141–150 of 542 posts
> Now the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing. Fair and accurate. In the best cases the person running the model didn't write this stuff and word salad doesn't communicate whatever they meant to say. In many cases though, content is simply pumped out for SEO with no intention of being valuable to anyone.
"I don't think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans." We've been past the tipping point when it comes to text for some time, but for video I feel we are living through the watershed moment right now. Especially smaller children don't have a good intuition on what is real and what is not. When I get asked if the person in a video is real, I still feel pretty confident to answer but…
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/09/technology/ai...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/19/technology/ar...
These are a little bit unfair, in that we're comparing handpicked examples, but I don't think many experts will pass a test like this. Technology only moves forward (and seemingly, at an accelerating pace).
What's a little shocking to me is the speed of progress. Humanity is almost 3 million years old. Homosapiens are around 300,000 years old. Cities, agriculture, and civilization is around 10,000. Metal is around 4000. Industrial revolution is 500. Democracy? 200. Computation? 50-100.
The revolutions shorten in time, seemingly exponentially.
Comparing the world of today to that of my childhood....
One revolution I'm still coming to grips with is automated manufacturing. Going on aliexpress, so much stuff is basically free. I bought a 5-port 120W (total) charger for less than 2 minutes of my time. It literally took less time to find it than to earn the money to buy it.
I'm not quite sure where this is all headed.
> the Web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing That’s neither fair nor accurate. That slop is ultimately generated by the humans who run those models; they are attempting (perhaps poorly) to communicate something . > two companies that I already despise Life’s too short to go through it hating others. > it's very likely because they are creating a plagi…
The issue with generative 'AI' isn't that they generate text, it's that they can (and are) used to generate high-volume low-cost nonsense at a scale no human could ever achieve without them.
> Life’s too short to go through it hating others
Only when they don't deserve it. I have my doubts about Google, but I've no love for OpenAI.
> Plagiarism has a particular definition ... no-one is required to append a statement crediting every text he has ever read
Of course they aren't, because we rightly treat humans learning to communicate differently from training computer code to predict words in a sentence and pass it off as natural language with intent behind it. Musicians usually pay royalties to those whose songs they sample, but authors don't pay royalties to other authors whose work inspired them to construct their own stories maybe using similar concepts. There's a line there somewhere; falsely equating plagiarism and inspiration (or natural language learning in humans) misses the point.
Intuitively I feel like word frequency would be one of the things least impacted by LLM output, no?
‘delve’ is given as an example right there in TFA.
So I would still state noun-phrase frequency in LLM output would tend to reflect noun-phrase frequency in training data in a similar context (disregarding enforced bias induced through RLHF and other tuning at the moment)
I'm sure there will be cross-fertilization from LLM to Human and back, but I'm not seeing the data yet that the influence on word-frequency is that outspoken.
The author seems to have some other objections to the rise of LLM's, which I fully understand.
[flagged]
> Also, it is shocking how authoritarian the “left” has become in my lifetime. We are going through a general uptick in authoritarian "discussions" online. It's interesting that you are only seeing it on the "left".
There's a bunch of ways to measure political opinions. The Authoritarian-liberal one being one of many. The economic-left and the economic-right are becoming more separated from the social-left and the social-right.
Tribalism also causes people to take on the positions of their 'tribe' which may be distinct to what their own personalities might normally gravitate to.
In the past, it has been the economic-left and social-right that were more prone to authoritarianism with their proponents believing that their ideals should be enforced.
The economic-right and social-left was more of a logic vs empathy tension ('this works' vs 'this is right') and a lot of people seemed to reconcile the two for one flavour of centrism.
To me it is a little shocking how authoritarian elements of the social-left have become, an ideology that has long been characterized by empathy and supporting others seems to have become blended with opinions which are exclusionary or dogmatic, which seem counter to their own principles.
In some respects maybe this is just the march of time making the progressive opinions of one generation the orthodoxy of the next and these people are just finding a new conservatism rooted in a new orthodoxy.
All those writers who'll soon be out of job and/or already are and basically unhireable for their previous tasks should be paid for by the AI hyperscalers to write anything at all on one condition: not a single sentence in their works should be created with AI. (I initially wanted to say 'paid for by the government' but that'd be socialising losses and we've had quite enough of that in the past.)
AI companies are indeed hiring such people to generate customized training data for them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clever name. I like the analogy.
I don't seem to get it.
LLMs pollute the internet like atomic bombs polluted the environment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clever name. I like the analogy.
I don't seem to get it.
Did we (the humans) somehow managed to pollute the internet so much with AI that's it's now barely usable ? In my opinion the internet can be considered as the equivalent of a natural environment like the earth. it's a space where people share, meet, talk, etc. I find it astonishing that after polluting our natural environment we know polluted the internet.