There will be a revival of human curation.
The cyberpunk hero we need is a librarian
Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting
131–140 of 452 posts
Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting
#132While the current speed of the AI research makes me quite uneasy, I cannot really dismiss what we are seeing as: >What we are witnessing is thus not "artificial creativity" but a simple "statistical mean of everything uploaded by humans on the internet which fits certain criteria". at least not more than I would my own brain. I don however fully expect a strong luddite-like backlash happening when this is going to be…
It’s weird how readily so many people will dismiss AI art as just being a product of its input, when that’s really all humans are as well. All artists (myself included) are just the ongoing product of various inspirations (inputs). Dali is a world-renowned artist, but his art wasn’t born in a bubble and ripped from the void. He studied and referenced artists before him, then changed it. Artists who saw his work later…
> when that’s really all humans are
There's a fair bit of truth in this but it remains a nearly useless oversimplification. We can't adequately isolate or even identify all the inputs into what makes a person what they are, or produce what they do. The idea that this is even possible is rejected by a large proportion of the world population, and for now at least we can't prove them wrong.
> All artists (myself included) are just the ongoing product of various inspirations (inputs)
This ignores that inspiration is itself an active and creative process. There's not a one to one mapping between a piece of art and the effect it has on a person who receives it. Even hating an art is a process of influence in a very real way that I don't know there's an AI analog of. These systems can not include a source in their output, but can they decide to include its opposite? What is the opposite of a tree, btw? A desert, an ocean, a seed? A value judgement based on culture and aesthetics and opinion and worldview that ML software has no standpoint from which to make.
I'm not trying to make a moral case for or against this technology right now. But I think trying to understand and evaluate it in human terms like this is a mistake. It's something else, and we're still trying to figure out what terms are appropriate to understand it, hence the difficulty. It's important to honestly engage with that alienness and uncertainty right now.
Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t exactly understand your question, but I’m assuming you mean something like, “What value is this person actually creating?” I can think of two direct use cases where I would find it helpful: - Creating a “précis” (concept from Neuromancer) video or article on a particular topic. For example, let’s say I want to learn about pre-20th century Indonesian art. Sure, I could Google and read some articles, but it wou…
I think the nearby comment that points out that this is more closely related to editing than to creation as it has recently been understood is correct. Which is not a value judgement per se, but the distinction between those two activities is useful and to me provides a useful lens to understand this change.
On the face of it, that is true. But on a deeper level, AI generation is really just a kind of rapid sketching, and sketching is a practice that goes back millennia.
Additionally, it depends on how you are defining "creation" and there have been various artistic movements which "created" art in a manner not dissimilar to AI image generators. The cut-up technique or some Dadaists, for example. I certainly would consider works by Burroughs or Tzara to be real creations and not simply editing.
Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting
#134All this ChatGPT hysteria led me to have the following conversation with it. Probably hit some near future nail on its head. "Hello AI, please do today's tasks", the programmer will be on the level of the call center operator of today in terms of skills * Human: Explain to me the phenomenon of post-ChatGPT depression seen in a software developer * ChatGPT: [...] After using the ChatGPT tool, some developers may exper…
What does this have to do with the article?
We can start expecting this kind of garbage to start polluting our discussion spaces.
Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting
#135According to the author, chatGPT is generating not "artificial creativity" but a simple "statistical mean of everything uploaded by humans on the internet which fits certain criteria". Isn't the post I'm typing here not also the product of my brain that's been trained by a couple of decades of sensory inputs and trained to produce outputs that fit certain criteria? What is the fundamental difference between fleshy ne…
No difference, you’re right - you’re just a large language model. Also, please write me a 5 page essay on the causes of the Industrial Revolution, in the style of a Shakespearean comedy. Please post your answer in the comments when you’re done.
If that's the difference (the time it takes) isn't that something we addressed a long time ago when computers could do long divisions way faster than any human? You know, the fact that computers can "think" faster than humans. Therefore the fact that it takes longer for a human to write that essay doesn't mean he's having a different process.
Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting
#136This is a different kind of dystopia than I expected
Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting
#137People really love to make predictions about technologies way too early. It’s been a year or two, tops, since this stuff has gone mainstream. I very much doubt that the consumer ecosystem will remain the same while content undergoes an AI-powered paradigm shift. We will most likely see a growth of curated sites that help weed out the nonsense, as has been typical for most new developments. And on that note, I think t…
I we have already seen this play out in music though.
Computers let anyone record music when it use to cost thousands of dollars to record music.
The results have been a disaster outside the top 1% of music makers. Such a dramatic change that anyone under 30 doesn't even know what has been lost at this point. Music as a whole is laughably less creative as "popular" / pop music established total dominance. The money all flows upward that use to be much more dispersed.
Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting
#138I've been known to start ranting when I'm searching on some topic that attracts SEO garbage (e.g., Python), and realize I'm in the nth different SEO garbage article search hit. I wonder whether a winning solution to the coming massively-parallel "AI" megaspew will emerge, how it will work, and whether Google will be the ones to do it. Or will the bulk of consumers overwhelmingly submit, and accept it as normal, much…
I almost decided to limit my searches to the search engines of the authoritative sites. Examples in the case of Python: the Python language, the Django framework, Stackoverflow (until it will surrender to AI posts then we see what happens.) I'll end up creating a home page with search boxes to those sites. Very '90s
You could also put something like searx [1] in front to search all at once (or at least provide unified interface for all).
Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting
#139People really love to make predictions about technologies way too early. It’s been a year or two, tops, since this stuff has gone mainstream. I very much doubt that the consumer ecosystem will remain the same while content undergoes an AI-powered paradigm shift. We will most likely see a growth of curated sites that help weed out the nonsense, as has been typical for most new developments. And on that note, I think t…
I we have already seen this play out in music though. Computers let anyone record music when it use to cost thousands of dollars to record music. The results have been a disaster outside the top 1% of music makers. Such a dramatic change that anyone under 30 doesn't even know what has been lost at this point. Music as a whole is laughably less creative as "popular" / pop music established total dominance. The money a…
I don't think that's true at all. There are a ton of niche music makers and a ton of ways to find them...infinitely more than there were a few decades ago. You just have to go looking for them. Which frankly isn't even that difficult with YouTube and SoundCloud. Maybe the musicians aren't making millions, but the creativity is definitely there.
Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting
#140I see parallels here with industrialization and automation in manufacturing and food production. Today, it's self-evident to us as consumers when a product is cheap, low-quality, manufactured garbage from China. In many cases we can choose to spend more and buy a handmade or custom version of the product we want. In the future we might knowingly consume AI-generated cheap text for some purposes and opt for "the real…
> It makes some content cheaper, but what are the side effects?
"Content" is already maximally cheap: just copy and paste. AI-generated material – at least, with the current genre of GPT-style predictive text algorithms – doesn't produce original content; it just serves to dilute our global knowledge base with semantic white noise and lossy copies of existing knowledge.