12 ms·

I remain confused but still somewhat interested as to a definition of "novel", given how often this idea is wielded in the AI context. How is everyone so good a

I remain confused but still somewhat interested as to a definition of "novel", given how often this idea is wielded in the AI context. How is everyone so good at identifying "novel"? For example, I can't wrap my head around how a) a human could come up with a piece of writing that inarguably reads "novel" writing, while b) an AI could be guaranteed to not be able to do the same, under the same standard.

testaccount28 1y ago
why would you admit on the internet that you fail the reverse turing test?
- fragmede 1y ago
  Because not everyone here has a raging ego and no humility?
- CamperBob2 1y ago
  You have no idea if you're talking to an LLM or a human, yourself, so ... uh, wait, neither do I.
- greygoo222 1y ago
  Because I'm an LLM and you are too
- mikestorrent 1y ago
  Didn't some fake AI country song just get on the top 100? How novel is novel? A lot of human artists aren't producing anything _novel_.
  - magicalist 1y ago
    > Didn't some fake AI country song just get on the top 100? No Edit: to be less snarky, it topped the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales Chart, which is a measure of sales of the individual song, not streaming listens. It's estimated it takes a few thousand sales to top that particular chart and it's widely believed to be commonly manipulated by coordinated purchases.
  - terminalshort 1y ago
    It was a real AI country song, not a fake one, but yes.
Workaccount2 1y ago
[flagged]
- pinnochio 1y ago
  [flagged]
snickerbockers 1y ago
Generally novel either refers to something that is new, or a certain type of literature. If the AI is generating something functionally equivalent to a program in its training set (in this case, dozens or even hundreds of such programs) then it by definition cannot be novel.
- brulard 1y ago
  This is quite a narrow view of how the generation works. AI can extrapolate from the training set and explore new directions. It's not just cutting pieces and gluing together.
  - beeflet 1y ago
    In practice, I find the ability for this new wave of AI to extrapolate very limited.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      Do you have any concrete examples you'd care to share? While this new wave of AI doesn't have unlimited powers of extrapolation, the post we're commenting on is asserting that this latest AI from Google was able to extrapolate solutions to two of AI's oldest problems, which would seem to contradict an assertion of "very limited".
  - snickerbockers 1y ago
    uhhh can it? I've certainly not seen any evidence of an AI generating something not based on its training set. It's certainly smart enough to shuffle code around and make superficial changes, and that's pretty impressive in its own way but not particularly useful unless your only goal is to just launder somebody else's code to get around a licensing problem (and even then it's questionable if that's a derived work or not). Honest question: if AI is actually capable of exploring new directions why does it have to train on what is effectively the sum total of all human knowledge? Shouldn't it be able to take in some basic concepts (language parsing, logic, etc) and bootstrap its way into new discoveries (not necessarily completely new but independently derived) from there? Nobody learns the way an LLM does. ChatGPT, to the extent that it is comparable to human cognition, is undoubtedly the most well-read person in all of history. When I want to learn something I look it up online or in the public library but I don't have to read the entire library to understand a concept.
QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
A system of humans creates bona fide novel writing. We don’t know which human is responsible for the novelty in homoerotic fanfiction of the Odyssey, but it wasn’t a lizard. LLMs don’t have this system-of-thinkers bootstrapping effect yet, or if they do it requires an absolutely enormous boost to get going
kazinator 1y ago
Because we know that the human only read, say, fifty books since they were born, and watched a few thousand videos, and there is nothing in them which resembles what they wrote.
terminalshort 1y ago
If a LLM had written Linux, people would be saying that it isn't novel because it's just based on previous OS's. There is no standard here, only bias.
- veegee 1y ago
  [dead]
- jofla_net 1y ago
  Cept its not made Linux (in the absence of it). At any point prior to the final output it can garner huge starting point bias from ingested reference material. This can be up to and including whole solutions to the original prompt minus some derivations. This is effectively akin to cheating for humans as we cant bring notes to the exam. Since we do not have a complete picture of where every part of the output comes from we are at a loss to explain if it indeed invented it or not. The onus is and should be on the applicant to ensure that the output wasn't copied (show your work), not on the graders to prove that it wasn't copied. No less than what would be required if it was a human. Ultimately it boils down to what it means to 'know' something, whether a photographic memory is, in fact, knowing something, or rather derivations based on other messy forms of symbolism. It is nevertheless a huge argument as both sides have a mountain of bias in either directions.
  - jstummbillig 1y ago
    > Cept its not made Linux (in the absence of it). Neither did you (or I). Did you create anything that you are certain your peers would recognize as more "novel" than anything a LLM could produce?
    - snickerbockers 1y ago
      >Neither did you (or I). Not that specifically but I certainly have the capability to create my own OS without having to refer to the source code of existing operating systems. Literally "creating a linux" is a bit on the impossible side because it implies compatibility with an existing kernel despite the constraints prohibiting me from referring to the source of that existing kernel (maybe possible if i had some clean-room RE team that would read through the source and create a list of requirements without including any source). If we're all on the same page regarding the origins of human intelligence (ie, that it does not begin with satan tricking adam and eve into eating the fruit of a tree they were specifically instructed not to touch) then it necessarily follows that any idea or concept was new at some point and had to be developed by somebody who didn't already have an entire library of books explaining the solution at his disposal. For the Linux thought-experiment you could maybe argue that Linux isn't totally novel since its creator was intentionally mimicking behavior of an existing well-known operating system (also iirc he had access to the minix source) and maybe you could even argue that those predecessors stood on the shoulders of their own proverbial giants, but if we keep kicking the ball down the road eventually we reach a point where somebody had an idea which was not in any way inspired by somebody else's existing idea. The argument I want to make is not that humans never create derivative or unoriginal works (that obviously cannot be true) but that humans have the capability to create new things. I'm not convinced that LLMs have that same capability; maybe I'm wrong but I'm still waiting to see evidence of them discovering something new. As I said in another post, this could easily be demonstrated with a controlled experiment in which the model is bootstrapped with a basic yet intentionally-limited "education" and then tasked with discovering something already known to the experimenters which was not in its training set. >Did you create anything that you are certain your peers would recognize as more "novel" than anything a LLM could produce? Yes, I have definitely created things without first reading every book in the library and memorizing thousands of existing functionally-equivalent solutions to the same problem. So have you so long as I'm not actually debating an LLM right now.
visarga 1y ago
> For example, I can't wrap my head around how a) a human could come up with a piece of writing that inarguably reads "novel" writing, while b) an AI could be guaranteed to not be able to do the same, under the same standard. The secret ingredient is the world outside, and past experiences from the world, which are unique for each human. We stumble onto novelty in the environment. But AI can do that too - move 37 AlphaGo is an example, much stumbling around leads to discoveries even for AI. The environment is the key.
baq 1y ago
If the model can map an unseen problem to something in its latent space, solve it there, map back and deliver an ultimately correct solution, is it novel? Genuine question, ‘novel’ doesn’t seem to have a universally accepted definition here
- gf000 1y ago
  Good question, though I would say that there may be different grades of novelty. One grade might be your example, while something like Gödel's incompleteness theorems or Einstein's relativity could go into a different grade.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

testaccount28 1y ago

why would you admit on the internet that you fail the reverse turing test?

fragmede 1y ago
Because not everyone here has a raging ego and no humility?
CamperBob2 1y ago
You have no idea if you're talking to an LLM or a human, yourself, so ... uh, wait, neither do I.
greygoo222 1y ago
Because I'm an LLM and you are too
mikestorrent 1y ago
Didn't some fake AI country song just get on the top 100? How novel is novel? A lot of human artists aren't producing anything _novel_.
- magicalist 1y ago
  > Didn't some fake AI country song just get on the top 100? No Edit: to be less snarky, it topped the Billboard Country Digital Song Sales Chart, which is a measure of sales of the individual song, not streaming listens. It's estimated it takes a few thousand sales to top that particular chart and it's widely believed to be commonly manipulated by coordinated purchases.
- terminalshort 1y ago
  It was a real AI country song, not a fake one, but yes.

Workaccount2 1y ago

[flagged]

pinnochio 1y ago
[flagged]

snickerbockers 1y ago

Generally novel either refers to something that is new, or a certain type of literature. If the AI is generating something functionally equivalent to a program in its training set (in this case, dozens or even hundreds of such programs) then it by definition cannot be novel.

brulard 1y ago
This is quite a narrow view of how the generation works. AI can extrapolate from the training set and explore new directions. It's not just cutting pieces and gluing together.
- beeflet 1y ago
  In practice, I find the ability for this new wave of AI to extrapolate very limited.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Do you have any concrete examples you'd care to share? While this new wave of AI doesn't have unlimited powers of extrapolation, the post we're commenting on is asserting that this latest AI from Google was able to extrapolate solutions to two of AI's oldest problems, which would seem to contradict an assertion of "very limited".
- snickerbockers 1y ago
  uhhh can it? I've certainly not seen any evidence of an AI generating something not based on its training set. It's certainly smart enough to shuffle code around and make superficial changes, and that's pretty impressive in its own way but not particularly useful unless your only goal is to just launder somebody else's code to get around a licensing problem (and even then it's questionable if that's a derived work or not). Honest question: if AI is actually capable of exploring new directions why does it have to train on what is effectively the sum total of all human knowledge? Shouldn't it be able to take in some basic concepts (language parsing, logic, etc) and bootstrap its way into new discoveries (not necessarily completely new but independently derived) from there? Nobody learns the way an LLM does. ChatGPT, to the extent that it is comparable to human cognition, is undoubtedly the most well-read person in all of history. When I want to learn something I look it up online or in the public library but I don't have to read the entire library to understand a concept.

QuadmasterXLII 1y ago

A system of humans creates bona fide novel writing. We don’t know which human is responsible for the novelty in homoerotic fanfiction of the Odyssey, but it wasn’t a lizard. LLMs don’t have this system-of-thinkers bootstrapping effect yet, or if they do it requires an absolutely enormous boost to get going

kazinator 1y ago

Because we know that the human only read, say, fifty books since they were born, and watched a few thousand videos, and there is nothing in them which resembles what they wrote.

terminalshort 1y ago

If a LLM had written Linux, people would be saying that it isn't novel because it's just based on previous OS's. There is no standard here, only bias.

veegee 1y ago
[dead]
jofla_net 1y ago
Cept its not made Linux (in the absence of it). At any point prior to the final output it can garner huge starting point bias from ingested reference material. This can be up to and including whole solutions to the original prompt minus some derivations. This is effectively akin to cheating for humans as we cant bring notes to the exam. Since we do not have a complete picture of where every part of the output comes from we are at a loss to explain if it indeed invented it or not. The onus is and should be on the applicant to ensure that the output wasn't copied (show your work), not on the graders to prove that it wasn't copied. No less than what would be required if it was a human. Ultimately it boils down to what it means to 'know' something, whether a photographic memory is, in fact, knowing something, or rather derivations based on other messy forms of symbolism. It is nevertheless a huge argument as both sides have a mountain of bias in either directions.
- jstummbillig 1y ago
  > Cept its not made Linux (in the absence of it). Neither did you (or I). Did you create anything that you are certain your peers would recognize as more "novel" than anything a LLM could produce?
  - snickerbockers 1y ago
    >Neither did you (or I). Not that specifically but I certainly have the capability to create my own OS without having to refer to the source code of existing operating systems. Literally "creating a linux" is a bit on the impossible side because it implies compatibility with an existing kernel despite the constraints prohibiting me from referring to the source of that existing kernel (maybe possible if i had some clean-room RE team that would read through the source and create a list of requirements without including any source). If we're all on the same page regarding the origins of human intelligence (ie, that it does not begin with satan tricking adam and eve into eating the fruit of a tree they were specifically instructed not to touch) then it necessarily follows that any idea or concept was new at some point and had to be developed by somebody who didn't already have an entire library of books explaining the solution at his disposal. For the Linux thought-experiment you could maybe argue that Linux isn't totally novel since its creator was intentionally mimicking behavior of an existing well-known operating system (also iirc he had access to the minix source) and maybe you could even argue that those predecessors stood on the shoulders of their own proverbial giants, but if we keep kicking the ball down the road eventually we reach a point where somebody had an idea which was not in any way inspired by somebody else's existing idea. The argument I want to make is not that humans never create derivative or unoriginal works (that obviously cannot be true) but that humans have the capability to create new things. I'm not convinced that LLMs have that same capability; maybe I'm wrong but I'm still waiting to see evidence of them discovering something new. As I said in another post, this could easily be demonstrated with a controlled experiment in which the model is bootstrapped with a basic yet intentionally-limited "education" and then tasked with discovering something already known to the experimenters which was not in its training set. >Did you create anything that you are certain your peers would recognize as more "novel" than anything a LLM could produce? Yes, I have definitely created things without first reading every book in the library and memorizing thousands of existing functionally-equivalent solutions to the same problem. So have you so long as I'm not actually debating an LLM right now.

visarga 1y ago

> For example, I can't wrap my head around how a) a human could come up with a piece of writing that inarguably reads "novel" writing, while b) an AI could be guaranteed to not be able to do the same, under the same standard. The secret ingredient is the world outside, and past experiences from the world, which are unique for each human. We stumble onto novelty in the environment. But AI can do that too - move 37 AlphaGo is an example, much stumbling around leads to discoveries even for AI. The environment is the key.

baq 1y ago

If the model can map an unseen problem to something in its latent space, solve it there, map back and deliver an ultimately correct solution, is it novel? Genuine question, ‘novel’ doesn’t seem to have a universally accepted definition here

gf000 1y ago
Good question, though I would say that there may be different grades of novelty. One grade might be your example, while something like Gödel's incompleteness theorems or Einstein's relativity could go into a different grade.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]