Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AIs are now re-writing history

robertelliottsmith.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–58 of 58 posts

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#51

Post by JetSpiegel »

geekpondering wrote: post #44
chrisrhoden wrote: post #20

"I told him that algorithms are, without prompting from their human designers or the owners of the photos, creating human moments that never existed." I'm not sure how anyone could make the argument that this occurred without prompting from their human designers. This seems to be a continuation of a theme, where AI academics and theorists are so divorced from the realities of present-day engineering that they assume…

I don't think its necessarily a question of how close we are to the singularity. I think it's a question of how close we are to the Orwellian Memory Hole.

But that was inspired by Stalin's photo manipulations, so it's not a question of "how close", we effectively already live in that world.

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#52

Post by dllthomas »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #51
geekpondering wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its necessarily a question of how close we are to the singularity. I think it's a question of how close we are to the Orwellian Memory Hole.

But that was inspired by Stalin's photo manipulations, so it's not a question of "how close", we effectively already live in that world.

Stalin's oppression took quite a lot of man-hours.

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#53

Post by yen223 »

yk wrote: post #27
shakethemonkey wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's AI in the sense that a pocket calculator from 1980 is AI. It doesn't know what it's doing, can only perform a limited range of calculations under tight constraints, has no awareness of whether or not the result is meaningful, and unless the authors went seriously overboard developing the suite, cannot learn from what it has done to improve the process.

Well, I am afraid that we are discussing semantics. The functions performed by the software, like facial recognition, are classical AI problems. Granted the software is certainly not any kind of general intelligence, and probably not even cutting edge AI, but it does still perform pattern recognition in unstructured data etc.

Ironically, parsing semantics is also a classic AI problem.

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#54

Post by lazyjones »

Doesn't this simply illustrate that as science advances, education of the general population must keep up to raise awareness of what's possible?

We've failed to educate people about many risks associated with the use of computers, but "photoshopped" images are a well-known phenomenon (though doing this to the extent described in the article, without anyone being aware of it, is a bit of a novelty).

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#55

Post by lifeformed »

mbca wrote: post #32

The middle paragraphs are just further proof that talking to a blowhard like Cory Doctorow is a complete waste of time. The "all photos are fake at some level" slippery slope argument is beyond tiresome. The fact that something like white balance introduces a small amount of post-processing into photographs does not mean that all levels of photo manipulation are somehow equal. That's nonsense on its face and should b…

Well, it depends on his tone. When pondering a question, I feel like it's good to define boundaries and then work your way inwards. He sets the lower bound: all photos are modified in some way. We are okay with that. But we're not okay with this smile edit. At what point in between does it become not okay? It makes you think very specifically about why something makes you feel the way you do.

He might not be saying, "these two things are the same," but rather, "this situation is similar, what makes this one okay but not that one?"

I don't know if that's what he was doing though. But I find my discussions start off similarly. I reframe a question in the context of similar things that I already know how to feel about, and find the intersection points.

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#56

Post by lifeformed »

cesarbs wrote: post #4
ivanche wrote: post #3

Some time ago I conducted a simple (albeit impossible in practice, for now at least) thought experiment. Let's say that average size of a JPEG image is 5 MB. Now, some machine could generate all possible valid JPEG files sized 5 MB. In some of those images there would be events which never happen, and never could (for example Usain Bolt running in 1896 Athens Olympic Games etc.) Of course, sheer number of such images…

A group of classmates and I spend about a week obsessed with this idea once. It's also cool to think that among all those images you would have e.g. the whole history of the world from all possible perspectives. I doubt it will ever be possible, though. Even for tiny, grayscale images the amount of images you'd have to generate is absolutely impractical, not to mention the effort to distinguish noise from actual pict…

Not to mention that the whole thing would be illegal. It'd have child porn, state secrets, libel, copyrighted software, etc.

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#57

Post by dTal »

ccvannorman wrote: post #24
masklinn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you realise the scales involved. 5MB (40Mb) is enough to create 1e12626113 different files, that's a number with 12.5 million digits For reference, the number of atoms in the visible universe is ~1e80 (1e78 to 1e82), you'd generate 1e12626033 images per atom (doesn't look any different does it? Well it's got 80 zeroes chopped off). For a second reference, assuming you're a standard-size hooman you have 1…

:-] I thought of a similar thing for an mp3; a computer would produce every possible "song"..but even at an incredibly low resolution of 100 kilobytes for a 3 minute song, you're looking at 2^800,000 possibilities. (1e240000). Another cool one is possible games of Go, ~1e768. This is one reason top computers still can't touch top humans at winning the game. Big numbers are fun. :-]

I don't think the number of possible games has anything to do with the difficulty of programming computers to play Go. There are 10^120 possible games of chess, for instance - still 40 orders of magnitude larger than the number of protons in the observable universe - and yet computers roundly defeat humans at chess these days.

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#58

Post by nobodysfool »

abemassry wrote: post #43
nobodysfool wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this. Have you considered using a GPU to speed up computations?

I thought about it, but according to the other commentors here a project like this wouldn't make sense. I was learning python at the time and I wanted to learn about multithreaded programming in python. I could turn it into a learning project with no practical applications. It would be a good platform to learn about OpenCL, and see if the benchmarking times improve.

You're right, it is absolutely senseles. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't take pride in your work.

Take a look at my Pythagorean cipher. It's idiotic and not practical, but it's just neat.

https://github.com/sp1d3rx/nonsense/blob/master/cipher.py

Post reply on HN