Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

"It's going to result in significant changes, just like microprocessors, the internet, and smart phones did, but it is not going to be the end of creativity."

All of that stuff might create chaos, but only with significant human input.

why? it seems descriptive of a real phenomena to me

― z_tbd, Tuesday, 16 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

So all the bits you may recognise haven't been independently created by AI. We already have "vast structures of polluting hardware", for example.

i haven't read the new left review piece. when it comes to the use of the term "data populism", i'm going off the first two sentences above:

"Mean images are far from random hallucinations. They are predictable products of data populism."

that sounds right to me. data populism, to me, is related to recreating the average of what vast swaths of people "like", which, imo, leads to bland crappy art. i've typed too many words in the past about all of that, but that's because it's a real phenomena, both in AI and non-AI (like the MCU)

the stuff in the quote about "social dreams without sleep", "processing society's irrational functions to their logical conclusions" -- i wish that were more true, or that i felt it to be more true. that would be more interesting than art that looks like deviantart. it's funny to me that everyone complains about how dall-e can't do hands and makes too many fingers and stuff -- that is actually interesting! it's gonna suck when it makes normal hands and fingers!

It will make normal hands and fingers, so what?

there is a memetic quality to discourse. when people sit down to write or even just have a conversation, they aren't saying new things every time. they often don't know where their influences are coming from either. as barthes said, "the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture." (this is true of other types of creative work too, like the production and dissemination of images is also a kind of discuourse).

however, it is one thing to recognize this "automatic" quality that is present in communication. it is another to fully automate it. this will just harden all of our patterns and assumptions. it's like, with these machines culture can reproduce itself without being mediated by thinking at all.

i just don't think this can possibly be good.

with these machines culture can reproduce itself without being mediated by thinking at all.

entire post was otm

treeship otm. this 'technology' isn't going away because it will be extremely useful as a concealment. the more i think about it the more the cheap captive labor that drives it is the key. i also am viscerally repulsed by its output and can't entertain anyone finding any merit at all therein. i've seen, ignored and been happier for ignoring trends before this and i'm sure this won't be the last.

would love to see an AI bot in a pitch meeting

technology has already shifted our culture a lot, even subtle things like spell check on phones I think changed the way we communicate with each other and made it a bit less personal. Twitter and YouTube have spun off their own weird brands of comedy which have materialized in sketch shows and stand up. it wasn't all that long ago that referencing a meme in real life was a really weird thing to do. I guess its natural to be afraid of the wider implications of this but I think it ain't all bad. My kids growing up in a world where you can literally just ask your watch a question and get the real answer is kind of a cool thing, if I'd grown up with that I think it would've rewired my brain in a few helpful ways

this whole thing reminds me a bit of these old ideas of how say the drum machine was gonna put drummers out of business, or how the Fairlight and Synclaiver were gonna kill the orchestra, and people spent a quarter million dollars to produce albums like Shout! and Pulling Rabbits Out of a Hat which sounded like shit. and that's not just revisionist history, people thought so at the time too. it's the same with a lot of AI stuff, yes the images they generate now look amazing but they're also soulless and completely uninspiring. the writing is technically impressive but also boring as hell. but like with drum machines for instance you had these folks who realized the real potential in them wasn't just replicating existing music but in doing stuff humans couldn't do, and that is where a lot of really great stuff lies.

so I think the shit like "AI's gonna generate an infinite amount of Drake songs" is just going to be a dead end, no one outside of blue checkmark types are gonna think that's interesting or gamechanging at all. but there are a lot of cool things you can do now with AI that simply wasn't possible before. some of the deepfake stuff on YouTube is really clever and hilarious, but the common thread is that all the good stuff is something that's been thought through and edited by a real person. even like that Twitch stream that did endless Seinfeld or Steamed Hams is a fascinating art project, because it's not AI replacing art, it's a new kind of art that's funny and bizarre because you know it's AI. that's the kind of thing I expect to see a lot of in the future.

My problem is there are a number of legitimate concerns that you could reasonably discuss about it but the issues that everyone focuses on are WHOGIVESASHIT.jpg

Just like when auto-tune gained took off in the 21st century and a valid gripe was "it makes a lot of pop singers sound sterile and homogeneous" but all we ever heard was the meritocratic argument that it was making bad singers into amazing ones, as if a tool that could fix wobbly pitch or create a neat robot sound was turning Lil Wayne into Mario Lanza

To me that's the exact same story, we focus on the shittiest derivative and unimaginative uses of a thing, which doesn't really make a whole lot of sense because 99.9% of attempts to be creative in every medium ever have been shitty, derivative, and unimaginative.

Sen. Hawley asks whether A.I. is going to be more like the printing press (good) or the atom bomb (bad).

— Scott Nover (@ScottNover) May 16, 2023

xxp AI might actually be able to do that though. a guy from a YMO Discord used an AI vocal filter + the Senor Conocut instrumental track to make something that really did sound like Frank Sinatra doing a cover of "Music Plans". that said it's kind of hard to imagine someone getting famous this way, at least the auto-tuned stuff does sound like their real voice somehow. but I can see a lot of creative/weird pop guys like Max Tundra making somethinghttps://www.ilxor.com/ILX/SiteNewAnswersControllerServlet cool out of it.

"with these machines culture can reproduce itself without being mediated by thinking at all."

It's merely an effect that cultural artefacts can be recombined in, at times, novel ways. Ultimately though a person is thinking of prompts as input.

Can a machine make art you'd want to see, or novels you want to read? To me AI is taking out the human input altogether.

xp = at some point someone might combine a set of outputs from AIs in a really interesting way. That's human input though.

I don't think we are anywhere close to machines being independently creative, I'm not even sure how close we are to humans using these AI tools to create writing or images or music that make any real lasting impression, although I do think that will happen sooner or later.

Yeah I can definitely see humans combining outputs to produce something wonderful but it would hardly be the cause for a moral panic.

These days v few ppl create paintings on a canvas that could match the old masters. That time has mostly been and gone.

that's true, plus everyone has forgotten about the painters from the past who were not masters

Just like when auto-tune gained took off in the 21st century and a valid gripe was "it makes a lot of pop singers sound sterile and homogeneous" but all we ever heard was the meritocratic argument that it was making bad singers into amazing ones, as if a tool that could fix wobbly pitch or create a neat robot sound was turning Lil Wayne into Mario Lanza

maybe more akin to sampling I think, which brought out a lot of the same arguments about how you didn't need "talent" anymore to make music

Ultimately though a person is thinking of prompts as input.

Certainly the depth and quality of the thought provided by the human 'sponsor' of the AI output is a critical piece of the process, but there is a reasonable counterargument that, while the ease and speed of creating AI outputs may superficially improve the quality of the mass of mediocre texts and imagery that already floods our human environment it will also accelerate the production and dissemination of junk content to the point where anything of exceptional value is instantly buried under the avalanche of crap. Social media has already taken us far down that road. AI will speed that process enormously.

Good points about AI not replacing “great art.”

But this has nothing to do with what I am saying.

I am saying that derivative text and imagery made by AI is ontologically different than the same made by people.

An information space, an Internet, filled with such material will be a degraded space, perhaps in subtle, even imperceptible ways.

Mass culture will become even less human than it is currently. And people will become lazier thinkers because they’ll use this machine to formulate their thoughts.

Autotune does not, on its own, impersonate human thought in a creepy, uncanny way. It’s just not a meaningful analogy.

On the bright side, maybe we'll enter a new golden age of philosophy, where the concept of "media literacy" gets folded into a larger project of everyday epistemological vigilance to avoid getting tricked by AIs that believe their own bullshit.

lololol a friend just posted this

"I tried playing chess with ChatGPT. It tried, but wasn't very good at it. Then, not very far in to the game it placed a knight I had already captured on to the board in a strategically advantageous. When I pointed out the, it apologized and then moved its queen.
Friends, we had traded queens the move before last."

Just seen a job ad for a Chat GPT Prompt Editor ($50 an hour, for sales copy), so it may well create as many jobs as it destroys!

"THE WORLD HAS CHANGED - we are NOT looking for someone who wants to write copy from scratch. Those days are gone. We need someone who embraces the new AI paradigm and can exploit all its power while minimising its deficiencies and shortcomings QUICKLY and EFFECTIVELY."

We imagine a person exists with this specific and desirable ability that exactly nobody had just a few months ago and we want to hire them to work their magic for us.

r/teachers is filled with teachers talking about using it to write first drafts of lesson plans and recommendation letters. I would rather die.

by the way treesh I know what you're anxious about because I kind of had the same thought myself when I saw Kraftwerk last year and it dawned on me how Computer World was really this sort of celebration of how these complex devices were going to wind up in our homes and our pockets. at the time they were just word processors or calculators or games like Pong but it was clear that the paradigm had shifted and that this thing, whatever it was, was not going away. but at least the humans still had control, it was about them doing the menial work for us.

and now things feel different, like our lives are being controlled by algorithm - maybe not because of AI specifically, though AI is certainly a leap in that direction. obviously there are thousands of ways in which this is actually a good and useful thing but also it does seem like feeding the algorithms is the most important thing - so many service workers I've had recently suggest very strongly that you give them the 5 star Yelp review, because they know this curries them favor with the algorithms, which is how they get business. lots of TV shows and movies, particularly those on streaming services, contain bits which I'm 99% sure were only put in there so they could get some viral gif out of it. lots of content is being made solely for the engagement. there are podcast bits that go viral and you look into it and the podcast itself doesn't even exist. it's a new way of thinking and it kind of sucks. hell this shit is even running the dating apps right now so in a way a big part of the next generation owes its very existence to the algorithm. I too get that sense that this is not really leading us down the best path.

lololol a friend just posted this

"I tried playing chess with ChatGPT. It tried, but wasn't very good at it. Then, not very far in to the game it placed a knight I had already captured on to the board in a strategically advantageous. When I pointed out the, it apologized and then moved its queen.
Friends, we had traded queens the move before last."

re: treeship

i agree with you and think that ultimately the problem i see with it is that writing is weirdly/naively just being seen as an end-product in and of itself.

whereas really, the whole point of writing is that it's thinking on a page. regardless of the tech and how good it is (and will get), there's just ultimately not really any *point* to outsourcing that part. especially in an academic sense.

ie. this nice quote via Sönke Ahrens of Richard Feynman talking about his notebooks:

"Richard Feynman once had a visitor in his office, a historian who wanted to interview him. When he spotted Feynman’s notebooks, he said how delighted he was to see such “wonderful records of Feynman’s thinking.”

“No, no!” Feynman protested. “They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.”

“Well,” the historian said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.”

“No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working. You have to work on paper, and this is the paper. OK?”"

I am very sympathetic to this view BUT sometimes writing is just instructions on how to run your dishwasher or whatever, it's not all gold just because it's the written word.

Yes but students need to write so they can work through their own thought process and formulate their ideas. If they rarely have to do this they will end up intellectually stunted. It’s not just their writing skills that will atrophy but their thinking skills.

The same is probably true for adults who end up automating their writing in their office jobs or personal correspondence. Literacy skills will dry up and with them reasoning skills.

Linee otm

I'm not so sure that students using ChatGPT is anything radically different from them plagiarising Wikipedia or whatever. And just as detectable (I know from painful experience, as my son was recently busted for using ChatGPT to do an assessment).

And if large language models are the basis on which AI is to go forward, and it seems to be the case, I don't think AI is going to impinge too much on true creativity. LLMs are designed to answer questions in the most obvious way, the way that they find most often in the datasets they're trained on - which is good if you're asking it to give you a short history of France, but useless for coming up with an original plot or metaphor or whatever.

It is certainly not as detectable. Turnitin.com and similar software can’t catch it. The digital tools to catch a.i. writing like “gptzero” simply do not work. The only way to catch it is if 1.) the bot makes a horrendous error due to a “hallucination” or 2.) you use draftback to see if they actually typed on the doc instead of copying and pasting.

One thing I have been thinking about a lot is that the last two decades of technology have led to the proliferation of a lot of very formulaic "content," and now the next generation of technology is enabling us to automate a lot of that same "content." Like the Buzzfeed quiz didn't exist 20 years ago, it had a very short life as a thing written by humans, and now apparently an AI can write it better. But part of why an AI can write it so well is that it was almost designed to be automatable. I could say the same about stuff like Marvel movies or Netflix docs or the harmonic and melodic simplification of pop music although I'm afraid of getting too trenchant social commentary with that.

xpost

yeah i agree. in the same sense that, ai-generated artwork as like, useful as the modern clipart/stock image in an office document, generated-text is the logical end-point for advertising copy, a lot of the internet etc.

but kind of similar to the image-generation stuff: to me, for it to be "good art" for a human audience - even in broadest the post-20th century sense - it just seems a bit *besides the point* for a human audience. like, not doubting how good the finished product can be or how impressive it can be. that art or writing etc. is essentially a self-actualisation vessel/tool for self-actualisation and *meaning*.

i mean, I'm bordering on full Eliezer-Yudowsky-singularity and end-of-humankind and losing sleep with this stuff in a wider sense...

but in terms of the replacing human-stuff-for-humans, it just seems like regardless of how good it is or gets, it's just a bit besides the point and that the goal posts will move accordingly (as they always have).

that even if it can fully replace the end-products, what makes writing/art/music/thought/etc useful or interesting to humans has a lot more to do with the journey rather than just the destination, so to speak.

^ "self-actualisation" a term so embarrassing i had to use it twice.

but in terms of the replacing human-stuff-for-humans, it just seems like regardless of how good it is or gets, it's just a bit besides the point and that the goal posts will move accordingly (as they always have).

that even if it can fully replace the end-products, what makes writing/art/music/thought/etc useful or interesting to humans has a lot more to do with the journey rather than just the destination, so to speak.

― linee, Tuesday, May 16, 2023 9:22 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

It has been pointed out that humans still watch humans play chess even though computers can beat the best chess masters at chess. But I do still darkly wonder if AI can reach a point where it can create art of a quality that we will accept it as "real" art or be wowed enough by it not to care that it wasn't created by a human. And I've been going through a lot of Yudowsky losing sleep moments recently too, over that, over loss of jobs, loss of purpose, perhaps even loss of control of human destiny, depending on how far this thing can really go. I never bought into any of the hype about the metaverse or crypto. This feels different. That doesn't mean I am convinced of where or how far it goes, but I can't pretend I'm not concerned.

my kids were babies when all that procedurally generated Youtube kids stuff came out. we'd take naps and I'd wake up and it would be playing. it was some of the most hypnotic, cursed shit I'd ever seen. like very much "not intended for a human audience" but I could never take my eyes off it. I have nothing to back this up but faith in the human race but I feel like people can sniff this stuff out naturally.

That's definitely how I feel about all the AI video stuff I've seen so far, it's extremely cursed. The image stuff doesn't feel quite as cursed by now, but it's fairly cold. I'm hesitant to say it's just going to stay that way though.

and like I don't think it's gonna singlehandedly steer human destiny (though it will undoubtably shift it in some way), it's just a really fast calculator it could never come up with something as brilliant as **looks straight forward** uh NBA Basketball

Haha, I sometimes reassure myself with the fact that it can't replace humans because it's only intelligent, and not stupid.

ironically, that stuff *is* kind of interesting because of all the ways it fails and reveals the seams behind it. the uncanny valley is an interesting sounding place after all!

i can only assume it will traverse the uncanny valley and be indistinguishable in the end output. but at that point it just seems like, the goal posts of what's interesting or useful for a human audience changes as it always has.

that a spotlessly-perfect performance of a Bach piece lost its meaning/value for a human audience as soon as midi was invented and the goal posts moved. man alive example of people still being just as interested in chess post-Deep Blue. people still perform music, do sports etc.

my doomer concerns are less to do with AI ever replacing human-stuff *for-a-human-audience*, no matter how good it gets. it's more that is just makes the human audience irrelevant in the first place.

ironically, that stuff *is* kind of interesting because of all the ways it fails and reveals the seams behind it. the uncanny valley is an interesting sounding place after all!

that's what i meant about how ai fucks up fingers, above. the response was "so what", which means "who cares", which means "shut up". i have no idea why i post here anymore. but i'm glad to see someone else who cares about the uncanny valley and the ways that ai fails (the most interesting thing about it)

I find that interesting too! And I find some of the harder to pinpoint examples even more interesting, like why does something about the particular way in which the frames progress in a certain AI video feel inhuman and alien?

I find that sort of thing fascinating because it's a detail a 4-year old always gets right - okay, maybe they can't always count to 5, but at least they always draw people with 2 eyes and 1 head. and again, they sometimes can't even count to 5. so I like that as a good reminder of the very fundamental differences between natural and artificial intellgience.