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The AI bullshit singularity

successfulsoftware.net

111–120 of 187 posts

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#111

The web is well on its way to destroying itself, LLMs are only going to accelerate the process.

Hey maybe we’ll go back to the smaller communities of the 90s, early 00s internet. Any large community will be overflowing with spam.

It should be clear to people that the general population sucks (eg see most comment sections).

We've spent endless time and money sealing ourselves off from the great unwashed only to expose ourselves to them in full force on the internet (plus Russian paid trolls). It doesn't make much sense.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#112

The article appears to have been delisted by HN. Not sure why. 'Big AI' didn't like it, perhaps?

When an article crosses some threshhold of replies to upvotes per unit of time it gets deranked, presumably to discourage political / flame-war topics. Eg, this article still shows up on the second page. After a while, when the replies slow down, it will move back to the first page (if it's still getting upvotes).

Didn't know that. Thanks.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#113
Isn't this really good news for artists? When everything you see is generic shit, it will be so much easier for truly creative thoughts, expressed through high quality writing, based on genuine experiences in the real world, to stand out.

Also, this will put pressure on human creativity to produce weirder stuff that can't be produced by simply paraphrasing and remixing known ideas. Mass photography was bad news for the portrait painting industry, but forced painters to think outside known concepts and explore crazy abstract art.

I totally look forward to whatever humans come up with next, that can't be easily generated by a computer program.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#115
Ugh, the guy who thinks "prompt editor" is the job title of the future, and that people in every field will take classes on prompt editing. Gag.

You know, there's no replacement for knowing how to do something yourself. And no, you cannot be as good creatively if you haven't learned a craft. (And no, prompt editing is not a craft any more than ordering food in a restaurant is cooking. Could you even describe in a useful way what was wrong with a soup you were served if you had never learned to cook?)

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment/sentiment/idea has already been thoroughly discussed, shared, retweeted, posted, and echoed a couple thousand times online already. Humans like you have been redundantly saying the same things in varying degrees of novelty, like this, for centuries.

That's what the topic of the post we are discussing is. He is basically reiterating the point. Which is a good point. And there have been zero good arguments made (as far as I'm aware) to why this fear would be unfounded.

I'm pointing out the irony. The Internet is already saturated with us continually metaphorically JPG compressing original ideas into textual redundancy, with many people having only been exposed to those copies of copies.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#117
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a wrong take. Even if the data is 100% synthetic, you can still hill climb to new mountains. If you don't believe me, look at evolution. It doesn't matter if we no longer have 100% human art as input. This is the worst these systems will ever look and feel, and they're only going to improve. I'd be willing to do a longbets on this one.

There are biological analogies you could have chosen other than adaptive hill-climbing. For instance, there's adaptive radiation, where a small population of organisms is introduced into a new environment and rapidly diversifies into new species, filling niches that weren't filled before. After the environment is mostly saturated, the populations stabilize and adaptation slows down, with gradual and relatively slow c…

> After the environment is mostly saturated, the populations stabilize and adaptation slows down, with gradual and relatively slow change and diversification.

We have the pressures of growth and novelty. My analogy is perfect.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#118
post #78
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a wrong take. Even if the data is 100% synthetic, you can still hill climb to new mountains. If you don't believe me, look at evolution. It doesn't matter if we no longer have 100% human art as input. This is the worst these systems will ever look and feel, and they're only going to improve. I'd be willing to do a longbets on this one.

It's getting really tiresome to see tech bros talk about biology as if they know what they're talking about.

> It's getting really tiresome to see tech bros talk about biology as if they know what they're talking about.

My undergrad was in biology, "bro". I was cloning luciferace into plants using agrobacterium-mediated transfection over a decade before this week's news of transgenic petunias.

I was planning to do a PhD in computational metabolomics, but life took a different turn: a couple of Google engineers saw the laser projector I built and programmed to play video games on the side of skyscrapers [1], and they lured me away to work on what became a decacorn. My quality of life and net worth certainly thank me for the pivot.

Take a look at my post history [2]. My analogies are informed and salient.

In any case, I'm working directly in this field now and the results we're achieving don't need affirmation. I tried to communicate this to outsiders in an easy to digest analogy. I'll let our work speak for itself.

[1] https://youtu.be/5XTi-jf-ans

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#119

Succinctly stated and something that resonates strongly with me. In the last internet revolution (web search), results started high quality because the inputs were high quality - bloggers and others just wanted to document and share knowledge. But over time, many interests (largely commercial) figured out how to game the system with SEO, and quality of search results has decreased as search's incentive structure led…

I doubt it's going to go the same way as search. You can't run Google on consumer hardware, but you can run LLMs locally.

At worse, newer models will get worse and you can just stick to older models.

You could also argue that proprietary models gated by an API are better than anything you can run locally, and yeah maybe those will get worse with time.

They're not going to get any worse than what you can run locally though. If they do, open models will overtake them, and then we'd be in a better position overall.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#120
post #23
post #6

Good cryptographic solutions exist for these problems

Cryptography can make content you create marked. But how would you use it to mark content other (non cooperative) people make?

Regulation. Law. Human verification. Slow old fashioned ways of verifying content. Basically in the context of news for example: outlets pinkyswear that their writers are made of flesh and use sources from other companies that have the same sort of certification and so on. All the way from eyes to consumer. And you'd not read news without that kind of certification in the future I guess.
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