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

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

#191

Post by bloak »

brookst wrote: post #156
tylerrobinson wrote: post #123

I 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…

You’ve illustrated two things, one spot on and one true but in the opposite direction. 100% agreed that AI is like early industrialization in that we don’t even know the messes we’re creating, and wild excess is likely to haunt us. But GMO foods are the opposite: people feeling “uneasy” is not an indication of harm. All foods are GMO. People are just uncomfortable with the modifications being in a lab rather than ove…

Genetic modification in a laboratory is not exactly the same as selective breeding as it can easily bring in a gene from a different species causing unexpected allergic reactions to the corresponding protein. This has caused at least one death of a human. I'm not opposed to all genetic modification, in fact I think it's generally a good thing, but the business has to be carefully regulated. Industry claims that it's totally safe are clearly inaccurate when someone has already been killed by it.

There's no point in having strict rules on food ingredients and labelling if manufacturers are allowed to, in effect, include any chemical whatsoever that can be built biologically: all they have to do is genetically engineer it into wheat (say) and write "wheat" in the ingredients. And the consumer has no idea what they're getting.

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

#192

Post by pixl97 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #171
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…

>from reputable sources

What does this even mean. Reputable sources tends to fail the 'chinese room' experiment because you can never tell if your source is reputable or just faking being reputable (or later becomes corrupted).

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

#193

Post by mason55 »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #159
jorgemf wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Create content with AI will be easier and faster, but it doesnt mean humans wont generate garbage. That is one of the main problems of the search engines. And as long as you can put ads in your content you can create any garbage and put ads there to make money, as long as the content sounds relevant for a lot of people. For me the main issue with AI creating content in internet is going to be the echo chamber of that…

It's the mass production that is the problem. A lot of talk into how businesses will still need curators to trim down the content and such misses a vital assumption: that these businesses actually care. Content farms won't trim down their 100 outsourced artists or writers to 10 curators; they will cut the stack completely, and just pipe whatever noise the AI generates straight into the commons. Even if 99.999% of it…

> A lot of talk into how businesses will still need curators to trim down the content and such misses a vital assumption: that these businesses actually care.

It's less about if the businesses care and more about if the consumers care. Businesses will respond to whatever consumers are willing to tolerate.

Honestly, it'll probably be a battle around requirements to label AI-generated content so that consumers can make an informed choice about what to trust. But, given the global nature of the internet, that's probably not possible. You probably end up with private/commercial reputation rating firms, and consumers can decide who they want to trust.

If people decide they don't care about the veracity of information or don't want to put in the extra work to ensure they are consuming "true" information they you'll end up with businesses built on auto-generated garbage.

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

#194

Post by CuriouslyC »

ethbr0 wrote: post #87
keiferski wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Filmmaking devices have gotten cheaper consistently over the last ~50 years. I don’t know about you, but I think some pretty good movies have come out since 1970, especially by directors working on very low budgets.

> I don’t know about you, but I think some pretty good movies have come out since 1970, especially by directors working on very low budgets. On the whole, I think the average quality of cinematography in theater or wide-streaming releases has decreased. Which isn't disagreement with your point, as I think it says more about audience tastes and gatekeeping filters than technology. When film equipment was expensive and…

The thing that has tanked the quality of theatrical films on average isn't improved technology, it's the increasing commodification of art, risk aversion of business and the modern reliance on data to drive business decisions. That's why we have basically nothing but sequels, reboots and formulaic drivel coming out of the major studios.

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

#195

Post by SQueeeeeL »

brookst wrote: post #156
tylerrobinson wrote: post #123

I 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…

You’ve illustrated two things, one spot on and one true but in the opposite direction. 100% agreed that AI is like early industrialization in that we don’t even know the messes we’re creating, and wild excess is likely to haunt us. But GMO foods are the opposite: people feeling “uneasy” is not an indication of harm. All foods are GMO. People are just uncomfortable with the modifications being in a lab rather than ove…

I feel like an intelligence going in and messing with genetics is very different from hijacking the process of evolution. In natural evolution, genetic profiles change, not just individual genes.

Most of the dunking on people who hate GMOs always feels like reactionary garbage, basically people desperately trying to feel smarter than the "unenlightened housewives". It always has such a condescending patronizing tone, as if being queasy about multibillion dollar corporations directly meddling in natural processes using extremely new technologies to increase their own profit isn't a terrifying concept. No, science never has had unintended consequences, their feelings are just invalid.

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

#197

Post by jtbayly »

fleddr wrote: post #180

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 g…

But when it’s wrong, who is responsible?

Suppose I want a new water softener, and all the reviews and pros and cons are made up by AI. I guess I blame the people posting AI crap as though it was real, the same way I blame made-up crap written by those people today. But maybe I blame the original authors of such nonsense even after it’s generated by AI, because that’s the garbage in that lead to garbage out? Or maybe I blame the people developing the AI for making the internet and life measurably worse? They at least seem to be fearful of that with the few fences they’ve put up trying to prevent “harmful” output.

But what about when the code written by an AI has a critical, but easy to miss bug in it? Blame the “programmer” who

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

#198

Post by CuriouslyC »

marstall wrote: post #48
keiferski wrote: post #11

People 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…

> These new tools are awesome if you’re a creator. you're typing "generate me an article about x" into gpt-3. who's the creator here?

Except that isn't the creative loop people are talking about. The creative loop is having an outline for what you want to communicate, and feeding parts of the outline into the model, running it a few times and cherry picking the best results, then stitching them together to create a cohesive whole in less time than it would have taken to create it from scratch (and with a higher quality final output).

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

#199

Post by fatneckbeardz »

tylerrobinson wrote: post #123

I 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…

another food analogy would be how farmers started grinding up dead animal carcasses and feeding the results back to live animals (i.e. making cannibals out of vegetarian ruminants), which resulted in an outbreak of prion diseases like Mad Cow / CJ.

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

#200

Post by ducktective »

sarahlwalks wrote: post #189
jkestner wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe AI content is just a way to launder copyright.

You can only say that if you also say that the creativity of human beings themselves is just a way to launder copyright.

"Good artists copy; great artists steal"

-Pablo Picasso

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