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The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

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Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#151

Post by hansonkd »

bdndndndbve wrote: post #88
datahack wrote: post #82

While I enjoyed the article, it’s just another in a line of the same article with different flavors and authors that all have the same fundamental error. The prevailing counterargument against AI consistently hinges on the present state of AI rather than the trajectory of its development: but what matters is not the capabilities of AI as they exist today, but the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are e…

We've been through this song and dance before. AI researchers make legitimately impressive breakthroughs in specific tasks, people extrapolate linear growth, the air comes out of the balloon after a couple years when it turns out we couldn't just throw progressively larger models at the problem to emulate human cognition. I'm surprised that tech workers who should be the most skeptical about this kind of stuff end up…

I think the mistake is that in the media it is extrapolating linear growth but in practice it is a wobbly path. And this wobbly path allows anyone to create whatever nearrative they want.

It reminds me of seeing headlines last week that NVDA is down after investors were losing faith after the last earnings. Then you look at the graph and NVDA is only like 10% off its all times high and still in and out of the most valuable company in the world.

Advancement is never linear. But I believe AI trends will continue up and to the right and even in 20 years when AI can do remarkably advanced things that we can barely comprehend, there will be internet commentary about how its all just hype.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#152

Post by input_sh »

bilater wrote: post #41
vunderba wrote: post #5

Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to. If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. I don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford a…

Again - think of where we were two years ago. I never understand this hubris people have to think AI can never do X while being proved repeatedly wrong.

Two years ago we had ChatGPT and Midjourney. Now... we also have those?

The accelerationism argument made a little bit of sense two years ago, but now, after two years of marginal improvements at best? Really?

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#153

Post by oldpersonintx »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #33
vunderba wrote: post #5

Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to. If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. I don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford a…

As someone who's struggled to really get into podcasts, I'm convinced that most people who enjoy podcasts don't really actively listen to them, they just like that extra bit of noise in the background while they do something else, with the added bonus that they might just listen at just the right time to pick up some interesting factoid. Don't get me wrong, I like podcasts, Fall of Civilizations being a personal favo…

[dead]

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#154

Post by nuancebydefault »

keiferski wrote: post #93
mattmaroon wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know it is decades away? A few years ago did you think LLMs would be where they are today? Is it possible you’re wrong?

Of course it’s possible I’m wrong. But if we make any sort of projection based on current developments, it would certainly seem that live-streaming AI indistinguishable from a human being is vastly beyond the capabilities of anything out today, and given current expenses and development times, seems to be at least a few decades in the future. To me that is an optimistic assumption, especially assuming that live prese…

For many people current AI created videos are already confused for real videos and vice versa.

When you follow up on technology by browsing HN, and see the latest advancements, its easier to see or hear the differences, because you know at what to look.

If I see on tv some badly encoded video, especially in fog or water surfaces, it immediately stands out, because I was working with video decoding during the time it was of much less quality. Most people will not notice.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#155

Post by petercooper »

WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW wrote: post #148
petercooper wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone in 2020: "If you can find a computer program that can generate an image with even a FRACTION of the aesthetic appeal of human created art...." Give it time. Progress is fast.

> Give it time. Progress is fast. Why pick 2020 as your starting point? That is simply around the time the current set of techniques came about. We had generative art back in the late 90's - my screensaver has been generative art for over 20 years now. Obviously generative art has come a long way but people have been working on various approaches to it for at least 30 years.

From 2020 until now, we've gone from crude blurry or clearly generative artefacts to being able to create full professional illustrations based upon textual prompts. That is huge. Classic generative art techniques look like cave paintings compared to what the latest image generation models put out (and I'm not talking about "AI slop" type stuff that DALL-E does).

Similarly, tools could fabricate podcasts years ago that sounded terrible. Now we have NotebookLM doing a "reasonable" job with two cliched-sounding "hosts". In a few years, will they potentially be able to create something akin to a professionally produced podcast given some smart prompting? The progress made so far points to yes, and I haven't seen any evidence so far to be pessimistic about it happening.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#156

Post by ryoshu »

mikeocool wrote: post #128
vunderba wrote: post #5

Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to. If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. I don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford a…

Agreed. I finally got around to listening to a NotebookLM generated podcast this weekend, and found it absolutely unlistenable. For some reason the LLM seemed to latch on to the idea that one host should say something, and the other host should just repeat a key phrase in the sentence for emphasis -- and say nothing else, and they'd do it like multiple times in a sentence, over and over again throughout the entire th…

There are a lot of "uh huh", "yeah", "agree" types of statements in odd places as well.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#157

Post by foobarian »

skybrian wrote: post #69
sourcepluck wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go back to the 1990s (even probably the 2000s?) and ask literally anyone what they think of the idea of people spending huge quantities of their time on this mortal plane watching videos of other people talking about how they do their make up and pick their outfits. Are those videos "worth watching"? Are videos of people playing video games "worth watching"? Are videos of people opening products and saying out loud t…

Bad TV is a lot older than that. It probably seems weird nowadays to watch “I Dream of Jeanie” and “Gilligan’s Island” reruns because that’s what was on TV. Or how about game shows and soap operas? Daytime TV was the worst. But people watched.

Every now and then I play the Gilligan's Island theme song because it's so catchy. Still no idea what the show is about

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#158

Post by ben_w »

vunderba wrote: post #5

Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to. If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. I don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford a…

Infectious energy is something I expect faked relatively easily, though I don't know your examples and doing it in AI might be a "first 90%" situation just like self driving cars; for me the problem is that they're fairly mediocre at the actual script — based on me putting a blog post I wrote into one and listening to what came out.

Given how many podcasts exist, I think you need to be at least 2 standard deviations above mean to even get noticed, 3 to be a moderate success, and 4 to be in the charts.

I'd guess AI is "good enough" to be 1 above average, as the NotebookLM voices sound like people speaking clearly and with some joy into decent microphones in sound isolating studios.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#159

Post by mvdtnz »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #33
vunderba wrote: post #5

Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to. If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. I don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford a…

As someone who's struggled to really get into podcasts, I'm convinced that most people who enjoy podcasts don't really actively listen to them, they just like that extra bit of noise in the background while they do something else, with the added bonus that they might just listen at just the right time to pick up some interesting factoid. Don't get me wrong, I like podcasts, Fall of Civilizations being a personal favo…

> Don't get me wrong, I like podcasts, Fall of Civilizations being a personal favorite of mine, it's just that my desire to try and actively listen to them requires that I carve out an hour (or much longer in the case of FoC, worth it) of my free-time to eliminate any distractions and focus.

I don't see why that should be true. Podcasts are great when coupled with mindless work like mowing the lawn, weeding the garden, stacking firewood, walking to the shop, driving etc. You can get virtually 100% out of a podcast while performing tasks like this.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#160

Post by mvdtnz »

thatoneguy wrote: post #57
Bjorkbat wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's struggled to really get into podcasts, I'm convinced that most people who enjoy podcasts don't really actively listen to them, they just like that extra bit of noise in the background while they do something else, with the added bonus that they might just listen at just the right time to pick up some interesting factoid. Don't get me wrong, I like podcasts, Fall of Civilizations being a personal favo…

I don't get them either since the hosts are typically "regular people" talking about often complicated subjects that they are by no means domain experts in. I find the format of "Dumdum Host A read some articles about something last night and Dumdum Host B asks questions about it" especially grating, unless it's purely opinion-driven and then I still probably won't care unless I read about the hosts and find out they…

> I don't get them either since the hosts are typically "regular people" talking about often complicated subjects that they are by no means domain experts in.

Huh? Most podcasts I listen to feature either experts in the field in question or very skilled journalists compiling the opinions of experts.

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