralization of control. If everyone uses their own desktop computer, then everyone is responsible for their own behavior. If everyone uses Hosting Service F, then at some point people will blur the lines and expect "Hosting Service F" to remove vulgar or offensive content. The lines themselves will be a zeitgeist of sorts with inevitable decisions that are acceptable to some but not all. Can you even blame them? There are lots of ways for this to go wrong and noone wants to be on the wrong side of a PR blast. So heavy guardrails are effectively inevitable.

__loam 3y ago

I'm sure the millions of people they stole the data from feel very empowered.