4 ms·

I get the point having read much the same from Tesla (and fans) regarding self driving cars that still haven't done half the things that Musk said was just arou

by ben_w 3mo ago

I get the point having read much the same from Tesla (and fans) regarding self driving cars that still haven't done half the things that Musk said was just around the corner pending regulators a decade ago and repeatedly since then. And myself I keep making comparisons between AI and the progress in 90s video games where every minor improvement got called "photo realistic" and then forgotten with the next game engine: https://archive.org/details/nextgen-issue-26 https://archive.org/details/nextgen-issue-26 So I'm not gonna say "this is it" when the software quality really matters, and I absolutely won't speak to progress (or lack of it) outside of software. But I will say "you can look around and easily see small businesses using AI to generate posters, quite a lot of small business software and websites are in the same category: the mistakes are real but increasingly don't matter".

qsera 3mo ago
>the mistakes are real but increasingly don't matter... I think it would start to matter once again. People will get fed up of AI posters and art. I think they already are...and once some threshold is crossed, the business won't dare to use AI generated assets/designs. Turns out humans are much better at recognizing patterns in stuff that is generated ONLY using patterns from human generated content.
- ben_w 3mo ago
  > People will get fed up of AI posters and art. I think they already are Agreed, but will this look like a meme/fashion cycle? If so, re-prompt each year with a different look. Yes, there are still issues here, a friend found an image he was amazed was AI generated, but to me it was obviously so, so I showed him a screenshot of ChatGPT making something just it and included my prompt: create image: hand drawing of cute springer spaniel puppy looking sideways, various geometric shapes drawn in layer behind and in front of the puppy, all done in style of 7 year old using crayons with mediocre colouring-in skills As I said to them: yeah, the line thickness feels AI, to me, the bad colouring-in scribbles feel like just the art style it was propmpted with it's like: it gets the big picture of the composition, and it knows how to colour in badly, but it doesn't know how to draw a dog as badly as the colouring in > Turns out humans are much better at recognizing patterns in stuff that is generated ONLY using patterns from human generated content. We're better at recognising patterns full stop. All biological brains are, and needed to be better than the current state of the art in machine learning because if a living organism was as poor at learning patterns as the SotA in machine learning, the organism would starve to death before being able to pick up anything and eat it. AI also has a second disadvantage, because there are so few models: the laziest of ChatGPT "thinkpiece" blog posts being everywhere is hard to miss, and 5000 fake bloggers all prompting the same model with "find biggest news story of today and write a blog post about it in a way that maximises my ad revenue" will get 5000 almost identical posts. This will remain true while each instance of the most commonly used AI fail to talk to each other in a way that at least mimics them collectively getting bored with writing the same thing 5000 times, it does not depend on e.g. quality.
- TeriyakiBomb 3mo ago
  Will? They already have.
- satvikpendem 3mo ago
  It's the exact opposite. Humans will hedonically adapt to anything. If they see enough AI posters pretty soon they will start to not care, at least the majority, while some minority will disagree. We've seen this pattern many times, from data privacy and people still using social media, to using non free software.
  - qsera 3mo ago
    >If they see enough AI posters pretty soon they will start to not care.. Wrong analogy. A marketing item wants you to look at it. It takes advantage of an involuntary impulse. A repetitive boring AI artwork will not trigger the impulse to look it. So it is not about "caring"....
    - ben_w 3mo ago
      Yes, but also. Right now GenAI content a bad thing, cringe, a sign of low-value or lack of attention to detail. I don't want to play even a free game if I think it was made by someone else prompting an AI, and that's despite liking the output when I do the same for myself. If AI output is normalised and becomes simply "boring" or "mundane", those negatives must have also gone away. After that (assuming there is an "after that", I don't want to bet either way), people would, as per your argument, need to un-boring them.
      - ragequittah 3mo ago
        >I don't want to play even a free game if I think it was made by someone else prompting an AI I have bad news for you if you think the video game industry isn't widely embracing generative AI. Companies try not to say it because of the current backlash involved but I truly believe Tim Sweeney isn't wrong[1]. I think in 5 years it will be a quaint idea to be AI-vegan and it'll be similar to how people resisted smartphones (I was one of them) until they became inevitable. [1]https://www.techspot.com/news/110410-epic-tim-sweeney-ai-labels-steam-meaningless-generative.html https://www.techspot.com/news/110410-epic-tim-sweeney-ai-lab...
        3mo ago
qwerpy 3mo ago
I’m probably illustrating your point but as a FSD fan it really got ”good enough” recently with version 14. The tipping point was suddenly, much more often than not, it can drive end to end from start (my garage) to finish (parked at destination) with no interventions. I can text and watch videos on my phone and as long as I glance up once a minute, it doesn’t complain. Handling highway driving with lane changes was great when it got there years ago, but just in the last year or so it has gone from a nice to have to “from now on I will never buy a car that can’t do this”. AI has hit some milestones for replacing work as well. There’s still many more to go and maybe some of them will never get hit (much like I don’t think a coast to coast drive with zero interventions during winter conditions is ever going to happen) but there are points at which it forever meaningfully changes some field of work. I think it’s there for writing code.
- ben_w 3mo ago
  > I’m probably illustrating your point but as a FSD fan Half-and-half. I'm not denying that self driving cars (and LLMs) are improving, I'm comparing it against the standards set by the biggest proponents. But yes, I have heard basically the same thing you just wrote for the previous several major releases of FSD. Where we agree is that, while you are a fan, you do explicitly give as an example of something you think it will never do, something very close to what Musk has promised: "Ultimately you'll be able to summon your car anywhere … your car can get to you. I think that within two years, you'll be able to summon your car from across the country. It will meet you wherever your phone is … and it will just automatically charge itself along the entire journey." - Musk, in Jan 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono... (That said, I think Tesla's FSD will never get there, not that it's impossible. The way Musk is behaving, there's going to be a financial scheme named after him in whatever passes for a textbook in 20 years, and it won't be the positive kind of example).
  - qwerpy 3mo ago
    What matters is the benefit it affords to drivers, not what "biggest proponents" say. Elon got overly excited in 2016, but for my day to day usage, I don't need it to self-charge on a drive across the country to get me. I need it to safely drive my family on my daily errands or weekend trips, which I now consider solved. I'm mentally prepared for the next US administration to exact retribution on his companies, and I expect FSD will be neutered after that. Hopefully other car companies are able to catch up. I'm more of a self-driving fan than a Tesla fan, so as long as the thing works as well as what I have now, I'll be fine with it.
w4der 3mo ago
I digress with your last quote, I feel like some people who are aware of AI are starting to develop a quasi allergic reaction to slop, and while the mistakes might not matter for most of the population, for others it does and will take notice.

by ben_w 3mo ago

qsera 3mo ago

>the mistakes are real but increasingly don't matter... I think it would start to matter once again. People will get fed up of AI posters and art. I think they already are...and once some threshold is crossed, the business won't dare to use AI generated assets/designs. Turns out humans are much better at recognizing patterns in stuff that is generated ONLY using patterns from human generated content.

ben_w 3mo ago
> People will get fed up of AI posters and art. I think they already are Agreed, but will this look like a meme/fashion cycle? If so, re-prompt each year with a different look. Yes, there are still issues here, a friend found an image he was amazed was AI generated, but to me it was obviously so, so I showed him a screenshot of ChatGPT making something just it and included my prompt: create image: hand drawing of cute springer spaniel puppy looking sideways, various geometric shapes drawn in layer behind and in front of the puppy, all done in style of 7 year old using crayons with mediocre colouring-in skills As I said to them: yeah, the line thickness feels AI, to me, the bad colouring-in scribbles feel like just the art style it was propmpted with it's like: it gets the big picture of the composition, and it knows how to colour in badly, but it doesn't know how to draw a dog as badly as the colouring in > Turns out humans are much better at recognizing patterns in stuff that is generated ONLY using patterns from human generated content. We're better at recognising patterns full stop. All biological brains are, and needed to be better than the current state of the art in machine learning because if a living organism was as poor at learning patterns as the SotA in machine learning, the organism would starve to death before being able to pick up anything and eat it. AI also has a second disadvantage, because there are so few models: the laziest of ChatGPT "thinkpiece" blog posts being everywhere is hard to miss, and 5000 fake bloggers all prompting the same model with "find biggest news story of today and write a blog post about it in a way that maximises my ad revenue" will get 5000 almost identical posts. This will remain true while each instance of the most commonly used AI fail to talk to each other in a way that at least mimics them collectively getting bored with writing the same thing 5000 times, it does not depend on e.g. quality.
TeriyakiBomb 3mo ago
Will? They already have.
satvikpendem 3mo ago
It's the exact opposite. Humans will hedonically adapt to anything. If they see enough AI posters pretty soon they will start to not care, at least the majority, while some minority will disagree. We've seen this pattern many times, from data privacy and people still using social media, to using non free software.
- qsera 3mo ago
  >If they see enough AI posters pretty soon they will start to not care.. Wrong analogy. A marketing item wants you to look at it. It takes advantage of an involuntary impulse. A repetitive boring AI artwork will not trigger the impulse to look it. So it is not about "caring"....
  - ben_w 3mo ago
    Yes, but also. Right now GenAI content a bad thing, cringe, a sign of low-value or lack of attention to detail. I don't want to play even a free game if I think it was made by someone else prompting an AI, and that's despite liking the output when I do the same for myself. If AI output is normalised and becomes simply "boring" or "mundane", those negatives must have also gone away. After that (assuming there is an "after that", I don't want to bet either way), people would, as per your argument, need to un-boring them.
    - ragequittah 3mo ago
      >I don't want to play even a free game if I think it was made by someone else prompting an AI I have bad news for you if you think the video game industry isn't widely embracing generative AI. Companies try not to say it because of the current backlash involved but I truly believe Tim Sweeney isn't wrong[1]. I think in 5 years it will be a quaint idea to be AI-vegan and it'll be similar to how people resisted smartphones (I was one of them) until they became inevitable. [1]https://www.techspot.com/news/110410-epic-tim-sweeney-ai-labels-steam-meaningless-generative.html https://www.techspot.com/news/110410-epic-tim-sweeney-ai-lab...
      - 3mo ago

qwerpy 3mo ago

I’m probably illustrating your point but as a FSD fan it really got ”good enough” recently with version 14. The tipping point was suddenly, much more often than not, it can drive end to end from start (my garage) to finish (parked at destination) with no interventions. I can text and watch videos on my phone and as long as I glance up once a minute, it doesn’t complain. Handling highway driving with lane changes was great when it got there years ago, but just in the last year or so it has gone from a nice to have to “from now on I will never buy a car that can’t do this”. AI has hit some milestones for replacing work as well. There’s still many more to go and maybe some of them will never get hit (much like I don’t think a coast to coast drive with zero interventions during winter conditions is ever going to happen) but there are points at which it forever meaningfully changes some field of work. I think it’s there for writing code.

ben_w 3mo ago
> I’m probably illustrating your point but as a FSD fan Half-and-half. I'm not denying that self driving cars (and LLMs) are improving, I'm comparing it against the standards set by the biggest proponents. But yes, I have heard basically the same thing you just wrote for the previous several major releases of FSD. Where we agree is that, while you are a fan, you do explicitly give as an example of something you think it will never do, something very close to what Musk has promised: "Ultimately you'll be able to summon your car anywhere … your car can get to you. I think that within two years, you'll be able to summon your car from across the country. It will meet you wherever your phone is … and it will just automatically charge itself along the entire journey." - Musk, in Jan 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono... (That said, I think Tesla's FSD will never get there, not that it's impossible. The way Musk is behaving, there's going to be a financial scheme named after him in whatever passes for a textbook in 20 years, and it won't be the positive kind of example).
- qwerpy 3mo ago
  What matters is the benefit it affords to drivers, not what "biggest proponents" say. Elon got overly excited in 2016, but for my day to day usage, I don't need it to self-charge on a drive across the country to get me. I need it to safely drive my family on my daily errands or weekend trips, which I now consider solved. I'm mentally prepared for the next US administration to exact retribution on his companies, and I expect FSD will be neutered after that. Hopefully other car companies are able to catch up. I'm more of a self-driving fan than a Tesla fan, so as long as the thing works as well as what I have now, I'll be fine with it.

w4der 3mo ago

I digress with your last quote, I feel like some people who are aware of AI are starting to develop a quasi allergic reaction to slop, and while the mistakes might not matter for most of the population, for others it does and will take notice.