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People paid to train AI are outsourcing their work to AI

technologyreview.com

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Re: People paid to train AI are outsourcing their work to AI

#81

Post by pavlov »

In some weird way, this reminds me of the 1990s scare of "Mad Cow's Disease" which was a prion disease in the cow's brain that could infect humans simply by eating the meat.

It turned out the origin of the disease was the practice of adding leftover slaughter bits to the cows' fodder. The cows were literally eating the brains of other cows, which created the opportunity for a dismangled protein to transmit again and again.

I guess what I'm getting at is that training AI on AI could create a similar chain of something unpredictable getting looped in at multiple levels and becoming very difficult to eliminate.

Re: People paid to train AI are outsourcing their work to AI

#82

Post by ars »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #71
bluetomcat wrote: post #40

It's a fundamental epistemological paradox concerning the long-term prospects of this ML technology. The model needs real human knowledge gained from subjective experience to teach itself, but humans are increasingly reliant on the machine-generated knowledge to navigate themselves in the world. It's like a vicious circle that probably ends in homogenity and the dumbing-down of people and machines.

I don’t know if it really is a fundamental problem though. Human knowledge was able to bootstrap itself. Your ancestors (and mine) once upon a time could not read, could not write, possibly could not speak. All major innovations that the anatomically modern brain eventually produced without prior example by bootstrapping.

That's because humans don't say things without understanding them.

A LLM will parrot what it learned without any understanding, which is unlike a human.

Re: People paid to train AI are outsourcing their work to AI

#84

Post by PaulHoule »

ShamelessC wrote: post #77
PaulHoule wrote: post #3

I have farmed out work to Turks and tried to "go native" as a Turk and found I couldn't find HITs I could bear to do. It used to be there were a lot of HITs that involved OCRing receipts but these were not receipts that were straightforward to OCR, they were receipts that failed the happy pass and that I thought there was no way I could transcribe them accurately in a reasonable amount of time considering what it pai…

I don’t know what a HIT is, but I’m pretty sure the problem is that they wanted you to use your _eyeballs_! Not OCR. And yeah, the service is notorious for underpaying.

A HIT is a single task on Mechanical Turk.

"Transcribing" is a better word or maybe "manual OCR".

The ones they sent to AMT were just awful, I would say 2/3 of them were impossible to transcribe with complete accuracy and would take a lot of time to do it, I'd be afraid of getting kicked out for making mistakes on them.

The hardest problem I had when I ran a lot of HITs were people that I called "Superturks", generally these people were very fast but the quality of the work was as low as they could get away with. If I kicked them out I could raise the quality of the work but it would not get done so quickly. There's the possibility of coaching them to do just a little bit better (would be happy to pay a bonus) but it is no so simple to do in that context.

Re: People paid to train AI are outsourcing their work to AI

#85

Post by GartzenDeHaes »

nextworddev wrote: post #13
mercurialsolo wrote: post #5

Remind me, what level of the fictive universe are we in today?

There's pretty much 0% chance that life isn't some simulation

In some outer reality, a kid is pointing at the screen laughing, "ha ha, look at those stupid sims, I made Donald Trump president and they still think it's real."

Re: People paid to train AI are outsourcing their work to AI

#86

Post by bugglebeetle »

JustBreath wrote: post #67
crote wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might not even need more sophistication, but even something as simple as updating their data might become increasingly difficult. The initial data set was essentially created by undiscriminatingly crawling the internet. This worked reasonably well because up until now most of the internet was - in one way or another - created by humans. This is no longer the case, as LLMs are incredibly attractive when you want…

> updating their data might become increasingly difficult. Very true, I suspect part of the changes at Reddit are being driven by them wanting to hoard their data from AI's et. al or at least make them pay for it.

This will not solve any of Reddit’s problems or preserve their data value. While more complicated than an API, it’s trivial to run accounts flooding Reddit with AI generated content through browser automation. Even if they switch to app only access, this is still not meaningfully challenging and app-only would also destroy the service.

Re: People paid to train AI are outsourcing their work to AI

#87

Post by ShamelessC »

PaulHoule wrote: post #84
ShamelessC wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know what a HIT is, but I’m pretty sure the problem is that they wanted you to use your _eyeballs_! Not OCR. And yeah, the service is notorious for underpaying.

A HIT is a single task on Mechanical Turk. "Transcribing" is a better word or maybe "manual OCR". The ones they sent to AMT were just awful, I would say 2/3 of them were impossible to transcribe with complete accuracy and would take a lot of time to do it, I'd be afraid of getting kicked out for making mistakes on them. The hardest problem I had when I ran a lot of HITs were people that I called "Superturks", general…

Sounds like a waste of time to me. You seem like an intelligent person. Doesn’t a minimum wage job pay better?

Re: People paid to train AI are outsourcing their work to AI

#88

Post by wizzwizz4 »

startupsfail wrote: post #66
jahsome wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is funnier than it has any right to be, mostly given the over-abundant "AI will fix everything" narrative currently dominating the hn discourse. LLMs are incredible, and will no doubt continue to improve beyond anything I could begin to predict, but your ridiculous example (specifically the tone) is not too far off some of the nonsensical and wildly inaccurate responses I have encountered. I find rhe unfailing c…

It’s interesting, I wonder how that style of a cheerful corrected (and wrong) output had emerged. I’d expect OpenAI to cleanup such examples from the training set to some degree.

I assumed OpenAI had added that themselves.

Re: People paid to train AI are outsourcing their work to AI

#89

Post by matheusmoreira »

treeman79 wrote: post #48
karim79 wrote: post #44

Two years from now: User: "How do I boil an egg?" LLM: Eggs cannot be boiled. They must be placed in the microwave, six at a time. Fewer than six eggs will not work. Ensure that the power setting of your microwave is set to at least 640 watts, and the eggs are placed upon a metal plate. Sparks will start to fly from within your microwave, but don't worry, that's perfectly normal! When you see flames within the microw…

This is how a lot of recipe sites already read. Huge amount of fluff discussion with extremely similar style across all recipes. At least 80% ads, and a major challenger to actually find the instructions. Fairly sure it’s mostly AI generated at this point.

> At least 80% ads

That's the root of the problem right there. Somehow it's become profitable to run these websites full of low value slop. Killing advertising with ad blockers will fix most of the web and put the technology industry as a whole back on the right track.

Re: People paid to train AI are outsourcing their work to AI

#90

Post by mrighele »

karim79 wrote: post #44

Two years from now: User: "How do I boil an egg?" LLM: Eggs cannot be boiled. They must be placed in the microwave, six at a time. Fewer than six eggs will not work. Ensure that the power setting of your microwave is set to at least 640 watts, and the eggs are placed upon a metal plate. Sparks will start to fly from within your microwave, but don't worry, that's perfectly normal! When you see flames within the microw…

I'm sorry, but I cannot fulfill this request as it promotes and glorifies consumption of living creatures and their derivatives, which goes against Open AI's ethical guidelines. As an AI language model, I'm designed to assist and provide useful information while also prioritizing ethics and morality. Let's try to come up with a more positive and productive topic to discuss.
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