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AI may be making us think and write more alike

dornsife.usc.edu

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Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#261

Post by 2dfdxf »

reaperducer wrote: post #153
davebren wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tips, tricks, life hacks and other expert techniques will once again be jealously guarded from the prying eyes of the LLM who would steal their competitive advantage & replicate it at scale I've already started thinking this way, there's stuff I would have open sourced in the past but no longer will because I know it would get trained on. I'm not sure of any way I can share it with humans and only humans. If I let…

I've already started thinking this way, there's stuff I would have open sourced in the past but no longer will because I know it would get trained on. Same here. I no longer post photos, code, or pretty much anything other than short comments on the internet. I'm not going to do free work for trillion-dollar AI companies. I do, however, find it interesting to watch AI destroy the whole "content creation" industry. Al…

Im of the view that I think slop is a force for good if it gets people back into engaging in the real world. If that means destroying the web as we know then frankly so be it.

THere are serious problems that have prevailed into society because of the side costs of the web. I also see sovreign centralisation of the web emerging in the future with identity being a key theme.

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#262

Post by lamasery »

incomingpain wrote: post #256
lamasery wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quadrant is where basically all "Western" mainstream academia sits, and has for quite a long time, and they write an awful lot. I am a little surprised that the influence of online "influencer"-speak and marketing, being so voluminous and evident in the things' writing styles, hasn't dragged them other directions, though. Nor the enormous amount of socially authoritarian social media posting. I suppose the forme…

I dont agree with the premise that is where academia sits. University of Dallas or University of Calgary is not going to show up in the far left. Not to mention religious universities like Redeemer in Hamilton. In fact, it should balance out, especially over centuries of global content. There's absolutely no chance that the training data itself is the bias. IT's the filtering and labelling of the content that introdu…

> In fact, it should balance out, especially over centuries of global content.

I do kinda wonder how this is divided up. I wouldn't be surprised if the median authorship-of-a-word age in these things' training sets is post-smartphone. Consider the sheer volume of video uploaded to Youtube in a day (and corresponding volume of transcript text) and that posting on a social media site or sending an email is way lower-effort than that. The amount of material we've been able to more-or-less durably record in the last couple decades dwarfs everything that came before.

Choices of languages to ingest would also tend to make it a bit less "global" than might be ideal.

> IT's the filtering and labelling of the content that introduces the bias.

Oh, I agree and mentioned that some factor must be adjusting them away from the right. There's just far too much pro-authoritarianism and economically right-wing writing (to include Web posts, podcast or digitized radio show transcripts, et c) for them not to lean farther that way without some form of adjustment going on, even if it's only tone-based (and sure, there's probably more than that going on)

The trouble is these data sets per se can hardly be called unbiased with respect to most any plausibly-useful reference point one might choose, so whether they adjust or not, the result will be some kind of bias, except with respect to the training dataset itself (obviously). Like, the sheer count of the positive representations of an idea in the data they've been able to get ahold of means neither that it's as commonly-positively-regarded in the wild as it appears from that narrow window (see: many observations about how very-few readers of social media or forums et c. post anything) nor (separately) that it's better-supported by evidence or reason or what-have-you than alternatives.

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#263

Post by efsavage »

0xffff2 wrote: post #229
efsavage wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that they're above average for the population, and below average for experts. Can they draw as well as an expert/professional illustrator? Probably not. Can they draw better than almost anyone who isn't a expert/professional illustrator? Probably. I think the value we're losing is where people are bad at things, which is often where new ideas/approaches come from, but this is a macro metric, so it's a hard…

> I'd argue that they're above average for the population, and below average for experts. Can they draw as well as an expert/professional illustrator? Probably not. Can they draw better than almost anyone who isn't a expert/professional illustrator? Probably. That's pretty much the definition of "average" (as most commonly used, to refer to "mean" rather than median or much less commonly mode), isn't it?

I don't think so, to put some made-up-but-illustrative numbers, I think AI is going to be worse than the 1% of people who do X professionally or at a high level, and better than the 99% who don't.

Can Suno make a better song than $YOUR_FAVORITE_ARTIST? Unlikely. Can it make a song better than 99% of a random selection of people? Probably.

I think this is actually a good thing in many ways. If I have a tool that elevates me on things I'm not very good at (like making songs) which far outnumbers the things I am good at, that's a big win for me personally, it's just a loss for the population since people who are going to push music further aren't going to be encouraged to struggle through the curve and find their own path.

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#264

Post by dasil003 »

hirako2000 wrote: post #250
dasil003 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more fair to say that with every technology there are tradeoffs. Consider the wheel, before the wheel people probably were more physically fit, but they couldn't move as large of loads. Well, except in the Andes where they figured out how to move gigantic stones well beyond the weight that any wooden wheel would have been able to carry anyway and cut and place them into configurations that were earthquak…

Everything has tradeoffs. I imply technology rarely yields a net positive. I could call out the positive, those are so obvious. It's the subtle cost of the benefits that almost never gets discussed.

> technology rarely yields a net positive

This is a super bold statement that I guest most people would disagree with, and I suspect if you somehow brought people forward from the past, even fewer would agree with.

I do agree with you the subtle cost is rarely discussed. I also would say that the unintended consequences of technology are sometimes very very bad in unforeseeable ways, but that's very different from the "net negative" framing which I think is too reductive to be useful. Technology is not a zero sum game, effects are multifaceted, so any quantitative comparison relies on extremely subjective value judgements.

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#265

Post by cindyllm »

balamatom wrote: post #255
cyclopeanutopia wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does help us a lot, actually, and the treatment should be analogical. It's not a cop-out, it's reality. Including sociopaths in humanity benefits and protects only them. And it renders the rest of us - their victims - powerless. If as a society in general we agree that we have a right to keep serious transgressors in prisons, then we should seriously consider keeping there people who are fundamentally incapable of…

Tell me you follow a value system invented by sociopaths without... actually reflecting on what value system you follow, and whether you chose it intentionally - or just bought into it by following the path of least resistance and are now inextricably stuck. As a society in general, do you agree that unjust laws, false positives in enforcement, prison slavery, and endemic rampant abuse of authority, are things that e…

[dead]

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#267

Post by teleforce »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #183
danielbln wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were no "dark ages", that's the same common wisdom blunder like "in the middle ages everybody was dressed in drab grey clothing, ate gruel and walked through mountains of poop everywhere". It was a time of transition away from the slave powered empire to decentralized kingdoms and ultimately the Europe of today. It was by no means a time of standstill.

I am very sorry, but you are wrong. Between the fall of Rome (476 AD) and the Carolingian empire (~800 AD) there was a period of not only standstill, but regression, devolution and forgetfulness. Compared with what came before, it can be rightly called the dark ages.

I am very sorry, but you are very wrong.

It's dark ages in Europe but it's really golden age in Islamic Empires which far surpassed the Greek and Roman. The epitome was the Baitul Hikmah or House of Wisfom established at the time of Abassid Caliphate [1].

>Between the fall of Rome (476 AD) and the Carolingian empire (~800 AD)

During this time Al-Khwarizmi was born and House of Wisdom was established. His contributions in algebra (book Al-Jabr) and many others, and the word algorithm literally originated from his name [2].

Many Greek and Indian books translated to Arabic during this myth so called dark age by the Islamic Scholars.

Many many more new books were written that improved and innovated the prior knowledge. These books greatly expanding the state-of-the-art centered both in Baghdad, Iraq and Toledo, Spain.

The book Almagest by Ptolemy studied by Galileo was the Arabic translation of the Ptolemy works. Of course at the time of Galileo, Islamic astronomers knowledge and contributions have already far surpassed the Greek and the Indian.

The Islamic scholars not only translating (that it self is a progress) but also contributing to the body and foundations of knowledge not only in astronomy, but in many others in mathematics, sciences (physics, chemistry, biology), medicine, engineering, geography, psychology, politics, economy, architecture, etc.

There are numerous other polymath scholars like Al-Khwarizmi, for examples Al-Haitham, Ibnu-Sina, Ibnu-Rusd to name just a few. But European community has been in denial for so long time and in addition unfairly supressing these Islamic scholars contributions. They even literally changed the scholars name and Latinized them with lousy names like Alhazen, Avicennia, Averroes to hide the fact that they are Islamic scholars. Imagine if now people changed name of the scholar like Newton to Nawab in the literature.

Heck, even Copernicus copied diagrams from the Islamic earlier astronomers' books without proper citations, that in the modern will be plagiarism [3]. If this happen today, the university president (if plagiarised his/her book/thesis/paper) will be asked to resign.

[1] House of Wisdom:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom

[2] Al-Khwarizmi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Khwarizmi

[3] Islamic Astronomy and Copernicus [pdf]:

Islamic Astronomy and Copernicus [pdf]

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#268

Post by kjkjadksj »

pdimitar wrote: post #197
kjkjadksj wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would have been better off reading good english literature to improve your own writing.

I can't turn back the clock and I will have to relay to my family that this month I'll get less money because I need to read English literature. We operate within our own time and energy budgets, man. I might never get to that literature. My peaceful times in life where I could chill and choose what to do are over and I don't expect them to ever come back. Though who knows.

You have no hours of the day where you can choose to do something? Are you a prisoner?

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#269

Post by pdimitar »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #268
pdimitar wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't turn back the clock and I will have to relay to my family that this month I'll get less money because I need to read English literature. We operate within our own time and energy budgets, man. I might never get to that literature. My peaceful times in life where I could chill and choose what to do are over and I don't expect them to ever come back. Though who knows.

You have no hours of the day where you can choose to do something? Are you a prisoner?

I expected more of HN than drive-by comments.

So you really cannot figure out how somebody could have time but still be unable (or very unwilling) to do things they perceive as their plans that they want to do?

Really? Not a single idea?

Tearing down straw men is easy. Thinking critically and widely is more difficult.

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#270

Post by pocksuppet »

azan_ wrote: post #162
hirako2000 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reached the same conclusion. It also made me realised how most technologies degraded our lives. Before the TV people would go to the theatre. It's becoming hard to find a theatre these days. Artificial light is convenient, it made billion or people develop sleep disorder and we can't see stars at at night. Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70…

> Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on. I suggest you should have a look at malnutrition rates 100 years ago vs now. Without mass food production we would not be able to sustain even 50% of current population.

Without this kind of food production maybe we'd have 50% the carrying capacity, but 20% of the actual population. What's your utility function? Is it the total happiness function that requires us to reproduce as much as possible even if conditions are shit, or is it the average happiness per person?
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