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Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

billwadge.com

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Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#41

Post by _carbyau_ »

skissane wrote: post #35
triska wrote: post #2

The "new-fangled" AI, as the article calls it, is often useful when the stakes are low, and you can accept mistakes in outcomes. Examples of such applications are: trying to determine which of your friends occur in a photo, which movies a subscriber may be interested in, or which action could lead to victory in a computer game. Getting a rough translation of a newspaper entry, as mentioned in the article, is also a g…

> As soon as you need reliable outcomes, such as certainty whether an erroneous state can arise in a program, whether a proof for a mathematical conjecture exists, or whether a counterexample exists, exhaustive search is often necessary. Proof checking requires 100% reliability. But if you are searching the space of all possible proofs for a valid one, that process does not require 100% reliability. On the contrary,…

The idea of chainlinking "AI to guide/choose AI for the next step" is where I expect more impressive results in future. It will be important to understand the limitations of AI to be sure of proper placement.

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#42

Post by _carbyau_ »

jamesgreenleaf wrote: post #37

> The image generator seems to understand that you can’t see through opaque objects I thought this isn't the case for Stable Diffusion. Wasn't it the humans making the source images who understood things like that, and their knowledge became encoded in the latent space of the model? I'm not an expert. Please correct me here.

Hmm. Wonder what "astronaut riding a glass horse" would do then?

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#43

Post by mxwsn »

The author undersells himself - AlphaGo basically searches the game tree the same way he describes of GOFAI. Monte Carlo Tree Search is old yet essential. The neural network mainly improves the game evaluation heuristic, using function approximation which I'm sure the author is familiar with. Modern AI abilities are mind boggling but they're not that complicated to understand, especially with a GOFAI background!

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#44

Post by woopwoop »

tomrod wrote: post #34
time_to_smile wrote: post #10

People spend an awful lot of time talking about current successes in AI without often reflecting on how much (or little actually) AI impacts their lives. Despite all of the energy put into current gen AI, as far as every day impacts the biggest things I can think of are: - Spam filtering/email sorting - Web search - GPS/Wayfinding - Voice assistants These are the only practical applications of "AI" that I use more or…

You might be surprised where AI shows up. Use a credit card? Fraud monitoring, KYC, and other financial models run through (e.g. Early Warning service). Log into a website? Application monitoring with anomaly detection. Own a 401k with shares in a financial vehicle like an ETF? AI used to predict the market for in-the-money trades. Gone to the ER? Risk levels of mortality, sepsis, etc. are constantly pushed to your m…

Do any of those applications use neural nets in any non-trivial way? I'm pretty sure that kind of stuff is all classical statistical modeling.

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#46

Post by drdeca »

falcolas wrote: post #18

As always, they mis-spelled the acronym for "Machine Learning". There's nothing "Artificial" or "Intelligent" here but a mathematical algorithm operating on an algorithmically-encoded dataset. If anything, it's closer to an encryption algorithm where the keys can decrypt deterministic parts of the plantext from the cyphertext and soften the edges a bit.

While I don't really endorse it, I understand the objection to a name with the word "Intelligence" as part of it.

I don't understand the objection to the word "Artificial".

Why do you say that there's nothing "Artificial" about these programs. Now, they may be contexts in which you could call a program "natural" in the sense of, "the natural way to do something", but, at the same time, are not all computer programs, in a different sense, artificial?

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#47

Post by [deleted] »

thwayunion wrote: post #6
triska wrote: post #2

The "new-fangled" AI, as the article calls it, is often useful when the stakes are low, and you can accept mistakes in outcomes. Examples of such applications are: trying to determine which of your friends occur in a photo, which movies a subscriber may be interested in, or which action could lead to victory in a computer game. Getting a rough translation of a newspaper entry, as mentioned in the article, is also a g…

> As soon as you need reliable outcomes, such as certainty whether an erroneous state can arise in a program, whether a proof for a mathematical conjecture exists, or whether a counterexample exists, exhaustive search is often necessary. Checking proofs is easier than finding proofs. > The question then soon becomes: How can we best delegate this search to a computer, in such a way that we can focus on a clear descri…

[deleted]

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#48

Post by sdenton4 »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #21
falcolas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, there's an area of research that's under way called "AI Assurance" which seeks to answer many of these questions. Some things they're attempting: - Creating explainable outcomes by tracing the inner works of ML models. - Looking for biases in models using random inputs & looking for biased outputs. - Using training sets with differently weighted models to find attacks and biases. etc.

The tragedy is that GOFAI did all these things as built-ins. Procedural expert systems have been doing introspection, backtracing, declaring confidence intervals etc since the 1960s. Layering "assurance" on top of inherently jittery statistical/stochastic and neural systems seems to misunderstand how these models evolved, where they come from and why there are alternatives.

While horses don't consume fossil fuels, they also don't solve the problem of transoceanic flight. Yet for some reason every discussion of airplane design ends up dominated by a vocal contingent of buggy whip salesmen.

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#49

Post by cateye »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #42
jamesgreenleaf wrote: post #37

> The image generator seems to understand that you can’t see through opaque objects I thought this isn't the case for Stable Diffusion. Wasn't it the humans making the source images who understood things like that, and their knowledge became encoded in the latent space of the model? I'm not an expert. Please correct me here.

Hmm. Wonder what "astronaut riding a glass horse" would do then?

I just tried it out. This prompt (without any additional description) didn't had a satisfying expected output with Stable Diffusion 1.5.

With some other keywords, it generated some cool looking images but not any where there was a clear transparent horse and visible legs of an astronaut or something.

It is generally just very hard to compose a prompt where multiple subjects interact in a specific instructed way.

Re: Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI

#50

Post by bulbosaur123 »

synapticpaint wrote: post #13

"Finally, a vital question is, how will this affect today’s working artists? Here the answer is not so optimistic." I have a different take on this. I think this technology will allow more people, not less, to make money as a living (so, professionally) in a visual arts related industry. So I'm broadening the field to include not just "artists" but "commercial art" as well (designers, commercial illustrators, video/f…

> Whenever something becomes cheaper (in this case, labor for art), its consumption increases. So in the future, because producing commercial art is so much cheaper, it will be consumed a lot more.

I have the opposite view. With lower barrier of entry it will get over-saturated, over-produced and consumers will suffer from content fatigue leading to less interest in AI generated media as a whole.

An analogy is luxury goods. Reducing price of luxury goods decreases demand for them.

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