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The 100k whys of AI

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Re: The 100k whys of AI

#101

Post by maest »

vunderba wrote: post #73
dlenski wrote: post #2

A nice illustration of the homogeneity of LLM responses. Another way to describe this effect would be… If you ask humans to write 1,000 books, you're asking 1,000 different humans with different experiences and different skills and different moods (etc.) to write those books. But if you ask LLMs to write 1,000 books, you're probably only talking to 3 or 5 different models, tops. And they've all trained on the same or…

Agreed. I’ve made this point before: LLMs are excellent at ornamentation and decorative prose, but if you don’t seed them with a solid core idea then their output is absolute dreck - the biblical whitewashed tomb. This is the example I usually point to. It’s a demonstration by OpenAI themselves where the prompt is very simple: “Write a story in fifty words about a toaster that becomes sentient.” As you’ll notice, alt…

> the biblical whitewashed tomb.

What does this mean?

Re: The 100k whys of AI

#102

Post by scotty79 »

gmerc wrote: post #28
scotty79 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also since those are lazy, you are also asking always in the same manner. How homogeneous were the prompts that generated those covers? People are making cookies with cookie cutter number 5 and other people wonder how come they are all the same.

Classic self selection effect though - if you’re resorting to LLM writing you’re almost certainly skewing lazy enough to not even bother trying to add perturbations strong enough to make the response deviate from the uniformity of the slop.

70% of living cells on Earth doesn't even have a nucleus. Bulk of everything is unsophisticated because unsophisticated things are easier to make.w

Re: The 100k whys of AI

#103

Post by vunderba »

maest wrote: post #101
vunderba wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I’ve made this point before: LLMs are excellent at ornamentation and decorative prose, but if you don’t seed them with a solid core idea then their output is absolute dreck - the biblical whitewashed tomb. This is the example I usually point to. It’s a demonstration by OpenAI themselves where the prompt is very simple: “Write a story in fifty words about a toaster that becomes sentient.” As you’ll notice, alt…

> the biblical whitewashed tomb. What does this mean?

It's an old metaphor originally used to condemn religious hypocrisy, but it can also refer more generally to something that appears pristine/beautiful but is still dead inside.

Re: The 100k whys of AI

#104

Post by fvckaigotohell »

AI is loved by mediocre talentless people who don't value expertise, don't value skills, lazy as fuck people who wants creativity without the effort.

If this is the "creativity" that they are producing for me, I want none of it. So I continue to block all and any LLM generated things, be it music, video, articles, social media posts, email, etc and I continue to block people who give me LLM generated garbage without thought, because they simply don't value my time (other than my day job ofc, because I still need to put food on the table).

I want an economy where AI economy is totally separate from non AI economy and we don't interact with each other. At least I make an attempt to isolate that myself.

Re: The 100k whys of AI

#105

Post by hakfoo »

fvckaigotohell wrote: post #104

AI is loved by mediocre talentless people who don't value expertise, don't value skills, lazy as fuck people who wants creativity without the effort. If this is the "creativity" that they are producing for me, I want none of it. So I continue to block all and any LLM generated things, be it music, video, articles, social media posts, email, etc and I continue to block people who give me LLM generated garbage without…

There's also another side of it: there's a legitimate case for places where we don't need high quality creativity.

We have a world of clip art and stock photos. A lot of this is not best effort-- people grab what's in the catalog, and the catalog is itself often either mediocre or overused to the point where it's a blatant signal of low-effort. If you want a smiling washing machine to put on a flyer for the building's laundry room, or a generic photo of St. Basil's for an article about Russia, nobody really complains about that.

AI could fill a similar niche. We know it's crap, but it's good enough crap. Except it's absurdly expensive crap when the externalities are actually priced in.

Re: The 100k whys of AI

#106

Post by aesthesia »

pxagntuvzt wrote: post #68
Lerc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much variation there would be if you got a single model to produce a couple of gigabytes of tiny children's stories. Might be an interedting research project.

There is one already: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07759 https://huggingface.co/datasets/roneneldan/TinyStories 6.5GB of tiny stories, as requested. ;)

SimpleStories is a more diverse version: https://huggingface.co/datasets/SimpleStories/SimpleStories

Re: The 100k whys of AI

#107

Post by fvckaigotohell »

hakfoo wrote: post #105
fvckaigotohell wrote: post #104

AI is loved by mediocre talentless people who don't value expertise, don't value skills, lazy as fuck people who wants creativity without the effort. If this is the "creativity" that they are producing for me, I want none of it. So I continue to block all and any LLM generated things, be it music, video, articles, social media posts, email, etc and I continue to block people who give me LLM generated garbage without…

There's also another side of it: there's a legitimate case for places where we don't need high quality creativity. We have a world of clip art and stock photos. A lot of this is not best effort-- people grab what's in the catalog, and the catalog is itself often either mediocre or overused to the point where it's a blatant signal of low-effort. If you want a smiling washing machine to put on a flyer for the building'…

The key difference now: It is really really easy and fast to generate this crap. It overwhelms society, and any industry it touches. It breaks everything.

Re: The 100k whys of AI

#108

Post by incognition »

thinkingemote wrote: post #19

On HN many comments under many threads are about whether the submission was written by AI. You could say I have noticed a pattern in Hacker News comments! In these comments there's a common pattern where some users argue that they do not agree that the submission was LLM written and they often focus on specific details to refute it (e.g em-dashes) and some users see the overall pattern clearly that it's totally obvio…

Have you seen this skit where guys take a picture of a guy and ask another guy if theyre gay or straight?

Re: The 100k whys of AI

#109

Post by noduerme »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #65
spwa4 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Add more randomness, add more steering, add random steering in random chapters, change it up, and so on. That doesn't work for AI models. The whole training process depends on the basic principle that if you take the average of 100, in this case book cover designs, that the average is less like randomness than any individual cover you've used to make your average. So the output will, by necessity, be closer to the…

> That doesn't work for AI models. Of course it does. I know it does because I've been using variations of this workflow since gpt3.0. In fact it's the only way it can work, since by design LLMs work from left to right. You can't expect it to produce original stuff if you don't give it the anchors for what original means. It'd be like going to a new bar every night and asking for a "beer that you haven't had before".…

What image generation models cannot replicate is the personal experience of the people who make art.

I'll give you an example. One of the most talented designers I employ is a nature lover and a bird-watcher. She has a unique mental profile, as well, in that she's synaesthetic between colors, letters and shapes. In other words, she has a unique neurological structure, coupled with high artistic talent, and an interest in a very particular realm of science.

What makes her design worth $150/hr is not just that her execution is often flawless. It's that you would not, and could not, think of a prompt which would make an AI model produce a new piece akin to anything she would think of in her process of thinking about what to draw. Could you have it replicate something she did? Obviously. But that means what you're doing is in the long tail, and in terms of quality and originality, is by definition somewhere in the mediocre.

And that's probably fine, for whatever you're doing. But an AI with any kind of prompt would not come up with a Studio Ghibli clone, if Studio Ghibli hadn't existed.

So you shouldn't imagine that you are actually getting any original output out of an LLM, regardless of how cleverly you design your prompts. But moreover, don't flatter yourself to think that you have the ideas to feed to a prompt which would generate truly original content and break free of the shackles imposed by its training. That is an illusion. Very few people have the propensity for generating new visual ideas, and that's why they're still in high demand. But their originality stems from their unique and impossible to replicate experience as individuals who have their own visual/mental map of the world.

Re: The 100k whys of AI

#110

Post by fgdgsdfgsdfdfgs »

dlenski wrote: post #2

A nice illustration of the homogeneity of LLM responses. Another way to describe this effect would be… If you ask humans to write 1,000 books, you're asking 1,000 different humans with different experiences and different skills and different moods (etc.) to write those books. But if you ask LLMs to write 1,000 books, you're probably only talking to 3 or 5 different models, tops. And they've all trained on the same or…

Those 1,000 humans will write 950 very similar, boring books though. I think you are over-indexing on the uniqueness of humans.
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