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AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training

julienposture.substack.com

91–100 of 137 posts

Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distinction is philosophical. Tech bros consider "art assests" or consumer oriented products as art. In their eyes its capibility as a tool for profit is a downstream effect. My point was that since their entire purpose in life revolves around developing and refining technology for the reproduction of capital, it reveals their blindness to any deeper aspect of the human condition than what can be sold for a profi…

> My point was that since their entire purpose in life revolves around developing and refining technology for the reproduction of capital, it reveals their blindness to any deeper aspect of the human condition than what can be sold for a profit And I think that's grossly missing the point. The vast majority of people making art are just trying to make something look aesthetically nice within some sort of provided com…

Is creating things of aesthetic quality not of value with respect to the human condition? Is not some subset of that aesthetic quality derivative of the intuition and intention of a human mind? Sure, if you want to build some tehchnology to make designing packaging for dog food more effecient go ahead, as long as it isn't the previous dog food packaging creators that are being made to absorb the economic cost of the new technology (which they are).

But I hope at last some subset of human art strives to do more than that, and I think it's a bad thing that the incentive to increase revenue at the expense of quality has now expanded past being a tool to improve efficiency of laborious tasks and is now instead cutting costs via cutting artistic value.

Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you need intelligent things to be intelligent. And it would probably be good to distinguish between "things that appear superficially intelligent" and "things that have genuine capacity for internal experience" while you're at it, since the popular perception on this forum seems to be to just declare that physicalism/materialism is obviously correct and explanatory and we can just brush the hard problem of concio…

Chomsky's critique of LLMs was somehow not even correct about his own theories ( https://x.com/profraha/status/1634311282135318529 ). And of course has the usual problem of 1. claiming LLMs are random statistical models (they aren't, the sampler is) 2. claiming instead of generating correct text they only "seemingly" generate correct text and not explaining why this is any less impossible. But people have built expli…

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Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I view it as a lost war. The war against human meaning. If "human meaning" goes, all else goes with it; Social media, search, education, ambition, creation, innovation... And along with that goes Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Apple, Meta, Amazon... There's nothing that exists outside that "bubble" of human meaning, Technology must preserve it, or technology dies. Unless you are confirming what many have already said..…

Human meaning won't go out the door. It's just we will no longer be able to differentiate it from machine generated content. Machine generated content will become more superior and more prolific such that it will cheapen human meaning. You'll find people will begin clinging onto the last vestiges of human created things like real painted art or vintage sculptures like they do vinyl records and non-digital books: An e…

Human art and appreciation thereof is already by and large an exercise in irrationality, so I don't see why this is necessarily a qualitative change. If people want to imbue "human made" with a special meaning, that's really no different than thousands of other ways we pretend things into being every day.

Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need intelligent things to act exactly like a human being I think you're going to look bad in the future where we have aliens or uplifted ravens and this looks racist/speciesist. Being trapped in a computer with no environmental interaction is obviously a big difference though. > but maybe the people with decades of research in linguistics and neuroscience are right to be skeptical. Like other kinds of academi…

No, you need intelligent things to be intelligent. And it would probably be good to distinguish between "things that appear superficially intelligent" and "things that have genuine capacity for internal experience" while you're at it, since the popular perception on this forum seems to be to just declare that physicalism/materialism is obviously correct and explanatory and we can just brush the hard problem of concio…

Materialism is rather obviously correct when it comes to consciousness just based on what we know brain damage does to humans.

But what does this have to do with problem of consciousness or internal experiences? There's no reason why the latter cannot be a material process.

As for the linguists... people forget these days, but before the AI winter, there were many experiments trying to build an AI by modeling the language. And what they learned from it is that when you have enough compute and just throw it at a neural net, you get better results (there was even a joke about AI progress being inversely proportional to the number of linguists working on it). Which, to put it bluntly, means that our understanding of language is still very lacking, and quite likely to be fundamentally wrong some respects. I don't think those people are in a position to judge at that point; not until they figure out language enough to program something that can talk as well as GPT-4 does.

Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training

#95
post #56

I only have a Ryzen 5 3600x and a 7650xt, and downloaded AMD's LLM tool. It runs, and chats. I have thought about training it on the 4500 pages of LJ entries I saved to PDF (I know I'd have to extract the text, and then spell check that puppy. or not. Maybe I should just leave my misspells if it's a doppleganger). But it seems it'd take a few weeks of running nonstop to train? Everywhere I'm reading says it's hard to…

Depending on the finetuning tool you're using, you can just start the training run, and then it shows you how long it'll take. Like give it 5 mins to stabilise, then see the estimated duration.

Axolotl is a good finetuning tool if you need one.

Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training

#96
The work of a good artist is much more than a style. You can express ideas, tell stories, generalize, convey something in a specific manner. If style can be reproduced with ease, the other qualities of what makes art great are harder to reproduce by AI. So if your art is more than just a style, you shouldn't be worried about AI.

Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training

#97

I’ve been using generative AI in my art for a good few years now and have a few thoughts on this. Yes it’s trivial to train a model on a particular style, I’ve done it many times, including on my own art. It can make things that look pretty good! But it can’t make anything great, not without a lot of luck or creative input from the user. It can make something that looks similar to a style, but it can’t explain what m…

The only must be good and cheap enough to convince management.

That's the main problem, not that AI is as good or even better as humans but that it's considered good enough.

Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training

#98
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human meaning won't go out the door. It's just we will no longer be able to differentiate it from machine generated content. Machine generated content will become more superior and more prolific such that it will cheapen human meaning. You'll find people will begin clinging onto the last vestiges of human created things like real painted art or vintage sculptures like they do vinyl records and non-digital books: An e…

Human art and appreciation thereof is already by and large an exercise in irrationality, so I don't see why this is necessarily a qualitative change. If people want to imbue "human made" with a special meaning, that's really no different than thousands of other ways we pretend things into being every day.

Yeah. The difference is at one point in time we didn't pretend, now we do. And therefore the lie we tell ourselves is more obvious. Many people will see through the lie.

Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training

#99
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human meaning won't go out the door. It's just we will no longer be able to differentiate it from machine generated content. Machine generated content will become more superior and more prolific such that it will cheapen human meaning. You'll find people will begin clinging onto the last vestiges of human created things like real painted art or vintage sculptures like they do vinyl records and non-digital books: An e…

Human art and appreciation thereof is already by and large an exercise in irrationality, so I don't see why this is necessarily a qualitative change. If people want to imbue "human made" with a special meaning, that's really no different than thousands of other ways we pretend things into being every day.

Indeed. It's entirely arbitrary.

I think, in using terms like "rational" the grandparent is confusing AI with science and presuming some kind of objectivity. One cannot make any sensible claim about what is "more superior" (the "more" is redundant by the way) since quality of art and meaning is not arranged on any cardinal scale. Humans get to define what is better, and that's the final judgement. And should they choose to define AI as "meaningless", then it's meaningless.

Now as to whether it will be "more prolific", that's a another matter. Cockroaches are already far more prolific than humans.

Re: AI doppelgänger experiment – Part 1: The training

#100

Related: "Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model" [0]. It's astonishingly simple to train both LoRAs and Embeddings nowadays -- if you combine it with tech like ControlNet, you can more or less have direct control over the illustration as well (see this example I converted to Hollie Megert's style with barely any effort [1] using the model from [0]) -- but FWIW I was p…

Can we just talk about the fact that the most popular fine-tuned model for SDXL is called PonyDiffusion?

The circumstances of its creation, and the whole entire world of like, booru websites that you have to explain to boomers in suits with VP titles who are trying to invest in this space is just surreal.

It's like a reverse of when they were raising their kids and giving us "the talk" as children. Now we have to give them "the talk" about what the word "doujinshi" means... for science!

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