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

I don't want anything your AI generates

coryd.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 345 posts

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#241

Post by tr3ntg »

I agree with a lot of what the author is saying here. If it matters, whatever it is, don’t use AI to directly generate it.

There is one great use of ChatGPT that I don’t think violates any of the author’s principles. When you’re trying to search for something on google, but you don’t know the words to use, and nobody you know is familiar with the topic, ChatGPT is great at giving you the words you need to continue your own search. This continues to be the most impressive types of “conversations” I’ve had with it.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#242

Post by qgin »

stolenmerch wrote: post #52

I'm not a fan of this hyper aggressive line-in-the-sand argumentation about AI that pushes it all precariously close to culture war shenanigans. If you don't like a new technology that is perfectly cool and your right to an opinion. Please don't position it so that if I want to use AI I have to defend myself from accusations of exploiting labor and the environment. That is NOT at all clear, settled, or even correct m…

There's a version of the future where AI actually takes larger and larger chunks of real work while humans move towards spending more and more of their time and energy on culture war activities.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#243

Post by jijijijij »

RolandFlicket wrote: post #28

My boss “writes” policies etc using ChatGPT. They’re generic, overly wordy and say nothing of original thought. I don’t read them and don’t care. When he sends me a link to them in MS Teams I always click the first auto suggested response Teams like “Looks great!” Machine v machine.

I hope at some point people will realize you can replace 95% of AI applications by a simple, stupid, very efficient interface. Guys, you are just cutting human interactions. We don't need AI for it. If it's AI end to end anyway, you can skip all the talking and just transmit whatever information directly. Not just text either, this extends to most everything, images as decoration, and whole websites enabled by super extra AI productivity. There is no point to human facing communication anymore, when everyone got AI to parse AI.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#244

Post by glimshe »

So silly. This reminds me of anti-computer rants from the 1980s. People confuse "AI can be used to generate garbage content" with "All AI-generated content is garbage".

I have 2 artist/photographer cousins, and both of them are raving about AI. I've seen the results, they make good use of AI as a tool to augment their talent, rather than to replace it. Sometimes they spend an hour going through AI-generated/altered content, but that saves them 10+ hours - the artistic input here is in operating and curating the AI-generated content in ways that an untalented individual wouldn't be able to do.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#245

Post by arghwhat »

adrian_b wrote: post #122
arghwhat wrote: post #85

"AI output is fundamentally derivative" By that definition, so is all human output. Musicians spend years studying and practicing other people's music before writing their own, painters spend years trying to replicate techniques before mastering their own, programmers spend years reading other people's bugs before authoring their own. All expression of skill is ultimately derivative. Sometimes slightly, sometimes ver…

All human output is much more derivative than the majority of "creators" dare to admit. Nevertheless, good human output always add something new and original to the elements that are derived from prior art. AI output consists entirely of derived elements, which only in the best case may happen to be mixed into a distinct combination from those already existing. Even when the combination is new, it is distinct only du…

> Nevertheless, good human output always add something new and original to the elements that are derived from prior art.

My personal opinion is that even the new and original elements are derivative. Once a creation derives from a sufficiently large number of sources - some unrelated, such as being inspired by music when painting - you consider it original and new, and once the space of experiences and current inputs you derive from grow sufficiently large and chaotic - including in particular that inputs and outputs become experiences, forming a feedback loop currently lacking in machine learning - you get what we consider "free thought" . That's at least the model I believe in.

> Without an ability to select like a human, which from the possible random combinations is more suitable to achieve a purpose, or ...

Untrained humans do not have this ability. It takes training to identify and categorize things. For example, my mother may appreciate a photo that most people would consider "good", but does not have the practice needed to either frame the scene herself or select the best framing to be deemed "good". At the same time, others might outright dislike the same picture - "good" is not exact in the first place.

I see no reason to believe that our models could do this as well or better than us. If an LLM generates reasonable responses, it must already have applied a standard of "best fitting". It is just not a distinct step, just like how we are not manually filtering our thoughts as we say them.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#246

Post by jijijijij »

defyonce wrote: post #211

AI art does "something" to my perception, I tend to strongly dislike it from the first glance, but I am unable to see why or whether it was generated. In general, it makes me want to consume less and less of "this". Which, in a sense, coincides with the drop of media consumption in general. What we see now is subtle poisoning of content: video games, news, social media, books, music. At some point in the future, it i…

Same. It's almost like an allergic reaction. As soon as I perceive a hint of "AI" origin I feel a strong aversion. Probably some uncanny valley dynamic, plus the sense of over saturation with "content" in general, where AI in particular contributes nothing of value.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#247

Post by bonton89 »

RolandFlicket wrote: post #28

My boss “writes” policies etc using ChatGPT. They’re generic, overly wordy and say nothing of original thought. I don’t read them and don’t care. When he sends me a link to them in MS Teams I always click the first auto suggested response Teams like “Looks great!” Machine v machine.

A guy I know is a manager and is a huge AI proponent and was telling me he writes one sentence about some one for a performance review and then has chatGPT blow it up into multiple paragraphs of machine generated corpospeak. I guess if his subordinates want to survive they'll have to use chatGPT to summerize that back down to the one sentence.

This whole exercise reminds me of the two economists paying each other to eat piles of crap.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#248

Post by bonton89 »

leetharris wrote: post #143
bee_rider wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what he feeds the AI. Maybe some nice concise bullet points, which are what you’d probably want. Maybe we’ll end up with dual layers of AI: one to expand out top-down requests, another to compress them to something efficient to read. We can also have engineers prompt the AI: write me a weekly status report on what I did. Here are my git commit logs and jira points. Emphasize (some topic). Then the owners can…

I read an article about this sometime last year. Basically AI is the exact opposite of compression. We take what should be a few bullet points, turn it into some overly wordy bullshit with AI, then the recipient uses AI to turn that wordy bullshit back into a few bullet points. And it costs a ton of compute to do this. Kind of insane. I hope society evolves to work smarter.

Finally we can create corpospeak nonsense at an accelerated rate and destroy the environment at the same time! A new era of productivity is upon us.

Re: I don't want anything your AI generates

#250

Post by batikha »

handoflixue wrote: post #217
logicprog wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that machine learning like large language models and image generating systems exploit labor might be up for debate, but the fact that they are disproportionately damaging to the environment compared to the alternatives is certainly true in the same way that it's true for Bitcoin mining. And there's more than just those two aspects to consider, it's also very much worth considering how the widespread use of s…

> disproportionately damaging to the environment compared to the alternatives This is a new one to me. Do you have any source for that? Once a model is trained, it seems pretty obvious that it takes Dall-E vastly less to create an image than a trained artist. I have trouble believing the training costs are really so large as to change the equation back to favoring humans.

Jevon's paradox though? Planes are so much more efficient now than the first prototypes, yet usage is so much higher that resource consumption due to airplanes have vastly increased. Same goes with generative models.
Post reply on HN