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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

#361

Post by shagie »

jagaerglad wrote: post #60
RHSman2 wrote: post #44

Best way to get ahead these days is actually not be in AI ;)

Could you please elaborate why you think this, I'm currently changing paths of my education from AI oriented to Software development oriented

The quip / aphorism is a commentary on that a few years ago, AI was about being on the cutting edge - the things that were going to be seen next year.

The work of AI researchers were about envisioning the future of what could be.

Well, now what we've got is something that consumes everything and outputs aesthetically pleasing means of the content that it has consumed.

However, that "consumes everything" means that its always reactive and working from data that is in the past.

There is no creativity in it. This doesn't mean that it won't inspire a human, and it does employ a lot of fancy tricks too (I'm seriously impressed by its ability to create limericks of made up words with a coherent definition).

However, the AI can never be "ahead" of the curve because it can only produce what it has consumed.

This isn't to say a lot of the work that we do in software development isn't doing what has been done again and again and again (see also CRUD), but the moment you're given a novel problem or need to maintain an existing solution and encounter a new bug, the "can an AI do it" rapidly fails at those tasks as it lacks the domain knowledge necessary.

-----

Btw, I'm going to suggest giving Accelerando a read ( https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... ). It has an interesting take on it...

> ... Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a technological singularity – they're bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later the posthuman descendants evolve Economics 2.0, or 3.0, or something else and it, uh, eats the original conscious instigators. Or uses them as currency or something. The end result we found is a howling wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed, postconscious processes running slower and slower as they trade storage space for processing power. ...

(the part that reminded me of it is the GP post's comment... and the intro:

> Manfred pauses in mid stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided roller blader. This is getting weird enough to trip his weird-out meter, and that takes some doing. Manfred's whole life is lived on the bleeding edge of strangeness, fifteen minutes into everyone else's future, and he's normally in complete control – but at times like this he gets a frisson of fear, a sense that he might just have missed the correct turn on reality's approach road. "Uh, I'm not sure I got that. Let me get this straight, you claim to be some kind of AI, working for KGB dot RU, and you're afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?"

)

It takes an interesting path of the acceleration (note that I don't agree with the essence of the slope but instead believe we are seeing the product of a lot of sigmoid curves with the slope near a maximum - but as the easy stuff gets done, the (heh) second derivative gets negative as harder and harder problems need to be solved https://towardsdatascience.com/derivative-of-the-sigmoid-fun... ). We are seeing the seeds of ideas sown decades ago sprouting in rapid succession - and get to the maximum where things are neat and everyone is going "whee!" but the next step of maintaining that growth will take time and much more effort than sowing the ideas.

Lots of people are working on the first half of the sigmoid curve... but people lose interest or resources when it comes to the second half and so you get a lot of things that are abandoned at or near where things started getting hard.

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

#362

Post by Tossrock »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #266
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…

Everyone is (rightfully) picking on your GMO example, but I want to address something else: > Today, it's self-evident to us as consumers when a product is cheap, low-quality, manufactured garbage from China. Correct. > In many cases we can choose to spend more and buy a handmade or custom version of the product we want. Not quite. It's increasingly hard to find a version of a product that's not low-quality garbage -…

This is an Amazon problem, not a markets-in-general problem. Amazon is currently completely taken over by cheap Chinese manufacturers and drop shippers. But, other sites are not. If you want something high-quality and handmade, go on Etsy.

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

#363

Post by rcarr »

lovehashbrowns wrote: post #330
rcarr wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternative take: No-one likes being lied to. AI is the ultimate deception. People will stop using the internet for anything other than information retrieval for problems. Artists will create on digital tools and then return to analogue publishing formats and distribution networks. People will follow them because artists are cool and tech bros aren’t. There will be an emphasis on becoming a local success story rather…

The vast majority of people don't care. Netflix's recommendation algorithm helped take down physical video rental stores and TikTok's algorithm is taking out Instagram, Facebook, and even YouTube. Vinyl is particularly annoying to deal with. Even a small collection gets unwieldy quickly. I prefer physical books to ebooks but physical books are annoying to deal with, too. I've just given up on physical books for the m…

People prefer the path of least resistance until the price becomes too high. When people realise they are obese, they generally try and lose weight. I strongly suspect that with the next wave of AI, more and more people are going to come to the conclusion that the price is too high. There is significant tech pushback already, I can only see that growing as it erodes even more people’s values and livelihoods.

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

#364

Post by amai »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #340
amai wrote: post #339

It will probably never work to find and filter out all AI garbage. But maybe there are ways to mark content generated by humans. Something like a digital signature only a real person can acquire from some authority.

What stops a human, or many humans, from using an AI to generate content and then uploading it as if it's their own?

True, but then the content is still cherry picked or curated by humans. It is not pure AI.

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

#365

Post by _shantaram »

Vox_Leone wrote: post #240
baxtr wrote: post #184

Sorry, I had to do it. I asked GPT3... How can we prevent drowning in garbage generated by AI? > Preventing drowning in AI-generated garbage can be a challenging task, but there are a few things that can be done to reduce the amount of garbage that is generated. One approach is to carefully design and train AI systems to generate high-quality content, rather than relying on large amounts of data to produce mediocre r…

A propos, has anybody asked The Last Question*?[0] "Can the entropy of the universe be reversed?" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question

Putting the question in verbatim led to a somewhat unimaginative, albeit technically correct response.

> The entropy of the universe, also known as the thermodynamic arrow of time, is a measure of the disorder or randomness of a system. It is a fundamental concept in thermodynamics, and it is widely accepted that the entropy of the universe is constantly increasing over time. This is because according to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of a closed system can never decrease.

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

#366

Post by bilater »

I think this is going to be one of those Malthusian takes that never really happens. Simply because a) most ideas are mixes and rehashes of other ideas and b) you are disregarding the human curation element...not every random mix of ideas is being upvoted. Only the best ones stay up and then those are taken and added to by people which essentially creates a new thing.

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

#367

Post by TeMPOraL »

thefreeman wrote: post #360
TeMPOraL wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that's why they're doing it. I've been wondering for a while now just why so many sites make you work hard to fish out the information you're after. I assumed ad exposure, but I had this feeling that it's not the whole story. Delaying people to fool Google bounce metrics is the idea I missed.

that’s not actually why they do it. it’s because recipes are not copyrightable. so they throw in a “story” to make it something they can copyright and try to prevent people from duplicating.

That's specific to recipe. Here I meant in general - e.g. blogs and news articles that bury the core point / answer somewhere around the final 1/3 of text, but also don't seem to exploit the artificially elongated text to expose you to more ads.

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

#368

Post by lamontcg »

DoughnutHole wrote: post #215
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…

People are already appending "reddit" to their search queries to filter out the SEO blogspam clogging up the results of a regular search. Reddit is already superior to base search results for anything that's not plain uncontroversial facts because at least you're getting an actual human's opinion, which you can treat and evaluate as such. For all its flaws maybe becoming like reddit it what search needs. AI generated…

Lots of reddit is already pretty useless, drowning in people who are desperate to sound clever by regurgitating one of the same 50 meme jokes with some minor twist to it. And the astroturfing on the political reddits are likely to start hitting the niche ones with products getting pushed by manufacturers. Just buy accounts that have been built by bots on front-page subreddits, then have them make AI-driven positive comments on the niche subreddits and now you've got organic-looking advertisement for your product. Moderators likely won't help since they are there mostly to keep the trolls out (or they're more focused on whatever political axe they're grinding).

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

#369

Post by tetraca »

drdaeman wrote: post #341
tetraca wrote: post #331

Upload your fake text and images anywhere. Upload it everywhere. Upload it as yourself. Upload it on behest of your willing friends. Corrupt your face in dozens of ways, then tag each as yourself. When everything is garbage, shadow profiles will mean nothing, social credit scores will mean nothing, analytics will mean nothing. Centralization can be turned on its head - the watering hole will be revealed to be the dan…

While I honestly do want to support this approach because unlike the alternative it might (just "might", though) work, I regretfully must also admit that the huge problem with this is collateral damage. There are millions of humans out there that are either highly susceptible to or are already caught into believing all sorts of nonsense, getting scammed in all forms, costing them money, time, well-being and even live…

> There are millions of humans out there that are either highly susceptible to or are already caught into believing all sorts of nonsense, getting scammed in all forms, costing them money, time, well-being and even lives. The issue with fake flood is that until the saturation/breaking point (when the understanding that existing trust system is fatally broken becomes truly mainstream) it's going to make this situation worse.

The people who are willing to engage in charlatanism and mass manipulation are already enabled by this tooling and will use AI as a force multiplier whether we use it to jam the signal or not, and the results will be far, far worse for victims because these people will actually have directed, dangerous goals and agendas to push them toward rather than having them flail in a contradictory trash pile.

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

#370

Post by moe091 »

I like the insight about the AI-generated images being fed back into the data-set AI uses to create new images(or text or whatever). As a human, I don't like this; AI(and the universe/humanity) where always headed this way, and this is just the beginning, AI replacing the work of humans, from the universes perspective this is simply progress. From our perspective we are being replaced, made obsolete. This is a perfect example of a precursor to the kind of feedback loops involving AI learning from AI that will eventually allow computers to far exceed human capability - though this is still a rudimentary version of it since it can't evolve in a fundamental way, just get a bit better a specific kinds of content generation.

Just as going from inanimate matter to life(encoding data via DNA) was, just as going from simple life to animals that can think and sense/process data was, just as going from animals processing via instinct to humans processing via logic and reason was, just as humans creating language and writing to collaborate and collect/process data in mass across generations was, and now to machines that will collect and process data at a level that is beyond human comprehension, it's all progress in a certain direction that's been consistently moving forward since the beginning of time. The universe is getting better at understanding itself.

That being said, I know the more practical, immediate consequences of this are more relevant right now. I have to say I disagree about the articles implication that this kind of mimicking, "purely statistical" generation of "new" content is in any way different than what humans do when creating art(it may be, but it's certainly not a given). I'm not much of a materialist, but even I somewhat lean towards the idea that the human mind and it's ability to create art is completely replicable via machines - most people agree that "new" and "original" art is always still just a unique combination of different ideas that came before it. Some even argue that it's fundamentally impossible for a person to have a genuinely original thought, or at the very least all thoughts are just combining different combinations pre-existing concepts into a set number of pre-determined "shapes" or patterns of relation(isomorphisms?) that the human mind is capable of(something akin to "archetypes"). After all, neural networks were modeled after the human brain, and although they aren't as advanced(yet), especially in terms of generalizing which is crucial for generating art, they likely aren't doing anything fundamentally different, and there's no reason they won't eventually become as advanced/complicated as the human brain - and then surpass it completely.

I'm going to contradict myself again though, and say that despite all of that I'm still open to the idea that the human mind contains some "extra element" that isn't quantifiable or replicable in the material world. I don't think that all the phenomena of the mind or the universe can be explained via pure materialism, and given that, it is likely that there is an element of the human mind, or soul, or spirit, that is truly "mystical", and a cold, calculating machine with no soul doesn't have access to this other realm of "stuff". The only reason I'm not convinced of this argument, is because of my original point about how it's clear the universe has been headed in this direction, and though I could never hope to understand it, I don't see a reason to suppose that the universe is going to stop it's trend of becoming increasingly capable of understanding and organizing itself(data) for our sake.

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