Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

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

― treeship., Tuesday, 16 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I am not a teacher but from what I know teachers aren't paid for this. This is really great for them if some of the most deadening *unpaid* bits could be shuffled aside so they can concentrate on the paid bits.

This ends up being a slightly better version of Google (even if Google us different, they have launched a version of this in the last week). I would absolutely like a better aid so the crappy bits of my job are more efficiently dealt with.

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!

― Zelda Zonk, Tuesday, 16 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Yes lol. What's the day rate for this kind of job? Maybe a reduction in income by 20%?

This is where this bit of automation matters, stuff like...the quality of thinking produced by the population, that's for the birds!

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.

How do you square this with the fact that, at this stage of development anyway, it has an instantly recognizable style that you yourself have written about at lenght? I can see how proving that it was used could be difficult, but noticing seems inevitable, it never reads like anything but itself.

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)

― z_tbd, Wednesday, 17 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I read it as the kind of apocalyptic because you said "it's gonna suck" once they get fingers, like it's game over. Which sounded inane.

It will probably get fingers right at some point the way that human painters got feet and toes right at some point. But technique isn't all that art is about?

And if AI gets to make good painting it might destroy the value of painting by humans, a lot of which is stored by the rich and is in private collections. We only get to see the best paintings via reproductions anyway. So even here I'm seeing a positive.

google seems to be trying two different paths (at least) to improving its by now incredibly shitty search

one is search results written by AI, with links out to sites that supposedly corroborate the answer given

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/10/23717120/google-search-ai-results-generated-experience-io

the other is results that link to pages written by actual people (called "Perspectives") rather than content farms or, er, AI - https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/10/23717685/google-perspectives-search-human-experiences-io-reddit

i think there has to be a role for AI in helping us navigate the incredible shitness of the modern web, even if it's all under the hood, weeding out the junk, but i suppose the bad actors probably have access to the same tech, so it's kind of an arms race? idk

i realllly hope amazon, apple, google etc start using AI to upgrade their incredibly shitty voice assistants as well, so that i can say something like 'play me a podcast that explains monetary theory' and it actually finds one and plays it

On Education and chat GPT. Its good that people are questioning what has been going on before this tool arrived and are thinking about how to offer better range of assignments.

This is a very good thing.

I like assignments that push students to ask questions, not offer superficially simple resolutions. I like inviting them to consider how works and canons relate to their practices and the ideas that animate them. Not plagiarism proof, but a better use of time?

— Zoé (@ztsamudzi) May 17, 2023

Absolutely

And this is again where "it sucks". Just a bit more automation adding to the precarity.

i need everyone to understand: if we accept this, it'll be the only fucking thing you ever hear again. soundtracks. waiting rooms. store music. it will destroy the livelihoods of tens of thousands of musicians; not stars with radio hits, but average working composers. pic.twitter.com/GxGV2f8Qau

— stillorangecrushed (@stilloranged) May 17, 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWjUY_3ubf4

Very funny.

Today's a big day for Sudowrite. We're launching Story Engine, an AI tool for writing long-form stories.

Our awesome team worked with hundreds of novelists for months to build the ideal interface for writers and machines to collaborate on a narrative. pic.twitter.com/kccZfkpGth

— james yu (@jamesjyu) May 17, 2023

You paid for a blue tick.

If we lose the ability to think critically and express ourselves creatively, we will have lost everything as a civilization. Thousands of years of the development of a written culture, gone.
This is what you want your legacy to be.#AI

— Bryn Donovan - Author (@BrynDonovan) May 18, 2023

LLMs are designed to answer questions in the most obvious way,

I didn't think was true. I thought it introduced some salt or randomness which is why if you ask it to write an essay and then you ask in again you don't get the same essay. Although I guess in the wider sense it won't stray too much from the obvious each time

I've been using GitHub copilot for a while, which suggests the right thing 9 times out of 10, maybe more, with some unusual quirks (I started writing an example JSON file with a key of "city" and it suggested "Abilene") but not got round to trying chatGPT in earnest.

Super impressive when asking in the abstract but haven't tried it for anything I'm actually trying to do yet. Going all in on it next week

I've been using it too, I'd say more like 50% but I guess it depends on what you're trying to do, also copilot x is allegedly much better as it learns more of your own codebase. even when it does get it right you have to read it carefully to be extra sure it's not doing something ever so slightly inappropriate. but when it does work it is satisfying.

even 50% is an overestimate, most of the time i finish typing before it has time to make a suggestion. some colleagues say it's made them much more productive though.

I've probably been writing fairly generic stuff in the period I've been using it which might explain the accuracy.

Where it really came in useful recently was I was wanting to add some comments to a bunch of bash functions in a file accumulated over time

As soon as I typed the # it suggested the perfect comment for every single function, except one which it guessed wildly incorrectly

Asked chatGPT to write me an ansible playbook to install docker on a raspberry pi, . I didn't actually mention ansible it just inferred it from playbook. Playbook worked first time out the box

But on the other hand it missed the mark with persistently changing dns servers. Took 5 attempts, each option looked right, but didn't work. I didn't know why, and neither did chatGPT. Got there in the end but only after it told me to edit a file that didn't exist but was similar in name to one that did

Did some more ansible stuff where it gave me some unsupported parameters. I said "chatGpt, you have given me some unsupported parameters!" and it said sorry about that, and gave me a better version without the unsupported parameters

Some of the time I feel like "this isn't that different to googling" but mostly a sense of unreality. I started to write some code and couldn't shake the feeling of being at the desk with a quill, people peering in and pointing and exclaiming "what is that?"

https://architizer.com/blog/inspiration/stories/ai-will-destroy-creativity-if-we-let-it/

my official word on this topic

it looks like Nvidia will be the beneficiary of the largest single day market cap increase ever, driven by its AI-related business

Not to sound like an Adobe shill, but the new AI-driven generative fill in the new Photoshop Beta is amazing. Went down a rabbit hole yesterday extending the width of photos just for the fun of it.

I was pretty impressed that I was able to plug in an LSAT logical reasoning question and it not only answered correctly but properly explained why the answer was correct when asked. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that it can do that via some kind of largely probabilistic word association, like how?

was it a novel question or one that can already be found on the internet? it can get standard winograd sentences correct but it's easy to make new ones that it gets wrong.

my official word on this topic

this was a good read and it's clear that you are much more knowledgeable about the ethics and philosophy of art than i am. but i'm curious how much time you've spent actually using and exploring these tools? talking specifically about the stable diffusion image models, anyone who has spent a non-trivial amount of time working with these tools can see that they are capable of producing true emergent beauty from that problematic sewer of data. though like some others in the thread, my creative curiosity lies in finding the seams and ripping them open

I was pretty impressed that I was able to plug in an LSAT logical reasoning question and it not only answered correctly but properly explained why the answer was correct when asked. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that it can do that via some kind of largely probabilistic word association, like how?

Everyone is so worried about people dying because AI becomes sentient and plots to destroy humanity, that we're not focused enough on the more likely reason AI will kill people: That we outsource basic human kindness, care, and dignity to machines. pic.twitter.com/ht393mYQRe

— Joel S. (@jh_swanson) May 25, 2023

my work just announced that using chat GPT and other generative AI is restricted, which is interesting considering I was just told by a developer a few weeks ago that I should use chat GPT to answer questions I had about building a data model

we got the same type of email message

on the other hand, a couple coworkers authorized to use the Azure ChatGPT data actually came up with a useful way to use it to classify some user text ("is this comment on the nature of the project or a specific measurement?" type of thing) and I was surprised

I tried the latest GPT-4 version and was surprised it struggled so much with the following prompt:

The following is a pytest unit test that tests whether a Python function, `rotation_matrix_to_rotation_vector`, is equivalent to the implementation provided by SciPy (`scipy.spatial.transform.Rotation`):


```Python
from scipy.spatial.transform import Rotation
import numpy
import torch.testing

def test_rotation_matrix_to_rotation_vector():
x = torch.from_numpy(Rotation.random(32).as_matrix())

expected = torch.from_numpy(
Rotation.from_matrix(x).as_rotvec(),
)

torch.testing.assert_close(
rotation_matrix_to_rotation_vector(x),
expected,
)

test_rotation_matrix_to_rotation_vector()
```

Implement the following `rotation_matrix_to_rotation_vector` function so it passes the provided unit test:

```Python
from torch import Tensor

def rotation_matrix_to_rotation_vector(
rotation_matrix: Tensor,
) -> Tensor:
raise NotImplementedError
```

In the implementation, ensure epsilon values are defined by `torch.finfo` of the input type.

It recalled the appropriate technique and even appropriate issues to mitigate (e.g., singularities around 0 and pi) but it eventually conceded after 20 attempts.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/26/rishi-sunak-races-to-tighten-rules-for-ai-amid-fears-of-existential-risk

When you know chat GPT just isn't a big deal.

What shocks me most about AI is how rapidly many people are eager to trust it with important tasks despite not understanding what the product fundamentally is. It's very good at predicting the next word in a sentence—a hyper-advanced autocomplete. It doesn't *think creatively.* https://t.co/E3XHtypOGY

— poorly hidden account (@poorly_hidden) May 27, 2023

ok this is a lot more interesting than the "extend classic paintings" thing that's going around

referring to this:

Lots of people are using Photoshop's new AI generation to expand classic paintings like the Mona Lisa, but the true test is to crop it smaller, then expand it to areas where we already know what it looks like to see how accurately it re-generates it. Here's my test. Nailed it! pic.twitter.com/a6ZIKC3fhj

— 🏴‍☠️ Maddox 🏴‍☠️ (@maddoxrules) May 31, 2023

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/31/ai-poses-human-extinction-risk-sam-altman-and-other-tech-leaders-warn.html

If this is true why not stop development at least until there is an international consensus on alignment? (which might be never, but so what?)

Non-proliferation treaties for these chatbots.

I do find it hard to believe that, per the tweet above, a hyper-advanced autocomplete poses an existential threat to our species.

I’m very skeptical of the ai ceos who say this stuff. If i was sam altman and i believed i was the ceo of a company producing a technology that would kill everyone, i would stop being the ceo of that company and go to bartending school or something.

seems to leave out an important bit about how, exactly, this is going to kill us all

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eaDCgdkbsfGqpWazi/the-basic-reasons-i-expect-agi-ruin

Here is one explanation

Dwarkesh is thinking about the end of humanity as a causal chain with many links and if any of them are broken it means humans will continue on, while Eliezer thinks of the continuity of humanity (in the face of AGI) as a causal chain with many links and if any of them are broken it means humanity ends. Or perhaps more discretely, Eliezer thinks there are a few very hard things which humanity could do to continue in the face of AI, and absent one of those occurring, the end is a matter of when, not if, and the when is much closer than most other people think.

Anyway, I think each of Dwarkesh and Eliezer believe the other one falls on the side of extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence - Dwarkesh thinking the end of humanity is "wild" and Eliezer believing humanity's viability in the face of AGI is "wild" (though not in the negative sense).

Basically the theory is we cannot predict how these things will behave because we don’t even know how gpt-4 works. And I guess the idea is that we will give it the ability to manufacture things—like machines or even viruses I guess—and not just the ability to generate plans that humans will either green light or not?

5. STEM-level AGI timelines don't look that long

I won't try to argue for this proposition

to some extent yes we don't know how these things behave and they can produce strange results but ... they produce images and text.

i mean if we were looking at wiring one of these things up to a nuclear button then sure i'd be worried.

To be fair I am surprised that it can write coherent essays that put forward relatively complex arguments. It seems that scientific thinking might not lag too far beyond that .

if by 'put forward' you mean 'rehash existing' then yeah...

It’s still a pretty complex process.

Like teaching a bright 9th grader to write as clearly as gpt-4 is difficult

‘Remarkable’ AI tool designs mRNA vaccines that are more potent and stable

probably just rehashing existing vaccines, though. lame!

I’m sort of playing devil’s advocate here. I am on record saying that gpt and midjourney are not really “creative” and that this element of them has been overhyped. But i also just want to understand what exactly this technology is and how it is likely to progress.