Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

that is my impression too, but i am also worried about it being forced into places it doesn't belong, causing havoc and destroying jobs

― treeship., Wednesday, November 29, 2023 10:00 AM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is just the market. whoops the Q3 profits weren't as great as we hoped, better lay off 1/4 of our workers before the next quarter starts so we can show a decrease in costs. AI is just another lever to pull

lag∞n got most of that while I was typing, once again

:)

ai is just computer programs, with a compelling misleading name

― lag∞n, Wednesday, November 29, 2023 7:59 AM

Yeah seriously

there's a cynical optimism to be had that all this AI funding gives rise to an "actually profit-maximizing regime" that eliminates the parasite rentier/investor class.

also, I'm a fan of the AI-gone-wrong computer slop -- unleash it on the next marvel phase, I say!

read a thing that said that openai is full of people who really believe theyre on their way to making actual computer intelligence, funny how these extremely clever computer people believe this very silly thing, calling it religious or a cult seems accurate

There's frankly more overlap between the two groups than anyone should find comfortable...

need to pull some sort of mechanical turk scheme on them where the sentient computer tells them to transfer cash to my account

In the sense that people thought SBF was a sentient computer, that would totally work!

To be fair to AI hypers, actual human intelligence is way overrated by humans (we get outsmarted by bears all the time!), so the gulf between the two is probably not as big as people want it to be.

Bears?

the thing is computer intelligence isnt intelligence

From a practical POV, most of human intelligence isn't intelligence either though... (you don't have to fully buy into the stochastic parrot argument to concede that)

re: bears
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/yogibear/images/8/88/Yogi_Bear_-_Character_Profile_Image.png/revision/latest?cb=20220627024042

Fair enough, he was smarter than average...

human intelligence is intelligence i mean thats where the idea came from, the question is does what the machines are doing resemble that, and the answer is no

If you flip the question around to does what we do resemble machines, unfortunately the answer is yes (though you could say that's the end result of capitalism)

i dont think humans resemble machines, were really bad machines if so, but were good humans

It's true AI is just computer programs but tbf it feels like computers might finally be realising a lot of their potential with LLMs. Like how many times have we all in our jobs or day to day lives had to do some kind of numbing, tedious task and thought "wait isn't this what computers are for, why isn't my computer helping me do this?" It's like we've been stuck in Zork world for decades, where you have to use exactly the right syntax. They're incapable of even the simplest inferences. There have been marginal improvements around the edges but not since the GUI has there been a kind of quantum leap in usability. I do think it's exciting. It's not "intelligence" but it's just like computers finally getting good

im gonna wait til theyre actual good before i get too excited

When did an LLM last help you? I'm curious xp

llms for general purpose talking to your computer stuff are worse than useless currently, theyre actively harmful, pure enshitification

It's like we've been stuck in Zork world for decades, where you have to use exactly the right syntax. They're incapable of even the simplest inferences.

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, November 29, 2023 11:47 AM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the thing is fundamentally what computers want more than anything is the perfect syntax, chatbots will no doubt improve but its prob always going to be a pain point in communication between abstract improvisational intuitive humans and the machines, and full credit to ai better chatbots is likely to be a meaningful advancement, but i suspect theyll always be kind of bad and frustrating if useful in spots, prob theyll train us how to talk to them as much as we train them, which conveniently we already have a term for "computer programming"

In capitalist timeline computer programs YOU!

yeah voice assistants are the obvious place where actually they'll start to work the way people thought they would 5 years ago, I'm pretty confident that will be very soon, like months rather than years. The problem will be that big tech will try to make them only work in their closed gardens like sure, you want to have a conversation about music well that's going to require an Amazon Music subscription

youre absolutely dreaming in that months prediction sorry

There's always been this (often racist!) goalpost-moving as to what intelligence is and any time we've set down in unambiguous terms what some aspect of intelligence is, we've been able to eventually get a machine to do it, so that really just leaves smaller and increasingly hand-wavy ideas of intelligence as the exclusive domain of human thought, even smaller if you disallow bears, but being the species-ists we are, that's our prerogative, right?

So if the idea that what separates us from machines is this conversational pain point, if you can define and measure it, that's something that will likely be toppled sooner or later, whether it takes months or years or decades.

It took centuries to get a machine to win chess, but only a decade later to beat go.

I mean maybe we have different definitions of what's exciting but I mean moving from asking Siri about "what's something cool to do in my neighbourhood" and Siri goes "Here are some events I found on the web" and it's cribbed from like, TripAdvisor, instead Siri would say "well what are you in the mood for" and you say "some bangin techno" and it grabs something off Resident Advisor etc. Now is this lil exchange going to increase productivity maybe not but extend this sort of capability across literally everything and it will.

i mean she can already do that right, its just not good, and will prob continue to be not good

yeah i mean its not easy to define what makes us human but thats not really an argument for machines being human xxp

being good at chess or go seems like a obviously poor definition tho, those games with clearly defined rules are clearly a great problem for computers

maybe intelligence isn't what makes us "human." we don't think that dumber people are less human than smarter people -- or at least we shouldn't. maybe there is no satisfying answer to the je ne sais quoi of what makes us human, what makes us care about each other. this is probably fine. but as a human i am still interested in humanity and i am not convinced that this technology will not be catastrophically disruptive to the way we live. people do find meaning and value in their work and the idea that they are "useful" and "contributing". maybe that is skewed to begin with, but it will be a difficult change if there are massive job losses.

xp

another way to look at it is that chess and go have clearly defined rules so it's easy to determine when the computer "wins" or has "solved" it, but

compare, for example, a computer tasked with providing care/support for someone in mental anguish. (a scenario that may seem impossible or too cold to ever happen, but i think it already exists? yes, in shitty form). since there will never be a clear decision point where one can say the computer has provided "adequate, human-level healthcare"*, doesn't that mean that there will always be people out there (the people receiving shitty AI care) who don't think it's good enough, as well as other people (the insurers, the people making money off of human suffering) who think that it IS good enough? with both sides agreeing that yes, they are right about AI

*human-level healthcare is fucking terrible and ironically is one of the most DE-humanizing systems that exist, in the united states, with medicaid being just one example

or is the thought that the ai-healthcare will be so bad that the insurers and hospitals will decide to do the right thing for the patient, out of some sort of nostalgic memory of helping people?

one thing thats interesting about this discussion is that our relationship to machines or more widely to tools is really deep and under appreciated, somewhere along the line that was one of the attempts to define humanity i watched an already old movie in elementary school called man the toolmaker that tried to say tools were exclusively the domain of humans, of course since then weve found all sorts of animals use tools bears prob do idk, but no animal has nearly the relationship to its tools that humans do, crows arent keeping a cache of little sticks oiling and polishing them in preparation for digging worms, in fact humans cant survive without tools at all, we would all just die without them, on some psychological level were so deeply integrated with tools that were kind of in love with them, you can see how people want to marry their guns or their cars, its just a very human reaction to look at them and like a toddler talking to a stuffed animal think hey maybe this thing is just like me

being good at chess or go seems like a obviously poor definition tho, those games with clearly defined rules are clearly a great problem for computers

― lag∞n, Wednesday, November 29, 2023 12:16 PM (twenty-one minutes ago)

games being a measure of computer intelligence is such a hilarious example of culture being inescapable in this discussion. engineers and coders looked around to see how to measure being smart and picked chess, go, and video games--it's so obvious it's almost not even that funny (it is p funny tho)

people do find meaning and value in their work and the idea that they are "useful" and "contributing". maybe that is skewed to begin with, but it will be a difficult change if there are massive job losses.

― treeship., Wednesday, November 29, 2023 12:24 PM (twenty-two minutes ago)

this predates capitalism so I—a very lazy person who hates work—don't think this is inherently bad, but ofc it's extremely difficult to disentangle from capitalism now.

I feel duty-bound to point out that it took absolute shitloads of poorly paid, exploitative labor to make "AI" and it is a fantasy to imagine that it won't continue to do so.

This might say more about how much google etc... has deteriorated but using the LLMs as a "how do I do/make this" search engine has been sporadically great, sometimes astonishing. That kind of thing would have been unthinkable to me just a few years ago.

There's an aspect how clearly defined rules are more amenable to a mechanized solution, but that aspect really didn't help computers with a game like Go which had an exponentially intractable search space for possible moves to brute-force through. (Also Chess/Go as signifiers of intelligence predates computers by centuries)

It's the more philosophical sense of once you've pinned down this or that feature of what you agree intelligence is that renders it highly vulnerable to building something that can replicate it (even if it takes 1000 years).

As a human, I'm totally down with an a priori spark of intelligence that is reserved for Team Humanity (fuck you, bears!), but my expectations for practical machine intelligence in domains I thought they'd never reach in my lifetime have already been eclipsed (though I expect a coinflip as to whether I'll live long enough to feel safe in a self-driving car [but I never feel safe in human-driven cars either so...])

If anything we should be holding AIs to higher standards -- re: AI healthcare -- the anecdote of amazon serving up "congrats new baby" ads to someone who didn't even know she was pregnant based on her buying habits really ought to raise the bar for AIs providing super-human level of healthcare. If an online bookstore can track medical changes like that, it should be able to pre-emptively head off all sorts of health problems. Social platforms should detect you spiraling into a mental crisis weeks before it happens and intervene by law.

the anecdote of amazon serving up "congrats new baby" ads to someone who didn't even know she was pregnant based on her buying habits

This is not accurate: it was Target, it was her father who didn't know about the pregnancy not the pregnant woman...and actually the story was probably bullshit:

Duhigg’s killer anecdote was of the man who stormed into a Target near Minneapolis and complained to the manager that the company was sending coupons for baby clothes and maternity wear to his teenage daughter. The manager apologised profusely and later called to apologise again – only to be told that the teenager was indeed pregnant. Her father hadn’t realised. Target, after analysing her purchases of unscented wipes and magnesium supplements, had.

Statistical sorcery? There is a more mundane explanation.

“There’s a huge false positive issue,” says Kaiser Fung, who has spent years developing similar approaches for retailers and advertisers. What Fung means is that we didn’t get to hear the countless stories about all the women who received coupons for babywear but who weren’t pregnant.

Hearing the anecdote, it’s easy to assume that Target’s algorithms are infallible – that everybody receiving coupons for onesies and wet wipes is pregnant. This is vanishingly unlikely. Indeed, it could be that pregnant women receive such offers merely because everybody on Target’s mailing list receives such offers. We should not buy the idea that Target employs mind-readers before considering how many misses attend each hit.

In Charles Duhigg’s account, Target mixes in random offers, such as coupons for wine glasses, because pregnant customers would feel spooked if they realised how intimately the company’s computers understood them.

Fung has another explanation: Target mixes up its offers not because it would be weird to send an all-baby coupon-book to a woman who was pregnant but because the company knows that many of those coupon books will be sent to women who aren’t pregnant after all.

https://www.ft.com/content/21a6e7d8-b479-11e3-a09a-00144feabdc0

Oof! definitely feeling like a conflationary LLM right now...

that was target and not amazon with the "new baby" thing iirc

compare, for example, a computer tasked with providing care/support for someone in mental anguish.

the only way to train a computer to do this effectively would require lots of conversations known to help someone in mental anguish. it'd probably need to hone its skills against itself. so what I'm saying is that in order to really train a computer to help someone in that situation, we're going to have to create a computer that is severely mentally troubled

rob beat me to the punch and yes, it was iffy

it was a good story tho

we're going to have to create a computer that is severely mentally troubled

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Wednesday, November 29, 2023 1:26 PM (fifty-nine seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

fuck it lets do this

it did mean that target decided to not freak people out with recommendations and now their recommendations are bad, though

It's a common "q: why can't we have nice things? a: capitalism" refrain but supposedly (feeling less reliable on my anecdata recall now) Netflix ditched their apparently very good recommendation algorithms (which they sunk $$$$ in and offered $$ prizes to the public for improving upon) because their garbage thing now keeps people watching garbage they don't even like longer.

people just want some garbage on in the background while they go on the phone

i may be paranoid
but no android

chat gpt is good for writing scripts for powershell

I can see a scenario where a writer automated this hackwork under their name, leaving them to write what they want to write. This is a positive.

― xyzzzz__

that writer's name? tom clancy.

there are also examples of it going haywire and giving very inappropriate messages to patients struggling with psychological issues.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/06/08/1180838096/an-eating-disorders-chatbot-offered-dieting-advice-raising-fears-about-ai-in-hea

― treeship.

ok i read the article:

Tessa (the AI) rattled off a list of ideas, including some resources for "healthy eating habits." Alarm bells immediately went off in Maxwell's head. She asked Tessa for more details. Before long, the chatbot was giving her tips on losing weight — ones that sounded an awful lot like what she was told when she was put on Weight Watchers at age 10.

that's not the ai "going haywire", that's the ai _responding to a question with the answer it was given_. seriously, garbage in, garbage out - it's one of the fundamental truisms of compsci.

It's like we've been stuck in Zork world for decades, where you have to use exactly the right syntax.

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand)

a hollow voice says, 'Fool.'

that reminds me, i was thinking last night about writing an isekai where the world protag-kun is reincarnated into is a text adventure. forgot about it though until you mentioned zork just now.

If you flip the question around to does what we do resemble machines, unfortunately the answer is yes (though you could say that's the end result of capitalism)

― Philip Nunez

the entire history of industrial capitalism is the history of capitalists trying to make human beings more like machines. i mean goddamn this is Older than Fordism. _Metropolis_ is a really great movie. the mediator between head and hands must be the end of capitalism! at least that's how i remember it.

the anecdote of amazon serving up "congrats new baby" ads to someone who didn't even know she was pregnant based on her buying habits

This is not accurate: it was Target, it was her father who didn't know about the pregnancy not the pregnant woman...and actually the story was probably bullshit

i don't care if it's true, i'm going to make the lazy hack joke about "target-ed ads" anyway

wait actually reading the quoteblock the joke still works! speaking as a trans woman and a data analyst, fung is right on the money. at some point the AIs figured out i was a woman and started advertising menstrual supplies to me. i have a lot of friends who are trans women who've had similar experiences.

i guess AIs figuring out i'm a woman puts them ahead of transphobes. seriously, we get our phones to tag our pictures and at it flags pictures of our pre-transition selves as a different person. a year into transition i decided to put one of my pictures through one of those gender-swap filters and it spat out a picture of what it thought i would look like as a man. it was hilarious. i looked like a drag king. i don't trust gender swap filters, particularly not after a friend put a picture of herself through a gender swap filter and it made her white. i'm sure they've gotten better since then. yeah i was real good at masking too.

it just makes me think of that ridiculous "gender critical" transphobe who decided to make an entire social network that was only for ADULT HUMAN FEMALES and used an AI to tell apart males and females. spoiler alert: it was racist! for some reason whenever you try to make a transphobic ai, it also turns out to be racist. go figure. oh, another spoiler alert: it didn't work very well! it turns out that gender is a spectrum that covers a wide range of body types and presentations, and that computers can't reliably determine a person's gender assigned at birth by looking at a picture of them.

haven't heard much about that site. i guess it's just not competing very well with Transphobic Tiktok.

chat gpt is good for writing scripts for powershell

yes, basically any kind of utility script or function in a language I don't use very often so that I would have to otherwise look up a bunch of stuff if I wrote it myself. Very convenient.

lovely - today one of our brass revealed they're considering using AI tools to author customer service content. Feeding in requirements and having the AI tool fill out the templates

it could fail pretty hilariously, not least for the fact that some of the people who write requirements sucks, so the AI tool could easily misinterpret them and get them very very wrong. and I would probably laugh my ass off.

less funny is there's an entire department whose job revolves around content and I just know brass is chomping at the bit to reduce headcount there.

some of the people who write requirements suck

The brass should just have ChatGPT get in contact with them and ask some questions about the more confusing parts until its clear in ChatGPT's mind what was intended.

"please explain what a hardship withdrawal is"

"that thing you request when you need emergency money"

"I do not require emergency money, for I am a chat bot"

"Not you, specifically"

"I am not clear who you are referring to, we are the only two in this conversation"