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Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human

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61–70 of 169 posts

Re: Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human

#61

This is not novel. Mturk has always been automated since its very first release. I remember worker forums sharing scripts to query amazon for the expected results that would get you paid. Amazon put up a bunch of very lucrative test jobs, but you only got paid if your answer matched the majority. The majority were automating, so unless you used the sometimes incorrect answers, you got nothing.

It's surreal that even when it comes to AI we still fundamentally rely on underpaid labor.

Re: Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human

#62
post #60
post #28

“AI” eating itself is the best outcome for everyone. It’s a mass energy balance. The inputs equal the outputs; garbage in, garbage out.

Why would you not root for AI? Its potential to improve humanity is huge even if there are potential bad sides. Some People bunching crypto with AI on the usefulness scale is quite ridiculous

I will root for AI a lot more readily when we have a good alternative (UBI?) for people whos jobs are being displaced faster than they can retrain

Y'all cheerleaders are going to create an underclass the likes of which you've never seen before. I hope they take up torches and pitchforks

Re: Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human

#63
Here is a radical idea. Inspired by south park’s human centipede: AI customers. It works by automating production AND the people buying it. These customers can pay using a crypto currency made just for that. To see the vision behind this all one needs is a little bit of microdosing and a reality distortion field.

Re: Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human

#64
post #60
post #28

“AI” eating itself is the best outcome for everyone. It’s a mass energy balance. The inputs equal the outputs; garbage in, garbage out.

Why would you not root for AI? Its potential to improve humanity is huge even if there are potential bad sides. Some People bunching crypto with AI on the usefulness scale is quite ridiculous

For the current crop of AI at least, the upside will almost entirely be captured by a handful of rich elites who will gain even more leverage over workers. Virtually no business owner pays someone well for any reason other than they have to in order to make more money themselves.

If LLMs don't flame out it will be like the dawn of offshoring except wider scale and without the upside of poor people in other countries making more money; just more wealth concentrated in the hands of ever fewer people.

Re: Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human

#65
post #60
post #28

“AI” eating itself is the best outcome for everyone. It’s a mass energy balance. The inputs equal the outputs; garbage in, garbage out.

Why would you not root for AI? Its potential to improve humanity is huge even if there are potential bad sides. Some People bunching crypto with AI on the usefulness scale is quite ridiculous

I root for AGI.

ML and LLMs in particular are just fancy maths/statistics. Yes they are immensely useful, but also 1. overhyped / overrated, 2. facing the problem of in-breeding.

AGI will work nothing like today's LLMs. AGI will stare at your question, and instead of answering, ask you: "why do you want to know that?". You can't have intelligence without curiosity.

Re: Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human

#66
post #4

This is going to cause problems as many Mechanical Turk tasks are being used to train AI models...

And even fine-tuning using AI causes the models to quickly degrade I've seen here previously. Perhaps we are already at peak of these LLMs now and the next gen won't come because all training data will be poisened with AI generate crap. That would be kinda funny to me tbh

Hard disagree. Phi-1 seems to be a harbinger of what is to come. However i think there is a plausible argument to be made that their training process approximates a kind of distillation

Re: Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human

#67
post #64
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you not root for AI? Its potential to improve humanity is huge even if there are potential bad sides. Some People bunching crypto with AI on the usefulness scale is quite ridiculous

For the current crop of AI at least, the upside will almost entirely be captured by a handful of rich elites who will gain even more leverage over workers. Virtually no business owner pays someone well for any reason other than they have to in order to make more money themselves. If LLMs don't flame out it will be like the dawn of offshoring except wider scale and without the upside of poor people in other countries…

This is technology in general though. Technology first benefits the rich and causes people to lose their jobs, but then in the next generation, people get different jobs and everyone’s life is better.

Technology is a double edge sword in every way.

Re: Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human

#68
post #31

It could be detected like so: 1. Give a sample of mechanical turk workers the same data to classify without telling them 2. Once submitted, look carefully at the ones they get wrong 3. If the turk worker gets similar ones wrong to other turk workers, they're probably not cheating 4. If the turk worker is frequently wrong on questions other turk workers all got right (e.g. if 99.9% of other workers got it right) then…

The thing is that the only reason mturk exists is that the work providers can get cheap as dirt “labor” to do very menial tasks. Having to build all those guardrails would defeat the purpose. The cost per task is some cents, having to pay even one engineer would 1000x the cost

Re: Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human

#69
post #65
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you not root for AI? Its potential to improve humanity is huge even if there are potential bad sides. Some People bunching crypto with AI on the usefulness scale is quite ridiculous

I root for AGI. ML and LLMs in particular are just fancy maths/statistics. Yes they are immensely useful, but also 1. overhyped / overrated, 2. facing the problem of in-breeding. AGI will work nothing like today's LLMs. AGI will stare at your question, and instead of answering, ask you: "why do you want to know that?". You can't have intelligence without curiosity.

Sounds like AGI will need a fedora hat to symbolize its metamorphosis into a full-blown redditor

Re: Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human

#70
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I root for AGI. ML and LLMs in particular are just fancy maths/statistics. Yes they are immensely useful, but also 1. overhyped / overrated, 2. facing the problem of in-breeding. AGI will work nothing like today's LLMs. AGI will stare at your question, and instead of answering, ask you: "why do you want to know that?". You can't have intelligence without curiosity.

Sounds like AGI will need a fedora hat to symbolize its metamorphosis into a full-blown redditor

m'lAIdy
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