10 ms·

I'm not convinced this is going to be as big of a deal as people think. Long-run you want AI to learn from actual experience (think repairing cars instead of r

I'm not convinced this is going to be as big of a deal as people think. Long-run you want AI to learn from actual experience (think repairing cars instead of reading car repair manuals), which both (1. gives you an unlimited supply of noncopyrighted training data and (2. handily sidesteps the issue of AI-contaminated training data.

smikhanov 1y ago
Prediction: there won’t be any AI systems repairing cars before there will be general intelligence-capable humanoid robots (Ex Machina-style). There also won’t be any AI maids in five-star hotels until those robots appear. This doesn’t make your statement invalid, it’s just that the gap between today and the moment you’re describing is so unimaginably vast that saying “don’t worry about AI slop contaminating your language word frequency databases, it’ll sort itself out eventually” is slightly off-mark.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  It blows my mind that some folks are still out here thinking LLMs are the tech-tree towards AGI and independently thinking machines, when we can't even get copilot to stop suggesting libraries that don't exist for code we fully understand and created. I'm sure AGI is possible. It's not coming from ChatGPT no matter how much Internet you feed to it.
  - Legend2440 1y ago
    Well, we won't be feeding it internet - we'll be using RL to learn from interaction with the real world. LLMs are just one very specific application of deep learning, doing next-word-prediction of internet text. It's not LLMs specifically that's exciting, it's deep learning as a whole.
- sebtron 1y ago
  I don't understand the obsession with humanoid robots that many seem to have. Why would you make a car repairing machine human-shaped? Like, what would it use its legs for? Wouldn't it be better to design it tailored to its purpose?
  - TGower 1y ago
    Economies of scale. The humanoid form can interact with all of the existing infrastructure for jobs currently done by humans, so that's the obvious form factor for companies looking to churn out robots to sell by the millions.
    - tartoran 1y ago
      Not only that but if humanoid robots were available commercially (and viable) they could be used as housemaids or for.. companionship if not more. Of course, we're entering SciFi territory but it's long been a SciFi theme.
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      Can, but an insectoid form factor and much smaller size could easily be better. It's not so common that being of human size is an advantage even where things are set up to allow for humans. Consider how chimney sweeps used to be children.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - smikhanov 1y ago
    Legs? To jump into the workshop pit, among other things. Palms are needed to hold a wrench or a spanner, fingers are needed to unscrew nuts. Cars are not built to accommodate whatever universal repair machine there could be, cars are built with an expectation that a mechanic with arms and legs will be repairing it, and will be for a while. A non-humanoid robot in a human-designed world populated by humans looks and behaves like this, at best: https://youtu.be/Hxdqp3N_ymU https://youtu.be/Hxdqp3N_ymU
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      More and more, cars are not built with repair in mind. At least not as a top priority. There are many repairs that now require removal of substantial unrelated components or perhaps the entire engine because the failed thing is just impossible to reach in situ. Nuts and bolts are used because they are good mechanical fasteners that take advantage of the enormous "squeezing" leverage a threaded faster provides. Robots already assemble cars, and we still use nuts and bolts.
AnotherGoodName 1y ago
The hallucinations get quoted and then sourced as truth unfortunately. A simple example. "Which MS Dos productivity program had connect four built in?". I have an MSDOS emulator and know the answer. It's a little obscure but it's amazing how i get a different answer from all the AI's every time. I never saw any of them give the correct answer. Try asking it the above. Then ask it if it's sure about that (it'll change it's mind!). Now remember that these types of answers may well end up quoted online and then learnt by AI with that circular referenced source as the source. We have no truth at that point. And seriously try the above question. It's a great example of AI repeatedly stating an authoritative answer that's completely made up.
- spogbiper 1y ago
  just tried this with gemini 2.5 flash and pro several times, it just keeps saying it doesn't know of any such thing and suggesting it was a software bundle where the game was included alongside the productivity application or I'm not remembering correctly. not great (assuming there actually is such a software) but not as bad as making something up
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- jonchurch_ 1y ago
  What is the correct answer?
  - AnotherGoodName 1y ago
    Autosketch for MS-Dos had connect four. It's under "game" in the file menu. This is an example of a random fact old enough no one ever bothered talking about it on the internet. So it's not cited anywhere but many of us can just plain remember it. When you ask ChatGPT (as of now on June 6th 2025) it gives a random answer every time. Now that i've stated this on the internet in a public manner it will be corrected but... There's a million such things that i could give as an example. Some question obscure enough that no one's given an answer on the internet before so AI doesn't know but recent enough that many of us know the answer so we can instantly see just how much AI hallucinates.
nradov 1y ago
There is an enormous amount of actual car repair experience training data on YouTube but it's all copyrighted. Whether AI companies should have to license that content before using it for training is a matter of some dispute.
- AnotherGoodName 1y ago
  >Whether AI companies should have to license that content before using it for training is a matter of some dispute. We definitely do not have the right balance of this right now. eg. I'm working on a set of articles that give a different path to learning some key math knowledge (just comes at it from a different point of view and is more intuitive). Historically such blog posts have helped my career. It's not ready for release anyway but i'm hesitant to release my work in this day and age since AI can steal it and regurgitate it to the point where my articles appear unoriginal. It's stifling. I'm of the opinion you shouldn't post art, educational material, code or anything that you wish to be credited for on the internet right now. Keep it to yourself or else AI will just regurgitate it to someone without giving you credit.
  - Legend2440 1y ago
    The flip side is: knowledge is not (and should not be!) copyrightable. Anyone can read your articles and use the knowledge it contains, without paying or crediting you. They may even rewrite that knowledge in their own words and publish it in a textbook. AI should be allowed to read repair manuals and use them to fix cars. It should not be allowed to produce copies of the repair manuals.
    - seadan83 1y ago
      An AI does not know what "fix" means, let alone be able to control anything that would physically fix the car. So, for an AI to fix a car means to give instructions on how to do that, in other words, reproduce pertinent parts of the repair manual. One, Is this a fair framing? Two, is this a distinction without a difference?
    - AnotherGoodName 1y ago
abeppu 1y ago
> which both (1. gives you an unlimited supply of noncopyrighted training data and (2. handily sidesteps the issue of AI-contaminated training data. I think these are both basically somewhere between wrong and misleading. Needing to generate your own data through actual experience is very expensive, and can mean that data acquisition now comes with real operational risks. Waymo gets real world experience operating its cars, but the "limit" on how much data you can get per unit time depends on the size of the fleet, and requires that you first get to a level of competence where it's safe to operate in the real world. If you want to repair cars, and you _don't_ start with some source of knowledge other than on-policy roll-outs, then you have to expect that you're going to learn by trashing a bunch of cars (and still pay humans to tell the robot that it failed) for some significant period. There's a reason you want your mechanic to have access to manuals, and have gone through some explicit training, rather than just try stuff out and see what works, and those cost-based reasons are true whether the mechanic is human or AI. Perhaps you're using an off-policy RL approach -- great! If your off-policy data is demonstrations from a prior generation model, that's still AI-contaminated training data. So even if you're trying to learn by doing, there are still meaningful limits on the supply of training data (which may be way more expensive to produce than scraping the web), and likely still AI-contaminated (though perhaps with better info on the data's provenance?).
bravesoul2 1y ago
Long-run you want AGI then? Once we get AGI, the spam will be good? https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/

smikhanov 1y ago

Prediction: there won’t be any AI systems repairing cars before there will be general intelligence-capable humanoid robots (Ex Machina-style). There also won’t be any AI maids in five-star hotels until those robots appear. This doesn’t make your statement invalid, it’s just that the gap between today and the moment you’re describing is so unimaginably vast that saying “don’t worry about AI slop contaminating your language word frequency databases, it’ll sort itself out eventually” is slightly off-mark.

ToucanLoucan 1y ago
It blows my mind that some folks are still out here thinking LLMs are the tech-tree towards AGI and independently thinking machines, when we can't even get copilot to stop suggesting libraries that don't exist for code we fully understand and created. I'm sure AGI is possible. It's not coming from ChatGPT no matter how much Internet you feed to it.
- Legend2440 1y ago
  Well, we won't be feeding it internet - we'll be using RL to learn from interaction with the real world. LLMs are just one very specific application of deep learning, doing next-word-prediction of internet text. It's not LLMs specifically that's exciting, it's deep learning as a whole.
sebtron 1y ago
I don't understand the obsession with humanoid robots that many seem to have. Why would you make a car repairing machine human-shaped? Like, what would it use its legs for? Wouldn't it be better to design it tailored to its purpose?
- TGower 1y ago
  Economies of scale. The humanoid form can interact with all of the existing infrastructure for jobs currently done by humans, so that's the obvious form factor for companies looking to churn out robots to sell by the millions.
  - tartoran 1y ago
    Not only that but if humanoid robots were available commercially (and viable) they could be used as housemaids or for.. companionship if not more. Of course, we're entering SciFi territory but it's long been a SciFi theme.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    Can, but an insectoid form factor and much smaller size could easily be better. It's not so common that being of human size is an advantage even where things are set up to allow for humans. Consider how chimney sweeps used to be children.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- smikhanov 1y ago
  Legs? To jump into the workshop pit, among other things. Palms are needed to hold a wrench or a spanner, fingers are needed to unscrew nuts. Cars are not built to accommodate whatever universal repair machine there could be, cars are built with an expectation that a mechanic with arms and legs will be repairing it, and will be for a while. A non-humanoid robot in a human-designed world populated by humans looks and behaves like this, at best: https://youtu.be/Hxdqp3N_ymU https://youtu.be/Hxdqp3N_ymU
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    More and more, cars are not built with repair in mind. At least not as a top priority. There are many repairs that now require removal of substantial unrelated components or perhaps the entire engine because the failed thing is just impossible to reach in situ. Nuts and bolts are used because they are good mechanical fasteners that take advantage of the enormous "squeezing" leverage a threaded faster provides. Robots already assemble cars, and we still use nuts and bolts.

AnotherGoodName 1y ago

The hallucinations get quoted and then sourced as truth unfortunately. A simple example. "Which MS Dos productivity program had connect four built in?". I have an MSDOS emulator and know the answer. It's a little obscure but it's amazing how i get a different answer from all the AI's every time. I never saw any of them give the correct answer. Try asking it the above. Then ask it if it's sure about that (it'll change it's mind!). Now remember that these types of answers may well end up quoted online and then learnt by AI with that circular referenced source as the source. We have no truth at that point. And seriously try the above question. It's a great example of AI repeatedly stating an authoritative answer that's completely made up.

spogbiper 1y ago
just tried this with gemini 2.5 flash and pro several times, it just keeps saying it doesn't know of any such thing and suggesting it was a software bundle where the game was included alongside the productivity application or I'm not remembering correctly. not great (assuming there actually is such a software) but not as bad as making something up
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
jonchurch_ 1y ago
What is the correct answer?
- AnotherGoodName 1y ago
  Autosketch for MS-Dos had connect four. It's under "game" in the file menu. This is an example of a random fact old enough no one ever bothered talking about it on the internet. So it's not cited anywhere but many of us can just plain remember it. When you ask ChatGPT (as of now on June 6th 2025) it gives a random answer every time. Now that i've stated this on the internet in a public manner it will be corrected but... There's a million such things that i could give as an example. Some question obscure enough that no one's given an answer on the internet before so AI doesn't know but recent enough that many of us know the answer so we can instantly see just how much AI hallucinates.

nradov 1y ago

There is an enormous amount of actual car repair experience training data on YouTube but it's all copyrighted. Whether AI companies should have to license that content before using it for training is a matter of some dispute.

AnotherGoodName 1y ago
>Whether AI companies should have to license that content before using it for training is a matter of some dispute. We definitely do not have the right balance of this right now. eg. I'm working on a set of articles that give a different path to learning some key math knowledge (just comes at it from a different point of view and is more intuitive). Historically such blog posts have helped my career. It's not ready for release anyway but i'm hesitant to release my work in this day and age since AI can steal it and regurgitate it to the point where my articles appear unoriginal. It's stifling. I'm of the opinion you shouldn't post art, educational material, code or anything that you wish to be credited for on the internet right now. Keep it to yourself or else AI will just regurgitate it to someone without giving you credit.
- Legend2440 1y ago
  The flip side is: knowledge is not (and should not be!) copyrightable. Anyone can read your articles and use the knowledge it contains, without paying or crediting you. They may even rewrite that knowledge in their own words and publish it in a textbook. AI should be allowed to read repair manuals and use them to fix cars. It should not be allowed to produce copies of the repair manuals.
  - seadan83 1y ago
    An AI does not know what "fix" means, let alone be able to control anything that would physically fix the car. So, for an AI to fix a car means to give instructions on how to do that, in other words, reproduce pertinent parts of the repair manual. One, Is this a fair framing? Two, is this a distinction without a difference?
  - AnotherGoodName 1y ago

abeppu 1y ago

> which both (1. gives you an unlimited supply of noncopyrighted training data and (2. handily sidesteps the issue of AI-contaminated training data. I think these are both basically somewhere between wrong and misleading. Needing to generate your own data through actual experience is very expensive, and can mean that data acquisition now comes with real operational risks. Waymo gets real world experience operating its cars, but the "limit" on how much data you can get per unit time depends on the size of the fleet, and requires that you first get to a level of competence where it's safe to operate in the real world. If you want to repair cars, and you _don't_ start with some source of knowledge other than on-policy roll-outs, then you have to expect that you're going to learn by trashing a bunch of cars (and still pay humans to tell the robot that it failed) for some significant period. There's a reason you want your mechanic to have access to manuals, and have gone through some explicit training, rather than just try stuff out and see what works, and those cost-based reasons are true whether the mechanic is human or AI. Perhaps you're using an off-policy RL approach -- great! If your off-policy data is demonstrations from a prior generation model, that's still AI-contaminated training data. So even if you're trying to learn by doing, there are still meaningful limits on the supply of training data (which may be way more expensive to produce than scraping the web), and likely still AI-contaminated (though perhaps with better info on the data's provenance?).

bravesoul2 1y ago

Long-run you want AGI then? Once we get AGI, the spam will be good? https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/