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The AI Battle

aifuture.substack.com

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Re: The AI Battle

#41

Post by DalasNoin »

ajafari1 wrote: post #16
qualudeheart wrote: post #14

Dark times ahead. If you haven’t already made it big with crypto or startups, you are toast and will be trapped in the permanent UBI underclass. That assumes that there will be a UBI at all. Combined with inflation this will mean that only those with $5 million or more in the bank will live what still count as middle class lifestyles. Those with less money will be forced into poverty. Many will adopt petty crime for…

I do believe AI alignment and safety is a huge concern, and unfortunately thinks are moving so fast there is not enough time for society to adapt. However, if we can safeguard that I am very optimistic about what a sufficiently advanced AI (we don't even need AGI) can do to help with climate change, medical advances, etc. Costs of goods will plummet as things become more abundant. The question is which path are we on…

Even if alignment works and AI is "safe", what does that actually mean?

Frank Herbert in Dune wrote about AI: 1. "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

If a few people control super intelligent systems, they could probably control all your thinking. Would these machines run all the media, all the politics, all of society? These machines could likely persuade you into any believe or action.

2. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments"

These early art generating AIs will only be the beginning to superhuman visual and audio art. All music, movies, games and whatever will come might be created by AI at a superhuman level. Will they control our sense of beauty and will you find human art to be dull in comparison?

This is just some perspective on what might be wrong with an AI utopia.

Re: The AI Battle

#42

Post by stuckinhell »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #33
stuckinhell wrote: post #13

AI that can do creative work is scary for its implications on humanity. Are we at best biological AI's ? I've played around with several of them. These artwork AI's are way more scary than GPT-3 et al because they seem to do something so creative with such good visible results. I don't think the genie goes back in the bottle. I think humanity has an existential crisis on its hands. Whats the point in doing things if…

> Whats the point in doing things if the AI can do it better than you ? If doing something makes you happy, that can be reason enough for doing a thing. A huge portion of people already engage in "useless" hobbies with no meaningful external outputs. And in the vast portion of those situations, experts and/or machines already exist that can do far better than a hobbyist. Yet people still have hobbies, because hobbies…

How do you know a huge portion of people engage in useless hobbies with no meaningful external outputs ? I really don't even know how one would go about figuring that out.

I think I see the opposite in my part of the United States. A life without purpose leads to rampant drug use, malaise, and decay.

I think an AI on demand that can out compete people in most of their hobbies would be absolute game changer, and doesn't currently exist. If that kind of automation reached the average consumer, I think the vast amount of people would give up those hobbies as well.

Re: The AI Battle

#43

Post by stuckinhell »

ajafari1 wrote: post #8

Any bets on when the majority of software development is automated? My estimate based on the exponential improvement rate of AI on various tests like MMLU and MATH is within 3 years. I know that might sound crazy, but a year ago it would have been crazy to think that graphics design jobs could be automated by an AI in 2022. Feel free to disagree and discuss why.

A huge amount of Software development is CRUD and that will be automated very quickly and soon.

Re: The AI Battle

#44

Post by awillen »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #32
slowmovintarget wrote: post #10

This very much requires acceptance of the worse-is-better model. That "beautiful" drawing of an an astronaut riding a horse is aesthetically... crap. It may take a person 5 hours to paint or draw that, but, arguably, a person wouldn't. GPT-3 might generate a novel, but, generally speaking the prose is jarring and awful to read, because there is no intent (danger: philosophically loaded word) behind it. It's all autom…

I don't think these sorts of tools will ever be used to generate a novel or something on that scale. We're building really sexy autocomplete tools that creators will use to fill in the blanks much like the great masters of the renaissance used apprentices to do much of the work in their masterpieces. People will outline what they want, then ask the AI to fill in the blanks, and iteratively refine the result. As long…

Ever is an exceedingly long time. I would be shocked if 100 years from now, we didn't have AI-authored bestselling novels. Even then, they might not be literary masterpieces, but certainly AI will be able to write formulaic stuff that sells really well.

If you don't believe that, just consider where technology was 100 years ago and what the response would have been if you'd described DALL-E in its current incarnation and asked people if they thought that would ever come to pass.

Re: The AI Battle

#45

Post by astrange »

qualudeheart wrote: post #20
slowmovintarget wrote: post #10

This very much requires acceptance of the worse-is-better model. That "beautiful" drawing of an an astronaut riding a horse is aesthetically... crap. It may take a person 5 hours to paint or draw that, but, arguably, a person wouldn't. GPT-3 might generate a novel, but, generally speaking the prose is jarring and awful to read, because there is no intent (danger: philosophically loaded word) behind it. It's all autom…

I agree that the horse picture sucks. Other people might say that they like Dall-E’s output on Twitter, for signalling purposes, but I still think they don’t really believe that. Still, it’s only a matter of time till nicer graphics are possible. Most graphic designers and artists are still worse than this thing, especially the type that bought a $200 drawing tablet on Amazon and sell their services on Fiverr. Those…

Nicer graphics are already possible from freely available colab notebooks like StableDiffusion. DALLE has the cruded interface possible; it's more a demonstration that the idea works at all than something you could use.

Re: The AI Battle

#46

Post by jaggirs »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #37

I'm not sure how the author could be so blind to the simple fact that computer generated articles and images are not useful. I mean if you want to replicate low quality blog spam and poorly written local news blurbs, maybe you could con a few companies into using your service. Or if you want to destroy the stock image market or the album art market (maybe that kind of "disruption" is somehow beneficial to you?) I gue…

I am not sure how you can be so derogatory yet apparently so ignorant. Have you even seen what DALLE-2 (or imagen) can generate? DALLE-2 does not have to 'prove itself' it is clearly on-par with human designers in terms of quality and price. There even is a product on the market right now called Midjourney that is worse in quality than DALLE-2 yet is growing incredibly fast and already breaks even economically.

If NLP tasks make a similar jump in quality as DALLE-2 did when compared to DALLE then they too might disrupt the writer industry.

Re: The AI Battle

#47

Post by qualudeheart »

marvin wrote: post #26
qualudeheart wrote: post #14

Dark times ahead. If you haven’t already made it big with crypto or startups, you are toast and will be trapped in the permanent UBI underclass. That assumes that there will be a UBI at all. Combined with inflation this will mean that only those with $5 million or more in the bank will live what still count as middle class lifestyles. Those with less money will be forced into poverty. Many will adopt petty crime for…

Things will be shaken up, the way they were when the steam engine was invented. But there's no reason to believe we're headed for a dystopic future. The result of this development and the underlying trend is vastly increased wealth creation. That's a good thing . You'd have to be a luddite to think otherwise. Read e.g. https://moores.samaltman.com/ , where Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO) suggests a scheme for wealth taxation…

The difference is that the steam engine created jobs that went to humans.

Strong AI, if it does create jobs, does not necessarily create jobs for humans. Any jobs that it creates could also be done by AI, cutting humans out of the growth of the economy.

Now I am in fact a luddite if it means (most) humans become second class citizens and especially if there’s no transhumanist enhancement option for us to stay competitive. Even more so if I’m among the people locked in the UBI class.

I like Altman’s welfare plan. I think it’s one of the easier ways to prevent the riots and emergent fascism that I predicted in other posts.

Re: The AI Battle

#48

Post by astrange »

stuckinhell wrote: post #13

AI that can do creative work is scary for its implications on humanity. Are we at best biological AI's ? I've played around with several of them. These artwork AI's are way more scary than GPT-3 et al because they seem to do something so creative with such good visible results. I don't think the genie goes back in the bottle. I think humanity has an existential crisis on its hands. Whats the point in doing things if…

> Whats the point in doing things if the AI can do it better than you ?

That's not how jobs work (comparative advantage). An AI won't replace you, simply because there's something better it could be doing than replacing you. And, no, it can't do everything at once - that would be a perpetual motion machine.

Re: The AI Battle

#49

Post by Retric »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #32
slowmovintarget wrote: post #10

This very much requires acceptance of the worse-is-better model. That "beautiful" drawing of an an astronaut riding a horse is aesthetically... crap. It may take a person 5 hours to paint or draw that, but, arguably, a person wouldn't. GPT-3 might generate a novel, but, generally speaking the prose is jarring and awful to read, because there is no intent (danger: philosophically loaded word) behind it. It's all autom…

I don't think these sorts of tools will ever be used to generate a novel or something on that scale. We're building really sexy autocomplete tools that creators will use to fill in the blanks much like the great masters of the renaissance used apprentices to do much of the work in their masterpieces. People will outline what they want, then ask the AI to fill in the blanks, and iteratively refine the result. As long…

Modern word processors haven’t suddenly and dramatically increased the number of great books available. They save a lot of time and effort relative to a typewriter, but such drudgery isn’t the bottleneck on creativity that you’re suggesting.

Re: The AI Battle

#50

Post by qualudeheart »

bsenftner wrote: post #19

The "AI battle" only rages for those who don't make AI; those that write AI know that battle is lost, we will not have an AGI in our lifetimes. We lack fundamental components, such as artificial comprehension. Lacking any form of comprehension, weak or not, all AI technology can ever produce is idiot savants and personality theater. It is not capable of writing original software, beyond the use of pre-composable comp…

Can you explain what you mean by comprehension?
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