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

221–230 of 452 posts

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

#221

Post by archon1410 »

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 way I'm thinking about it is with GMO food. GMO food supporters point out that GMOs help us feed more people, but it still makes others uneasy.

a very apt analogy perhaps in a way you didn't intend. it makes people uneasy, there's a natural reaction towards the unnatural, maybe for emotional reasons. it's the same way with GMO crops and AI poems—they will not be able to tell the difference between actual creativity and "artificial artefacts"/"random statistical noise", but they're supposed to have mystical difference. One authentic, the other inauthentic. One that is actually good, and one that merely tricks you into thinking it is good. But don't attempt to scientifically determine if there's any difference... you'll be disappointed.

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

#222

Post by bdsa »

vincnetas wrote: post #22
pcblues wrote: post #12

"Eating your own shit is never healthy in the long run." However, putting someone else's shit in your butt seems to work wonders. Maybe we just need to replace the internet's AI queue with a stack?

Yes, your own shit is not really healthy, on the other hand, someone else's shit might be really beneficial. There is even a fancy scientific phrase for "eating other peoples shit" : Fecal Microbiome Transplant https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2021.5198...

You, er... you don't eat it.

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

#223

Post by fleddr »

jtbayly wrote: post #197
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…

Depends on the use case.

You have nobody to go to for a AI product review in the same ways current human reviews carry no responsibility towards you.

Different story though for a medical exam or your self-driving car.

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

#224

Post by forgetfulness »

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…

The food analogy would probably be more along the lines of the mass availability of foods fashioned from refined ingredients designed for long shelf lives, i.e. "processed foods".

Produced at scale, durable, easily distributed, enticing flavor, if it's actually any good for eating is far down the list of priorities when devising these things, as its effects are noticed far after purchase.

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

#225

Post by dragonwriter »

misto wrote: post #217
alexb_ wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

First, Monsanto and its way of operating very much still exist. Just because it was purchased by another company (which of course resulted in an even greater monopoly), does not make its impact to the world disappear. Second, everytime this topic comes up, pro-GMOist make it sound like the technology is making some great strides with providing 'healthier food for everyone' with no downside. Why is it that the current…

> Why is it that the current model for GMO aims to increase resistance to pesticides instead of simply growing the yield? I

It doesn't; there are plenty of traits beyond pesticide resistance that have GM crops targeting them, including yield, drought resistance, nitrogen fixation, etc.

Pesticide resistance is the most established on the market becauae there happened to be particular success with it decades ago, that’s it.

Negative consumer sentiment toward GMOs means that neither the producers nor the growers of GM crops are seeking public attention to the fact that crops are GM, and their products are mostly sold in markets that don’t require GM labelling for the same reason, so the crops already in the public consciousness are all that stays there.

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

#226

Post by throwaway894345 »

AltruisticGapHN wrote: post #204

> Those "artificial" creations are also uploaded on the Internet. Those artificial artefacts are now part of the statistical data. > Do you see where it leads? This reminds me of one of the philosophers cited as inspiration for The Matrix, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard#Simulacra_and... This guy sums up pretty much how I felt about this since when those images started poring on social media. This will…

> This will serve, once again, capitalism and it's absurd race towards the bottom, lowest common denominator.

What is the alternative? Are socialist economies known for producing great art? What is Venezuela producing? Cuba? North Korea?

It seems far more likely to me that the American entertainment industry is just in a rut (as it tries to figure out streaming and adjust to the bad assumption that pandemic-level entertainment consumption was here to stay), and market economics will force established players to improve or face disruption.

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

#227

Post by DoughnutHole »

ghaff wrote: post #106
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #15

In just the past couple of weeks, I've noticed lots of machine generated cooking recipes. They follow the typical SEO pandering blog format, where there's an unnecessary story about the author's trip somewhere or their child's school play being the inspiration for making this particular recipe, followed by the actual recipe details. The machine generated stories are even more pointless and meandering than what humans…

I guess I'm in the minority of actually appreciating a lot of the background. And it can't just be SEO given that cookbooks these days are hardly just lists of recipes for the most part and people do apparently buy them.

Well to me there's two distinct types of background:

1. Background directly related to the recipe/cooking in general.

2. The writer's personal anecdotes tangentially related to the recipe.

Some cooking blogs have great background (eg. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's work on Serious Eats) but I would say they're mostly type 1 - information that informs you about the recipe, how they developed it, technique etc. They have type 2 background as well (jokes, what inspired them to make the recipe, snippets of their day-to-day lives) but it's definitely a small proportion of the body of the text. These blogs always have background that's work reading.

What I can't stand is the blogs with reams and reams of text of nothing but personal anecdotes, meandering stories, media references, what their kids are up to etc etc, occasionally returning to talk about something to do with the recipe. I don't have any examples because I now avoid untrusted recipe blogs like the plague, but it becomes very obvious to me when a recipe blog strays from useful background to worthless padding for the sake of copyright and SEO.

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

#228

Post by tejohnso »

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…

> GMO food supporters point out that GMOs help us feed more people

That seems like an odd thing to point out to me.

More people is not an obviously positive thing for us or the planet. And we have enough food and wealth for everyone as it is. If feeding more people were the priority, it could be addressed in other ways. I think the primary motive behind GMO is increased control and profit. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there's a whitewashed motive as well.

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

#229

Post by giantrobot »

pixl97 wrote: post #147
kneebonian wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting idea but really then aren't you just recreating reddit to an extent. The things people like or that are popular are upvoted because the voter agrees whereas what is unpopular gets down voted regardless of veracity because people like the way it sounds. Beyond that a once popular website or producer says or does something that offends the sensibilities of the internet crowd and then everyone goes and do…

>The things people like or that are popular are upvoted because You forgot to add "Because clever posters use bots to give an early upvote boost to their posts, and downvote competing posts" And the more eyeballs on the site, the more things will be manipulated this way by bad actors.

Yeah, it's nice to see the best parts of Digg survived! /s

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

#230

Post by fnordpiglet »

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…

As has been discussed here, the more AI generates the content the less humans generate content. Further AI generated content is much faster and cheaper to produce so it’s quantity will dwarf human generated content. This then feeds into the training set and becomes self reinforcing. There will be no collective human cognitive labor to source for free.

I suspect to mitigate that AI companies will hire lots of people to simply write. This writing will be tailored to address shortcomings in the model and provide human mediated training material that’s targeted at training areas of difficulty for the models. The goal won’t be moderation, or editorialism, or producing original content. No one other than the machines will see the content written. The goal will be to improve the ability of the models to produce compelling content in volume for a marginally low cost - which may become dominated by the content creators feeding the machine. But it’ll be much less cost on the margin with a more predictable quality result than hiring individually unique humans to make hit or miss content at scale.

(N.b., I’m only focusing on the free cognitive labor statement)

Post reply on HN