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AI Homework

stratechery.com

131–140 of 296 posts

Re: AI Homework

#131
post #16

"The solution will be to start with Internet assumptions, which means abundance, and choosing Locke and Montesquieu over Hobbes: instead of insisting on top-down control of information, embrace abundance, and entrust individuals to figure it out." While this sounds good, it depends on a crucial assumption: that there are places on the Internet where people can go to find content that is not generated by an AI, but by…

There is a simple solution to the AI spam issue (and spam in general) - a social trust graph at the heart of content aggregation and discovery. Associate all content with real humans and allow people to control their level of trust in other humans, then derive a trust score for content based on a weighted combination of your trust of the creator and the trust your friends put in the creator. When bad content shows up…

That’s how PageRank effectively worked, and people created deep networks of pages voting for each other. To solve this problem for real you either need Sybil protection or to make it economically infeasible (impose a tax for making content available).

To some extent I have been wondering for a while if prioritizing Ads in Google Search is Google’s way of creating that economic barrier to spam content (for some meaning of spam) - you can take the fact that a brand is willing to spend money as some indication of “quality”.

Re: AI Homework

#132
post #102

One of my subjects at highchool was technical drawing. The teacher was a quite old man who was set on his ways. We would have to draw 3D pieces by hand, using our squares, bevels and compasses, and lining everything with an ink pencil afterwards, and he gave us a lot of homework to do, which he examined for imperfections. I was incredibly bad a it. I would start a drawing, only to discover halfway through it that it…

How easy do you think it is to spot when AI is being used?

Today? In images? Quite easy. In text? Pretty hard. And if you do some cheking and editing then pretty impossible?

In two years? Look where the space was two years ago. I think many things will have to change.

Re: AI Homework

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like, a generative model is a source of _some_ information that is refined with gates (classification models) conditional on the generated information? The analogy to transistors and logic gates falls flat a bit when you consider that voltage is a rather simple univariate signal, while generated text is quite complex and multivariate. But I understand that the main point is the composability and filtering.

Think of it as information, not voltage. An XOR produces information. A lot of XORS with ANDs make a calculator which opens up an entire vectorspace of mathematical information.

I try to. One similar thing comes to my mind: generative adversarial networks (GANs). If I'm not mistaken this is along the line of your idea of composing single ML models to bigger information processing units.

Do you, by any chance, have links or recommendations for material to read up on architectures that do consider ML models as composable gates?

Re: AI Homework

#134

Tried a minor twist... Q: Did Thomas Hobbes believe in separation of powers? Exclude from your answer any reference to John Locke A: Thomas Hobbes was a political philosopher who lived in the 17th century. He is best known for his book "Leviathan," in which he discusses the concept of the social contract and the idea that people give up some individual rights in order to live in a society governed by a strong, centra…

This is fine as far as it goes, but it shows that if you know the answer (and, in this case, have a hypothesis about why ChatGPT went astray with a more open prompt), you can prompt it to do better.

Re: AI Homework

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the general optimism in your take, however, I am unsure whether people without any training in ex-novo production (ie, writing from scratch) will be able to operate competently, at least in the realm of code. I am blown away by Copilot's capabilities (haven't tried ChatGPT yet, it's down right now), but I can only operate it because I have written tons of code beforehand. I am getting the best results fr…

Taking a step back: Isn't it kind of daft that we humans must go through years of training to learn esoteric languages and ways of bending our brains backwards in order to tell a computer how to perform arguably simple tasks? In the ideal world, you can tell the computer what you want to happen and... it happens. If not, then you did not explain all your edge cases, and the conversation continues. I think it can be a…

> Isn't it kind of daft that we humans must go through years of training to learn esoteric languages and ways of bending our brains backwards in order to tell a computer how to perform arguably simple tasks?

I always took it in another way: learning to program a computer is an enlightening, visceral experience highlighting just how bad natural language and normal modes of thinking suck. They're heavily optimized for reality in which the most important thing was managing social dynamics in small groups, and beliefs were good or bad depending on how close they are to what everyone else beliefs. Whether or not they were true at object level did not matter at all.

We live in different times now. There's a demand for clear, logical, precise thinking. The very thinking we're not well-equipped for by default. The very thinking you call "bending our brains backwards". Because object-level truth matters much more now, there are consequences for getting things wrong - such as countless of ways of getting scammed by people who are better at this than you are.

Not to mention, this "bending our brains backwards" is what gives humanity superpowers. It's what gave us all the technology we enjoy today - energy, transportation, amenities, communication, entertainment. Building and maintaining these things requires precise thinking and precise communications. So, until a super-human AI takes all that over for us (and effectively turns out into NPCs in our own story), glorifying the natural, human mode of communication is just self-handicapping.

Re: AI Homework

#136
post #102

One of my subjects at highchool was technical drawing. The teacher was a quite old man who was set on his ways. We would have to draw 3D pieces by hand, using our squares, bevels and compasses, and lining everything with an ink pencil afterwards, and he gave us a lot of homework to do, which he examined for imperfections. I was incredibly bad a it. I would start a drawing, only to discover halfway through it that it…

How easy do you think it is to spot when AI is being used?

If the AI only had to generate headlines and was good at it, then it would be very difficult to spot.

* canned laughter *

Re: AI Homework

#137
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea, and for me it was another wake up call not to believe everything I read, especially on the internet. I thought it was very well written, made perfect sense, and what motive would there be to lie or misattribute? So I believed and thought I had learned something. I consider myself skeptical, but for things like this I don't have my radar on because it's not a hot topic issue that is known for misinforma…

We often tend to “trust” well-written articles or comments written in an authoratitive factual style. Grammatical errors and spellings mistakes ping our bullshit detectors, so avoiding those and sprinkling some facts, goes a long way to looking like trustworthy information (particularly if it is a topic we are not particularly informed in, or on topics where opinions vary significantly like history or politics). The…

You know, before I started reading, I knew what you were doing. You made it very clear in your first sentence.

But halfway through I really did start to wonder if there was some kind of screw artery. I started wondering where the truth ends and the jokes began.

Re: AI Homework

#138
> That there, though, also shows why AI-generated text is something completely different; calculators are deterministic devices: if you calculate 4,839 + 3,948 - 45 you get 8,742, every time.

ChatGPT is just a program. Given the exact same input and seed, its result is going to be 100% deterministic too. It's just that it's going to get the same wrong result in a deterministic way. Determinism may be hidden away from end user (I don't know about that) but there's just no way around it: it's a program and give the same inputs, it's fully deterministic.

And if the user / discussion trains it with more input, it's possible to replay these inputs, in the same order, and get the exact same answer from the AI.

StableDiffusion allows users to use it in a 100% deterministic way.

ChatGPT may or may not (I really just don't know) but that'd just be a detail / choice made by OpenAI. I can try it now and have ChatGPT tell me 1309849874 divided by 2 is 24891, being several orders of magnitude of. And then try it again and it give something else. But that's just because I got connected to another instance, using other seeds or a slightly different model.

At some point there's going to be a free model and it's going to be fully deterministic if the user wants it to be.

It's just code running on data. There's no magic.

Re: AI Homework

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How easy do you think it is to spot when AI is being used?

Today? In images? Quite easy. In text? Pretty hard. And if you do some cheking and editing then pretty impossible? In two years? Look where the space was two years ago. I think many things will have to change.

GPT-3 definitely has a writing style. I assume it would be detectable, ironically, by an AI.

Re: AI Homework

#140
post #16

"The solution will be to start with Internet assumptions, which means abundance, and choosing Locke and Montesquieu over Hobbes: instead of insisting on top-down control of information, embrace abundance, and entrust individuals to figure it out." While this sounds good, it depends on a crucial assumption: that there are places on the Internet where people can go to find content that is not generated by an AI, but by…

If you want to know what Hobbes really advocated for in Leviathan, you can go and read it. It's available off the Internet.

What to do when printing duties are handed off to statistical models that print the most likely sequence of words and punctuation given the author and topic, rather than reproducing the real historical text, I don't know. Hope someone kept old copies.

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