Not by AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Not by AI

#91

Post by giraffe_lady » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 1:41 PM UTC

brookst wrote: post #82

giraffe_lady wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about other people but I don't "fault" the AI anything, nor am I even particularly bothered by AI-generated content per se. What fills me with dread is the obvious glee over removing human work from sellable products, when there is no viable alternative to working for most people. We've created a world where a lot of jobs can be automated, and that is somehow a bad thing , and it's going to be used to cr…

Would you be happier if your car / bicycle / city bus was produced entirely by hand, with no tools or automation? Labor will shift. Bemoaning new efficiencies and new empowerment because they reduce the need for meaningless labor consumption is backwards. We should be sensitive to those whose lives will take an unexpected turn (I may be one of them!), but we should do so in the context of celebrating greater individu…

No, as I was trying to imply I don't particularly care about the use of a given technology per se, I care about the consequences of its application to labor.

"Labor will shift" makes it sound like a smooth and automatic process but it is not. People will lose jobs with no equivalent replacements, families will fall into poverty and misery when they hadn't before. In a place like the US with healthcare tied to employment, people will die. And eventually, it will reach a stable equilibrium with fewer jobs that can support a reasonable quality of life. That's what labor shifting looks like, we know because we've seen it over and over again.

The changes might ultimately be net positive for a great many people, but that's small consolation to the people whose lives will be made much much worse during the transition. None of this is inevitable, but historically it's the path we've chosen and we seem even more dedicated to this outcome now than at previous times of change in the relation between labor and survival.

Re: Not by AI

#92

Post by brucethemoose2 » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 1:42 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #4

transitivebs wrote: post #2

A quote I heard recently that really resonated with me: "Soon, asking a writer if they use AI will be like asking a photographer if they use Photoshop" – e.g., it's a foregone conclusion, and the best artists will generally adapt to using the best tools available

Art will continue to evolve with AI. Another argument I keep hearing (most recently from pg), is that we'll always need non-AI training data. That, too, doesn't follow. Training new models on synthetic data does not mean we get stuck in a particular mode or style. We'll continue moving, improving, and trying wildly new things. Bootstrapping with synthetic data doesn't block evolution - it enables faster evolution, ev…

Training ESRGAN, I quickly learned that AI sniffs artifacts humans can't see. And I got particularly funky results training a model on selected previous generation upscales.

Hence I disagree. Even of the training data curators are perfect, there is a risk of "model inbreeding."

And the curators are not perfect. In fact, they seem to prioritize (by necessity) volume and speed over quality and curation when training these LLMs and diffusion models.

Re: Not by AI

#93

Post by decremental » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 1:42 PM UTC

gspencley wrote: post #50

underyx wrote: post #17

> If humans rely solely on AI to generate content moving forward, any new content generated by AI may just be recycled content from the past. To be honest, I’d struggle to find any human content that is not recycled from the past. I guess we are still better than AI at remixing sufficiently novel combinations of concepts but I think much of this AI content aversion comes from some kind of phobia, or an unwillingness…

Philosophical food for thought: if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop? In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea", then how did the ideas that we are pulling from, deriving from and combining come into existence? If all we are saying is that existing ideas inspire new ones, or that most human generated content is derivative, then I complet…

It's just something people say lazily in passing without giving much actual thought to why they're repeating what they saw somewhere else in a similar thread.

Re: Not by AI

#94

Post by anonyfox » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 1:43 PM UTC

gspencley wrote: post #50

underyx wrote: post #17

> If humans rely solely on AI to generate content moving forward, any new content generated by AI may just be recycled content from the past. To be honest, I’d struggle to find any human content that is not recycled from the past. I guess we are still better than AI at remixing sufficiently novel combinations of concepts but I think much of this AI content aversion comes from some kind of phobia, or an unwillingness…

Philosophical food for thought: if all content is recycled / mixed from the past, when did innovation and creativity stop? In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea", then how did the ideas that we are pulling from, deriving from and combining come into existence? If all we are saying is that existing ideas inspire new ones, or that most human generated content is derivative, then I complet…

I think this is purely a statistics problem. Like all breakthroughs are actually _discoveries_ of things that already do exist or mechanisms that can be exploited somehow.

There is a huge amount of information flowing around us in realtime, and linking some thought/thing to something else, which then might have implications (subsequent discoveries) is statistics. We do have people with a better wetware so they have increased %chance do recognize something in front of them as well as linking it in a "novel way", but this is not really neccessary, it only increases %chances.

Even pretty radical things can be explained this exact way, up to having some sort of brain "damage" (or drugs like LSD) that changes mental pathways and have a %chance to be actually right and lead to discoveries, but also the %chance here is very low. (not every trip is a breakthrough in art/science, right?)... a bit like iE people that can smell sounds or link some natural phenomenon with an emotional situation between some people and write about it.

> peak human innovation

that might simply a nonsense question if you follow my previous argument. there simply is no real "innovation" - only "discoveries" of stuff. and we meatbags with very limitied/unreliable wetware at some point can't "progress" any more, but non-biologically flawed systems might overcome our limitations and do just that for us.

with our naked eyes, we cannot see things like infrared light, but it exists and some tools helped us to understand everything around it somewhat. now we're building more advanced tooling to get through the next plateaus - just like we have to build very sophisticated tooling to watch further into space or more closely into fractions of atoms, which in turn lead to more discoveries, and ultimately "innovation" we can feel in our lives.

the only thing I will 100% agree to is that a real AGI will be the _last_ discovery/innovation humanity will ever make - and that is a good thing - it means we finally overcome our biological limits somewhat.

Re: Not by AI

#95

Post by return_to_monke » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 1:43 PM UTC

I wonder how fast this badge will get into datasets, and AIs, which will then try to replicate it - as part of the content they generate

Re: Not by AI

#96

Post by blueboo » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 1:44 PM UTC

Ironically, this celebration of originality itself recycles a now-familiar, incorrect meme—that generative AI just interpolates/remixes/collages between existing work.

It does a lot more than that. It is capable of novelty and striking out in novel directions per the AI artist’s direction. Maybe there’s some soul-grounded capital-t truth forever out of reach, but that’s metaphysics.

Re: Not by AI

#97

Post by DrewADesign » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 1:44 PM UTC

underyx wrote: post #17

> If humans rely solely on AI to generate content moving forward, any new content generated by AI may just be recycled content from the past. To be honest, I’d struggle to find any human content that is not recycled from the past. I guess we are still better than AI at remixing sufficiently novel combinations of concepts but I think much of this AI content aversion comes from some kind of phobia, or an unwillingness…

The problem isn't art, it's discovery. There's more new original art being made and published right now than ever before in history. I'm in art school so I see a lot of it. Sure, there's a lot more chaff to cut through than there was when publishing was almost exclusively controlled by large corporations, but it's there.

Art that isn't recycled is almost always an illusion caused by your not being familiar with the things it was remixing. Nobody pulls things out of thin air. Even whacked-out acid trip visions were molded by our cultural experiences and aesthetic. While there are a few people who make large shifts in their artform-- e.g. Jackson Pollock, Jimi Hendrix, and Antoine Carême-- but a) they were still making incremental progress, and b) you'd have a pretty limited set of things to choose from for your entertainment.

PS Edit: Right now AI-generated art is novel, but it has far less potential to meaningfully advance art as time progresses. It will mimic what it sees, but it won't see anything that a creative cultural avant-garde doesn't produce first, and as long as real people are doing it first, there will be eyes that want to see it before an AI algorithm waters it down into some conceptual amalgam of its real form. That probably includes commercial entities who are deliberately trying to make themselves stand out.

Re: Not by AI

#98

Post by tmountain » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 1:45 PM UTC

lrantf wrote: post #63

underyx wrote: post #17

> If humans rely solely on AI to generate content moving forward, any new content generated by AI may just be recycled content from the past. To be honest, I’d struggle to find any human content that is not recycled from the past. I guess we are still better than AI at remixing sufficiently novel combinations of concepts but I think much of this AI content aversion comes from some kind of phobia, or an unwillingness…

The AI aversion has several reasons: 1) The output, while impressive on the surface, is bland and recycled. It will drag down the general level in the same manner that CGI has destroyed movies. 2) People don't want to consume AI generated content in the same manner that they generally don't watch Stockfish vs. Stockfish. 3) It is not phobia, it is disgust at humans being dehumanized. The phobia seems to be on the sid…

Regarding point #3.

The problem people have with AI is that it is cheapening the things that make us "special". If anything I can draw, paint write, create, and pour my heart and soul into can be acceptably approximated by a "bot" in five seconds or less, then what do I have to offer to the world beyond my "work" output? The things that creatively inspire me have been commoditized in a way where it's exponentially harder for me to generate value doing them.

Artists and musicians have famously struggled for centuries. A technology that raises the bar on an already exceedingly difficult path (making money doing creative things) makes that particular situation much worse.

Re: Not by AI

#99

Post by nemo44x » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 1:45 PM UTC

"Made in America" vibes. It must be better because we made it...

There's a sort of insecurity about this. And I get it, people are freaking out. I feel unsettled in many ways and I truly believe this technology is profound. Wait until it's realtime and embedded in everything. But I don't believe it's a cause for concern. I don't think we need to legislate transformers trained on public data as something illegal, for example.

I think it's a tool, a fantastic tool and a powerful tool, but a tool none the less. It will democratize many things and it will lead to increased productivity and creativity. But we, humans, will find more things to do; ways we can't see right now because it wasn't possible and still probably isn't.

Re: Not by AI

#100

Post by blueboo » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 1:45 PM UTC

sharemywin wrote: post #90

sharemywin wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if people have actually tried prompting chatgpt for lists of creative things. make up a list of fictious creatures and describe them. make sure the names aren't reused.

These seem pretty creative to me? are they? I'm not a fictional guy so I don't really know? can you be extraordinarily creative and unusual? Sure, here are five highly creative and unusual fictional creatures: Crystalline Leviathan: The Crystalline Leviathan is a massive creature that lives deep in the ocean. Its body is made entirely of iridescent crystals that refract light in all directions, creating a dazzling di…

Plus you can prompt it to take those results and make them more unusual, evocative, creative. Basically use the same kind of creative pumps that human artists do.