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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

#251

Post by aaaronic »

xdennis wrote: post #218
coldpie wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you wrote, but I really dislike contributing to the negative spin on GMOs. GMOs are super important for our future and a really amazing technology, they really do not deserve the bad wrap they've gotten from science ignorants and marketing departments. Please don't disparage GMOs :)

GMOs are terrible which is why they're banned in most European countries. > bad wrap they've gotten from science ignorants Science is not about blind trust. How many times have scientists discovered wondrous new things like asbestos, Thalidomide, leaded gasoline, teflon, only to take decades to realize the consequences? Even if we blindly trust science, there are various other issues like: patenting life, monopolizat…

Asbestos is, sadly, completely natural and mined directly from the ground. The other things in your list are obviously not.

GMOs are a very complicated topic, and I can see both sides of the argument having some merit. Proving that new things don't actively do harm (both short- _and_ long-term) should be required before they go to market (or they should have to have very strong warning labels about being untested).

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

#252

Post by ghaff »

DoughnutHole wrote: post #227
ghaff wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Absolutely. There is content around recipes that is good and content that is, well, not. But a lot of people seem to object to anything other than a recipe.

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

#253

Post by visarga »

> Algorithms are able to create out of nowhere this very engaging content. That’s exactly why you are finding the results fascinating. Those are pictures and text that have the maximal probability of fascinating us. They are designed that way.

Conditional generative models are not the same as Facebook's feed ranking models, which are optimized for engagement. Instead, generative models are fine-tuned to solve many tasks, expecting correct answers when asked for. For example, when you ask for a cat, you expect a cat, and when you ask for a Python snippet, you expect it to do exactly what you said.

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

#254

Post by chubot »

Does this sound old-fashioned? Read more books and less Internet.

There is a lot of information in books that is not on the Internet, yet many people don’t seem to realize it. I notice a lot of people seem to get almost all of their information from the Internet. Over time, I think that will make you stupid.

(The neutering of google books was a setback, but perhaps paradoxically good — it preserved a unique value of books)

There are also a lot of fluffy books published in the last 20 or so years - roughly equivalent to content farms - which is why older books that have stood the test of time are a good bet.

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

#255

Post by lukev »

The answer is not to "disconnect". The answer is to read critically, to read for argument, and to try to connect with the intent of what the author was saying. All the while realizing that most of the content out there is bullshit(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit), whether written by a human or not. And yes, the amount of bullshit is about to increase exponentially. But it was already a majority.

Ironically, this post itself doesn't pass that test. I'm not necessarily claiming that it was written by GPT-3 (although it could have been and I have a track record of pointing that out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894742) There are a lot of humans that write like this too.

But it has the hallmarks a language model text; it lacks an argument (beyond a simple sentence that could have been given in the prompt), its explanation of how generative models work isn't particularly accurate, its recommended course of action is anodyne and one has the sense that most of the sentences are just there to take up space.

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

#257

Post by alexb_ »

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?

What? TONS of GMO foods are made for things other than pesticides. Nutritional content, size, yield, taste - in fact one of the biggest uses of GMOs is making the plants need less pesticides! If you think the only reason GMOs exist is to sell more pesticides, you just do not know what you are talking about.

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

#258

Post by avereveard »

archon1410 wrote: post #221
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 cr…

GMO difference is not mystical. GMO allows for massive quantities of weed killer to enter our environment with not well understood effects. It has been recently linked to the bee collapse for example.

And that's before considering monocultivar risks which are well understood and the underhanded ways gmos are handled by corporations, which are well documented.

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