Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by ironmagma » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #100

ironmagma wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are doing something that has inherent value — extracting gold from a mine, performing music, working a factory line — you are the top of funnel for value creation. Unfortunately for you, the only way for society to run is to have your would-be profits extracted to the maximum extent by other parties. Therefore the rich are the ones who actually don’t tend to produce as much and those who do are taken advantage…

> The father away you are from value production, generally the better off you are. you are only counting the human labour involved in the creation of value. what about the capital? Would you, as a hired gold miner, be able to accept zero pay for your work, until the gold is sold (then you got the full price of the sold gold)? What if you starved between the time you mined it, and the time it takes to sell? And how wo…

No, but also that wouldn’t be possible because you can’t give 100% of the value to the miner or else the mining operation will cease due to the lack of overhead (supervisors, salesmen, equipment). The starvation argument is pointless, a lot of people get paid with commission and they survive. Also I’m not even saying there’s an alternative to the current system so what are you on about?

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

#112

Post by petesergeant » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 4:37 PM UTC

boesboes wrote: post #10

bmmayer1 wrote: 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

> even fine-tuning using AI causes the models to quickly degrade

Really? My recent reading[0, 1] suggests AI training with AI-generated content provides excellent results, but happy to see some counter examples

0: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07759

1: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11644

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

#113

Post by gregw134 » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 4:38 PM UTC

gumballindie wrote: post #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.

Set up a whole virtual economy, with AI agents paying rent, having jobs, inventing goods to sell and deciding whether to buy. Fast forward 100 years and see what happens.

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

#114

Post by chii » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 4:42 PM UTC

pdntspa wrote: post #96

qeternity wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for people whos jobs are being displaced faster than they can retrain Where is this mass displacement of which you speak? Which companies are firing en masse and replacing with AI?

Content writing and concept artists come to mind, I've heard commercial art is getting decimated. The trucking industry is dumping tons of $$$ into automated AI trucking. Tech companies are experimenting with drone delivery instead of hiring drivers. Rideshares experimenting with self-driving taxis. The list goes on. More locally, the local McDonalds recently remodeled, reducing the customer counter to something like…

And yet every one of those automation has been driven by somebody, who presumably will receive value for that work. They in turn, will drive demand for goods/services - thus producing more jobs in the process (perhaps a job that doesn't currently exist).

I dont think the doom and gloom scenario being sold as the AI apocalypse is as bad as it is being portrayed.

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

#115

Post by digdugdirk » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 4:43 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #100

ironmagma wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are doing something that has inherent value — extracting gold from a mine, performing music, working a factory line — you are the top of funnel for value creation. Unfortunately for you, the only way for society to run is to have your would-be profits extracted to the maximum extent by other parties. Therefore the rich are the ones who actually don’t tend to produce as much and those who do are taken advantage…

> The father away you are from value production, generally the better off you are. you are only counting the human labour involved in the creation of value. what about the capital? Would you, as a hired gold miner, be able to accept zero pay for your work, until the gold is sold (then you got the full price of the sold gold)? What if you starved between the time you mined it, and the time it takes to sell? And how wo…

I'm not sure what you're arguing for/against with this line of reasoning.

The previous statement was in regards to the extraction of value - modern markets are such that the best(/fastest/easiest/etc) way to make money is to be at the top of the value chain and let your capital do the work. This is a self-reinforcing feedback loop, enabling you to use your increasing gains to find other forms of leverage (in your example - buying the mine and the equipment, setting up commodity trading positions, etc) and keep on ratcheting up the leverage. One inevitable outcome is for you to have the opportunity to use this leverage against the people doing the actual digging up of the gold.

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

#116

Post by chii » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 4:44 PM UTC

peddling-brink wrote: post #82

rollcat wrote: 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.

That AGI will likely mean the end of humanity. We will no longer be the dominant species. If the AGI is anything like us, it might keep us around as slaves. Not immediately, but give it 100 years. We’ll be the frog in the pot of boiling water.

Do you think a dog that lives as a pet to a human is happier (and a more fullfilling life) than a wild dog?

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

#117

Post by gumby » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 4:44 PM UTC

This reminds me of the problem Google Translate encountered: after starting eith. manually curated set of texts (e.g. UN and EU documents), it later read translated pages on the web...until people started automatically translating their sites with google translate leading to a bad feedback loop.

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

#118

Post by varelse » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 4:45 PM UTC

haxiomic wrote: post #73

thrashh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Coming from genuine curiosity, what jobs don’t compete with an AI that’s designed to mimic and surpass human capability?

[dead]

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

#119

Post by gumby » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 4:45 PM UTC

JustBreath wrote: post #61

geraldwhen wrote: post #13

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.

We do that with natural intelligence too: in most countries teachers are underpaid.

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

#120

Post by logicprog » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 4:46 PM UTC

fatherzine wrote: post #78

logicprog wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, not necessarily, because while it may be highly compressed data shaped by a long history, we don't know if that data is actually any good. It could be the compounded misapprehensions of all the peoples that contributed to it. Just the fact that something holds a lot of highly efficiently compressed data doesn't mean it's actually good data. You might argue that if it's old and still common today then it must ha…

"we don't know if that data is actually any good" We know the data survived a narrative/biological co-evolution distributed process spanning thousands of generations over many millennia. It doesn't make it perfect, but it makes it pretty darn good with high likelihood, especially when compared with narrative complexes invented yesterday, which have yet to withstand the test of time and which show measurable signs of…

> We know the data survived a narrative/biological co-evolution distributed process spanning thousands of generations over many millennia. It doesn't make it perfect, but it makes it pretty darn good with high likelihood,

This is fallacious. Already responded to this at length.

> which have yet to withstand the test of time and which show measurable signs of dysfunction.

Unlike the older traditions, which manifestly have horrible dysfunctions and consequences for a lot of people in a lot of areas. Should we never try to fix and improve those failings because we "dont know what might happen"? Or is that unknown worth it to actually have a shot at really making things better? Why are we acting like we can't have a reasonable idea of how good or bad an idea is based on reasoning through the idea, why is the null hypothesis that any societal change could cause civilizational collapse when there's no evidence of that? It's like the people constantly claiming gay marriage will cause the collapse of western civilization. Also, why are we weighing the known horrors of our inherited traditions so lightly you barely even acknowledge them, so much more lightly than the vague, unknown disasters of... civil rights or gay marriage. Who knows what disasters letting women vote or have their own bank accounts or get jobs might bring! The horror!

> See also the Lindy effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect "the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age"

Lasts a long time =/= good.