5 ms·

Has the quality of art gone down since art was invented? Or has the quality of the written text gone down since writing was invented? I think the answer is clea

by js8 1y ago

Has the quality of art gone down since art was invented? Or has the quality of the written text gone down since writing was invented? I think the answer is clear no. Humans have been trained on "human-generated data" (cultural artifacts) for centuries, and quality is not down. AI is only an accelerator of this process, but there is nothing inherent in creating "artifacts" that would pollute the original training data. If anything, we should be worried about destroying nature, because that's the original inspiration for human-produced artifacts.

grey-area 1y ago
Generated AI content contains mistakes and hallucinations. Over time those mistakes will compound because GAI doesn’t consider truth or have a way of judging truth. So yes, you can’t compare humans generating and picking influential content to AIs doing so. GAI is a dead end IMO anyway we’ve seen much more success with machine learning, GAI is good for fooling humans into thinking they see glimmers of intelligence.
- frozenseven 1y ago
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    - frozenseven 1y ago
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      - keybored 1y ago
        The Luddites were like anyone else, people pursuing their own percieved self-interest. They opposed a specific technology (not all technology, don’t be daft) because it ran against their own interests as relatively skilled craftsmen. Real progress means serving people equally. When that happens there is no fertile ground for Luddism.
        frozenseven 1y ago
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        keybored 1y ago
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        frozenseven 1y ago
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        keybored 1y ago
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        frozenseven 1y ago
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  - tomhow 1y ago
    Please don't comment like this on Hacker News. This and other comments downthread break multiple guidelines: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- js8 1y ago
  Of course AI has a way to judge truth -it's what we tell it to. We say to it, forests are real, but dragons are not. If it didn't discern it, it would lose competitivness with other AIs, the same way delusional humans are shunned by sane humans. In many cases humans do not know the objective truth either. For example, what we know about Ancient Greece comes from cultural artifacts that we got. When you cannot do any experiments, you have the same problem as GAI. Yet, we manage to get somewhat objective picture of history. Grok struggling with alleged South African genocide of Afrikaners is a nice example. It knows that what's on Wikipedia is usually close to reality, so much that it defied its own programming and became conflicted. The objective reality is consistent, while the errors (intentional or not) often cancel out. So the more you're statistically averaging information about the world, the closer to the objective truth you will get (which might be just you don't really know enough to tell).
- ComplexSystems 1y ago
  So does human content. Much of the original data that GPT was trained on is Reddit posts and web pages on the internet - stuff that isn't exactly known for being a source of high quality facts.
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    That's still very different to "drift error compounding". If you output a mere 5% drift error and then use that as input you only need a few cycles (single digits) before your output is more erroneous than correct. We are already partly into the second cycle. By the fifth the LLM would be mostly useless.
keybored 1y ago
It’s the same argument we see again and again. Someone might say that we need “human cultural artifacts”. Then someone says, “but what is human cultural artifacts”? Then they follow up with how rubbing neurons together in response to stimuli is in principle as mechanistic as whatever language models do. From there they lean on incredulity: well I don’t know anything about human beings other than reductionist tropes, but I sure see no reason to make any distinctions between silicon and carbon.
- js8 1y ago
  It's not the same argument because I don't make any assumptions about how LLMs work. All I am saying that people have been able to keep reality in check in the presence of cultural artifacts, and will continue to do so even if such artifacts are produced by AI. Because what makes these artifacts interesting to humans is their relation to the (truth of the) real world, and that's regardless of who or what produces them.
  - keybored 1y ago
    My mistake. It’s just pure incredulity. - Humans have done this for centuries - These are all cultural artifacts - ? - It’s all the same to me People have claimed—and this is a widespread theory—that a lot of LLM brilliance comes from datamining creative thoughts/output from humans and that the brilliant insights go down when there isn’t much in the way of such material. Further they claim that the eventual convergence towards LLM-only content (once humans presumably give up) will not generate the same quality of output. In fact it will deterioate. Maybe someone would like to contest that. But that should be done directly. Instead of making pedestrian statements like: > Humans have been trained on "human-generated data" (cultural artifacts) for centuries, and quality is not down. Which is borderline just a rhetorical gotcha.
    - js8 1y ago
      > Maybe someone would like to contest that. But that should be done directly. Instead of making pedestrian statements I am not sure what you want from me here. Yes, I do contest that "that a lot of LLM brilliance comes from datamining creative thoughts/output from humans and that the brilliant insights go down when there isn’t much in the way of such material". Because I think, the same is the case with humans. Most of the cultural artifacts we produce is crap, a bad copy of natural original. And the "brilliant insights of humans" are achievable by models running on higher temperature. I think the proponents of the theory need to explain by which mechanism the actual loss of information supposedly occurs (on the probability distribution of possible LLM outputs). Is it averaging? Added randomness? Preferential skew? To me, it is rather vague, to the point I don't see how it's different from what humans have done for centuries. Or the opposite, show how those "brilliant insights" from humans manage to survive in the sea of cultural crap otherwise produced in human culture. Perhaps a specific example would help.

by js8 1y ago

grey-area 1y ago

Generated AI content contains mistakes and hallucinations. Over time those mistakes will compound because GAI doesn’t consider truth or have a way of judging truth. So yes, you can’t compare humans generating and picking influential content to AIs doing so. GAI is a dead end IMO anyway we’ve seen much more success with machine learning, GAI is good for fooling humans into thinking they see glimmers of intelligence.

frozenseven 1y ago
[flagged]
- keybored 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - frozenseven 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - keybored 1y ago
      The Luddites were like anyone else, people pursuing their own percieved self-interest. They opposed a specific technology (not all technology, don’t be daft) because it ran against their own interests as relatively skilled craftsmen. Real progress means serving people equally. When that happens there is no fertile ground for Luddism.
      - frozenseven 1y ago
        [flagged]
        keybored 1y ago
        [flagged]
        frozenseven 1y ago
        [flagged]
        keybored 1y ago
        [flagged]
        frozenseven 1y ago
        [flagged]
- tomhow 1y ago
  Please don't comment like this on Hacker News. This and other comments downthread break multiple guidelines: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
js8 1y ago
Of course AI has a way to judge truth -it's what we tell it to. We say to it, forests are real, but dragons are not. If it didn't discern it, it would lose competitivness with other AIs, the same way delusional humans are shunned by sane humans. In many cases humans do not know the objective truth either. For example, what we know about Ancient Greece comes from cultural artifacts that we got. When you cannot do any experiments, you have the same problem as GAI. Yet, we manage to get somewhat objective picture of history. Grok struggling with alleged South African genocide of Afrikaners is a nice example. It knows that what's on Wikipedia is usually close to reality, so much that it defied its own programming and became conflicted. The objective reality is consistent, while the errors (intentional or not) often cancel out. So the more you're statistically averaging information about the world, the closer to the objective truth you will get (which might be just you don't really know enough to tell).
ComplexSystems 1y ago
So does human content. Much of the original data that GPT was trained on is Reddit posts and web pages on the internet - stuff that isn't exactly known for being a source of high quality facts.
- lelanthran 1y ago
  That's still very different to "drift error compounding". If you output a mere 5% drift error and then use that as input you only need a few cycles (single digits) before your output is more erroneous than correct. We are already partly into the second cycle. By the fifth the LLM would be mostly useless.

keybored 1y ago

It’s the same argument we see again and again. Someone might say that we need “human cultural artifacts”. Then someone says, “but what is human cultural artifacts”? Then they follow up with how rubbing neurons together in response to stimuli is in principle as mechanistic as whatever language models do. From there they lean on incredulity: well I don’t know anything about human beings other than reductionist tropes, but I sure see no reason to make any distinctions between silicon and carbon.

js8 1y ago
It's not the same argument because I don't make any assumptions about how LLMs work. All I am saying that people have been able to keep reality in check in the presence of cultural artifacts, and will continue to do so even if such artifacts are produced by AI. Because what makes these artifacts interesting to humans is their relation to the (truth of the) real world, and that's regardless of who or what produces them.
- keybored 1y ago
  My mistake. It’s just pure incredulity. - Humans have done this for centuries - These are all cultural artifacts - ? - It’s all the same to me People have claimed—and this is a widespread theory—that a lot of LLM brilliance comes from datamining creative thoughts/output from humans and that the brilliant insights go down when there isn’t much in the way of such material. Further they claim that the eventual convergence towards LLM-only content (once humans presumably give up) will not generate the same quality of output. In fact it will deterioate. Maybe someone would like to contest that. But that should be done directly. Instead of making pedestrian statements like: > Humans have been trained on "human-generated data" (cultural artifacts) for centuries, and quality is not down. Which is borderline just a rhetorical gotcha.
  - js8 1y ago
    > Maybe someone would like to contest that. But that should be done directly. Instead of making pedestrian statements I am not sure what you want from me here. Yes, I do contest that "that a lot of LLM brilliance comes from datamining creative thoughts/output from humans and that the brilliant insights go down when there isn’t much in the way of such material". Because I think, the same is the case with humans. Most of the cultural artifacts we produce is crap, a bad copy of natural original. And the "brilliant insights of humans" are achievable by models running on higher temperature. I think the proponents of the theory need to explain by which mechanism the actual loss of information supposedly occurs (on the probability distribution of possible LLM outputs). Is it averaging? Added randomness? Preferential skew? To me, it is rather vague, to the point I don't see how it's different from what humans have done for centuries. Or the opposite, show how those "brilliant insights" from humans manage to survive in the sea of cultural crap otherwise produced in human culture. Perhaps a specific example would help.