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The AI Battle

aifuture.substack.com

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Re: The AI Battle

#31

Post by ajafari1 »

tialaramex wrote: post #29
slowmovintarget wrote: post #10

This very much requires acceptance of the worse-is-better model. That "beautiful" drawing of an an astronaut riding a horse is aesthetically... crap. It may take a person 5 hours to paint or draw that, but, arguably, a person wouldn't. GPT-3 might generate a novel, but, generally speaking the prose is jarring and awful to read, because there is no intent (danger: philosophically loaded word) behind it. It's all autom…

> those systems are not a path to AGI If that's the actual meat of your claim, it's weird to just put it unsupported at the end. If you think it's an aside you've got a big problem, because without it the rest is pretty weak. We saw this with chess. Anybody who was clinging on to the idea that well, the machines can't really play chess, because technically there do seem to be a few humans who are better, was screwed…

Right on. When do you expect a productized AI that can replace your average skilled programmer?

Re: The AI Battle

#32

Post by CuriouslyC »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #10

This very much requires acceptance of the worse-is-better model. That "beautiful" drawing of an an astronaut riding a horse is aesthetically... crap. It may take a person 5 hours to paint or draw that, but, arguably, a person wouldn't. GPT-3 might generate a novel, but, generally speaking the prose is jarring and awful to read, because there is no intent (danger: philosophically loaded word) behind it. It's all autom…

I don't think these sorts of tools will ever be used to generate a novel or something on that scale. We're building really sexy autocomplete tools that creators will use to fill in the blanks much like the great masters of the renaissance used apprentices to do much of the work in their masterpieces. People will outline what they want, then ask the AI to fill in the blanks, and iteratively refine the result.

As long as we can miniaturize the models sufficiently that individuals and small companies can get output that's comparable to what big corporations with deep pockets can get, these sorts of AI tools have the potential to revolutionize creativity.

Re: The AI Battle

#33

Post by mrshadowgoose »

stuckinhell wrote: post #13

AI that can do creative work is scary for its implications on humanity. Are we at best biological AI's ? I've played around with several of them. These artwork AI's are way more scary than GPT-3 et al because they seem to do something so creative with such good visible results. I don't think the genie goes back in the bottle. I think humanity has an existential crisis on its hands. Whats the point in doing things if…

> Whats the point in doing things if the AI can do it better than you ?

If doing something makes you happy, that can be reason enough for doing a thing. A huge portion of people already engage in "useless" hobbies with no meaningful external outputs. And in the vast portion of those situations, experts and/or machines already exist that can do far better than a hobbyist. Yet people still have hobbies, because hobbies are fun!

Ultimately one's purpose in life can only really be defined by oneself. As human cognition/capability is increasingly shown to be wholly unremarkable, I expect more and more people to turn to lives of leisure, indulgence and self-fulfillment.

This is all contingent on AI being harnessed for our collective benefit, instead of the egos of a select few. That's the facet of AI development that keeps me up at night. AI, AGI, and eventually ASI will be human-intent amplifiers of a magnitude barely conceivable by most. There is no steady-state where things remain as they are today. We are going to either end up with a utopia, or one of a myriad of possible dystopias.

Re: The AI Battle

#34

Post by CuriouslyC »

hoppla wrote: post #22

Are AIs capable of creating something really unique, or is it just a washing machine spinning on old ideas?

It can apply patterns learned in different contexts to new contexts, which has the potential to create things that are unique in a sense.

Re: The AI Battle

#35

Post by k__ »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #10

This very much requires acceptance of the worse-is-better model. That "beautiful" drawing of an an astronaut riding a horse is aesthetically... crap. It may take a person 5 hours to paint or draw that, but, arguably, a person wouldn't. GPT-3 might generate a novel, but, generally speaking the prose is jarring and awful to read, because there is no intent (danger: philosophically loaded word) behind it. It's all autom…

I read, many artists have to do dumb comissions for porn all the time. So there might be a market for "art" no humam would wanna draw anyway.

Re: The AI Battle

#36

Post by ben_w »

ajafari1 wrote: post #31
tialaramex wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> those systems are not a path to AGI If that's the actual meat of your claim, it's weird to just put it unsupported at the end. If you think it's an aside you've got a big problem, because without it the rest is pretty weak. We saw this with chess. Anybody who was clinging on to the idea that well, the machines can't really play chess, because technically there do seem to be a few humans who are better, was screwed…

Right on. When do you expect a productized AI that can replace your average skilled programmer?

I'm not sure what average looks like. Possibly last August? Possibly some time around 2035? It'll be a moving target though, as anyone worse than the AI isn't likely to stay in the role for long.

Re: The AI Battle

#37

Post by TaupeRanger »

I'm not sure how the author could be so blind to the simple fact that computer generated articles and images are not useful. I mean if you want to replicate low quality blog spam and poorly written local news blurbs, maybe you could con a few companies into using your service. Or if you want to destroy the stock image market or the album art market (maybe that kind of "disruption" is somehow beneficial to you?) I guess more power to you. But beyond those very narrow and largely meaningless endeavors, I think computational statistics (what the author calls "artificial intelligence") has yet to prove itself in literally all of the use cases the author brings up.

Re: The AI Battle

#38

Post by qualudeheart »

ajafari1 wrote: post #16
qualudeheart wrote: post #14

Dark times ahead. If you haven’t already made it big with crypto or startups, you are toast and will be trapped in the permanent UBI underclass. That assumes that there will be a UBI at all. Combined with inflation this will mean that only those with $5 million or more in the bank will live what still count as middle class lifestyles. Those with less money will be forced into poverty. Many will adopt petty crime for…

I do believe AI alignment and safety is a huge concern, and unfortunately thinks are moving so fast there is not enough time for society to adapt. However, if we can safeguard that I am very optimistic about what a sufficiently advanced AI (we don't even need AGI) can do to help with climate change, medical advances, etc. Costs of goods will plummet as things become more abundant. The question is which path are we on…

We’re headed for dystopia.

We desperately go transhuman with Musk’s Neuralink tech or we die as slaves.

Once AI approaches AGI it will enable a highly dangerous form of fascism. Society can be controlled top down by a dictatorship using AI to oppress whoever it doesn’t like. That means the recently impoverished masses will be at the mercy of whichever fascist or totalitarian government is in charge.

You have to do transhumanism in order to make yourself strong enough to resist machine fascism, or you somehow slow technological progress so any mass technological unemployment can’t happen fast enough to cause the civil war meets economic riots scenario that I’ve alluded to in my last post.

Note that I’m not saying the riots inherently lead to fascism, but that fascism may emerge as a reaction by current economic elites against the uprisings, or as a result of an extremist takeover caused by the crisis. The latter would be like the Bolshevik or Nazi takeovers in Russia or Weimar Germany.

If you slow progress down enough there also can’t be a point where machines progress past human level without humans also upgrading themselves at the same speed.

The crux of my argument is that progress in AI is dangerous because of the direct economic consequences and second, third order risks from political chaos.

If I had my way GPT-3 wouldn’t have happened until we already had brain computer interfaces at an economically useful level. Unfortunately neuroscience looks way to hard for that to happen.

I would not at all be surprised if Neuralink isn’t even economically useful by the time AGI happens.

We don’t have the equivalent of the scaling hypothesis for transhumanism yet. Scaling neural networks is simply the best way to make them better. It’s dead simple. You just throw money at the problem.

We need something like that for whatever tech can preserve human agency i.e. Neuralink.

Re: The AI Battle

#39

Post by ajafari1 »

qualudeheart wrote: post #38
ajafari1 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do believe AI alignment and safety is a huge concern, and unfortunately thinks are moving so fast there is not enough time for society to adapt. However, if we can safeguard that I am very optimistic about what a sufficiently advanced AI (we don't even need AGI) can do to help with climate change, medical advances, etc. Costs of goods will plummet as things become more abundant. The question is which path are we on…

We’re headed for dystopia. We desperately go transhuman with Musk’s Neuralink tech or we die as slaves. Once AI approaches AGI it will enable a highly dangerous form of fascism. Society can be controlled top down by a dictatorship using AI to oppress whoever it doesn’t like. That means the recently impoverished masses will be at the mercy of whichever fascist or totalitarian government is in charge. You have to do tr…

We are moving too fast to put in adequate safeguards unfortunately. Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, recently mentioned something interesting on a Lex Fridman interview. They are going to double down on safety since the algorithm side has moved much faster than expected.

Moreover, Max Tegmark, MIT scientist and author of the famous book Life 3.0 said this on a podcast last month: "Frankly, this is to me the worst-case scenario we’re on right now — the one I had hoped wouldn’t happen. I had hoped that it was going to be harder to get here, so it would take longer. So we would have more time to do some AI safety. I also hoped that the way we would ultimately get here would be a way where we had more insight into how the system actually worked, so that we could trust it more because we understood it. Instead, what we’re faced with is these humongous black boxes with 200 billion knobs on them and it magically does this stuff."

Re: The AI Battle

#40

Post by Jack000 »

hoppla wrote: post #22

Are AIs capable of creating something really unique, or is it just a washing machine spinning on old ideas?

these particular ML models are trained on human-generated data, which means the model is a reflection of that data.

This doesn't mean that the model can't create something original though. There's a video on youtube where a linus techtips graphic designer competes with DALLE-2, and I found it interesting that the human graphic designer did exactly what some accused the AI of doing - finding images on the internet and kitbashing them to satisfy the prompt. The AI on the other hand could create a completely original image without any source material, even if its understanding of visual concepts are merely an "interpolation" of the training data.

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