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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

#61

Post by fizzynut »

shafoshaf wrote: post #23
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…

The only barrier for higher stakes applications is going to be the frequency of errors. Flying an airplane or running a factory has a lot less margin for error, but humans don't do those things perfectly either (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Union Carbide-Bhopal disaster). It doesn't have to be perfect, just better than humans. And in fact, I'd argue that by having no deterministic outcomes prevents systemic failure,…

The problem is that humans fail in very different ways. I don't ever need to wonder if a human driver following behind a road maintenance truck visibly carrying traffic cones or stop signs is going to be a problem...

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

#62

Post by kuramitropolis »

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…

"Working artists" (lol) are gonna be just as subservient with or without 2D typewriters, because the "creative industries" are to art basically what porn is to sex. (Anglophones have this linguisic quirk where half of the time "art" is synonymous with "graphics", which to other languages sounds like trying to tie your shoelaces with one hand fused to your face.)

Truth be told, I'm yet to see an AI-generated or AI-assisted work that provokes any internal experience other than thinking "hey, cool pixels/sounds/sentences/whatever". Not even the usual "somebody paid a lot of money to make this thing, so I better pay attention" which is the official function of commercial art.

It's certainly a very interesting academic exercise, and possibly a lucrative line of business. But if the value proposition is supposed to be "now it's easier for more people to create more complex stuff" (i.e. operate at a higher level of abstraction), why do I keep finding many "manually produced" works that speak to me on some level, even among the shitfountain of mass culture - while no AI-made thing has yet got me thinking anything other than "hey, cool tech?"

I'll start worrying when an AI chooses to ignore its incentives and, instead of doing something more rewarding, goes on to create a work of art just because. I'll also start worrying when people start becoming unreceptive to non-AI art, which I think is more likely to happen within our lifetimes.

Because what I see here is some cool tech for creating some ersatz sensory stimuli. And obviously, with enough compute you can make this advanced enough to confidently supplant the previous generation of tech for creating ersatz sensory stimuli. Somewhat less obviously, this reduces the risk of a spontaneous transcendental experience when perceiving AI art to a safe margin. Which is... probably good for business somehow?

At the end of the day, the human sensory system has a finite complexity, so you can create more and more compelling simulacra. Have at it. What'll happen is the next generation of humans will grow up awfully prone to Wile E. Coyote moments - tragic as well as comic.

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

#64

Post by PartiallyTyped »

bluejay2387 wrote: post #52

Alot of GOFAI was about symbolic reasoning which is back in fashion thanks to areas like Neurosymbolic AI and Graph Learning. One could argue that Generative AI like Stable Diffusion is incorporating some of these techniques. What is prompt engineering and textual inversion if not the manipulation of symbols? Add more recent interest in areas like Answer Set Programming and "what is old is new again". It's not like G…

One could very well argue that a Markov Chain as seen in Diffusion models is nothing more than following a graph from a point sampled from the prior back to the original distribution. The edges in a said graph are generated either via a scoring model which predicts an estimate of the gradient directly, or by generating a conditional pdf and sampling from it.

This is no different to tree search, not really anyway, it's just that ANNs are used to handle the intractability of expanding an infinite and continuous space or providing the probabilities within a MCTS - which is what AlphaGo and AlphaZero do.

One could argue that LMs / Causal Transformers are also doing treesearch, indeed one of our evaluation metrics, perplexity, is a measurement of the model's uncertainty in the transition p(token_i | token_{i-1} ... token_{0}).

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

#65

Post by wizzwizz4 »

sdenton4 wrote: post #48
nonrandomstring wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Turns out, we don't need transoceanic flight; we can put horses on stirrups, and have an elegant system of clockwork to allow them to power a boat.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-past...

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

#66

Post by darepublic »

mxwsn wrote: post #43

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!

The authors attitude is a bit annoying to me. This same kind of complacency is a roadblock to progress

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

#67

Post by pj_mukh »

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…

I used to believe exactly this, and I think this is mostly correct. There are exceptions though. The one that made me reconsider this proposition was Andrew Ng's early work. "New Fangled" AI to precisely control a helicopter! [1] Can't really accept mistakes or imprecision in the outcome. A lot of it was RL work [2]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-QUkgk3HyE&ab_channel=Stanf...

[2]: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2003/hash/b427426b8acd2c2e53827...

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

#68

Post by s1mon »

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…

NFTs notwithstanding, people paying big money for art aren't usually just "buying" .JPG files. There's often some physical component, sometimes quite large, heavy and difficult to reproduce. Oil paintings, castings, mixed-media pieces larger than a car, etc.

These sorts of things are less likely to be subject to someone typing a command into an AI generator program. AI stuff will have impacts on grunt work, and will be used to come up with crazy ideas when artists are stuck, and there will be some people who will make a lot of money with a line of text and some software, but overall, the art world values uniqueness, the human touch or at least the human conceit that goes into "computer art" or "machine art".

Art is only worth what people (real live humans) will pay for it. The NFT market has finally started to crater as people have realized there's nothing there there.

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

#69

Post by ripe »

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…

I believe most of these applications are based on statistical methods, but not what is commonly known as AI/ML.
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