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We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

calpaterson.com

171–180 of 427 posts

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probbably due to the memory of the deaths of millions of people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_... You get bit by a viper in the bathroom and your going to avoid that bathroom for a while.

That doesn’t really explain anything, given there are millions of deaths under capitalism too.

[dead]

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#172
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a negative positive feedback loop?

Just positive feedback loop. The term "positive" or "negative" refers to the effects of the feedback path on the overall system, a negative feedback loop attempts to negate any changes in the outputs, while a positive feedback amplifies any changes.

Perhaps "Vicious Cycle" and "Virtuous Cycle" is better terminology in this case. Both of them describe self-reinforcing (i.e. positive) feedback loops, while also making clear judgement on the desirability of the consequences.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#173
post #29

An annoying example which has gotten worse recently is recipes. I generally trawl through 5k words of someone's life story and product promotions to get to the piece of information I need, and they often rewrite the recipe 5 different times in different levels of detail -- is this because to make the first page rank on Google you need to pad out the SEO? I too always find myself doing site:reddit.com.

Google page ranking depends on how long people spend on the webpage, so if you have to wade through longform text, it mistakenly assumes that the content is quality. Note that most recipe blogs are fake. Someone wrote the original content long ago. Then, someone else hired a copywriter off a freelancing platform to change the words of the text just enough to avoid copyright violation, then put up a new copycat websit…

I just had a vision of a perverse instantiation AI that takes over and turns the whole universe into copy-paste recipe websites

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#174

The following quotes are fairly interesting and ironic: > Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally pretty negative about search engines that sold ads. Appendix A in their original paper says: >> "we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers" > and that >> "we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives…

The AI that makes Google work is not the algorithms they use to index the web its AdWords which uses a general purpose algorithm to auction ads. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

Sure, google search was the core prototype that used algorithms to give great search results but without Adwords google wouldn't be google.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#175
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does bribing not exist in that system?

Sure there is. I don't know which motivation you'd have to bribe someone to promite your product, though. Would also be hard to sustain if intellectual property was decommodified. Other, more pressing concerns have to be addressed, though.

because there aren't luxuries in that system. that creates a need, and from it a secondary market, which without titles[1], sees the exchange of power either via favors exchange or plain tribalism. bribery then becomes the norm for the influential, even if actual money doesn't change hand, favors and contraband do.

1: a catch all to include both money, 'quota cards' and the likes

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#177
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't this also the story of a dating site (whose name escapes me. OKCupid? PoF?)? Original owner wrote an article about how paying for a dating site is a bad idea. Money is offered, article disappears. Searching is failing me at the moment edit: Was OKCupid: https://www.themarysue.com/okcupid-pulls-why-you-should-neve...

From the article > 12-moth plan > 6-month plan Why would a dating site have a 12-month plan, and why would a user of a dating site want a 12-month plan? Not only would you hopefully want to be off the site within 12 months, as soon as you found someone compatible, you would hopefully delete the app, but you've unnecessarily paid for months you will (hopefully) never use. I don't understand why anything but month-to-m…

Month-to-month is just as bad. The ideal business model for a dating site, from the users' perspective, is a one-time advance payment. This puts the business into the situation where they have an incentive to get you satisfied as quickly as possible, so that they can spend as little time/money on you as possible, so that your value to them doesn't go negative from allowing you to spend too much of their time/money.

This is, as it happens, how professional matchmakers tend to charge.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#178
I know one case where Google appears to be actually using "AI", and the results are terrible.

A client of mine is continually having their listing on Google Maps "helpfully" updated by Google to be wrong. They change the services, they change the hours, all to be wrong. They added a new services section, duplicating their existing services and adding back ones that had been removed post-COVID.

There is no way to make it stop. They show the changes in low-contrast yellow and through dark patterns make it difficult to revert the changes. All they can do is check it daily and revert the changes one-by-one.

I'm trying to get API access so I can automatically revert changes that weren't made by the business. It requires manual approval which takes 2 weeks. Months later, I haven't heard back.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#179

The problem is that google created a negative feedback loop with the web. People have a tangible interest to game google, which worsens the quality of their AI datasets, which makes their AI suggestions terrible. There was the expectation that google's AI suggestions and info boxes would improve over time, but i 've noticed them getting worse and consider them a permanently broken gimmick now. They probably have the…

I've noticed something similar (garbage in, garbage out, essentially) with translation services by google and co. People use these services to translate their sites, which then get fed into these models. There are a bunch of translation errors of terms of trade that are endemic in the german/english translations and apparently originate from these wrongly-trained models, which are then used to build new translations.

And then people learn to speak the language from that, and the errors become part of the language.

Re: We were promised Strong AI, but instead we got metadata analysis

#180
post #29

An annoying example which has gotten worse recently is recipes. I generally trawl through 5k words of someone's life story and product promotions to get to the piece of information I need, and they often rewrite the recipe 5 different times in different levels of detail -- is this because to make the first page rank on Google you need to pad out the SEO? I too always find myself doing site:reddit.com.

I prefer to stick to physical recipe books from trusted chefs. Sure, the internet can deliver the breadth and depth, but to wade through this comes not only with the large search cost but also with the risk of a poor recipe... and don't get me started on recipe websites that don't have metric measurements!
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