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AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

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Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#271

Post by Aerroon »

platinumrad wrote: post #102
james2doyle wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should check out "model collapse". It seems that an abundance of content, that is more and more AI generated these days, may not be a viable option. There is also a vast amount of data that is increasingly going private or behind paywalls

People love harping on this one, but model collapse hasn't turned out to be an issue in practice.

I don't really understand why model collapse would happen.

I understand that if I have an AI model and then feed it its own responses it will degrade in performance. But that's not what's happening in the wild though - there are extra filtering steps in-between. Users upvote and downvote posts, people post the "best" AI generated content (that they prefer), the more human sounding AI gets more engagement etc. All of these things filter AI output, so it's not the same thing as:

AI out -> AI in

It is:

AI out -> human filter -> AI in

And at that point the human filter starts acting like a fitness function for a genetic algorithm. Can anyone explain how this still leads to model collapse? Does the signal in the synthetic data just overpower the human filter?

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#272

Post by drcode »

Aerroon wrote: post #265
drcode wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At no point in the next 30 years will there not be an active community of people who "loathe" AI and work to obstruct it. Then I have good news for you: If humanity goes extinct in the next few years because of unaligned superintelligence, there actually will no longer "be an active community of people who loathe AI and work to obstruct it"

But AI isn't going to be unaligned. It's going to be aligned the same way we are because it learns from our data.

we mostly know how to make it understand what we want. we don't know how to make it care about what we want, except via reinforcement learning. there are good reasons to believe rl won't work for this once the ai reaches a certain levels of capability.

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#273

Post by Legend2440 »

runarberg wrote: post #267
Legend2440 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>With this many parameters overfitting is inevitable. Nope. Go look up double descent. Overfitting turns out not to be an issue with large models. Your video is from a political activist, not anyone with any knowledge about machine learning. Here's a better video about overfitting: https://youtu.be/qRHdQz_P_Lo

I am not a professional statistician (only a BSc dropout) so I won‘t be able to gain the expertise required to evaluate the claim here: That double descent eliminates overfitting in LLMs . That said, I see red flags here. This is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. My actual degree (not the drop-out one) is in Psychology and I used statistics a lot during my degree, it is…

Almost certainly those weren't even in the training data. They showed up too soon; LLMs are retrained only every 6-12 months.

Instead, the LLM did a web search for 'bixonimania' and summarized the top results. This is not an example of training data poisoning.

>This is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Well, I don't know what to tell you; double descent is widely accepted in ML at this point. Neural networks are routinely larger than their training data, and yet still generalize quite well.

That said, even a model that does not overfit can still repeat false information if the training data contains false information. It's not magic.

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#274

Post by pesus »

overgard wrote: post #169

Honestly, it's no wonder there's a lot of pushback. We have these irresponsible CEO's talking non stop about taking peoples jobs at a time when people are struggling to make ends meet, all while taking in insane cash infusions. Why wouldn't people loathe AI at this point when the marketing is "we're going to fuck you over and there's nothing you can do about it".

Billboard company puts up billboards saying "don't hire humans".

HN comments: "I just don't understand why people hate AI".

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#275

Post by phainopepla2 »

xpe wrote: post #261
phainopepla2 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're overthinking the parent comment, I think. When Dario goes on TV he says things like "AI is going to put 50% of white collar workers out of a job in a few years". The average TV viewer who hears that doesn't know what AI alignment means, they just hear that this guy, whatever his intentions, is threatening their ability to survive in this economy.

> they just hear that this guy, whatever his intentions, is threatening their ability to survive in this economy. Yep, Dario is straddling this sort of impossible line: he's the least-scary harbinger who is try to be one of the more transparent people to sound the alarm. But the funny thing about saying "don't shoot the messenger" is that it usually gets uttered well after the messenger has taken a bullet. > You're o…

> But the funny thing about saying "don't shoot the messenger" is that it usually gets uttered well after the messenger has taken a bullet.

Dario is not just a messenger, though. In his case it would be more like, "Don't shoot one of the generals in the invading army." To which it would be reasonable to ask, "Why not?" Even if he's the general saying that he wants minimal civilian casualties.

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#277

Post by csande17 »

GaryBluto wrote: post #206
ginko wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations are not people.

Who works at corporations and benefits from their actions?

If my LinkedIn feed is any indication, bizarre inhuman ghouls who wear the names and profile pictures of my college friends like skin-suits and exclusively post AI-generated marketing materials for AI products.

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#278

Post by jimmaswell »

tptacek wrote: post #9

I'm glad this person found community, but I think they've been a bit starstruck by concentrated interest. At no point in the next 30 years will there not be an active community of people who "loathe" AI and work to obstruct it. There are those people about smart phones, the Internet itself, even television. Meanwhile: the ability to poison models, if it can be made to work reliably, is a genuinely interesting CS ques…

[flagged]

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#279

Post by jumploops »

lxgr wrote: post #225
jumploops wrote: post #203

I've noticed this trend most heavily on Reddit. Some communities are very pro-AI, adding AI summary comments to each thread, encouraging AI-written posts, etc.[0] Many subreddits are AI cautious[1][2], and a subset of those are fully anti-AI[3]. Apart from these "AI-focused" communities, it seems each "traditional" subreddit sits somewhere on the spectrum (photographers dealing with AI skepticism of their work[4], pr…

Reddit (and more generally, human) groupthing in a nutshell. "Quick, clearly position yourself on this one-dimensional line (or maybe even better sort yourself into one of these two sets) so we don't have to engage in that pesky nuance thing!"

Yes, groupthink certainly seems to be pushing each community into the false dichotomy of AI good/bad, even if it's still early days.

Another example from `r/bayarea` where the author is OK with AI but the top comments are increasingly wary of its potential for harm[0]

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1sp8wvz/is_it_just...

Re: AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing

#280

Post by belorn »

haberman wrote: post #88

I'm old enough to remember a time when the primary hacker cause was DRM, the DMCA, patent trolls, export controls for PGP, etc. All things that made it difficult to use information when you want to. "Information wants to be free." It's wild to see the about face. Now it's: > If [companies] can’t source training data ethically, then I see absolutely no reason why any website operator should make it easy for them to st…

This claim of contradiction has never worked for me.

Let say person A wants everyone to be rich.

Person B plots a plan to make themself rich and everyone else poorer.

One can make an argument that any action by A is now a contradiction. If they work with B, it makes a lot of people poorer and not richer. If they work against B, B do not get rich.

However this is not a contradiction. If a company use training data in ways that reduce and harm other peoples ability to access information, like hiding attribution or misrepresenting the data and sources, people who advocate for free information can have a consistent view and also work against such use. It is not a shift. It is only a shift if we believe that copyright will be removed, works will be given to the public for free, and companies will no longer try to hide and protect creative works and information.

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