Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

ploum.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 452 posts

Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#171

Post by CuriouslyC »

neilv wrote: post #45

I'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…

The solution is to create datasets that contain data and aesthetic judgment metadata from reputable sources together, and train models to perform aesthetic judgment. This will both filter out spam/low quality content, and provide a conditioning tool for generative models to improve their output. Even better, the arms race this will kick off will create a virtuous cycle that will push progress in AI.

The only problem with aesthetic judgment models is that (much like human aesthetic judges) it will sometimes give poor scores to things that are dissimilar to the data it was trained on, even though many people might find those things aesthetically appealing.

Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#172

Post by acdha »

alexb_ wrote: post #164
jmount wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't so much the "G" of GMOs, but that they are mono-crops usually licensed by near monopolies like Monsanto. Things are going to be bad when something goes wrong with one these, and there is no replacement and no way out of the licensing fees.

Monsanto is great, because you can immediately know that someone is just regurgitating points when they mention the company. Monsanto hasn't existed for years. And patents run out. Being concerned about patents is a very weak argument against technology which saves lives around the world (using non patented crops, no less!) and is responsible for allowing more people to eat healthier food.

Monsanto was acquired by Bayer, yes, but did their business practices change? This feels like trying to play gotcha when someone says Comcast instead of Xfinity when they were referring to the reputation built under the earlier name.

Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#173

Post by pixl97 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #95
ginko wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all its flaws I find Youtube is one of the best sources for recipes these days. Especially when you search in the language of the country the dishes are from and use CC auto-translate.

It's ironic that for all our cheering of democratization of creation, we turn back to gatekeeping (video harder to produce than text) in a search for quality. Although maybe that's more a comment on the inevitable end state of democratization of creation + centralization of search/discovery + monetization of traffic.

Why is it ironic? I think it's more of a "humans are unable to learn from history moment". Romans called it "the mob" because of the common problems that occurred when large groups of undirected people got together and chaos broke loose. Of course the opposite where the authoritarian leader ruled everything also lead to Rome burning.

There is a happier middleground where multiple gates exist to filter out the bullshit, but no said gatekeeper controls the entire market leading to monopoly behavior.

Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#174

Post by nradov »

mason55 wrote: post #165
toddmorey wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the interesting thing about these tools is that they don’t link to the sources or cite the sources but instead train on them to generate a new source. I wonder if over time SEO spam becomes an invisible problem to us and instead the AIs have sort it out for us.

> I wonder if over time SEO spam becomes an invisible problem to us and instead the AIs have sort it out for us There have been some good Twitter threads about this. Basically, this is the last generation of AI to be trained with inputs that were ~100% human. It probably won't take long until the bulk of the content online is generated by AI, at which point it will just be an AI feedback loop. Any new concept, idea,…

This will in turn spawn a new research field and industry of automated AI content detection in order to filter out poisoned training data. Also expect to see web browsers incorporate that technology with some sort of rating or color code to flag pages that seem to be AI generated. It's going to be a real arms race.

Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#175

Post by AlexandrB »

qubex wrote: post #17
nottorp wrote: post #13

What I really wonder is: is there a correlation between consumption of streaming tv series and positive attitude towards this "AI" wave? "statistical mean of everything uploaded by humans on the internet which fits certain criteria" applies to both ChatGPT/StableDiffusion and most movie series on streaming TV. My pet theory is that if you can stomach watching the same stories with different skins hundreds of times, y…

I’m 41 and I’m utterly baffled by my 24 year-old SO’s interest in binging an apparently infinite litany of TV shows from streaming services. I’ve watched the first six seasons of Game Of Thrones, the first season of Dark, all of The Expanse (reading the last book of the final trilogy now), His Dark Materials (because I read the books) and Andor. That’s it. I watched some Star Trek TNG & DS9 as a kid and was horrified…

I've dived back into anime recently because of the aggressive sameness of everything on streaming TV. I don't know whether something changed about how "western" media is written or I've just watched so much TV that I can't help but roll my eyes at commonly deployed tropes. At the risk of outing myself as a huge "weeb", I find anime still manages to surprise and entertain me where western programming does not.

Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#176

Post by john-radio »

jkestner wrote: post #149
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe AI content is just a way to launder copyright.

That's certainly what my impoverished artist friends have taken away from it.

Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#177

Post by dwringer »

nottorp wrote: post #93
GaggiX wrote: post #65

AI training on AI-generated images works like a very complicated Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), only the best images have a chance to be relevant enough to be noticed by a scraper, after being selected by the user who used the AI, and they have probably been shared several times by random people. Also, a lot of AI-generated content doesn't look like trash to me, I've seen a lot of good images, the…

> Also, a lot of AI-generated content doesn't look like trash to me, I've seen a lot of good images Translation: There is a lot of human generated original art that you're not aware of, and when you see it in the "AI"'s output you think it's original.

People have the same argument all the time about musicians ripping off each others' compositions, no AI needed for that.

Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#179

Post by nonameiguess »

qubex wrote: post #17
nottorp wrote: post #13

What I really wonder is: is there a correlation between consumption of streaming tv series and positive attitude towards this "AI" wave? "statistical mean of everything uploaded by humans on the internet which fits certain criteria" applies to both ChatGPT/StableDiffusion and most movie series on streaming TV. My pet theory is that if you can stomach watching the same stories with different skins hundreds of times, y…

I’m 41 and I’m utterly baffled by my 24 year-old SO’s interest in binging an apparently infinite litany of TV shows from streaming services. I’ve watched the first six seasons of Game Of Thrones, the first season of Dark, all of The Expanse (reading the last book of the final trilogy now), His Dark Materials (because I read the books) and Andor. That’s it. I watched some Star Trek TNG & DS9 as a kid and was horrified…

First off, probably don't date a 24 year-old. I realize there is no strict correspondence between age and taste, but I'm 42 and my wife is 41 and, well, our shared experience is quite a bit more similar. She can relate when I get nostalgic about the 80s and 90s. She even reads! Complete novels, more than she watches TV. She doesn't have TikTok or Instagram. It is entirely possible to go full-time mutual old people yelling at clouds in a blissful bubble in which the river of bullshit may as well not exist, but probably not if you insist on staying cool and regularly interacting with young people.

Second, watch the rest of Dark, Better Call Saul, and House of the Dragon. Don't watch the last two seasons of Game of Thrones. Just pretend it ended at 6.

Re: Drowning in AI Generated Garbage: the silent war we are fighting

#180

Post by fleddr »

A lot of people in the comments are making a hard distinction between AI garbage/bullshit and the pure/genuine human-created thing, and the various ways in which we can keep this distinction alive.

If only that was true, the bullshit part. You should start living with the idea that the AI generated content is NOT bullshit, because we're either already there or very close to it. The AI content will be of value, look good, pass tests, and be indistinguishable from human-created content for a large amount of use cases in mass media.

So I wonder if we should ask, how do we filter out the bullshit? The more relevant question is: if its indistinguishable in its output compared to humans, what does that mean for our economy, purpose and humanity?

Because without action, the future is easy to predict. 3 companies run AI, feeding on all collective human cognitive labor without paying a cent for it. Then, one by one, it will wipe out every creative/cognitive sector, or at least decimate them. These shocks to the economy and culture will lead to a brand new type of pushback: anti-AI activism. That won't do much because AI doesn't care. Finally, some 10 years after the catastrophe there will be a congressional hearing where a 75 y/o asks: "so this AI thing, it's like a better calculator, right?".

It would be another fine case of humanity failing to grasp the exponential function.

Post reply on HN