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The AI Battle

aifuture.substack.com

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Re: The AI Battle

#81

Post by marvin »

ajafari1 wrote: post #39
qualudeheart wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you have a link to this interview? Would be interesting to hear more about what DeepMind is currently up to.

Re: The AI Battle

#82

Post by turmeric_root »

f38zf5vdt wrote: post #25

As someone working on some of this stuff: (1) Open source models for image generation that are comparable to what DALLE2 or Imagen can spit out will be available by the end of next year. There will be nothing for OpenAI or Google to monetize. (2) These models aren't magic. Often to get the content generation you want you need to finetune the models. 21st century graphic designers are well aware of AI image generation…

> There will be nothing for OpenAI or Google to monetize.

I disagree. FB/Yandex are releasing massive text transformers to the public, but even with the model available to download you need a DGX rack to run inference. Google/OpenAI can make money by charging for access to their hardware.

Re: The AI Battle

#83

Post by paganel »

f38zf5vdt wrote: post #25

As someone working on some of this stuff: (1) Open source models for image generation that are comparable to what DALLE2 or Imagen can spit out will be available by the end of next year. There will be nothing for OpenAI or Google to monetize. (2) These models aren't magic. Often to get the content generation you want you need to finetune the models. 21st century graphic designers are well aware of AI image generation…

> We're getting to the point where a single person can do that on their phone.

50 years ago we had Godard and À bout de souffle (in fact, 60 years), the man was doing his filming thing on the streets of Paris almost single-handedly, nowadays we don't have anyone close to Godard when it comes to creativity. Yeah, the tech is there, the creativity most certainly is not.

Again, there's no AI that can give us what Eisenstein and Prokofiev did [1] with a lot less technical resources. The real creative classes from today should be fine, problem is (as already stated above) we have forgotten how to be really creative. Again, tech won't help us with that.

[1] https://youtu.be/IcPixaWL2Pg?t=85

Re: The AI Battle

#84

Post by Barrin92 »

It's not going to happen for a very simple reason, the personal identity of the artist in the age of mass produced crap (not just by machines, but also by other people) is gaining importance.

(Today) consuming music or art isn't just about the work itself, it's even more about the person and culture surrounding it, and there is no culture or interesting narrative in machine produced art. AI art is not authentic, it has no location in time or space.

We know this to be true because it's already possible to generate music that even experts can't distinguish from human creators.[1], yet nobody listens to bot-Bach, everyone listens to the real one. The only people who watch bot chess-competitions are AI enthusiasts, not chess fans, and so on. So I'm kind of tired to treat this as a futuristic doomsday scenario when the present has already shown that the human element in and of itself isn't replaceable, and even increasingly the distinguishing factor. Radio stations already instead of licensing expensive music could simply churn out machine produced tracks. Yet, how many are doing that?

The reason is not the lack of quality (some questionable popular artists should cure everyone of that delusion), it's the fact that as soon as the listeners would be made aware of the fact that the music is machine generated they would lose all interest immediately. Because art that lacks a creator is just a reproduction, it lacks uniqueness and context.

AI bloggers should consult Walter Benjamin[2] rather than internet futurists, because thinking about the nature of mechanically reproducible art isn't a novelty of ML technology, it's been with us ever since the industrial era.

[1]https://www.openculture.com/2018/01/artificial-intelligence-...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...

Re: The AI Battle

#85

Post by notahacker »

stuckinhell wrote: post #42
mrshadowgoose wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How do you know a huge portion of people engage in useless hobbies with no meaningful external outputs ? I really don't even know how one would go about figuring that out. I think I see the opposite in my part of the United States. A life without purpose leads to rampant drug use, malaise, and decay. I think an AI on demand that can out compete people in most of their hobbies would be absolute game changer, and doesn…

> How do you know a huge portion of people engage in useless hobbies with no meaningful external outputs?

How many hobbyists' hobbies all meet the thread-relevant standard of usefulness with meaningful external outputs (e.g. producing creative work with comparable or greater value to people outside their social circle than hypothetical superb AI alternatives... or the abundance of writing and painting and recorded media and manufactured goods and software already out there available at little or no cost)? What proportion of the population would you say undertook literally no activities which could be described as hobbies? The difference between those two numbers is your portion of people who engage in "useless" hobbies with no meaningful output.

People still play chess badly against human opponents even though computers can play it perfectly (or with dialled down difficulty); even using computers with perfectly adequate chess playing programs installed to seek out remote human opponents. People spend hours trying to play Stairway to Heaven borderline adequately despite the fact anyone can listen to Stairway to Heaven played by Jimmy Page on demand, and has been able to for very little outlay for half a century now. Even if fans could ever be persuaded that the music the AI was generating was superior to that created by Led Zeppelin, why would people interested in playing music cease to be interested in playing music?

A hobby is something people choose to do primarily for enjoyment rather than profit; it's almost a tautology that [further] reducing the potential for profit by spamming the space with AI-generated outputs isn't going to greatly discourage people from doing it.

Re: The AI Battle

#87

Post by slavboj »

People miss the most direct application of language model based AI, IMO - a ton of sales and CSR jobs are fundamentally numbers games following a script with escalation paths, with the existing scripts targeted at cutting your losses because man-hours are expensive. That's the kind of thing that you actually can get a large amount of training data for (for instance because existing interactions are recorded and transcribable) and an implementation opens up a lot of value because the calculus flips - it becomes worthwhile to pursue increasingly marginal opportunities because suddenly your time is cheap.

Re: The AI Battle

#89

Post by Havoc »

marvin wrote: post #26
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…

Things will be shaken up, the way they were when the steam engine was invented. But there's no reason to believe we're headed for a dystopic future. The result of this development and the underlying trend is vastly increased wealth creation. That's a good thing . You'd have to be a luddite to think otherwise. Read e.g. https://moores.samaltman.com/ , where Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) suggests a scheme for wealth taxation…

> there's no reason to believe we're headed for a dystopic future.

Oh idk. The recent shifts in wealth distribution, gig economy and cost of living crisis squeezing bottom end sure feels a little dystopian to me

Re: The AI Battle

#90

Post by rytill »

bsenftner wrote: post #19

The "AI battle" only rages for those who don't make AI; those that write AI know that battle is lost, we will not have an AGI in our lifetimes. We lack fundamental components, such as artificial comprehension. Lacking any form of comprehension, weak or not, all AI technology can ever produce is idiot savants and personality theater. It is not capable of writing original software, beyond the use of pre-composable comp…

How would you falsify this hypothesis? What specific task do you think AI will be unable to do in our lifetimes because of this lacking of comprehension?
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