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

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281–290 of 452 posts

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

#281
post #255

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. Ironicall…

If the amount of bullshit is going to increase exponentially what decision do we have other than to disconnect? Our attention, mind space, and time are all limited. We just don't have time to process this exponentially growing pile of content.

Same as we do now. Nobody currently goes around reading random books or articles. We use link aggregators from communities we trust, reviews from reputable establishments, or recommendations from our friends.

These mechanisms are certainly going to have to adjust (I estimate at least 10% of links posted on HN are already GPT-generated, for example, and who knows how many comments -- it's much harder to tell when thinks are shorter.) StackOverflow is already in the midst of a ChatGPT-induced moderation crisis.

Being judicious about the communities you take recommendations from, the content you spend time consuming and thinking about things critically is already an intellectual survival trait. It's just going to become that much more important.

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

#282
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You've been misled about GMO causing an allergic reaction death: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gmoverdose/.

I suggest you do more research on the benefits and risks of GMOs from more reputable sources. From my understanding, the primary risks of GMOs are less to do with human health and more about environmental risks, such as creating superweeds that can outcompete native plants or negeative effects on soil microbes.

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

#283
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Well, if we were talking about food, I'd say Gordon Ramsay, David Chang, Anthony Bourdain or The New York Times could be considered reputable, while a Yelp reviewer with a handful of reviews could be considered disreputable.

Ultimately you can boil it down to: Trust sources when they make statements that are later observed by me to be true, or are trusted by other sources that I trust. The negative feedback loop boils down to: If a source made a statement that I later found to be untrue, or extended trust to an untrustworthy source, reduce that source's trust.

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

#284
I see a future of the internet, and we're already 80% of the way there, where everything in the internet is fake generated and pretty much useless spam. It'll get to the point where going on the internet would be the equivalent of trying to find something useful in a trash dump, and it'll not even be worth the effort.

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

#285
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that happened, but who cares? It also allowed creative people to make stuff without needing a huge budget Is it not too early to make predictions?

Your quote isn’t a prediction, but a direct observation of what occurred.

You are drawing a parallel implying that in the future one will behave like the other - close enough.

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

#286
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

from a more generalist viewpoint, we must consider not only the business models, but the mindsets behind them

consider an example from another area. the assembly line and "k12 education". a 'raw material' (but it's actually a child) enters an assembly line, every year they will be passed to the next part of the process, another professional worker will receive the product and will work on it/them for a year.

Also notice how modern elementary education treats the teachers; they far too much like factory workers! low wages, they haven't much of a choice about how to do their jobs.

Now consider the mindsets behind the successful GMO crops (+pesticide combos) that have been the money makers for these corporations.

And consider the mono-crop mentalities and the above mentioned feedback cycle: gmo+pesticide kill the soil leading to more gmo+pesticide; it's a vicious cycle. it's a vicious cycle that keeps making more money! (the assembly line was a great way to really manufacture lots and lots of munition for the war, it is a very effective technique to make stuff that will be sent to get wrecked in a war, in this sense it 'made a killing' as in made lots of 'money')

and again, consider the mindsets involved. why are we educating children like they were cars in a production line?

these corporations are full of people educated like I described, lowering our collective education quality in a longer feedback cycle far too large to be easily noticed; it's a 20-40 year feedback cycle, which has been reducing the quality of the living beings involved.

we have a difficult problem, and no power to do anything about it

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

#287

> not "artificial creativity" but a simple "statistical mean of everything uploaded There is a metaphor I rarely see used. IMO it is way better: A deep learning based software is a complex system [1] (not a statistical one). It is tapping into very powerful natural processes: How (high degree) order emerges from randomness through complexity. There are many stunning examples [2] of this that can help us picture how A…

> statistical mean of everything uploaded

Half true. Yes, there is a mean of something, but no, it's not the content that is averaged, it's the gradients.

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

#288
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…

I think you are right, AI content will not be distinguishable from human content. What we really need to figure out is the direction that we are going as humanity. This planet must quickly become too small for us, human beings will not be needed anymore which means we need to find bigger challenges or we will self destruct out of pure laziness and self indulgence. Personally I don't think AI will only destroy creative and cognitive sectors, it will destroy absolutely every single sector in existence. There won't be a single job left that a human can do better than a robot. And humans will also pick the robot worker over the human worker every time. This is what happened during the industrialization, it's not like a few factories said: "hey you know what guys, let's be a bit quirky and still use 100% humans for this factory just because we can.". No, nobody is going the human route. It would be objectively slower and worse and therefore you go with the robot. There isn't a single area in life where you wouldn't pick the robot over the human and the question is solely how fast we can get to implant some good AI into mechanical bodies.

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

#289

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.

Well, the uncomfortable truth is that our copyright regime doesn't really make sense. An AI is sort of the equivalent of a junior coder or an art student - it can look at existing work and mash it up and produce something in the same style that's novel (inspired by a prompt - which is like your teacher giving you an assignment). That's copyrightable when it's a human being doing it, and there is no inherent protection for art style, I can make all the Picasso-style artwork I want even if I'm blatantly ripping off his style, and I would own the copyright on the resulting works. Like, if I do a painting in the style of Picasso, should Picasso get the resulting copyright? Why?

And programmers are not without sin either - how many people here run to stackoverflow and copy some answer, or mash it up and produce something similar-but-cleaned-up? That's going to get a lot more powerful in not too many years too... and the thing is, is your little DTO file with blocks of fields and setters and getters really novel and worthy of a government license to cultural exclusivity, or is it a relatively obvious implementation of an API? Which (per Oracle v. Google) are also not really copyrightable...

Humanity hasn't squared the reality of most content being low-value generative trash already (despite being human-generated!) with the reality of a system that automatically awards up to ~150 years of exclusivity (lifetime of the author +75 years). Like, that's the long and short of it. A lot of what we do as humans is just building up a squishy water-filled neural net ("how to make a painting in the style of Picasso") and running random prompts and goal-seeking through it and cleaning up the generative output. Now AIs have gotten to the level of "average college student" and it turns out that's not actually all that difficult or interesting anymore, but we're still working in this model where that's supposed to be worth ~150 years of cultural exclusivity and protection automatically.

If you only get copyright on the things that are truly novel and have no previous creative basis or cultural/stylistic heritage... that's a pretty big change to the copyright system for humans too! Especially in light of the fact that there's only a few ways to implement most configurations/functions... does Spring own all the copyright to your config classes because they're basically doing the same thing as the spring demo projects? hard to see much novelty in that sort of thing pretty much ever, so those probably should not be copyrightable at all under a "totally novel" requirement, but if they do surely Spring owns the copyright.

As mentioned in a sibling comment, the "at scale" bit is surely relevant in a practical sense, but, it doesn't change the underlying-principles basis. This is a situation where "at scale" has just thrown the underlying problem into stark relief. A 2-lifetime (life of author +75 years) governmental grant of cultural exclusivity doesn't really make sense in a world where humans are constantly and trivially mashing up each others' ideas even within a single lifetime, it just doesn't fit the way we exchange ideas in general. And now you have the college-student-bot that can generate a million shitty DTO classes or artworks-in-the-style per day that makes that plain. But ultimately it's just doing the same thing as an art student but faster... if you put an art student in a Mechanical Turk box and made them draw whatever you demanded, would they not own the copyright? And would it be a problem if India had an art school that set up an "industrial art" process and employed a million students in boxes drawing whatever you said to draw? It would probably be problematic for DeviantArt commissioners, but would it violate the principle of copyright?

We just haven't managed to square that reality where most human works are fairly trivial derivatives of other works (your deviantart commissions really don't mash up any similar works or styles that came before? really?) and yet worthy of 150 years of license to cultural exclusivity. And the college-student-bot is blowing that model up. People still need to eat, of course, but that's an orthogonal problem to the societal framework we've set up not really making sense. We can solve the copyright problem and not the eating problem (as we have many times before - buggy whip manufacturers adapted too), or we can solve the eating problem and not the copyright problem, or solve both or neither. People not being able to eat and shelter themselves is a capitalism problem, not a GPT problem, and we will probably have to address the idea that everybody needs to work to survive as machines continue to displace the last strongholds of human labor (as I'd argue creative work has become). We should not be restricting our ideas on collaboration and cultural generation just because it produces inconvenient outcomes for the current copyright regime and capitalistic model, the model needs to bend to fit humans and not the other way around.

This isn't the only place the inherent contradictions and problems of copyright come up either. The idea that a nighttime photograph of the Paris skyline could be copyrighted by someone else other than the photographer who created it is pretty janky too. Is a photographer not adding significant creative value with composition/etc? Literally just having that one element makes my photo derivative? Maybe that's the analogy to GPT/stable-diffusion I guess - but the thing is, it still works the same with a human as with a robot, an AI-generated Paris skyline still would be copyrighted by the architect too. And if the argument is that the code owner or original artist owns the style, then, Pablo Picasso owns the copyright to all my paintings too, just like the architect of the Eiffel Tower owns the copyright to my photographs of the Paris nighttime skyline. And Spring (or Oracle!) owns the copyright to a great deal of your Java code. So that probably is not going to work out great for you either.

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

#290
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> baffled by my 24 year-old SO’s interest in binging an apparently infinite litany of TV shows … TNG & DS9 as a kid and was horrified by what snippets of Discovery and Picard I came across The thing that bemuses me is those who hate the new trek shows with a passion, and find the time to keep watching and constantly bitching about it online. It is like complaining is a hobby in itself and they are almost looking for…

> The thing that bemuses me is those who hate the new trek shows with a passion, and find the time to keep watching and constantly bitching about it online.

Very meta of you to watch these people and find the time to complain about them.

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