Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

all the others suck tho

lol PRIMAL OASIS ECHO

Treeship speaks wisdom

people will still lose jobs. businesses cut costs in many ways that hurt their product. my point is that AI is overhyped. the labor power of human workers is still the engine of capitalism, and people who say otherwise are lying.

Here's the thing tho: "generative" (eyeroll) AI is only ever recycling amd recombining existing content. It has never "generated" anything or come up with an original thought. Its only fuel is what people (people like us) have already given it.

I have spent, um, something like 38 years feeding it. Every word that I have published, every illustration I've drawn, every song I have written and recorded.

The robots have not thanked me, as far as I know. And when I am unemployed, probably next month, they will not pay my mortgage. So forgive me if I am little bit bitter about that.

xps

I still lean to it being revolutionary, at least for laptop jobs - it's come along quickly, it's still developing fast, even in current state its possibilities when trained on specialist datasets are just getting started. The 'not like human intelligence' feels a bit marshlight to me - it doesn't really need to be to cause a lot of disruption in the near future, and if it develops rapidly I'm not sure it matters whether its mode of 'intelligence' is recognisably human or instead non-human - we'll be somewhere messy either way.

I can definitely see a path with medium-term stability where it's just another tool, as it is now, but I'd feel naive banking on that (because everything always gets worse).

YMP you're welcome to join my new band, Midnight Brit Groove

I mean maybe as someone who's made a living generating sentences - plenty of them pretty rote - I am just falling for the uncanniness. I know how dumb it is! eg how bad at mimicking styles where it has a narrower dataset.

One of my bosses has started to develop the annoying trait of searching for information of OUR OWN PROCESSES in chatgpt, a clear indication of what we were all suspecting in that he knows sod all about the job.

an excerpt here about how altman previously being a fuckup https://www.newcomer.co/p/sam-altman-forced-out-of-openai-by

― 龜, Tuesday, November 21, 2023 8:27 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

thats the one i was talking about upthread

how many swords, Dall-E, how many swords?
https://imgur.com/a/e5VgCCm

chatgpt et al absolutely need to have a huge banner that shows up every session saying NOT A SEARCH ENGINE! I MAKE SHIT UP!

We're def going to see a lot more from the entertaining genre of 'people fucking up really badly because they trust ChatGPT as some kind of god-mind'

chatgpt et al absolutely need to have a huge banner that shows up every session saying NOT A SEARCH ENGINE! I MAKE SHIT UP!

― organ doner (ledge), Tuesday, November 21, 2023 9:58 AM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

now why would they do that lol

sorry, need to dial down my faith in humanity settings

just went to check out bings situation and its interface features the ai bot interface heavily tho if you type into the box itll take you to normal search results with "chat" being a tab, btw lol at the prompt

https://i.imgur.com/t0nvuXA.png

chatgpt isnt a search engine doesnt have access to new info but microsofts implementation of it is?

https://i.imgur.com/0dLTvM3.png

no, it's got integrated bing search now

training cut off is April 2023 tho

so I think if you say 'tell me about Bjork' you get a summary of her life and works to 4/2023

But

User
What's Bjork's latest release?

ChatGPT
Björk's latest release is a new dancehall-inspired song titled "oral," a collaboration with Rosalía. This track was officially released after being teased earlier, and all profits from it will go towards fighting fish farming in Iceland

And it says 'researching with bing' while it's generating.

so it may or may not be a search engine depending on what you ask. Can't see any trouble there

no, it's got integrated bing search now

― woof, Tuesday, November 21, 2023 11:49 AM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

but what does this mean

I want to live in this world

(What happened to post notifications? That was supposed to be in response to this frankly amazing-sounding Björk song)

microsoft’s a licensee and their bing product using chatgpt is what I mentioned earlier: a derivative that was fed bing’s search data and was instructed to return verbatim data and not fully generative phrases

I know a few people working with the Microsoft-hosted white label ChatGPT to get it to serve up factual data and it’s tricky. It’s very particular in how it reads structured data and one of the possibilities would be not to point it at internal wiki-style articles that are vary wildly in structure and format, but to write documentation in a very structured format, and then have the wiki-style stuff be downstream from the LLM. So you’d write very concise statement/description paragraphs, feed those to the chatbot for q&a purposes, and also have chatgpt generate the pages.

Obviously you’d need proofreading and this is all very beta, but I think we’re at yet another iteration of restructuring how we write in order for computers to process that information and then deliver it to humans.
This has, of course, gone swimmingly with SEO and clickbait in the past

if you’re wondering what the product looks like: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/use-your-data-quickstart

My professional world is largely technical writing, in a competitive context.

An AI that goes out to the internet and does writing-by-google is worse than useless, because every competing company can submit exactly the same content.

The tools that I think have more potential are those that do NOT go outside, and just parse my existing library. But... I could just do that myself.

I think the risk isn’t that human writers go away, it’s that all writing becomes this consumed-by-ai technical writing specifically structured in ways that make sure the LLM doesn’t fuck it up when it regurgitates it

chatgpt gets extra functionality quite often - now it does pictures, now it reads PDFs, now a bit of data viz, now it searches the web. And sometimes a bit of it goes, and then it comes back… it's a confusing platform tbh

The MS thing sounds like it overlaps with GPTs?

yes. they’re a close licensee of chatgpt, kind of a second-party provider, and possibly on the way to being a licensee that actually does most of the development as part of a consortium

I think the cynical take I've landed on is that the product of AI will kinda remain half-assed garbage but that people will slowly adjust to the garbage until it becomes an acceptable alternative to human-generated product in many contexts. Like I can see the writing staff of every show on CBS being replaced by AI without anyone really noticing or caring.

fwiw human language is only one of the things LLMs are decent at. they’re basically pattern recognition and inference tools

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/large-language-models-also-work-for-protein-structures/

afaict one of the teams I support is using a sieve-like approach to run multiple LLMs and other ML models to infer protein structures in the way mentioned in this article

xp maybe! I think the crass commercialization aspect is that we’re going to get more sophisticated versions of chum. those nonsensical chumbox articles at the bottom of pages that Clickhole satirizes will start looking different. episodic tv of the NCIS or w/e variety is basically background noise chum already and it’s easy to imagine that being generated

the issue is that there are no new ideas and you still have to have something to pull from, whether it’s a decade of scripts or just throwing all of the past tv shows in a blender plus something new. to an extent all human endeavors are a mishmash of existing material but it’s disarming to think that the AI could eventually build new stories off of the AI’s previous output

i dont think this thing will be able to write a tv show but maybe it will be able to write some of the stuff no one cares about

https://i.imgur.com/LTZ9dGM.png

yeah I think grey goo content world is already halfway here - I see more and more articles that (I think) are clearly chatgpt generated. There's just no cap on feeding it crap questions or a text to summarise and dumping the output straight to the web.

I mean this is zero effort, 5 seconds of typing and 30 secs of waiting for output. It's perfectly sensible and boring as shit.

User
why does a messageboard like ilx survive in this day and age
ChatGPT
The survival and continued relevance of a message board like ILX (I Love Music) in the current digital era can be attributed to several factors:

Niche Communities: ILX caters to a specific interest group - music enthusiasts. This niche focus creates a dedicated community where members share a common passion. Such specialized communities often survive and even thrive despite the prevalence of larger social media platforms.

Quality of Discussion: Forums like ILX often offer a depth of conversation that is harder to find on mainstream social media platforms. The format encourages longer, more thoughtful posts and discussions, which can be appealing to those seeking more than just quick, superficial interactions.

Sense of Belonging and Identity: Long-standing members of ILX have likely developed a strong sense of community and identity within the forum. This can create a loyal user base that continues to participate and contribute over time.

Simplicity and Familiarity: For some users, the straightforward, text-based format of traditional message boards is preferable to the more complex interfaces and algorithms of modern social media. Additionally, long-time users might prefer the familiarity of the platform and its community norms.

Archival Value: Forums like ILX often have a rich archive of past discussions, which can be a valuable resource for information and historical perspectives on various topics, particularly in niche areas like specific music genres or artists.

Avoidance of Mainstream Social Media Pitfalls: Some users might prefer message boards to avoid the downsides of mainstream social media, such as data privacy concerns, overwhelming amounts of content, or negative mental health impacts.

Moderation and Governance: Message boards often have a different approach to moderation compared to larger platforms. This can sometimes create a more controlled environment where discussions are more respectful and productive.

In summary, the survival of a messageboard like ILX is likely due to its ability to offer a unique, niche community experience, fostering in-depth discussions and a strong sense of belonging among its members, away from the pitfalls of mainstream social media.

on the web theres so much seo driven stuff that might as well be ai already, its prob where ai picked up its terrible style even

yeah, the grey goo idea does grab me because of playing with the damn thing but I don't know if it's actually just the shit tide rising a little higher, or full tsunami because barrier to entry is now unbelievably low. + once the compute power gets properly priced in and venture money thins, maybe it will still be cheaper to offshore SEO content trash? Although it looks like a tuned 70B llama 2 (ie sort of open source) could handle the shit-production job at scale for peanuts.

people are already pulling that shit. pretty sure I mentioned it before, but searching for specific topics that seo ad farms have picked up on gives you garbage results. video game walkthroughs were the one I was encountering, but you occasionally get career-specific info too

it’s a dead giveaway when they fuck up and reuse the images, but half the time, it’s just a mostly-coherent webpage that’s a mechanically reworded version of someone else’s content but with double the ads and no attribution

I can't wait until every article is written in the format of a 9th grade paper about the Civil War. Gimme proper introductions and conclusions or gtfo, I says.

I was finding guides to using the chatgpt api that were written by chatgpt.

I twigged when I just decided to ask chatgpt

It's like Human Centipede but where ChatGPT's mouth has been sewn to its own anus.

I would ask chatgpt for a fuller description of the chatgpt centipede, possibly with a dall-E illustration, but unfortunately it is down

The robots have not thanked me, as far as I know. And when I am unemployed, probably next month, they will not pay my mortgage. So forgive me if I am little bit bitter about that.

― Oh I believe in Yetis' Day (Ye Mad Puffin)

ai is going to wind up taking more and more jobs... not just directly! the ones that are left require an ever-changing set of skills... it's really hard for me to continue to keep up with what's considered "employable" these days. i am seeing a lot of people in the same boat. people get laid off and finding a new job is just really difficult these days. a lot fewer jobs. a lot less money. plus, a lot of my friends are "disabled" and not able to work. the economic and social values i was taught was that people who aren't actively working are a drain on society, a burden. if they're suffering, well, it's their own fault. that's what i was taught. those are the values i see being put into practice.

these aren't values i particularly agree with. i don't think that these values are... a viable basis for a society, on a long-term basis. i don't have the power to change those values. it's a major source of ongoing stress in my life. i employ a lot of radical acceptance. i'm getting a lot of opportunity, these days, to practice radical values.

anyway i'm not going to throw one of my shoes at gpt. those things are fucking expensive, i need me some shoes.

American capitalism is based on a covert “deal.” Work hard and you will find a niche where you “provide value to shareholders” and then you’ll get paid so you don’t starve. This deal was never actually true, but for many people it looked more true in the past than it does now. And so the question is what will happen when more people acknowledge that the old covenant is *really* broken this time. There is no path to living in comfort and dignity for many.

So much of politics and ethics in america is built on what you described kate. The idea that if people were willing to work they would at least prosper moderately. If chat gpt destroys, say, 80% of lawyers’ jobs all of that kind of thinking is going to seem laughable, even to the formerly comfortable middle and lower bourgeoisie.

It could be a revolutionary moment. More likely America will just become colder and angrier.

im gonna wait til ai demonstrates 5% of the competency required to do a job before i start worrying about it taking them

Best case scenario, people stop valuing human beings for what they can “provide” and start appreciating them for their intrinsic value. The kantian imperative. And then we build new economic and political structures around this humanistic framework. The odds seem long for this one though.

also worth noting that software and indeed technology generally has been "taking jobs" for a long time, are there fewer jobs now, not really, are the current jobs worse, yes in a way, specifically in the way that they pay less offer less security etc, is that because the jobs technology took were inherently better, was file clerk a somehow great job, no, the issue with downward mobility amongst working people is of course one of worker power, and corporate power

if you want the kantian imperative you have to join a union, then you can ask them for it lol

interesting question is ask people what job their grandfaters did if they owned a house if their grandmothers worked, tho this may be more of a great grandfather question for some people at this point, couple memorable answers ive gotten for home owning sole bread winners were worked at a news stand and donut maker