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ML promises to be profoundly weird

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#381

Post by gritspants »

satvikpendem wrote: post #375
gritspants wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wants and needs are not the same. We are experiencing the difference in real time. AI does not give society a want or need.

My point was not about the difference, it was about the fact that average people cannot conceptualize new ideas until one person or team invents it, then the average person will want or need it. As for AI, I and many others want it, and some even need it, in certain use cases. Speak for yourself.

I believe the idea that you (or I) might know better than the 'average people' to be incredibly conceited, arrogant, and frankly wrong. It is an attitude that gives you superiority for having achieved nothing.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#382

Post by idle_zealot »

munificent wrote: post #299
steveklabnik wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can totally see that, for sure. I was much more likely to write a review long ago, now I don't even bother. (For buying stuff online, at least.) Maybe I lost my innocence about this stuff a long time ago, and so it's not so much LLMs that broke it for me, but maybe... I dunno, the downfall of Web 2.0 and the death of RSS? I do think that the old internet, for some definition of "old," felt different. For sure. I'll…

> I'm from the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion, and now that largely makes me feel kinda old. Me too, 100%. But that was during a moment in time when that information was more likely to be enabling a person who otherwise didn't have as many resources than enabling a billionaire to make their torment nexus 0.1% more powerful. > I kinda had to accept that stuff I make was going to be used towards ends…

> But in a world with AI, I worry that anything I put out there increases inequality and that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Maybe that's just the way things are now and I have to accept it.

This observation doesn't really clash with "information wants to be free." You just have to include LLMs in the category or "information," like Free Software types already do for all software. You don't need to abandon your principles, you should shift your demands. A handful of companies can't be allowed to benefit from free information and then put what they make behind a wall.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#383

Post by satvikpendem »

gritspants wrote: post #381
satvikpendem wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was not about the difference, it was about the fact that average people cannot conceptualize new ideas until one person or team invents it, then the average person will want or need it. As for AI, I and many others want it, and some even need it, in certain use cases. Speak for yourself.

I believe the idea that you (or I) might know better than the 'average people' to be incredibly conceited, arrogant, and frankly wrong. It is an attitude that gives you superiority for having achieved nothing.

I'm not sure what you're even talking about, you're putting words and an argument into my mouth which I never said.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#384

Post by idle_zealot »

randallsquared wrote: post #346
throwanem wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion That was always a luxury of its peculiar historical moment, though, wasn't it? Barlow didn't have to care who paid for the infrastructure, but he was just bloviating.

No, it's as true now as it was then. The intellectual property team didn't win on the merits or by law enforcement; it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick.

> it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick

That's not the whole story, though. There have been many community-driven projects to bring convenient access to copyrighted works to the masses in a convenient way. You may recall the meteoric success of Popcorn Time. Law enforcement shut them down. Without the hand of the state beating down any popular alternative to legal distribution it absolutely would be the dominant mode of media consumption.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#385

Post by Quarrelsome »

Retric wrote: post #370
munificent wrote: post #150

There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woo…

> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. This is just wildly incorrect. People started running out of trees during the early Iron Age. Woodlands have been a managed and often over exploited resource for a long time. Active agriculture vs passive woodlands vs animal grazing has been in constant tension for thousands…

> This is just wildly incorrect.

from an global perspective it isn't. Some places sure, like Western Europe, who in some cases had completed enclosure, but remember the new world had only been discovered a few hundred years ago at that point.

Just google maps the north part of South America, even today there are large swathes of undeveloped land across it and back then it was considerably less exploited. At that time it would have appeared infinite, especially to the European industrialists.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#387

Post by gopher_space »

arjie wrote: post #216
wat10000 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do it as a hobby, that's fine. Some people do it for a living. And while they aren't owed a living doing that specific thing, it is going to be a big problem for them if they can't make money at it anymore. I'm sure plenty of people feel the same way about software. They make software as a hobby and don't care about remuneration or credit. Meanwhile I write software for my day job and losing the ability to make m…

Ah, I see. It’s just straightforward protectionism like dockworkers opposing automation and so on. That I do comprehend, in fact. I write software too and I may no longer be able to just do it in the old way. Pretty scary world but also exciting. I can’t imagine trying to restrict LLM software writers on that basis but I can comprehend it as simply self-interest. Fair enough.

It’s about the amount of time available.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#388

Post by altruios »

lelanthran wrote: post #296
altruios wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

refuse consent? You may need to clarify that thought. I don't think the poster has a viewpoint that 'refuses consent', their viewpoint is their writing they put for others to view is for others to view, regardless of how it is viewed. They seem to be giving consent, not refusing it, no?

> refuse consent? Who said anything about refusing consent?

> I think you are walking all around the word "consent" and trying very hard to avoid it altogether.

> Your perspective, because it refuses to include any sort of consent, is invalid. No perspective that refuses consent can be valid.

This is what I was responding to. I do not understand your thinking in this post.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#389

Post by lp4v4n »

_dwt wrote: post #58

I have a question for all the "humans make those mistakes too" people in this thread, and elsewhere: have you ever read, or at least skimmed a summary of, "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"? Did you say "yeah, that sounds right"? Do you feel that your consciousness is primarily a linguistic phenomenon? I am not trying to be snarky; I used to think that intelligence was intrinsically…

>I am not trying to be snarky; I used to think that intelligence was intrinsically tied to or perhaps identical with language

I learned a long time ago that this wasn’t the case.

I can speak several languages, and many times when I remember something and want to search for it on Google or any other AI engine, I can’t recall which language I originally read it in.

So whatever mechanism the brain uses to store information, it’s certainly language‑agnostic. There are also many moments when you fully grasp a concept but forget the words to describe it, yet the concept itself remains clear in your mind.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#390

Post by CamperBob2 »

simianwords wrote: post #360
pessimizer wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an odd example of testing, but I design very complex board and card games, and LLMs are terrible at figuring out whether they make sense or really even restating the rules in a different wording. I thought they would be ideal for the job, until I realized that it would just pretend that the rules worked because they looked like board game rules. The more you ask it to restate, manipulate or simulate the rules,…

> Here's an odd example of testing, but I design very complex board and card games, and LLMs are terrible at figuring out whether they make sense or really even restating the rules in a different wording. I'm positive that they are perfectly fine and will a pretty good job. Did you actually try it?

Eh, I can see their point, I think. The models can restate the rules differently, I'm sure, but it sounds like the GP is saying that LLMs can't tell whether the rules are well-balanced.

It would be interesting to see some example problems along those lines. Design some games with complex rules, including one or two of the most subtle game-wrecking bugs you can think of, and ask the models if they can spot them.

In fact that sounds more interesting the more I think about it. Intensive RL on that sort of thing might generalize in... let's say useful ways.

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