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The AI bullshit singularity

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Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#91

Post by timmytokyo »

echelon wrote: post #18
jsheard wrote: post #5

The same goes for image generation models, AI art already has a tendency to veer into the same clichés and those are only going to get reinforced if newer models are trained on newer scrapes which now include the million hyper-derivative AI images being uploaded to places like DeviantArt, Twitter and Pixiv every day. Those vendors who got in early have a moat in the form of untainted scrapes, but they'll eventually n…

This is such a wrong take. Even if the data is 100% synthetic, you can still hill climb to new mountains. If you don't believe me, look at evolution. It doesn't matter if we no longer have 100% human art as input. This is the worst these systems will ever look and feel, and they're only going to improve. I'd be willing to do a longbets on this one.

There are biological analogies you could have chosen other than adaptive hill-climbing. For instance, there's adaptive radiation, where a small population of organisms is introduced into a new environment and rapidly diversifies into new species, filling niches that weren't filled before. After the environment is mostly saturated, the populations stabilize and adaptation slows down, with gradual and relatively slow change and diversification.

Plugging LLM into this analogy would lead to a story where we're at the initial "Permian explosion" phase of evolution. New LLMs are rapidly "hill climbing" as they feed on virgin data scraped from the Internet. But as those LLMs diversify and adapt, they peter out once all niches have been filled and the fuel consumed.

Another analogy is the Petri dish, but that's an even more pessimistic analogy than adaptive radiation.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#92

Post by maaaaattttt »

The fact that internet is going to be filled with AI content is likely to happen. But for the rest I think it’s the classical bias science fiction has when predicting the future. More of the same. Or the linear transposition of the now (for a lack of better wording). Think CRT screens alongside flying cars.

One could argue that LLMs have some form of intelligence already even though I believe it falls more under “very good intuition”. Even if the internet is filled with trash, we still have (and will continue to do so I hope) a lot of content of high quality available (all the books, podcasts, videos, etc. produced up until now). If you take human intelligence, it doesn’t require the whole internet to start to get smart. A lot of interactions with the real world and some good books/videos should be enough to get to AGI (and start the dreaded feedback loop). We just haven’t found a way to achieve it yet (AFAIK).

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#93

Post by jimbokun »

lewhoo wrote: post #38
smartmic wrote: post #2

I broadly agree with that. Repeated training with self-generated data is the technological equivalent of incest and can lead to nothing good.

I think I'll restrain from buying into this until much more testing is conducted. There is information out there suggesting training on synthetic data is at least on par but cheaper.

On par at doing what?

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#95

Post by aj7 »

dale_glass wrote: post #22
jsheard wrote: post #5

The same goes for image generation models, AI art already has a tendency to veer into the same clichés and those are only going to get reinforced if newer models are trained on newer scrapes which now include the million hyper-derivative AI images being uploaded to places like DeviantArt, Twitter and Pixiv every day. Those vendors who got in early have a moat in the form of untainted scrapes, but they'll eventually n…

Art is much less vulnerable. Art is very heavily tagged, accurately described and filtered. Many galleries don't accept AI art at all, which means to sneak in the AI needs to be pretty much perfect. Also, there's an enthusiastic scene of LoRAs where the makers work with small enough datasets to do manual curation.

Photography has been very well developed technically for almost a century. Yet very little is considered art. The most interesting AI art, to me, are “image compilations” where the compiler appears to have taken just a bit of LSD.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#96

Post by Eliah_Lakhin »

I think that people's believe in LLM is intelligence is closely tied to mistaken association between intelligence and the ability to speak.

Parrots can speak, but they cannot reason. Moreover, evolutionary, birds learned to mimic the speech to fool other species. To fool in such way that other species would think that parrots are of the same specie.

We, the humans, are smart enough to recognise that even though parrots can talk, they are not as smart as we are. Unfortunately for us, LLMs are much more advanced things than parrots, and they are capable to fool broad masses pretending that LLMs are of the human specie with all inherent features including the reasoning intelligence (that we cannot easily test externally).

This is unfortunate, because such false believes slow down actual scientific progress towards the natural intelligence researches, and towards creating of the true reasoning artificial intelligence.

Btw, I wouldn't be surprised that if one day the AGI created, it will not be able to speak at all, nor recognise the images.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#97

Post by empathy_m »

teraflop wrote: post #39

I'm almost certain that I've seen this exact phenomenon described in a sci-fi novel written before LLMs existed. I thought it was Neal Stephenson's Anathem , but a quick skim through the text didn't turn anything up. Anybody else know what I might be thinking of?

Yes it's a major plot point in Anathem. The Internet was so badly polluted with machine generated garbage that a special caste of techno priests, the Ita, evolved with the mission of doing machine augmented web searches to find valid knowledge among the vast noise.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#98

Post by alkonaut »

Solvency wrote: post #64
scottbez1 wrote: post #20

Succinctly stated and something that resonates strongly with me. In the last internet revolution (web search), results started high quality because the inputs were high quality - bloggers and others just wanted to document and share knowledge. But over time, many interests (largely commercial) figured out how to game the system with SEO, and quality of search results has decreased as search's incentive structure led…

This comment/sentiment/idea has already been thoroughly discussed, shared, retweeted, posted, and echoed a couple thousand times online already. Humans like you have been redundantly saying the same things in varying degrees of novelty, like this, for centuries.

That's what the topic of the post we are discussing is. He is basically reiterating the point. Which is a good point. And there have been zero good arguments made (as far as I'm aware) to why this fear would be unfounded.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#99

Post by jimbokun »

ronald_raygun wrote: post #4

I always found the idea of infinitely self improving AI to be suspect. Let’s say we have a super smart AI with intelligence 1, and it uses all that to improve itself by 0.5. Then that new 1.5 uses itself to improve by 0.25. Then 0.125, etc etc. obviously it’s always increasing, but it’s not going to have the runaway effect people think.

The general assumption is that some form of Moore’s Law continues, meaning that even without major algorithmic improvements AIs will blow past human intelligence and continue improving at an exponential rate.

Re: The AI bullshit singularity

#100

Post by __loam »

aj7 wrote: post #88
__loam wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We may enter into a highly ironic regime where ai companies subsidize writers and artists at scale to produce better data.

I like this idea very much. Is this similar to human moderation of training data?

Sure. I suspect it might be hard to actually recruit people like this considering how the people who got sampled are hugely pissed off at AI firms rn, but money will go a long way here.
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