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People paid to train AI are outsourcing their work to AI

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101–110 of 233 posts

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

#101
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.

Is post 2023-05 reddit data really that valuable? the website's become quite cliched at this point, it's apparently full of bot spam, and you already have a ton of data to work with.

What would be valuable to sell is the real upvote/downvote information.

I would be more interested to see if all of per-Eternal September Usenet is included or not. Just reprocess the data so they're having friendly chats about vi vs emacs and you don't have to worry about toxicity.

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

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has been a problem long before LLMs made their way out of research papers. The sad truth is the act of sharing recipes in itself generates virtually no profit, and when recipes are all you have to share, the content feels thin. So they have to pad it with lifestyle blogs and ads. Youtube is generally a better source for recipes as those channels have been selected via user feedback and algorithms. You still need t…

> when recipes are all you have to share

Also note that recipes as a list of ingredients and then some instructions aren't copyrightable. The cooking sites add all that additional fluff to make the content copyrighted.

As an interesting thought experiment, would an LLM trained on cooking site data conflate all the content as part of the recipe, and thus when prompted to create a recipe for chocolate cake, include all kinds of secondary fluff in the response? Things like fish-shaped volatile organic compounds and sediment-shaped sediment, perhaps?

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

#103
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.

"I first encountered $DISH at $ENDEARING_LIFE_EVENT when my $RELATION…"

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

#104

> The workers are poorly paid and are often expected to complete lots of tasks very quickly. Even if you paid people $1000 per hour they would still use AI to train AI.

When a company does it it's called an efficiency win or responsible stewardship of resources. When an individual does it it's a moral failing worthy of termination

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

#105
post #51
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 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…

LLMs are incredible tools, but they're just that - tools. They're not a replacement for human judgment. Heck, one of the things you have to judge is how accurate the answer is. The LLM can't assess that - as you note it has unfailing confidence in reporting the wrong information.

What I have found, and I've been using Bard over ChatGPT because Bard seems to be a bit smarter at first glance, is these tools are powerful but limited. They can augment a workforce but only a fool, soon to go out of business, would use them to replace a workforce.

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

#106

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.

Eyeballs are optical, and it sounds like GP was recognizing characters, so I think it was, in fact, Optical Character Recognition.

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

#107
post #81

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…

The origin wasn't just other cows. It was ground remains of other animals including sheep with scrapie and zoo animals imported from abroad.

In any case, the cows got fed with the weirdest stuff.

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

#108
post #51
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 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…

I wonder if it learned that if someone says something dumb, they'll probably keep saying more dumb things. It's trained to predict what comes next, not what is correct. So what comes next after "the sky is yellow"? "The sky is purple", of course!

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

#109
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Oh? I say things only when I don't understand them. Once I understand something, talking about it further seems rather pointless and certainly boring.

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

#110
post #81

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…

We'll soon have the "Mad AI's Disease". Though with the current level of hallucinations some LLMs have they are already half way there.
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