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The AI bullshit singularity

successfulsoftware.net

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Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#31

Post by opportune »

horeszko wrote: post #21
opportune wrote: post #7

The internet is already mostly filled with low quality bullshit though, and GPT-4/Gemini are much better writers than whoever is churning out SEO as we know it now. It's a lazy argument to imply this 1. invalidates the technological achievement 2. prevents iterative improvement a la the singularity. For one, the Internet itself is not bullshit just because a lot of spammers/hustlers put bad content on it to try to ma…

Good content won't disappear necessarily, it could however be drowned out by BS as the author states. Its the needle in a haystack problem, where AI is used to increase the size of the haystack, making the needle (i.e. quality content) harder to find.

The Internet is a pull model. I can go to Gwern's website directly and not care that most other websites have crap on them.

People choose to use push models for content through meta properties, tiktok, and aggregators like reddit and HN, but nothing is forcing them to. If they push enough bad content, people won't keep using them. Already happened with Facebook and Reddit predecessors, probably happening to Reddit now.

It doesn't matter how big the haystack is when you have the ability to go directly to the needle.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#32

Post by aomix »

I know this comparison has been made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

That Michigan PhD student dump was by an unauthorized third party and was shut down. But was the pricing reasonable? Are admins of old school message boards sitting on now valuable DB dumps of activity on the board in the form of millions of messages?

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#33

Post by ieie3366 »

Have you actually used an LLM? GPT-4 is (well was before turbo) an anti-bullshit machine.

You could ask it any question, ”why does my hair look dead if using a hairdryer” and it actually gave an on-point 100% relevant no-bullshit answer. Try googling that, it’s a million seo spam results, none which answer the question

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#34

Post by zamadatix »

I think bullshit generation is a side effect of any new accelerating technology, not a specific type of new accelerating technology. When we learned to write things down it accelerated our society and our bullshit generation. When we learned to send information electronically it accelerated our society and our bullshit generation. The article already mentions the internet but neglects to mention that is already mostly bullshit prior to LLMs. We still find ways to extract the growing value and move on to the next innovation despite the growing bullshit though.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#35

Post by rocqua »

opportune wrote: post #7

The internet is already mostly filled with low quality bullshit though, and GPT-4/Gemini are much better writers than whoever is churning out SEO as we know it now. It's a lazy argument to imply this 1. invalidates the technological achievement 2. prevents iterative improvement a la the singularity. For one, the Internet itself is not bullshit just because a lot of spammers/hustlers put bad content on it to try to ma…

You are spot-on (I think) with the point that identify and reputation will become much more important. I hope this will end up with system that help cultivate and verify reputation. I fear however that the identity leg is much easier to tackle.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#36

Post by _giorgio_ »

This article is bullshit.

It's on the first page only because it talks about a very widespread fear, namely that LLMs might actually become dumber because they are trained on their own output.

In reality, LLMs are already trained on the output of other LLMs, as specific and well-directed training is much more effective than a disorderly ingestion of text produced by illiterate internet users. Let's not forget the demographic makeup of the typical average user. I think that training on reddit and 4chan messages can be much more harmful than training on text produced by the worst chatbot.

Hacker News editors are trying to build a narrative to instill fear and pessimism.

"What's the fun in writing on the internet anymore?" explains that everyting can be stolen and rewritten by AIs. And today they talk about LLMs and the whole internet becoming dumber. Tomorrow they'll talk about news falsification and LLMs used to replace writers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39415878

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#38

Post by lewhoo »

smartmic wrote: post #2

I broadly agree with that. Repeated training with self-generated data is the technological equivalent of incest and can lead to nothing good.

I think I'll restrain from buying into this until much more testing is conducted. There is information out there suggesting training on synthetic data is at least on par but cheaper.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#39

Post by teraflop »

I'm almost certain that I've seen this exact phenomenon described in a sci-fi novel written before LLMs existed. I thought it was Neal Stephenson's Anathem, but a quick skim through the text didn't turn anything up. Anybody else know what I might be thinking of?

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#40

Post by rzzzt »

ronald_raygun wrote: post #4

I always found the idea of infinitely self improving AI to be suspect. Let’s say we have a super smart AI with intelligence 1, and it uses all that to improve itself by 0.5. Then that new 1.5 uses itself to improve by 0.25. Then 0.125, etc etc. obviously it’s always increasing, but it’s not going to have the runaway effect people think.

Your AI will end up twice as intelligent - eventually.

Were it to improve by 0.5, then 0.333, then 0.25, then 0.2 and so on would be an entirely different matter!

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