6 ms·

> unconditionally intellectually empowering What makes you think those who’ve worked hard over a lifetime to provide (with no compensation) the vast amounts of

> 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.
        graphe 3y ago
  - 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.

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.
        graphe 3y ago
- 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.