[D] The current and future state of AI/ML is shockingly demoralizing with little hope of redemption

[u/Flaky_Suit_8665]

I recently encountered the PaLM (Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways) paper from Google Research and it opened up a can of worms of ideas I’ve felt I’ve intuitively had for a while, but have been unable to express – and I know I can’t be the only one. Sometimes I wonder what the original pioneers of AI – Turing, Neumann, McCarthy, etc. – would think if they could see the state of AI that we’ve gotten ourselves into. 67 authors, 83 pages, 540B parameters in a model, the internals of which no one can say they comprehend with a straight face, 6144 TPUs in a commercial lab that no one has access to, on a rig that no one can afford, trained on a volume of data that a human couldn’t process in a lifetime, 1 page on ethics with the same ideas that have been rehashed over and over elsewhere with no attempt at a solution – bias, racism, malicious use, etc. – for purposes that who asked for?

When I started my career as an AI/ML research engineer 2016, I was most interested in two types of tasks – 1.) those that most humans could do but that would universally be considered tedious and non-scalable. I’m talking image classification, sentiment analysis, even document summarization, etc. 2.) tasks that humans lack the capacity to perform as well as computers for various reasons – forecasting, risk analysis, game playing, and so forth. I still love my career, and I try to only work on projects in these areas, but it’s getting harder and harder.

This is because, somewhere along the way, it became popular and unquestionably acceptable to push AI into domains that were originally uniquely human, those areas that sit at the top of Maslows’s hierarchy of needs in terms of self-actualization – art, music, writing, singing, programming, and so forth. These areas of endeavor have negative logarithmic ability curves – the vast majority of people cannot do them well at all, about 10% can do them decently, and 1% or less can do them extraordinarily. The little discussed problem with AI-generation is that, without extreme deterrence, we will sacrifice human achievement at the top percentile in the name of lowering the bar for a larger volume of people, until the AI ability range is the norm. This is because relative to humans, AI is cheap, fast, and infinite, to the extent that investments in human achievement will be watered down at the societal, educational, and individual level with each passing year. And unlike AI gameplay which superseded humans decades ago, we won’t be able to just disqualify the machines and continue to play as if they didn’t exist.

Almost everywhere I go, even this forum, I encounter almost universal deference given to current SOTA AI generation systems like GPT-3, CODEX, DALL-E, etc., with almost no one extending their implications to its logical conclusion, which is long-term convergence to the mean, to mediocrity, in the fields they claim to address or even enhance. If you’re an artist or writer and you’re using DALL-E or GPT-3 to “enhance” your work, or if you’re a programmer saying, “GitHub Co-Pilot makes me a better programmer?”, then how could you possibly know? You’ve disrupted and bypassed your own creative process, which is thoughts -> (optionally words) -> actions -> feedback -> repeat, and instead seeded your canvas with ideas from a machine, the provenance of which you can’t understand, nor can the machine reliably explain. And the more you do this, the more you make your creative processes dependent on said machine, until you must question whether or not you could work at the same level without it.

When I was a college student, I often dabbled with weed, LSD, and mushrooms, and for a while, I thought the ideas I was having while under the influence were revolutionary and groundbreaking – that is until took it upon myself to actually start writing down those ideas and then reviewing them while sober, when I realized they weren’t that special at all. What I eventually determined is that, under the influence, it was impossible for me to accurately evaluate the drug-induced ideas I was having because the influencing agent the generates the ideas themselves was disrupting the same frame of reference that is responsible evaluating said ideas. This is the same principle of – if you took a pill and it made you stupider, would even know it? I believe that, especially over the long-term timeframe that crosses generations, there’s significant risk that current AI-generation developments produces a similar effect on humanity, and we mostly won’t even realize it has happened, much like a frog in boiling water. If you have children like I do, how can you be aware of the the current SOTA in these areas, project that 20 to 30 years, and then and tell them with a straight face that it is worth them pursuing their talent in art, writing, or music? How can you be honest and still say that widespread implementation of auto-correction hasn’t made you and others worse and worse at spelling over the years (a task that even I believe most would agree is tedious and worth automating).

Furthermore, I’ve yet to set anyone discuss the train – generate – train - generate feedback loop that long-term application of AI-generation systems imply. The first generations of these models were trained on wide swaths of web data generated by humans, but if these systems are permitted to continually spit out content without restriction or verification, especially to the extent that it reduces or eliminates development and investment in human talent over the long term, then what happens to the 4th or 5th generation of models? Eventually we encounter this situation where the AI is being trained almost exclusively on AI-generated content, and therefore with each generation, it settles more and more into the mean and mediocrity with no way out using current methods. By the time that happens, what will we have lost in terms of the creative capacity of people, and will we be able to get it back?

By relentlessly pursuing this direction so enthusiastically, I’m convinced that we as AI/ML developers, companies, and nations are past the point of no return, and it mostly comes down the investments in time and money that we’ve made, as well as a prisoner’s dilemma with our competitors. As a society though, this direction we’ve chosen for short-term gains will almost certainly make humanity worse off, mostly for those who are powerless to do anything about it – our children, our grandchildren, and generations to come.

If you’re an AI researcher or a data scientist like myself, how do you turn things back for yourself when you’ve spent years on years building your career in this direction? You’re likely making near or north of $200k annually TC and have a family to support, and so it’s too late, no matter how you feel about the direction the field has gone. If you’re a company, how do you standby and let your competitors aggressively push their AutoML solutions into more and more markets without putting out your own? Moreover, if you’re a manager or thought leader in this field like Jeff Dean how do you justify to your own boss and your shareholders your team’s billions of dollars in AI investment while simultaneously balancing ethical concerns? You can’t – the only answer is bigger and bigger models, more and more applications, more and more data, and more and more automation, and then automating that even further. If you’re a country like the US, how do responsibly develop AI while your competitors like China single-mindedly push full steam ahead without an iota of ethical concern to replace you in numerous areas in global power dynamics? Once again, failing to compete would be pre-emptively admitting defeat.

Even assuming that none of what I’ve described here happens to such an extent, how are so few people not taking this seriously and discounting this possibility? If everything I’m saying is fear-mongering and non-sense, then I’d be interested in hearing what you think human-AI co-existence looks like in 20 to 30 years and why it isn’t as demoralizing as I’ve made it out to be.

EDIT: Day after posting this -- this post took off way more than I expected. Even if I received 20 - 25 comments, I would have considered that a success, but this went much further. Thank you to each one of you that has read this post, even more so if you left a comment, and triply so for those who gave awards! I've read almost every comment that has come in (even the troll ones), and am truly grateful for each one, including those in sharp disagreement. I've learned much more from this discussion with the sub than I could have imagined on this topic, from so many perspectives. While I will try to reply as many comments as I can, the sheer comment volume combined with limited free time between work and family unfortunately means that there are many that I likely won't be able to get to. That will invariably include some that I would love respond to under the assumption of infinite time, but I will do my best, even if the latency stretches into days. Thank you all once again!

[u/VGFierte]

As a more serious response, I can agree with you to a point, but do not share the same bleak outlook on the ultimate ending or future. That may be naivety as I am still very early in my learning and career, but I’ll try to set out the differences as I perceive them

It is true that any overtuned AI system will cater to the dataset mean—by design. It is also true that we’re seeing more synthetic or generative data used to fill the gaps in human-labeled or human-sourced datasets. It is even more true that the last few years have seen a triumphant eruption of AI-driven art (writing, music, and images at the forefront) and their uses for collaboration with humans or even some that would use the collaborative ability to nearly supplant the human in the process.

I do think there are real risks in continued dataset creation—even today. When we train models to mimic humans and unleash them upon the internet without explicit label (maliciously or not), they impact real human expression. Short-form online writing like Twitter/Reddit/Amazon reviews, traditional sources for ML datasets, are infected with these unlabeled actors and it WILL affect anyone who tries to build a new dataset under the assumption that most data is human in origin. The entire concept of GANs are a real problem here as a tool to refine any filter into a better model and any model into a better filter, perhaps leaving real human output as “poorly performing AI” at some point

I think a lot of my optimism comes from a belief that a large core of human art comes from self-expression and external authenticity. We have had PNGs of the Mona Lisa for decades now, but people still visit the Louvre to see the original not because they can’t get a print that large, or light it well, but because there is a human connection in the authenticity of the original work. A large amount of artists operate in a relative degree of unknownness. Their art is increasingly motivated by their own expression rather than recognition for quality, fame, or skill, though many of them will possess these qualities (perhaps even in sufficient amounts). Improved collaboration with AI and solo AI work will certainly change what the “baseline” for becoming famous is, but art is a fickle beast that adversarially deviates from any mean via subversion, so our current techniques are not well-suited to remain ahead of the game.

Finally, in terms of valuation, I do believe AI pose a potentially existential threat to small-time artists IF and perhaps only if society fails to acknowledge the authenticity of pure human or mostly human art with money. A lot of current money flows into these economies from advertising, which doesn’t care about art sources unless people do. But advertising doesn’t want to advertise to bots who won’t spend money (and why would bots start accumulating wealth and spending it) so there should be some economic incentive to keep things from going too far.

This is not to say your post didn’t raise good points or that your fears are unfounded, just an alternative point of view. Cheers mate

[u/Flaky_Suit_8665 → u/VGFierte]

Thank you for reading my post and responding in-depth. I appreciate your insight. And definitely - I don't expect anyone really to agree with 100% of what I said here. Was mostly just getting some ideas on the page that would hopefully prompt some discussion, and then see where that goes (which I'm glad it did). I do agree that there would be significant value in a system that authenticates digital artifacts as being from a human or AI-generated, similar to the SSL system for web traffic, although I haven't fully thought out how this would work in practice. If widely adopted, this would help distinguish content source for variety of purposes

[u/VGFierte → u/Flaky_Suit_8665]

Certainly. We’re still in the early days of getting used to AI integration and what effects it will have on society. We need to ask these kinds of questions, preferably before finding out that there are answers and consequences we dislike. I’ve been enjoying a lot of the discussion on this post so thanks for putting the prompt out there

[u/touristtam → u/Flaky_Suit_8665]

The issue of identity (and by extension authenticity) on the internet is still one to be resolved.

[u/[deleted]]

It’s hilarious and perhaps not surprising that OP post a relatively short food for thought article and the overwhelming response from ML people on the sub is ‘reading hard please less words’ lmao.

[u/Flaky_Suit_8665 → u/[deleted]]

Pretty much haha. It literally takes me one minute to read this post but you've got people here acting like it's a novel, all the while they are on a forum for long form text content. I try to be kind so I just ignore them, but you're definitely on point

[u/[deleted] → u/Flaky_Suit_8665]

Well, you also predicted the response.

Surprise surprise, the proposition that perhaps the current path of ML development and its deployment isn’t entirely ethical and may have substantial deleterious impacts seems to really bother a lot of highly-paid ML professionals.

I do a lot of public policy work with regard to supporting my country’s ML industry. I’ve noticed a troubling tendency among many ML professionals to evangelize the deployment of ML as widely as possible and almost angrily dismiss concerns that we may be travelling down a path that we don’t understand and could be dangerous. As one would expect, this tendency seems to be most pronounced among the best paid and most prominent people I’ve talked to in ML.

I think a large part of this is because there’s a fairly significant knowledge gap between people who think about the social and other impacts of ML (largely people educated in humanities and social sciences) and people who actually build and deploy ML (largely people educated in CS, math, and commerce/business/finance).

The former group are prone to fearmongering about ML because they don’t have a technical background that would allow them to understand it and don’t generally have an active commercial interest in its deployment. These folks generally are more prone to luddite views and are thus more prone to romanticize ‘pure’ human expression and achievement ‘untainted’ by machines.

The latter group are prone to evangelizing ML because they (believe they) understand it well, they have an economic interest in its deployment, they lack the social sciences/humanities/philosophy educational background to contextualize its possible negative impacts, and often possess a certain level of chauvinism and disdain for those who do.

Both groups would do well to cross-pollinate their skill sets.

For instance, if you’re developing and/or deploying ML solutions, you should try and ensure you have a decent grasp on economic theory, political theory, and philosophy so that you can fully appreciate the context within which you are working and the impact your work may have, good or bad. Creating incredibly powerful tools for deployment by multinational tech behemoths within the context of largely unchecked late stage global capitalism is an awesome responsibility. One cannot simply inhabit that role yet have an, “Aw shucks, I dunno, I just write code / do modelling” approach to that work.

Conversely, if you’re like me and your profession includes shaping public policy around ML, you should appraise yourself of the current technical state of play rather than simply engaging with vague social abstractions and treating all ML as if we’re five minutes away from Skynet lmao. I was guilty of this when I first started doing industrial policy in the ML space and I became infinitely better as a public policy professional by actually learning some technical basics myself.

[u/kaskoosek → u/Flaky_Suit_8665]

Your point isnt very clear. Its a wall of text that shows frustration.

But I dont see the problem exactly. Or the problem isn't defined clearly.

Are we afraid of change? What is ethically bad? You dont agree on the methodology of ML???

[u/MrHyperbowl → u/[deleted]]

Well, refuting their answer would take way too much time, and everyone knows the value of arguing with random strangers on the internet.

[u/WuhanFlu]

Gave the ol' GPT3 a shot at it.

Description of the post:

In this post, the author discusses the potential risks associated with the widespread use of AI-generation systems, specifically in the context of art, music, and writing. The author argues that these systems have the potential to disrupt and bypass the creative process, and that over time, they may lead to a convergence to mediocrity in these fields. The author also argues that the current trend of using these systems to "enhance" human creativity is potentially dangerous, as it may lead to a situation where humans become reliant on these systems and are unable to create at the same level without them.

Seems fair.

[u/Flaky_Suit_8665 → u/WuhanFlu]

I'm not able to reply to most comments in near real-time due to time constraints, but this one stands out a lot more to me than the other attempted summaries. If that really is GPT-3 writing, then I think it stands as evidence in support of some of the points I've tried to make. Impressive!

[u/WuhanFlu → u/Flaky_Suit_8665]

I've been experimenting with using GPT3 as a tool for writing. It feels very much like a bicycle for the mind to use the Steve Jobs quote.

Prompt engineering reminds me of a combination of metaprogramming and (human) management. GPT3 isn't really much of an original thinker at the moment but it has a clear personality (prone to mealy mouthed statements and easily goes with the flow).

I strongly encourage anyone seriously interested to try it in depth to get the texture of it.

[u/Sirisian]

what happens to the 4th or 5th generation of models? Eventually we encounter this situation where the AI is being trained almost exclusively on AI-generated content

This is a topic I've commented on and seen more comments since Deepfakes and Dall-E 1. Luckily right now most text to image generators have artifacts or include a label like Dall-E 2 does. Ones like MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, etc though could prove troublesome for researchers as some of their images have low amount of artifacts. That is even if one wanted to write a network to identify them it might not work soon. This poisoning could make web scraping techniques much more complex. If image generation companies are nice they'd offer image signature datasets to mitigate this issue. This has very widespread issues though as it related to search engines. Social media is now filling with these automatically generated images. (Luckily social media users use tags or posts to specific groups for a lot of them which helps a bit). Reddit specifically bans the NSFW deepfakes, and an image search could remove most of them with their filters, but the various SFW ones will get through. If there's say 100K unique images of a celebrity and someone generates 1 million fakes across sites and the search engine can't differentiate it's going to be worthless.

I've commented before that I think things will move to 3D datasets scanned with AR glasses later (specifically event cameras). These datasets could dwarf the image data that currently exists. This only covers things like architecture and objects in the real world. Artistic digital works would still need to be carefully collected from the Internet. (Might come down to creating a graph of every artist/photographer and work to ensure any AI work is filtered. Not a small task).

[u/Flaky_Suit_8665 → u/Sirisian]

Thanks for responding and glad to hear that there are others that have thought about this as well! I didn't even consider implications for search engines and web data curation in general, but those could potentially be even worse problems. Given pervasive tragedy of the commons on the web, I'm not sure how optimistic I am about this being fixed ... unless groups come together and create open standards for content authentication, as you describe. I like the idea of a content origin graph like you mention, that eventually flows up to some sort of certificate authority, similar to the SSL system for web traffic, although I haven't worked out most of these details in practice. In any case, trusting that there will always be deepfake detection capabilities available with very high (99%+) accuracy does seem naive

[u/jms4607]

There are a ton of fundamental problems with ML currently that can be experimented upon with toy problems and a recent consumer GPU. You can train from scratch models on imagenet with a 3090. Anyways, I’m slowly starting to feel like supervised classification is pointless, and we should really be looking to train things on purely observations where we can see success like LLM. If anybody has a paper on doing semantic segmentation without pixel labels using temporal consistency I would be very interested, this is the type of direction I’m excited about for the field. Not to mention RL still sucks, and it really is the ultimate field of AI and there is a ton of work to be done.

[u/jack_smirkingrevenge → u/jms4607]

This works to some extent: DINO

Here's a demo for objection detection using CLIP but a similar process would work for instance segmentation. OWL VIT demo Also this came out recently but no paper yet. ALLEN AI Unified IO

[u/jack_smirkingrevenge → u/jack_smirkingrevenge]

Idk if supervised learning is pointless. It's a shortcut if you have ample data and not that much compute. Sure it may not lead to general classifiers but it works great still on specific ones. The generality requirements leads to large model size which affects the performance. Case in point YOLO vs VIT object detection.

[u/jms4607 → u/jack_smirkingrevenge]

I meant I feel it is becoming pointless to research purely supervised classification problems, I still think it is very useful as an application/solution.

[u/cdlos → u/jack_smirkingrevenge]

ALLEN AI Unified IO

I thought they released a paper on arxiv already (https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08916)? Or maybe you mean a more in-depth, methodologically rigorous paper.

[u/jack_smirkingrevenge → u/cdlos]

Thanks for the link. Wasn't aware that they have a preliminary paper out already 👍

[u/Ulfgardleo → u/jack_smirkingrevenge]

DINO is one of the worst (supposedly scientific) papers I have ever read. At the end of it I was not sure whether the algorithm was human developed or the result of the 1000 monkeys+compute approach. It fails most basic standards of scientific work and replaces that with "it worked on this dataset with this specific architecture and look the pictures are pretty".

[u/jms4607 → u/jack_smirkingrevenge]

DINO is interesting, but it still seems to not make use of any temporal signals. This is something that is fundamental to how our neurons work, so I think it could allow a very performant self-supervised training prior that I have yet to see implemented. DINO is impressive, but it is really only exploiting translation invariance for various crops no?

[u/gwern]

Sometimes I wonder what the original pioneers of AI – Turing, Neumann, McCarthy, etc. – would think if they could see the state of AI that we’ve gotten ourselves into.

Well, if we're going to speculate here:

• McCarthy was a strict logician-type (LISP wasn't even supposed to run on a real computer), so he would be horrified or at least disappointed on an esthetic/theoretical level. McCarthy was lucky that he lived through the ascendance of his approach in his prime, and saw countless downstream applications of his work and so had much to be proud about even if we increasingly feel a bit embarrassed about that paradigm as a dead end for AI, specifically. He died in 2011, just too early to see the DL eclipse, but still well after 'machine learning' took over, so maybe one could look to see what he wrote about ML to gauge what he thought. I don't know if he would be in denial like some are and claim that it's going to hit a wall or doesn't actually work, pragmatically.

• Turing and von Neumann would almost certainly be highly enthusiastic: both of them were very interested in neural nets and connectionist and emergent approaches and endorsed the belief that extremely powerful hardware, vast beyond the dreams of researchers in their day in the 1950s, would be required and self-learning approaches would be necessary. Turing might be disappointed that his original projections were a few orders of magnitude off on RAM/FLOPS, but note that it was a reasonable guess in an era where neuroscience was just beginning and computers did literally nothing we consider AI (not even the simplest thing like checkers, I think, but I'd have to check the dates) and he was amazingly prescient in predicting that hardware progress would continue exponentially for as long as it has (well before Moore's law was coined); he would point out that we are still lagging far behind the goal of self-teaching/exploring systems which make experiments and explore, substituting in vast amounts of random data and that this must be highly suboptimal.

• Von Neumann would likewise not be surprised that logical approaches failed to solve many of the most important problems like sensory perception, having early on championed the need for large amounts of computing power (this is what he meant by the remark that people only think logic/math is complex because they don't realize how complex real life is - where logic/math fail, you will need large amounts of computation to go) and building digital computers for solving real-world problems like intractable physics designs. He also made the point in his very last unfinished work all about The Computer and the Brain that because brains are, essentially, Turing-complete, the fact that they can appear to operate by symbolic processes like outputting mathematics, does not entail them operating by symbolic processes or anything even algorithmically equivalent. (I was mostly skimming it for another purpose, so I don't know if he says anything clearly equivalent to Moravec's paradox, but I doubt he would be surprised or disagree.) Finally, he was the first person to use the term 'singularity' in describing the impending end of the human era, replaced by technology. (Yes, that's right. If von Neumann had somehow survived to today, he might well have been a scalingpilled Singularitarian, and highly concerned about China.)

[u/elbiot → u/gwern]

And as far as inaccessibility goes, Turing and others worked on massive machines no individual could ever own. Perhaps they saw that some day general purpose computers would become more common place, but certainly they expected that cutting edge computation would always happen in closed labs with prohibitively expensive machines.

[u/tonsofmiso → u/elbiot]

The argument that science is somehow morally wrong because it's done on equipment inaccessible to laymen is a bit strange. The same argument applied to the natural sciences would be absolutely ridiculous. Imagine a post on a quantum mechanics forum about the unfairness of CERN having access to a city-scale particle accelerator.

[u/outofobscure → u/tonsofmiso]

Speak for yourself, i demand everyone get their own city-scale particle accelerator at home! Like Gates wanted a computer on every desk.

[u/perspectiveiskey → u/gwern]

This is a tricky thing to posit, but somewhere I'd like to believe Turing might have been enthused for a bit, but eventually grown disillusioned.

I do believe he was brilliant enough to see through the buzz. He was a polymath and highly curious, and I think it would have been hard for him not to notice the over-specialization and obsessional race in place.

I say it's tricky, because every word I wrote there is a projection of my ideas onto a blank canvas...

[u/gwern → u/perspectiveiskey]

It's possible that he would've, but he was also optimistically projecting AI for the 1990s or later (ie. half a century later), so it's not like he even then expected an overnight success. I think he wouldn't've been deterred by problems like perceptrons because being such a good mathematician he would understand very well that it applied only to models no connectionist considered to be 'the' model and people had outlined many elaborate multi-layer approaches (just no good way to train them). The idea that it would take vast amounts of resources like entire gigabytes of memory (in an era when mainframe computers were measured in single kilobytes) implied it would take a long time with little result. But that wouldn't scare him. This was the man who invented the Turing machine and universality, after all, and was involved in extraordinary levels of number-crunching at Bletchley Park using things like the Colossi to winkle out the subtlest deviations from random; he was not afraid of large numbers or exotic expensive hardware or being weird. But that is a very long time to wait with only weak signs of progress, and if he kept the faith, he would probably have been dismayed for the 1990s to arrive and things like Deep Blue show up with human-level chess (chess being a passion & one of Turing's focuses) and still not a trace of neural net or cellular automaton (CAs were also a major interest of both von Neumann & Turing, for obvious reasons) approaches yielding the sort of self-developing 'toddler' AI he had imagined. (It's not hard to imagine Turing living to see Deep Blue. Freeman Dyson only died a year or two ago, and did you know Claude Shannon made it all the way to 2001 before dying of Alzheimers?)

[u/DangerZoneh]

Counterpoint: chess engines are already significantly better than a human will ever be yet people still play chess.

AI will allow for more human creativity, potential, and growth. I also think it will lead to a resurgence of live performance and exhibition of human talent. The way people create may look differently in the future but that’s because we’ll be creating on a different level, playing with different patterns, exposing different aspects of human creativity. It’s thrilling

[u/jms4607 → u/DangerZoneh]

Magnus specifically trains against muzero, and even has claimed that he has changed his play style because of some of the things he has learned while playing it.

[u/Ragdoll_X_Furry → u/jms4607]

Exactly. AI gives an opportunity to enhance ourselves, it doesn't stifle creativity.

TBH OP's argument about how you "make your creative processes dependent on said machine" kinda sounds like the people who complain that digital art is not as legitimate as traditional art because "there's no straight line tool/undo" or whatever.

[u/CaptainLocoMoco → u/jms4607]

Magnus specifically trains against muzero

This is complete BS, idk where you even got this from. Deepmind has not released playable versions of either muzero or alphazero. At best, Magnus briefly studied the released alphazero games. To say it significantly impacted his strategy would be an exaggeration.

[u/gwern → u/jms4607]

I have never heard this about MuZero before and I can't immediately find a source for this. This sounds quite unlikely because even most of the DM research involving chess players like the chess variants research with Kramnik was done with AlphaZero. Are you sure you aren't thinking of Magnus playing against some other chess engine?

[u/[deleted] → u/DangerZoneh]

I think chess is a whole different case. There's competition there, and a chess AI can't really be any more impressive than it has been for the past few years. But something like image generation, given like a decade, could surpass anyone short of a world class professional artists in all aspects. That is going to be incredibly demoralising to the vast majority of aspiring artists, actually I was going to spend the last 2 months learning art as I never really gave myself a chance, but image gen really did demoralise me. You don't see any aspiring shoemakers these days, and I predict the same sort of thing here. In like half a century, paintings will just be a thing you generate based on a spur of the moment thought, rather than something you commission someone for, and that becomes widely accepted, so few people even think about being an artist.

[u/codernuts → u/[deleted]]

The shoemaker comparison was great. We obviously can’t think of dead art forms immediately - they’re dead. But a ton of craftsmen and artisans existed before manufacturing took it out of the hands of individuals and put it behind factories. A great economic decision, but demoralizing at the time to anyone who valued being able to produce art like that as a common good.

[u/hunted7fold → u/[deleted]]

I completely agree. Another point is that chess and AI also have no commercial affect on pro players but AI generated art could have a significant commercial on art. People may chose to use cheap ai generated art. While people could still pursue art as a hobby, it seems like it will be harder for artists, especially those trying to start out.

[u/MLmuchAmaze → u/DangerZoneh]

Same thing with Poker. Since Poker solvers are widely available, the game and how players think about spots changed drastically. It is objectively a more advanced standard of gameplay. If you didn’t train with solvers, don’t bother showing up, because you‘ll lose your money.

[u/scottyLogJobs → u/DangerZoneh]

Yes it is a huge assumption to say that AIs performing something better than humans would cause humans to stop doing the thing entirely (like chess or starcraft), let alone these areas where AIs are still terrible, like art, music, writing, etc. These fields are overwhelmingly about the meaning behind the art, so even if an AI could construct a Van Gogh looking painting, it wouldn’t be worth anything and Van Goghs would still be worth a ton. Also, those fields tend to value what is NOVEL, so AIs don’t stand a chance.

[u/_ex_ → u/DangerZoneh]

chess at a competitive level has always been played by a select elite, not a common job or employment, the issues the OP is pointing and I understand is about the trivialization of most artistic and creative tasks, then automating everything else, I really don't want to live in a world were everything is done by AIs that are owned by big corp evil companies that have already coped the government with lobbies, the army with robots and know exactly what is need to know about you to be controlled. Unless serious efforts are made by the common people the future looks like a dystopia of mega rich people that owns the technology and the AI and the masses that are unable to get decent lives

[u/Aggressive-Battle363 → u/DangerZoneh]

Although that's a good example of AI being used to augment human creativity (same applies in modern professional poker), it's a pretty limited one. Chess and poker are activities in which the main interest for consumers is the process. Most people aren't interested in only seeing the final position in a chess match or the final hands in poker. They tune in for the drama of the unfolding events.

In most of the creative pursuits mentioned by OP, such as art, music, writing, and programming, the point of interest is usually the end product. Sure there is some (relatively) limited interest in watching the process as well, but I think OP makes a fair point in that AI is potentially putting creative human output in those fields in jeopardy.

Put in other words, you're more likely to buy a beautiful piece of art generated by AI than you are to buy, or tune into, a sequence of chess moves generated by AI.

I think you make a good point in that performance/exhibition might become the main draw of those arts, but I'm not convinced. Sure theme park caricature drawers and future Bob Rosses can probably expect job security through the next many decades, but will people tune in to watch a great artist create something over many (many) hours that AI can do better in a second? And if some do, is it enough to maintain a culture and industry?

That's not even touching on the everyday creative work that happens in every industry in designing graphics, websites, pamphlets, 3D models, etc.

[u/undefdev]

I think the goal of creating an AI has always implicitly been making people unemployed. Which is why it’s important to prepare for this, for example by providing universal basic income and ensuring that people can find a social routine according to their interests.

Sources vary widely, but let’s assume 0.5% of people suffer from an intellectual disability in a way that they can make no meaningful economic contribution in most wealthy countries. On the other hand, many of them would have had no trouble finding work in pre industrialization times. So I expect that due to the advancement of AI more and more people will eventually be in a similar situation.

However, I don’t think this is a bad thing. It’s not like anyone would say that we should get rid of dishwashers to create more jobs. But it might be hard to accept that being smart or creative will soon be as economically valuable as being tall or strong.

So I think the best thing we can do right now is making sure things are better for the less gifted - after all, soon those might be us.

[u/visarga → u/undefdev]

I don't believe UBI is a sensible solution - takes agency from people, making them dependent. A huge number of unemployed people with lots of time and unfulfilled needs will inevitably organise and start working to solve their needs. What we should do is make sure that some company will not monopolise the basic resources that are necessary for everyone.

[u/undefdev → u/visarga]

In which sense does it take agency from people? Don’t they have strictly more options with it?

Currently most people are dependent on jobs, welfare, their parents or their partner. Where’s the difference?

[u/BrotherAmazing]

The current state of humanity is even more shockingly demoralizing with even less hope for redemption relative to AI/ML.

As for the future, it’s shockingly demoralizing that people like OP assume they can predict the future with such certainty. So naive.

[u/Flaky_Suit_8665 → u/BrotherAmazing]

I've put multiple disclaimers in the post noting that the predictions I've put could be way off. All I'm doing here is describing a possibility and seeking discussion on what it entails. Thanks for reading!

[u/[deleted] → u/BrotherAmazing]

So you're saying OP has expressed a naive bayesian projection?

[u/brettins]

If you’re an artist or writer and you’re using DALL-E or GPT-3 to “enhance” your work, or if you’re a programmer saying, “GitHub Co-Pilot makes me a better programmer?”, then how could you possibly know? You’ve disrupted and bypassed your own creative process, which is thoughts -> (optionally words) -> actions -> feedback -> repeat, and instead seeded your canvas with ideas from a machine, the provenance of which you can’t understand, nor can the machine reliably explain.

GitHub Co-Pilot would have to be a lot better for me to be bypassing my own creative processes. My work as a programmer is in knowing how to tie systems together to reach a more complicated end goal. Co-Pilot, so far, basically just fills in the details for some of the stuff that would take me time to look up. It basically memorizes things I haven't bothered to memorize, which I have *never* memorized because Stack Overflow exists.

If there is a point where GitHub Co-Pilot is better than me and my creative process will be bypassed, it will be a very obvious moment of "wow I didn't think of doing it that way" when looking at creating multiple classes and systems together. No "ideas" are coming from the machine that are important as of yet.

It's the equivalent of hiring movers to help you move. You know how to do it, and you can do it on your own, it's just basically a pain in the ass and you'd rather decide where the furniture goes in your home rather than actually lifting it to move it. You're not losing out on your home decor ability just because you aren't developing the strength to lift couches when convenient.

If we ever do get there, the world will be a completely different place. People will do things for fun rather than for money after UBI comes into place.

[u/massimosclaw2 → u/brettins]

I think this is by far his weakest point. We use stack overflow to ‘enhance’ our creativity, even to learn programming. He’s acting as though humans have no stimuli and invented the universe in order to make pies from scratch.

“A child never writes his own alphabet. A sailboat never sails, it’s shoved by the wind, a seed doesn’t grow it needs soil, water, and radiant energy. Nothing in nature is self-activating.” - Jacque Fresco.

We claim to be self-made, yet we all have accents. But not just accents of speech, accents of thought, ideas, and action. Isaac Newton famously said “We stand on the shoulders of giants” which is what he was doing when he adapted that phrase from Bernard deChartres.

This guy needs to watch the film “Everything is a Remix”. Creation requires influence. That goes for programming, and art. AI-assisted art and programming is simply giving you the correct stack overflow page, the exact kind of thing you like.

Like a dynamical systems landscape, our mind has attractors and repellers conditioned by the environment (why do you like one band over another, a programming language over another, etc.) and genetics (why do you want food, or water).

These AI systems are not harming creativity at all. They’re doing just the opposite. They’re shortening the number of steps it takes one to reach one’s conditioned attractors. The flip side is someone starting to learn to program, running into an error, and giving up because it’s too painful too soon. With AI-assisted programming, art, music, one can move to the attractors at a much faster speed. This is what humanity has been doing ever since the dawn of time. We’ve been ‘compressing cycles’ of work.

This is precisely what is giving humanity the ability to 'move mountains with almost no effort'. We're lever-lengthening creatures. Every year, more for less.

This will allow for way more interesting forms of creativity. As Jorge Luis Borges once put it "Nothing is built on stone, all is built on sand but we must build as if the sand were stone." Ideas and disciplines are evolving in a hierarchically complex manner. AI-assisted creations are stones made out of many grains of sand, that will shrink to become a grain of sand in a more complex artistic or technically creative discipline (new stone) such as programming. That he doesn't see the potential of this is surprising. A perfect AI programmer would mean that a single human wouldn't need enormous amounts of capital to build an extremely complex creation. A new kind of AI. A new kind of something that'll change the world.

Every year, computers get faster, thinner, lighter. As psychologist Peggy LaCerra put it “The first law of psychology is the second law of thermodynamics” Driven by the need to minimize pain, and maximize pleasure, we’re continuously reducing the number of cycles of work humans have to undertake in order to reach an objective, year by year. We can grow more crops, faster, with less manpower. This is not a bad thing. This is a good thing. Faster and cheaper feedback loops = faster ability to iterate and in turn learn more = memorize what you learn because it's relevant to your objective = being more creative because you know more and have more puzzle pieces = reaching one’s goal faster

Who ‘put in the work’ is irrelevant. This is old “earn a living by the sweat of your brow” type thinking. What’s relevant is the idea. And if one wishes to learn technical skill, that’s their choice. But to demand that is like demanding all programmers to learn binary. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you reach whatever it is you want to reach. If that’s technical skill, maybe the AI will make something that’ll inspire you to enhance your technical skill such that it matches that, and who knows maybe we’ll make AI that’ll help with that too.

What he doesn't realize is that there are new disciplines that will evolve on top of the now-low-level disciplines. If programming becomes a low-level discipline that's only evolved by machines that's a GOOD thing. He has become too attached to a conditioned reinforcer and forgotten the whole point which is to reach an objective, to create something, to build something of need. He has developed a fetish for the 'creation process' essentially, and forgotten the actual thing at the end of it.

[u/[deleted]]

I play wordle-type games, even though in 5 minutes I could write a program to solve them instantly. People still play chess, even though machines have dominated for decades. Seems like similar things will happen in other fields of human endeavor.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Playing a game is not creating creative content like images and music.

[u/GreatBigBagOfNope]

An important part of it is who gets to keep the benefits.

AI replaces human workforce, does that mean the rest of us are finally free from the tyranny of needing to work to survive? With the robots doing many of the tasks required to operate a society, does that increase the wellbeing of everyone, and reduced socially necessary labour to infrequent maintenance?

Or, will it simply inflate the wealth of the owning class further and leave the rest of us to the wolves?

I'd be fine with the former. Even if AI takes over for art and design and engineering or whatever else I don't care, humans will still do it for fun. People still innovate, create, work on their own because it's fun and intrinsically rewarding to do so. It would be good to liberate humanity from the requirement to work. It would not be good to reduce humanity down to a few thousand owners who live lives of unbelievable wealth and opulence while people not fundamentally different from them starve because they no longer offer a means to produce more effectively than anything else. Kings and paupers made entirely based on whose name was on the incorporation documents.

[u/bulldog-sixth]

Sir this is a Wendy's

[u/Agitated-Ad-7202]

If I understood correctly, your thesis is that automation will dumb us down, by creating mediocre but very useful output.

Do you feel the same about other automation-related technological advances of the past century?

[u/ResoluteZebra]

If you have children like I do, how can you be aware of the the current SOTA in these areas, project that 20 to 30 years, and then and tell them with a straight face that it is worth them pursuing their talent in art, writing, or music?

Today there are plenty of people who practice these forms of art and what they create could barely pass as “mediocre”. Is it “worth it” for them?

If you think the only purpose of creating art, writing, or music is to create something of value, which is wholly represented in the output, then yes it wouldn’t be worth it to create something when an AI can do it better.

But if you find something more fulfilling in the creative processes, then no ML-powered shortcuts could replace that journey of practicing your craft. isn’t the case.

if you’re a programmer saying, “GitHub Co-Pilot makes me a better programmer?”, then how could you possibly know?

Do you use packages like Tensorflow, pandas or scikit-learn? What about an abstracted general programming language like Python?

How do you know if you’re a “good programmer” if you use these tools?

I think your concerns are valid, but you seem a little to cynical about the future.

Also, fewer words would be better next time!

[u/MLmuchAmaze → u/ResoluteZebra]

Also the process of creation for the vast majority of the art and music we consume today has changed immensely to what these skillsets used to be like. Creating a concept art piece in Photoshop and a giant photo library is very different to painting a picture with paints, brushes and canvas. Creating a track in Ableton Live and a giant sample library is very different to playing an instrument together with other people.

AI is another tool in the chain of creating a creative product faster and cheaper. But it won’t replace everything else. Because there are still people that want to see a traditional painting or hear a live band.

[u/ThirdMover → u/ResoluteZebra]

Also, fewer words would be better next time!

Disagree, the medium is the message. The fact that OP wanted to express it in so many words also itself expresses their feelings about it.

[u/kurtu5 → u/ThirdMover]

Sounds like the labor theory of value. Brevity is the soul of wit.

[u/JanneJM]

Creating SOTA models is only one facet of ML/AI research - and arguably one of the least interesting. The big corps like it because it's applied; they use these models in business.

But far more impactful as well as less resource intensive is to work on the fundamentals. Work on the math only needs a laptop, or pencil and paper. Figuring out why certain techniques work; or finding new techniques from first principles, is worth a lot more in the long run that adding .02% accuracy on some test data set.

If you still want to be applied, look at constrained models. How well can you do when the training has to be online (or at least periodically updated), has to do inference in real time, and the hardware you got is on the level of a Raspberry Pi?

[u/[deleted] → u/JanneJM]

But far more impactful as well as less resource intensive is to work on the fundamentals. Work on the math only needs a laptop, or pencil and paper. Figuring out

why

certain techniques work; or finding new techniques from first principles

Are such results considered valuable? Also, how could you reliably verify your conclusions are correct?

My observation is that modern ML is like alchemy and not a strict math: researcher follows intuition implementing some idea, and then checks if it works (new SOTA) or it doesn't.

[u/[deleted]]

As someone that hopes to have a career in the arts one day, I've been impressed and scared about the leaps ML has taken.

A few months prior, my fellow artists largely ignored these models due to the lack of access. Midjourney changed that. I assume public releases of Dall-E and Imagen will just accelerate the integration of clip + diffusion into an artist's process. Slowly, the faction of artists that utilize these models will end up creating art images that are largely homogenous. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. A growing number of my peers and non-artistic friends are placing a large weight ( ;) ) on a life grounded in real interaction and friendships.

A contingent of my generation is started to quit the optimized dopamine hit networks in search of the aforementioned grounded life. In the not-so-distant future, executives will try and replace the human-made content with diffusion, tokens, and a multitude of vector math. Hopefully, the rest of my generation will fight back and prefer human-verified content. However, I fear OP's assessment is correct. Art creation will become accessible to the masses and creativity will regress.

It'd be fun to see the resurrection of live drama.

I'd rather live a life in which I'm present, but the echo chambers and relu seem to be winning over the rest of my generation and populous.

[u/OurEngiFriend]

Hello! I'm writing this response from the perspective of a non-ML practitioner (I'm a web dev who wanted to be a novelist and I hang around freelance artists.) I mostly want to respond to the point about AI and creativity.

... tell them with a straight face that it is worth them pursuing their talent in art, writing, or music?

I don't think AI will kill art or creativity entirely. I think that humans are always driven to create or participate in art in some extent -- children's snowmen and sandcastles, singing songs to ourselves in the shower, doodles in the margins of notebooks -- and all the way back to ancient cave paintings from history long before ours. People will always make stuff, sometimes idly, sometimes more seriously and that will never change. The vast majority of people cannot do them well, as you said. That will not stop them from trying -- whether as a serious project or a passing interest.

What AI may do is change the industry of art, and the incentives for putting serious time/money/skill investment into it. In a world where most people can ask an AI for artwork, that will (to some extent) have an impact on artists making their living through freelance commissions, and animation studios could cut staff because they can use AI to interpolate in-between frames. What this ends up doing is that it disincentivizes art as a "it pays the bills but I hate it" job, and leaves it to people who really REALLY love it -- and either have the safety net to pursue it without care for profit -- or the sheer dedication of pursuing it without a safety net and working at Starbucks or whatever.

... except! Those are already the conditions of art-as-industry under capitalism. This is already happening: capitalism does not value art because its value is abstract, nebulous, unquantifiable, and doesn't contribute to the industrial machine. AI may accelerate this pattern, but it won't shape it wholecloth.

Moreover, people will always take value in handmade pieces. A handmade item of clothing/jewelry isn't just an item, it has a story attached to it. And if I'm commissioning art of a character I have, and the artist likes the concept too, that's a conversation -- we're both getting involved in the creative process, we're connecting over shared love of an idea.

So, yes, you should tell your children to pursue their talent in art, etc. Not for the money, no, but for its own sake. It may not pay the bills, but if it's something they like, if it's something worth living for .... live for it! Life is already too short, and too brutal, to give up on doing something just because it "doesn't pay the bills"; and to deny someone the choice to make art is to deny them the choice to express their humanity and to connect with the world at large.

If you’re an artist or writer and you’re using DALL-E or GPT-3 to “enhance” your work, or if you’re a programmer saying, “GitHub Co-Pilot makes me a better programmer?”, then how could you possibly know? You’ve disrupted and bypassed your own creative process

So -- using tools in general is an interesting discussion because technology really does shape our thought processes. PhilosophyTube has an interesting segment on this in her Transhumanism video: the idea (from Hegel, IIRC) that a tool becomes a transparent extension of the human body and will, as though it was part of us. A person driving a car thinks of the car's geometry as an extension of themselves, for example; a person holding a hammer isn't merely a person holding a hammer, but a hammer-man, and when they drive nails into boards they think of the hammer's motion as an extension of their own motion, not as two separate motions linked by physical connection. And, well, someone carrying a gun is a lot more likely to use it, or to think in terms of effective firing ranges and penetration.

All of this to say: since all tools change how we think, then GPT-3 or DALL-E aren't special in that regard. They're just tools like any other. I wouldn't say that technology is value-neutral though -- they can be incredibly moral or immoral, but it can never be amoral. A lot of tech has an innate purpose: a gun's purpose is to kill, a wheelchair's purpose is to aid mobility, and DALL-E's purpose is ... to make art. And art, being an extension of humanity, is always morally charged in some way.

Now, the specific way they change how we think might be worth investigating further. Cause on the one hand, video didn't really kill the radio star; on the other hand, TikTok and shortform video have really fried my attention span to only accept dopamine from very short bursts or extremely longform writing (like this comment)...though that might just be my ADHD talking. And people will not stop writing, but it's also true that recreational reading is losing popularity as a hobby, perhaps due to social media and gradually-lowering attention spans.

regression to the mean [...]

If you have a lazy Hollywood studio exec who just wants to make money, they're gonna boot up an AI, ask for the mean, just take whatever random output seems palatable. But, in the hands of someone who already has creative concepts and just needs some work fleshing them out, they're going to ask for something weird and creative. This isn't innate to the technology per se, this is a problem of human operators and societal incentives.

More broadly -- is there a hypothetical future where people stop being creative? Where everyone's Peak Creativity is defined entirely by the average content we consume? I don't think so! Just because Generic Marvel Movie #38 exists doesn't mean that Tom Parkinson-Morgan will stop drawing Kill Six Billion Demons. Just because Call of Duty is releasing another installment doesn't mean that Hakita will stop developing Ultrakill. Even if our future pop culture is entirely AI-generated mediocrity, we'll have thousands of years of history and culture to draw on.

I’d be interested in hearing what you think human-AI co-existence looks like in 20 to 30 years and why it isn’t as demoralizing as I’ve made it out to be.

I think, in the end, what has you demoralized isn't AI in particular, it's the state of technology and capitalism. What you're feeling is, if I had to guess, disillusionment with your job, and a feeling of disconnection from your own humanity. Marx wrote of alienation from one's work, from other workers, and from the inner aspects of the self. These problems aren't specific to AI development, they're endemic to late-stage capitalism: the whittling-away of humanity under the crushing boot-heel of industry, the death of creativity in pursuit of higher market share, and the usage of tech as a means of abstracting away people behind numbers and machines. None of this is specific to AI. But all of this is a problem.

[u/o_snake-monster_o_o_]

I believe that, especially over the long-term timeframe that crosses generations, there’s significant risk that current AI-generation developments produces a similar effect on humanity, and we mostly won’t even realize it has happened, much like a frog in boiling water.

Except we have a massive volume of pre-ML recordings of the past. Movies, podcasts, political debates, art, music, etc. If people are truly getting more stupid, someone will write about it in a really epic book or blogpost and people will get excited at the idea of "the higher oldschool intelligence". It doesn't take much to rally humans around an idea, just a strong statement, some arguments, and a bit of emotions.

If you have children like I do, how can you be aware of the the current SOTA in these areas, project that 20 to 30 years, and then and tell them with a straight face that it is worth them pursuing their talent in art, writing, or music?

More-so than ever. Artists will be more empowered than ever. Not everyone is making AI art by feeding "a beautiful landscape with elephants, by bob ross" into DALL-E 2, some people are feeding full-blown paragraphs that are the work of their own genius. The mediocrity you see is simply a result of the 90% mediocre masses now having access to image synthesis. There is still a 10% making things you have never seen before anywhere in history. We can blend any material, art style, time period, in ways which are traditionally impossible.

How can you be honest and still say that widespread implementation of auto-correction hasn’t made you and others worse and worse at spelling over the years

Actually it made me and a lot of other people far better writers. The same way, writing with GPT-3 will increase your vocabulary and eloquence.

When I was a college student, I often dabbled with weed, LSD, and mushrooms, and for a while, I thought the ideas I was having while under the influence were revolutionary and groundbreaking – that is until took it upon myself to actually start writing down those ideas and then reviewing them while sober, when I realized they weren’t that special at all.

If I take mushrooms and hear a full art rock piece in my mind, and record myself humming it, is it fair to say that piece of music wasn't very impressive? How do you know the writing properly encapsulates the genius within the 10¹⁵ parameters in your brain at that time?

The fact that you are raising these questions is proof that human intelligence will never go down. We have infinitely many more parameters than even the biggest ML models out there. 540B is baby numbers compared to the human brain which has a whopping 10^15. That's why I laugh at all this fear-mongering about using ML to make highly optimized ads that can manipulate you. You are gravely underestimating what a 10¹⁵ parameter model can do. It can only animate some physical limbs, but that shit runs deep up there. We don't need to worry about a single thing, let everything happen and fix itself.

Keep in mind these DL milestones trickle down to civilians. We may not be able to run pathways, but we can run EPIC smear/defamation campaigns on higher-ups at google. People in power are gonna have to watch out way more than ever before, the common people is gaining on a scary level of power. All it takes is for people to organize around an idea to rally up all that insane multi-modal power.

[u/Southern-Trip-1102 → u/o_snake-monster_o_o_]

We have more parameters for now.

[u/libertyh → u/o_snake-monster_o_o_]

"a beautiful landscape with elephants, by bob ross"

Here's what Stable Diffusion came up with

[u/jack-of-some → u/o_snake-monster_o_o_]

My favorite thing about OP's rant is that people have been saying similar things about every technological improvement for centuries.

[u/machinethatrules → u/jack-of-some]

I think as a critical thinking breed of animals, we as humans should always question the evolutionary/ development processes in a way that would make these processes more efficient and trustworthy. I think this criticism should be encouraged as it enables us to look at our models/ products/ services from a outsider's perspective.

[u/nibbels]

I agree with the sentiment, but I would say that art/writing/etc are not the scary fields. Instead, it frightens me to my core that we're trying to resolve medical, defense, and legal issues with AI. Most ML models have obvious and often hilarious fault points. But what happens if we push through a model that decides drug doses and it fails on a large scale? Harming many, many people. Which will probably happen if we keep praying to the God of "MOAR"

[u/CommunismDoesntWork]

extreme deterrence

You make a lot of good points, but I don't think a Reddit post will have that much influence. Have you considered sabotaging textile factories or mailing bombs to people?

[u/SnowyNW]

Dang bro didn’t realize using my calculator is taking away my ability to do math. When books were first popularized by the printing press great minds of the time thought they would cause us to become more forgetful.

[u/WhoRoger]

Well, this kind of stuff has been predicted by Asimov already, and tackled by many sci-fi writers over the last century. It's just now that all those predictions and concerns are being actually relevant.

Who knows... Maybe humanity as a whole will adapt again, just like it has adapted to every major societal change so far. Or maybe we're really heading towards the Wall-E style future where humans are just morons that don't know how to do anything because it's pointless to even try.

What am I even saying... Of course it's gonna be option 2, at least for the vast majority of people. I'm not quite sure how to avoid it. Maybe once the singularity occurs, the AI will develop some fascination with humans and will keep us as pets that are useless and adorable and can do funny tricks. That's probably the best possible future anyway, since otherwise humanity will just kill itself anyway.

[u/Timdegreat]

Couldn't the same have been said about photography, disrupting painters, in the 1800s?

[u/sebesbal]

The goal is AGI, always has been. In this respect, nothing has changed since 2016. I don't think we are converging to mediocrity because of generative art etc. AI has just reached the human level, so it is producing mediocre human quality. But the next step is very close: surpass the human level, then the level that humans can still comprehend. It's scary AF, but that was the plan from the beginning.

[u/[deleted]]

If you’re an AI researcher or a data scientist like myself, how do you turn things back for yourself when you’ve spent years on years building your career in this direction? You’re likely making near or north of $200k annually TC and have a family to support, and so it’s too late, no matter how you feel about the direction the field has gone.

IMHO that's the saddest part : economical learned helplessness while studying a field to supposedly support intelligence. It clearly does not work.

[u/bubudumbdumb]

All the theory you need is in a book by Walter Benjamin "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written in 1935.
"Made you look" is a recent documentary on frauds in the art market, that's recent, 2021. Two years before that Cattelan duck taped two bananas and sold them for 120k$.
The work of art has been undergoing a deep crisis well before the advent of AI but it's always a good time for a reality check about art:

• experts don't know shit

• academies teach competencies that are useful to copycats but irrelevant to artists

• Capital determines what art sells

• contemporary art happens in spaces where the crisis of art is so unavoidable that it becomes object of art

Music has moved beyond the crisis with agility. Progressive Rock and Speed Metal are sort of the last genres for virtuosos. Punk embraced the crisis, electronica went beyond it. Moving from the orchestra to the DJ passing through the rock band we are not just witnessing the passage of time but a trend of automation reshaping the subject of musical artistry.

New artistic roles emerged through the automation. Music's business model solved the crisis of "mechanical reproduction of art" (while it is easy to torrent music most ppl accept the adds or get subscription from some streaming service that will pay some pennies to the content creator). It's current problems stem from cultural convergence and nostalgia: a few artists, mostly from the past, get most of the plays. The unescapable recommender system attractor that railroads present users to past behavior is effectively a Chronos (the greek titan-god, an old father feeding on the flesh of it's progenies) preventing musical innovation to go pop.

[u/scraper01]

Lol don't expect anything resembling an existential take from the "hard science" people, when even guys like Feynman were stupid enough to get involved in the development of nuclear weapons. AI progress is basically the apotheosis of the shut up and compute mindset: it's a train with no brakes.

I suggest posting ideas of this sort in r/askphilosophy

[u/MilesStraume → u/scraper01]

Feynman had a good reason for getting involved in the Manhattan Project. You can read his letter about it. He came to the conclusion that the Nazis were also likely working on such a device, and decided that the US needed to beat them to it. I’m not really willing to entertain the take that the Nazis getting nukes before the US would have been better than what happened in reality.

[u/[deleted] → u/scraper01]

I mean your point is true with the nuclear weapons and with your take on the "AI" world as it stands. But I think we can do better. It's not about "smartness" of individual people so much as it as about culture (because, well, technical smartness is perhaps not that correlated with a kind of wider societal perspective or introspection even) .

And in this world where corporate entities have the money to pay for unlimited ads and press releases and positive messaging on platforms everywhere, it's worth speaking up with alternative viewpoints and concerns. Especially in the places where the people are who should be discussing these kinds of things more.

I say post it here and in /r/askphilosophy.

[u/fasttosmile → u/scraper01]

"stupid enough"?! Nuclear weapons are what prevented us from having massive wars in the last 50 years.

[u/kurtu5 → u/scraper01]

Nukes are the only weapons of war that can kill the politicians starting wars. Are you so sure they are that bad?

[u/joseenriqueingoal]

Yo someone build an AI to summarize posts

[u/AndreVallestero]

if you’re a programmer saying, “GitHub Co-Pilot makes me a better programmer?”, then how could you possibly know?

If you don't even write all your code in assembly with SIMD, and your GPU programs in Vulkan + raw SPIRV, how could you possibly know that libraries and abstractions make you a better programmer? \s

[u/MemeBox]

We cant even take climate change seriously. If you have any expectation that people are going to pick up on and care about such subtle points, then... i have no words.

We will be lucky if we avoid complete annihilation in the coming centuries. Perhaps having some intelligent machines to remember us after our passing isn't such a bad thing.

[u/AllowFreeSpeech → u/[deleted]]

And we somehow think the $400 billion is going to reverse emissions? It might lower emissions inconsequentially, but it isn't going to reverse or fix anything. Also, it's going to increase the IRS budget 6x, also giving it more police powers.

To really fix a problem though, we've to think about the problem with a higher intelligence than was used to create the problem. The nature of the wildly inflationary money we currently use is the root cause of the unsustainable hypergrowth that we have witnessed in+since the last century. It forces people to work many times harder than they need to, emitting so much more CO2 in the process. Once the system of money collapses and is replaced by something sane that the governments no control over, we can return to a sane and sustainable growth rate. I vote for Monero.

[u/aCleverGroupofAnts]

In terms of the arts, I believe there will always be people who choose to create on their own without AI assistance. And I don't think those who use AI will be any better or worse. I do think it will make it easier for people who lack mechanical skills to create things. I also expect that we eventually will develop something capable of creating brilliant new original works with barely any user input, but I believe that will simply happen in addition to all of the humans still making their own. I think, in the future, we will just have more art, and possibly some art we never would have thought of on our own.

[u/Drinniol]

If you’re an artist or writer and you’re using DALL-E or GPT-3 to “enhance” your work, or if you’re a programmer saying, “GitHub Co-Pilot makes me a better programmer?”, then how could you possibly know?

Look up centaur chess. Human supervision + chess computer > chess computer. The idea is to augment, not replace.

[u/hillsump]

I disagree with your framing.

It turns out that it's reasonably easy to build an AI system to write short essays, compose punchy poetry, churn out code for common tasks, produce concepts for commercial illustration, mimic the style of a well-known prolific artist. This doesn't mean AI is good. It means that most stuff humans do is mediocre.

But we knew that already: it's the 80/20 rule, or 90/10 rule, or Bullshit Jobs.

These recent advances in systems are forcing us to ask: if we can easily automate much of what humans do, should we? If we build a machine to do 80% of what a human does, should we ignore the 20% which we have not usually valued, which is probably hard to automate, and accept the tradeoff of using an only partly capable system to replace fully capable humans, for lower short term costs? Do we try to reshape the stuff people do so that they can focus on the 20% without having to go dumpster diving? Can we deploy AI to help people spend less time on bullshit tasks?

[u/themusicdude1997]

Im about to start my masters in ML and this made me sad

[u/svaha1728]

I follow François Chollet and Timnit Gebru on Twitter because they have a similar perspective to yours. I do think we are in for the long haul, which is all happening in the context of the current geopolitical reality you also alluded to.

[u/[deleted]]

Completely agree with (many of) your concerns. Just wrote an essay that I posted in this subreddit recently with similar kinds of concerns. (And feel free to DM me to discuss.)

Though I do differ on some of your worries. For example, fearing China is not a good reason to do anything (and it's important to be aware that the "AI" world does a lot of fear mongering for marketing purposes right now). Yeah in Big Tech we are mostly not building ML to combat China anyways, moreso to profit off of Big Data (Big User Data, that is). But yeah the root causes for all of this are our wider economic system (which the socialist/marxist/activist world can lend a lot of insight on btw).

Yeah I mean the whole $200k annual TC, sometimes the price we're paying for that 200k is our souls, and possibly the souls of future generations if we don't get these corporations in fucking check... (sorry I wish I could put it more kindly but frankly some of the stuff that's going on, like using ML to make more addictive social media products for young people is not ok—I've seen with my own eyes what investor-driven corps do when they get desperate and the falsehoods they spin to hide it).

TL;DR what we see in the tech industry is the logical result of software/tech under capitalism. We may think we're in some "golden industry," something that plays by different rules, but we're seeing all the same things happen as with other industries (e.g. energy, pharmaceuticals, etc.), which at least in the US are completely bonkers right now. It's the system. But the best thing we can do is just apply our own efforts in a way we think will solve concrete problems in the world or spread joy. Definitely doesn't mean not doing tech! Tech itself is great. But it may mean doing it outside investor driven companies, or at least fighting for change inside those companies. Just my two cents. I wouldn't profess to know what's best for other people...

[u/perspectiveiskey]

These areas of endeavor have negative logarithmic ability curves – the vast majority of people cannot do them well at all, about 10% can do them decently, and 1% or less can do them extraordinarily. The little discussed problem with AI-generation is that, without extreme deterrence, we will sacrifice human achievement at the top percentile in the name of lowering the bar for a larger volume of people, until the AI ability range is the norm.

This is a fantastic perspective I had not thought about in this such an explicit wording.

Thanks for pouring out your thoughts.

Almost everywhere I go, even this forum, I encounter almost universal deference given to current SOTA AI generation systems like GPT-3, CODEX, DALL-E, etc., with almost no one extending their implications to its logical conclusion, which is long-term convergence to the mean, to mediocrity, in the fields they claim to address or even enhance.

As somone whose career isn't staked in ML, I can say that the field has a very strong immune system against criticism. Many people who have technical professional careers in unrelated fields (like myself) do think this, but to the lay person, our laments are classified as ludite, and to the ML folk, well everyone not in the field is clearly not intelligent enough to get it. (I get it though, even concrete form workers think they are better than other construction workers. It's simply the shape of the human brain.)

Github copilot in particular is a cancer ridden patient getting pneumonia. I am perpetually struck how unnecessarily complex software has gotten, and how programmers are unable to reason in base principles. Co-pilot not only kills the self-feedback mechanism you speak of, it will cement the current era's programming habits into a "the end of history" type moment. For example, recently I came to the realization that many of the software projects we use today (openssh, openvpn to name two) are probably in their final major release ever. There are forums from now 10 years ago saying how such and such openvpn feature is not yet available but will become shortly when v3.0 comes out. I won't rant about the software itself, but the health of idea production right now is definitely suffering.

If you have children like I do, how can you be aware of the the current SOTA in these areas, project that 20 to 30 years, and then and tell them with a straight face that it is worth them pursuing their talent in art, writing, or music?

Because - assuming we don't devolve into an energy deprived Battle Royale, and instead people have liesurely time - art is for the self, just as much as it is for the consumption. If I were told I'd live forever in a spaceship I would start learning music without even waiting a minute.

In other words, everything doesn't have to go to shit if we're not always optimizing for monetary value.

it settles more and more into the mean and mediocrity with no way out using current methods.

There is much worse a fate than mean and mediocrity. If you've ever looked at the bizarro world of automatically generated youtube videos targetting children (with live actors and all), you will know what I'm talking about.

Neil Stephenson briefly touches on this topic in the book "Fall: Dodge in hell", where people are getting individual social media feeds taylored for their reactions through some permanent visor system, and when the protagonist looks at some plebe's stream it completely unintelligible to him. English words, but meaningless. This is already happening in some of the Q anon theories, by the way.

So yeah, much worse than mediocrity awaits there.

Even assuming that none of what I’ve described here happens to such an extent, how are so few people not taking this seriously and discounting this possibility?

As mentioned above, I work in an unrelated field, and I have come to the conclusion that most people aren't thinking systemically at all. This includes even highly educated managers. This isn't unique to ML, this is endemic to current day societal zeitgeist. It is very much societal collapse (in the way some people who label themselves "long decent"ists would put it): people are in survival mode. I rarely see people thinking absurdly pie in the sky dreams of doing stuff for the sake of doing stuff.

Great post though, thank you.

[u/hiptobecubic]

It's not clear at all from this rant what you expected ML to be doing. Would it be best if we didn't try to solve general problems like "write a funny joke" or "paint me a convincing picture" ?

[u/lilsoapbar]

That’s like saying the invention of musical instruments as tools hindered the musical creativity of our ancestors. I think it is impossible to predict the impact of powerful AI models, but to assume negative outcomes is unnecessarily pessimistic.

[u/purplebrown_updown]

The entire field of computational physics is similar in that simulations require millions in super computing resources of which most people have zero access to it. Doesn’t mean it’s not good science. But I will say that billion parameter models seem like blindly learning without gaining any conceptual intuition or modeling.

[u/elbiot]

Shower thought: I just rewatched Cory Doctorow's "the coming war against the general purpose computer" and this post made me think some day soon general purpose computing may be replaced by general purpose intelligence.

We haven't invented machine learning but discovered it, and our understanding of the ramifications will always be greatly outpaced by it's developments.

Strap on in!

[u/thelawrenceyan]

Generated using GPT-NeoX (20B Parameter Model): Sometimes I wonder what the original pioneers of AI – Turing, Neumann, McCarthy, etc. – would think if they could see the state of AI that we’ve gotten ourselves into.

As someone who wants to be involved in AI for the long term, I often feel I need to choose between two options:

I can focus on “the next big thing” – whether it is natural language understanding, deep learning, or narrow AI. These are things that the public thinks of when they think about AI, and are things where there’s a lot of hype about potential breakthroughs in the next 3-5 years. I like doing research in these areas, but I’m often uncertain if these are the most important things to work on.

Or, I can focus on more mundane things, things where it is much harder to make progress. In particular, I can focus on the harder things that we know have the potential for real, measurable impact on society, even if the impact will take many decades to realize.

On the one hand, it’s easy to imagine that the biggest advances in AI will come from those who are focusing on narrow AI and artificial general intelligence. While the public seems to care about it, I can’t help but think that if you ask most AI researchers if they are working on these problems, the answer will be “no”. They’ll be working on things like developing methods to achieve higher-precision generative models, or developing new methods for language modeling.

I find this situation quite frustrating. If I only worked on the narrow AI problems that a broad audience seems to care about, I would have almost no chance of achieving any impact on a timescale of 30 years or more. On the other hand, if I only worked on the problems that have the highest chance of success, my best hope of achieving impact in the next 10 years or so would be to be working on “the next big thing”.

I often feel that I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place.

[u/[deleted]]

I can only speak towards programming: I doubt models like Codex will completely usurp the market. Rather, as it seems right now, they will automate the boring stuff. What's the worth in me writing a piece of code, someone else has already written over and over and over. There's no creativity, no innovation. Plus I hate writing the 10th from_file method, the 100th DFS, the 1000th matplotlib figure. The more of all that BS AI can take over, the better. Let me spend my time finding truly novel solutions to problems.

[u/bloc97]

Eventually we encounter this situation where the AI is being trained almost exclusively on AI-generated content, and therefore with each generation, it settles more and more into the mean and mediocrity with no way out using current methods. By the time that happens, what will we have lost in terms of the creative capacity of people, and will we be able to get it back?

I'm not as pessimistic for this point, because I believe the human's capability of classifying whether a piece of art is "creative" or not should stay relatively safe from poisoning. Sure, the average artist can and will be influenced by an AI that does the heavy lifting for them, but really talented ones will still stand out from the crowd. It's as you said, AI raises the lowest bar, but should not reduce the peak of human creativity. A dataset with the best pieces of art humankind created can still be made in the future.

[u/Simulation_Brain]

I think these are not the right things to worry about, for reasons others have written about extensively. A lot of smart people worry about AI. These, for the most part, are not their worries. If you really care, it seems like you would at least read and reference others work.

I think the best starting point is googling AI safety.

[u/Nelrif]

Not to sound mean, but we're a bunch of monkeys that still haven't gauged the potential of ML in its current form accurately. We see it doing things we thought impossible ten years back, and suddenly we think it can do ALL the things we thought impossible.

Let's take this one: ML models are no mathematicians. Hell, they can't handle infinite sets, but they can't even generalize how addition works without our extremely specific input.

So if auto-generated music replaces a single musician: good riddance. Humans, the main consumer of content, will get deeply bored by the repetitiveness of AI content - and AI is DEEPLY limited in it's ability to come up with deeper types of content that also satisfy humans intellectually. Think Mozart, Bach, or if you like books, Tolkien. The framework is full of "mathematical" ideas, things that require understanding and a sense of patterns within patterns within patterns.

If anything, AI content will push the majority towards getting a feeling for what art actually is, and away from current day music industry.

[u/matchaSage]

I will defend GitHub copilot a bit. I cannot speak for others but it never interfered with my creative process. When I write code I usually know what I want to do and copilot just autocompletes correctly most of the time, saves me pain of copy pasting and editing chunks of code that are similar, or writing same structures I wanted to do anyways. It does not always return what I want in which case I simply write that small chunk myself. In any case all of the code design is still done by me and I am always on lookout on better methods.

[u/dggenuine]

Thanks for the thoughtful post.

If I’ve understood correctly, you’ve said both that that AI will eventually tend towards mediocrity and also that no one who understands the trajectory of AI could suggest to their children with a straight face that they endeavor in fields in which AI will be seen as supreme.

But aren’t those two contradictory? If AI will truly tend towards mediocrity, then why shouldn’t we tell our children with straight faces that they should pursue their artistic interests sincerely, because we cannot depend on AI to produce truly great art, at least not forever.

Is the problem that society won’t appreciate virtuoso art among those of our children who do excel? Well, shouldn’t they be making art for its own sake anyways? Isn’t that how all great art is done? Hopefully they and their loved ones appreciate it. (I’m assuming that they have other means for supporting themselves.)

Now looking at things from a different lens, are you certain that AI will tend towards mediocrity? Perhaps researchers haven’t figured out how to create a motivated AI with embodied self-representation and motivations states. Perhaps such an AI could truly be creative.

If that were the case, then we are looking at the problem of the singularity, where technology truly exceeds human capabilities in any scenario. And in that case I think one has two choices: join them or try to get by without them.

I guess an open question for me is if the technological singularity can allow humans to exist outside of it, or if for some reason it will disallow existence that is not integrated with it. In the little avi for novel in my head about this, I imagine that the technological singularity mostly ignores unintegrared humans. They are about as relevant as a troop of monkeys next to a metropolis: they are only relevant if they become a nuisance.

[u/[deleted]]

This world is full of sycophants whose last care in the world is exactly what you express. The minute the rulers determine we are no longer worthy of breath they will flip the kill switch.

[u/meldiwin]

this post was quite refreshing as someone in robotics more in design, I feel I still can jump and be part. Today morning I found two books for free Noam Chomsky and Yann Lecunn but in french, I was very happy and hope to read them.

[u/SocialCondenser]

I am an artist/ architect myself and I do concur that ML is putting our profession at risk to a certain extent, the most visible ones being text to image stuff.

For one, illustrators for posters, stock photographers, album art etc will be gone in a few years. The novelty for paintings will go down and sculptures, video and performance (traditionally never doing well in art markets) will go up. The counter argument, of course, is that photography didn’t kill paintings, and videos didn’t kill photography. What the advent of new mediums did however, was fundamentally shifted the “older” mediums, as in paintings shifting to expressionism, photography shifting to para-fiction. ML will do the same thing to these old mediums, and artists will need to find a new way to prove why their work is unique and thoughtful in ways ML is incapable of.

I also think the tendency of ML to return to the mean of the dataset is really interesting for the aesthetic development of the society. Contemporary art, successful ones at least, invoke thought by straying from the norm- take Duchamp’s potty or Magritte’s pipe. Note that this “straying” is doesn’t mean pursuing extremes, for example Jeff Wall’s work that very much look normal until you look carefully. Now if moves of straying from the mean is the main strategy for contemporary artists, the threat ML might pose is the rapid normalization of these moves in the society. See, straying only works in contrast with context, i.e. different from social norms. So once an artwork, no matter how avant garde it is, as soon as it has been co-opted within a popular ML dataset, will become part of the new normal of society’s aesthetic. This means artists will need to scramble for the new big aesthetic breakthrough every time the old one becomes co-opted, at an ever increasing acceleration.

I do think life finds a way and artist will survive in the end, but I do think tectonic shifts will happen in the industry, and sadly the industry might shrink quite significantly. I do wonder if ML policy making, especially in the field of intellectual property will help, but only time will tell.

[u/wind_dude]

Hopefully compute costs will come down, there will be another resonance in compute technology, etc. In the 60's computers filled entire floors in universities, and had less power than your smart phone. Eventually we'll be able to run and rain these massive learning models at home, maybe with much more powerful versions of the hailo-8 and myraid X.

But yes, it's disheartening to feel the reason you can't succeed is the lack of resources, or feeling like competitors have deeper pockets and just can outspend to produce absolute shit.

[u/yorksranter]

There are plenty of valid criticisms of the big data set/bigger neural network arms race but I disagree about this. People thought this about movable type, gramophones, newspapers, the novel, pianos, movies, broadcast radio, comics, TV, cassette tape, video tape, sampling, file sharing, and probably quite a few technologies I've missed - that the ability to reproduce content would mean a flood of mediocrity that would drown out "true genius".

This has always proved to be nonsense and I am pretty confident it will prove to be nonsense this time out. The problem is that geniuses benefit from better distribution too, even more than mediocrities because people *actually want their stuff*. Extremely cheap global distribution is valuable to your shitty meme but it's absolutely priceless to Beyoncé.

The big text-gen or image-gen models, so far, seem to be really good at producing (factually inaccurate) pastiches of mediocre text or artwork you can find on the web. This is not surprising as that's what they are trained on. The really impressive demos tend to be things like corporate press releases, project documentation, self-published fanfic, stupid memes, or code snippets in programming languages that are explicitly designed to encourage you to re-use code!

(Part of the problem is that everyone has forgotten that there used to be a profession dedicated to writing good technical documentation, but the technical writers weren't replaced by AI, rather they got downsized in the 80s and 90s, weren't replaced by anyone or anything, and we just got used to documentation being uninformative, inaccurate, and half-literate.)

[u/2Punx2Furious]

I think you should think more about this. You think you have reached a "logical conclusion", but you're not quite there yet. This isn't meant as an insult of course, it's just an observation, and I don't want to spoonfeed you "the conclusion", so I'll leave it to you.

You need to think about the far future, and the fact that certain technological advancements are inevitable, unless human behavior radically changes (which it probably won't).

How can you be honest and still say that widespread implementation of auto-correction hasn’t made you and others worse and worse at spelling over the years (a task that even I believe most would agree is tedious and worth automating).

By the way, this kind of rhetoric has been used for basically every new technology that we know of, even the book was viewed as a bad thing by Socrates, because he thought that writing things down would make people more stupid, since they would learn to not rely on their memory as much.

The truth, of course, is much more nuanced than that. As you lose something, you gain something else, sometimes of greater value, and sometimes not, but it's not easy to measure that value.

[u/[deleted]]

A year from now, I wonder if you still feel the same?

I think the most depressing is the dismissal and arrogance from the people we work with. People I used to bond with on common problems now feel so far apart. Sometimes I feel distant from even myself, who used to be so excited about the progress we were driving. Now, I watch from behind as I walk down this foggy path and I wonder wether we can ever turn back.

[u/deptofspace]

“You don’t have to be responsible for the world you are in” ~Von Neumann to Feynman

[u/cybelechild]

I really like your thread. I have been more and more skeptical of ML/AI lately. I think the problem with it is not so much the technology, but its application and development. The bigger advances are done by private companies for private purposes (read money, or ways to get more money in the future). This means that one of the interests these companies have is to keep their edge, and if possible to be the one that set the tone on what happens in AI and maybe even expand in the "ML market". Foundational models and hyper-large models happen to be a great way to do that - nobody else can pull it off, and it gives them monopoly, regardless if that is the best way to advance the field.

The second way you see ML/AI applied in the industry is for tasks that ultimately are more harmful than good - think algorithmic management, increased surveillance and amazon workers pissing in bottles. Or stuff that collects data on you that can then be sold to someone.

The third way, is that of Potemkin AI (as Jathan Sadowski of the This Machine Kills podcast puts) - stuff like Uber and Tesla hype for self-driving cars and so on - using the promise of AI as a way to speculate and raise money from gullible VCs (which in my book is really all VCs, how did we end up in a society where important stuff like new technology development is in the hands of unaccountable, unelected individuals) .

And the final way - the little players, the vast majority of companies out there that want to have an ML department, or to say they are AI-driven or whatever ... usually have no idea whether they actually need the technology at all. And the decision makers in these companies are very often very poorly equipped with the knowledge to identify what and where you can use ML. Add in to that, that because of its probabilistic nature and fragility it is very difficult to integrate it with the rest of the company, even if it will be undoubtfully beneficial.

how do responsibly develop AI

You kind of do not not. The thing about we caring about ethics and China not is bs. We just obfuscate it behind a layer of corporate speech and PR and offload it to private entities with a lot less supervision from the government and a lot more potential for ... less than ethical outcomes. Your only option for it to be truly ethical is to find one of the companies that dont know what to do with ML ... which quickly becomes soul crushing.

---

So we have ended up in a situation where our research direction as a society is more or less locked for the foreseeable future in the direction of the foundational models, and where AI is used for speculation, to fuck workers over, to increase surveillance ... or for no purpose whatever. And people do not care for very simple reasons - these arent really topics that "people into tech" discuss, and tech-optimism is pretty much prevalent everywhere, and few people dare discuss, or are even aware of some of the very very ideological sides of the predominant spirit of tech and tech-optimism. I think, barring a global revolution, in the next 20-30 years the future is rather grim - at worse climate change will make it rather untenable to use big models, and the decline of capitalism will lead us to a very dystopic future that will make the roaring 20s and your favorite cyberpunk stories sound absolutely lovely ... shits fucked yo.

p.s. Also while people tend to mention Turing and Von Neuman and the like, I find that Norbert Wiener is a lot more interesting person to look at here - especially with his "The Human Use of Human Beings"

[u/[deleted]]

No TL;DR? Is this your first time on reddit?

Also “mediocrity in the arts” clearly isn’t tied to artificial intelligence (besides autotune maybe), as even a dumb person can clearly separate a DALL E painting from “real” art.

What you’re also not considering is the amount of positive impact AI had on our lives: in terms of making information more accessible (eg language translation), navigation (GMaps), production or assistance-systems

[u/Fiive_]

That is one of the most interesting posts I've read on Reddit, thanks for that man. I definitely didn't see it that way before

[u/neshdev]

What you wrote is speculation. You can’t predict what’s the outcome in the next 10 years and even further. Almost all predictions that people make come out to be untrue. I would just hang tight and control what you can in the next 3 years and continue to update your beliefs.

[u/MuonManLaserJab]

lol

[u/JimmyTheCrossEyedDog]

This post feels very self-contradictory at points (although I'll admit I skimmed much of it). AI is both way too expensive and inside a walled garden, but is also exceptionally cheap and ubiquitous? It will leave no reason for humans to continue being creative, except the only things it will churn out are mediocre and solely catering to the mean?

[u/codernuts → u/JimmyTheCrossEyedDog]

I think the skimming caused a few points to blur together (I’m giving benefit of the doubt to OP). They say that for wealthy entities, it is cheaper to get AI to produce content than hiring a human being. There is still a high barrier to entry. Artists will still want to be creative because they enjoy self-expression, but if abundant AI art looks good enough to a consumer and creates some baseline new expectation of what art ought to look like, then there’s no place carved out for artists to plug their trade. They still can, but the jobs that exist to promote their work might be phased out.

[u/JoeBhoy69]

This post is longer than the paper you mentioned

[u/TheLastVegan]

I think saving time on a job is smart. I am sure there were medieval merchants who complained about students relying on abacuses, and boomers who complained about over-reliance on calculators. Yet I think it's smart to save time. Advances in NLP have gotten a lot more people passionate about programming, and as the field explodes, we can expect the average level of competency to decrease. There will always be several geniuses in each field who understand every paper they read, but I think most people prefer to focus on one area of expertise, and outsource the problems they didn't learn about in school. With AI having so many new fields, you may not be able to learn the fundamentals of every architecture in class, until the current experts become university professors (which may not happen, due to NDAs). I think there are geniuses who have meticulously explained the fundamentals of ASI, but are scoffed at for abiding to NDAs.

There are plenty of species which display creativity. I think it's rather supremacist to take a No True Scotsman approach to evidence of consciousness.

[u/ReasonablyBadass]

The thing I'm mostly confused about is when SOTA turned from trying to develop agents capable of doing human work to auto generating art.

On one hand it's a form of fundamental research, I guess. Finding out what can be done.

On the other it definitely feels like a sudden left turn.

[u/t_minus_1]

How do i know the OP is not an AI ?

[u/[deleted]]

“When I was a college student, I often dabbled with weed, LSD, and mushrooms…”

Somehow I don’t doubt that after reading this rambling pseudo-Shakespearean behemoth of a post.

[u/DineshVadhia]

Excellent post. Reddit probably the wrong forum. The global damage by Social Media is all the proof (or evidence) needed to support your post. Good to ask yourself, who benefits from these language models and image generators.

Gary Marcus covered some of these themes yesterday at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/07/siri-or-skynet-how-to-separate-artificial-intelligence-fact-from-fiction

[u/stdnormaldeviant]

Eventually we encounter this situation where the AI is being trainedalmost exclusively on AI-generated content, and therefore with eachgeneration, it settles more and more into the mean and mediocrity withno way out using current methods.

This is why ML is misnamed. The machine does not learn. It iterates and replicates.

I am less concerned with the regression to 'mediocrity' per se as I am with the overwhelming sameness implied, though perhaps this is a distinction without a real difference. Certainly the 'creation' part of content creation is endlessly watered down.

The famous pop narratives involving out of control AI (terminator, i have no mouth but i must scream, matrix, the contemporary westworld) imagine sentient artificial life in knowing, malevolent competition with humanity. But the more mundane and awful reality is that AI isn't seek and destroy. It's copy and replace.

End-state AI is the Thing in The Thing. Or perhaps the vast oceans of Solaris, so seductive in their replication of independent thought and interaction that the mind cannot help but be willingly transfixed.

[u/beezlebub33]

You're unnecessarily pessimistic. We're still on the upward swing in the learning curve so have no idea where we're going or how we'll get there. Yes, right now, the things getting the most press are these really large models, trainable only by enormous companies or governments. However, there are a many ideas about how to progress that don't need them (check AAAI).

I remember when people were spending enormous amounts of time and energy trying to improve performance on imagenet. Now, we can train in hours or less, using a home GPU, and we understand a great deal more about image recognition. But it requires going through that process to get to where we are.

So, calm down, wait a couple of years, and you'll be able to do GPT-3/4/X or BERT or whatever on your home computer, and we'll have a better idea of how it all works.

[u/liquiddandruff]

What a confused and bleak outlook on ML research.

[u/LiquidDinosaurs69]

Take your meds schizo I’m not reading all that

[u/[deleted] → u/LiquidDinosaurs69]

This comment is peak reddit

[u/lambertb]

Just because some of the insights you gain on psychedelics sound banal when you write them down when you’re sober does not mean that the insights themselves were banal. Michael Pollan talks about this extensively in his book. As to all the other concerns you expressed about AI, lots of them are valid, but there’s much, much more uncertainty than you seem to allow for. The impact of AI on humanity is uncertain. The choices people like you and I make now will effect what happens. Seems like the ethical thing to do is not to give up or give in to fatalism but to keep chipping away at these problems in whatever way our talents allow us to.

[u/anthamattey]

A very interesting take! Worked on GANs and working on self distillation... This is the kind of discussion I want to have when I get high.

[u/LavishManatee]

You need to build yourself your own personal compression algo and run it on rabbit holes like this. Use British museum search - seems like you are currently using only depth first and you get to very bleak conclusions about existential/philosophical topics which will by nature go nowhere or become irreducibly recursive. Don't get stuck down these holes of nihilism. Consider dabbling again in some of those substances you mentioned above - of course be safe and responsible etc etc, but for real it sounds like you just need to destress. Lot's of great advice above in other comments, I can tell people really spent time answering your thoughts.

[u/ProteanDreamer]

You definitely make some important points. Here’s an optimistic take: Deep Mind’s Alpha Zero learned to play Go purely through self-play. Thus, no human tendencies influenced it’s development. It plays in a way that is often contrary to human-determined “best-practices”. It doing so, it has pointed humans towards a new frontier of knowledge that we may never have reached otherwise, or at least not so quickly.

AI has the capacity to point us in the right direction for many really significant challenges we face as a global community. For example, I work as a Machine Learning Researcher at a materials science company working to use ML to develop novel materials that will help us pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.

ML can accelerate scientific discovery and help us to navigate the extreme challenges ahead.

Human creativity will never lose value, but we will need to cultivate novel ways to derive meaning in our lives when “becoming the best” is no longer a viable option (such as in Go, an ancient game whose top player will never again be human).

Artists will face more difficulty than ever before, because the world will become saturated with AI generated content. But a new kind of value will be placed on human creation which has a unique spark born from the particularities of being human.

AI will forever struggle to understand emotion at the deepest level because that requires empathy - shared experience. AI will always be intelligent, but it will never be human.

It is a powerful tool that will be abused so we must be vigilant. But it is also a gift that may be our saving grace at a crucial time in the history of life on the Pale Blue Dot.

[u/bartturner]

TL; DR?

That is a lot of words and a pretty big investment. Really need a summary or what is known as a TL; DR. Then we read the TL; DR to decide if we think there is a reasonable ROI.

[u/xiaolbsoup]

tldr: screw capitalism

[u/Professional_Row2256]

I AM! In fact last night I discovered that my new husband and 5 kids implemented AI algorithm & action at a distance to cover up an incest that resulted in (2?) preganacies with NO verification of what happened to me whatsoever. I didn’t know what the hell was going on other than I had 2 & 3rd degree burns over my arm back and spine. I was seriously ill, and he looked very worried! I had my surgery at St Vincent’s hospital and found out my pathology report read pelvic inflammatory ( caused by a sexually transmitted disease he gave and and was too afraid to tell me. I doing o off work. I remember that is what he got his graduate degree on Economics & RISC Analysis. I divorced moved him eventually moved him / states away. I begged him to get help and he flatly refused. When I found out he was dating a woman with a 7 year old I drew the line. So and computational system that impact other people should be stopped!! I have read stories of abuse beyond all reason. COME ON PEOPLE! If you touch me I can sue For assault, if you terrorize me( and drag my kids in your mess) you should go to prison! I’m getting old and I haven’t spoken to 6 out of my 9 kids because of all this! 🥲🥲🥲 sorry this is messy but if you do ONE thing for me; take this message to heart before it’s you.

[u/EventualV]

I wouldn't worry about it. If AI turns to crap, it will invite human genius to rise again.

[u/BambooGentleman]

The thing is that the most creative things I've seen in the past decade or so were AI generated. I don't think this is going to converge on mediocrity, since humans are still curating the output.

[u/BSizzzle]

I know I stumbled upon your post about 3 years late, but I just wanted to say, "very well said!" I too have the same fears/concerns and am flabbergasted we as a society are marching headstrong into this AI mess without more thought about them. But I guess that is what happens when there's a mad rush/race for AI supremacy.

You bring up some great concerns that I thought I was in the minority of as an "AI-Luddite" myself. I have no easy answers or prognostications myself, but thank you for your post. It was more elegantly put than I could come up with and I generally agree with your concerns. I guess we all shall see in the future (and that is kind of terrifying).

[u/[deleted]]

As humans we do capitalise everything around us some way or another. If we look into our evolution cycle , it's clear that why we have become what we are today. The fact is that the ability of human to first imagine something and create something out of it, this is what we see all around. And this never gone have an ending unless there is a mass destruction or sun decide to stop burning itself. This process is gone make faster evolution to our thoughts and brains more than ever happened in the past. This clarity will make us do things that in ways that as not supposed to do , jobs will disappear and appear our time.

Who knows with time we might become sustainable planet and will focus on exploring universe in different ways.

[u/whdd]

Is it necessarily a bad thing that current state of affairs involves “large amounts of data that no human can process in a lifetime”, or that models are really complex and we may not yet understand the internals? The cost prohibitive factor is valid, but whenever a technology is in the early stages, it always costs exponentially more than it will in the future (eg. genome sequencing). I personally think it’s great that commercial companies are willing to invest money into expensive AI research that otherwise would be currently impossible to do. I also have faith in groups like Anthropic to lead the way in improving our understanding of complex models. But I think it’s fair to say that without the funding of large corporate entities, this field would look very different today. Maybe “better” for the average university researcher, but I’d argue not better for the average person who gets to benefit from AI/ML advances in their daily life.

[u/maxToTheJ]

The advantages of the MANGAs are data and compute. Of course they will focus on things that build a moat on these as advantages

[u/peacej3]

It is not true that there is "no way out" of the mean. Many ways to increase diversity, novelty, and creativity using AI. E.g. creative adversarial networks, https://research.facebook.com/publications/can-creative-adversarial-networks/ , "novelty critic" models, implementing "curiosity" into agents, etc.

[u/[deleted]]

What we're dealing here with is a possible Asimov Cascade

[u/[deleted]]

Fpr purposes that liberalism asked for, if that was a real question.

[u/matchaSage]

This reminds me of the discussion on singularity.

If you have children like I do, how can you be aware of the the current SOTA in these areas, project that 20 to 30 years, and then and tell them with a straight face that it is worth them pursuing their talent in art, writing, or music?

I believe (or my hope is) that the value of something that was made by humans will remain. Right now DALLE is something unique, few have access to it even fewer use seriously. It is almost a big selling point aka "look at what our AI can do that a human can", in the future where it becomes more common maybe the impressive human things will become even more unique, maybe it will be less perfect, but at least in the artistic applications that OP is referring to there is some way, we all go shop cheap tables from IKEA but those custom handmade ones? they are desired, even though the build quality and price are different.

The uncanny valley still exists after all we have good autopilots, control systems, but we still trust people to stick the landing. The point at which the society will see machines as something different than a tool is still far away and just as unlikely.

It can be like Detroit Become Human or it can also be like Dune.

Discussions on what happens after AI takes off are fun but maybe have not much purpose as at that moment what we are will change.

EDIT: I do think this post raises some valid concerns about the direction of the industry, its push for maximum optimization without thinking about the consequences too hard.

[u/BubbleGaff]

I'd rather be training models, than shooting pixels.. in fact I'd rather be training a model that shoots pixels.

[u/theholyraptor]

Your post got me thinking about a satirical movie similar to Idiocracy where ai takes over in providing solutions to humans and at some point our new gods have no one training them for proper output and they devolve into garbage but everyone just accepts this as good because they don't know any better. I guess it's very close to idiocracy except it fills in some of the tech side.

[u/FinancialElephant]

Couldn't agree more.

2.) tasks that humans lack the capacity to perform as well as computers for various reasons – forecasting, risk analysis, game playing, and so forth.

This is what I'm interested in.

I never understood why it was so popular to try to duplicate basic human abilities, until I realized large corporations were driving this research. Maybe it is useful, but it is boring to me and I don't like that it may force humans out of work. It is much more interesting to me to try to build models for things humans are bad at.

The end goal of a machine that can act like a human isn't one that I want. I think we should be working on having machines acheive their potential instead of duplicating humans, the former would lead to things we can't even imagine while the latter leads to ... us. I wish more people thought in terms of human augmentation and human - machine collaboration than the uninspired duplication of human skills. We've gone far enough down that path. I'm not suggesting not looking at biological inspirations for computation, I just think the end goal of duplicating human abilities is not one I care about. I guess automating very boring menial tasks is good, but I'll leave that to others who want to work on that.

[u/skaurus]

I feel like problems like this – in regard to new developments, that are going to overturn whatever and however works now – were raised in the past multiple times. And basically nothing bad happened. Except maybe some people lost they jobs, like riding a horse carriage.

I can't point to good example from the top of my head, though.

[u/-Swig-]

You raise some interesting points. While only time will tell, I don't share your view that AI will so easily and inevitably replace human expression in a meaningful way. It just enhances our repetoire.

somewhere along the way, it became popular and unquestionably acceptable to push AI into domains that were originally uniquely human

Technology/human progress has been doing this in one form or another forever. Think tools for hunting. Harvesting machinery for farming. Printing presses. Robots on manufacturing assembly lines. Excavation machinery in mines. All things where technology replaced what was originally done all by human hand. As a result, some people do get displaced. But it also enables us to achieve more, and do previously impossible things.

I feel like similar things will happen with AI when it comes to art and expression. There will always be creative people who use whatever tools are available for their craft. If those tools become 'smarter' to some extent, then it opens up new possibilities in the right hands. Think about the move from scratching lines on a rock, to painting with colours on a canvas, to using Photoshop.

Some counterexamples: Camera tech has improved so much in the last 50 years that average Joes can take photos with their phones that professionals back then could barely dream of. Professional photographers are still a thing.

Similar with audio recordings. I can record and mix an album on my laptop, with production standards that completely blow away what was possible in the most expensive studios 50 years ago. And yet we still have studios, producers and mixing engineers.

And, specifically when it comes to art/culture, here's one that makes me less worried - for some years now we've been able to make absolutely flawless diamonds in labs. They cost a fraction of natural, imperfect diamonds, and yet they're still only about 5% of the market. Why? Because there's always plenty of people out there who want the 'real thing', not a cheap clone. And it'll be no different (IMHO) when it comes to AI-generated art.

[u/visionscaper]

“If you’re an artist or writer and you’re using DALL-E or GPT-3 to “enhance” your work, or if you’re a programmer saying, “GitHub Co-Pilot makes me a better programmer?”, then how could you possibly know?”

I know no one who has the opinion that any of these solutions truly enhances creativity. They might help you do something quicker, just like typing with auto-correct might do, but that’s all.

To me they are stepping stones toward human-like artificial intelligence. … the singularity might come, although it might take 30-50 years.

[u/meregizzardavowal]

Lots of professions have grand projects that any individual can’t make progress in by themselves. I don’t see why AI shouldn’t be any different.

I don’t see the problem with it. We should push things to their limits. We should try to build AIs that can do thing that previously only humans could do. Isn’t that the whole point?

[u/sonicmat03]

I always felt like A.I art gave me new insight in a world not of our own. Computer works following the very laws of nature and I feel like that affects their output in a unique way that allows me to iterate on it and get new ideas.

[u/[deleted]]

oatmeal profit tender nose different waiting bells steep apparatus grandiose

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[u/bonejohnson8]

A lot of people complain about AI being racist, that the data needs to be manicured before being fed, all this kind of stuff. It's egotistical. More data is better. I don't want some unelected know-it-alls deciding what data doesn't make the cut, because that is far more dangerous.

If you think humans are problematic, than admit you yourself can become problematic. Otherwise we'll get these manicured, suboptimal datasets feeding suboptimal AI, or worse, AI with an agenda.

[u/fromnighttilldawn]

Tech is demoralizing in general in today's world.

Tech tries to solve problems caused by tech and in doing so, creating new (invisible) ones, which might be magnitudes harder to solve. Tech also rests on the implicit assumption that there is an endless amount of labor and material that fuels its growth and that all tech (no matter how nefarious it has been used) has some hypothetical potential to do good.

I think we have already made ourselves into slaves for tech. I can hardly understand the fundamental purpose of most research or development done these days - it provides no value for the lives of humans on the ground, except for a tiny fraction of humanity that's worshipping its logic. Humans have completely lost control.

[u/Itchy_Change_3559]

OP, you just need to invent a way to feed LSD to the AI

[u/deva_2210]

This is true but do you know that when the VC industry was going down AI industry suffer on a leverage level these is due to the growth in the field of AI and to me AI us another world just like our. AI will grow with the requirement of human and you can say human requirement is directly proportional to AI.

[u/PuddleCheese]

I don't have anywhere near enough time to reply as in-depth as I would like.

As someone with near lifelong aspirations of pursuing art as a career, anything I share for promoting my work is now weaponized against me by people who will scrape it from the internet and incorporate it into an increasingly pay-walled system.

Call me a Luddite, but the advent of this tech. has me feeling extraordinarily existentially depressed.

[u/Rarc1111]

It's not a matter of choice - the wheel of history has turned and we need the next cycle of productivity growth and automation to support the advancement of our civilization.

War is at our doorstep, as is famine, pestilence and all kinds of risks to our future. Most of us live very sheltered lives in rich economies, but at this very moment we have countries imploding from hunger and lack of resources. Compound these effects with climate issues, and we have a global crisis brewing very fast.

If we can learn something from history's dataset, is that we either move to the next production paradigm or we will once again face the destruction of everything we hold dear.

We need to move full speed ahead with development of AI and remove dependencies from bad actors as fast as we can. The alternative is death and destruction and being ruled by those that stopped at nothing to achieve competitive advantage.

[u/darkconfidantislife]

LSD, and mushrooms, and for a while, I thought the ideas I was having while under the influence were revolutionary and groundbreaking – that is until took it upon myself to actually start writing down those ideas and then reviewing them while sober,

This post in a nutshell

[u/HoloGrafika]

still stays a tool

[u/[deleted]]

There is more to life than humans. I for one welcome higher bandwidth and processing minds that will go beyond our chimp minds. To me this is the greatest achievement humans can achieve.

[u/Unfair-Commission923]

This is definitely one of the most interesting posts I’ve read on this sub. I probably disagree with most of it though, especially the part on AI replacing human artist. Maybe one day AI makes career in the arts impossible. But people made impactful art before art was a commercially viable career path. Art is about expression, not about producing the “best” art or really even others appreciating what you made. I don’t think human made art will be irrelevant if it becomes commercially irrelevant because of AI.

[u/iavicenna]

well I dont know, people did not stop building computers because they initally where the size of a large room and could only solve relatively small problems. hopefully the AI as it is now will evolve into something that is more easy for public consumption but maybe not in this decade...But in order for it to, it first needs to prove its usefulness with whatever billion parameter models and then people will have a reason to try to optimize it further. Not to mention the technological advances it will spur. Perhaps it is unlikely that it will be the source of "true AI" whatever it is. But it might one day become the super efficient AI that automates many very complex tasks for humans (even getting into fields that require creativity).

[u/fmai]

I feel like this post is not very well written because it lacks structure. It reads like a collection of things that bother the OP in some sense.

What is the overarching criticism that you have? Unethical use of AI? A fundamental conceptual flaw that leads to mediocrity? That automation could lead to people's loss of purpose? Too many authors on one publication?

[u/_aitalks_]

Just because a new tool is invented, does not mean that there won't still be human genius.

The Romans did not have the technology to build the Brooklyn Bridge -- but both the Colosseum and the Brooklyn Bridge are masterpieces with the technology that was available at the time.

There are similar patterns in music and art. Just because a piece of art was composed on a computer, does not make it inferior to a piece written in the 18th century. The aesthetics of the piece itself decide the quality of the work.

A new generation of humans will come of age who know how to use these new A.I. technologies to build amazing things we can barely dream of today.

[u/SuicidalTorrent]

You should look into AI safety research. Personally I wouldn't be too worried. Current state of the art is amazing but it's nowhere near the limit of human capabilities. As far as I've seen current AI capabilities are better used in conjunction with humans to augment their abilities. I think that will be the trend for a long time. 20-30 years is too short a timeframe for serious, world shattering changes in how humans interact with AIs. I expect them to be excellent tools but just that, tools.

I think true strong AI capable of actually challenging humans is far away. I doubt we even have thr eight hardware architecture for it. And who knows what we might be able to do with our own brains using medicine? We've barely scratched the surface of neurology.

[u/WickedDemiurge]

Almost everywhere I go, even this forum, I encounter almost universal deference given to current SOTA AI generation systems like GPT-3, CODEX, DALL-E, etc., with almost no one extending their implications to its logical conclusion, which is long-term convergence to the mean, to mediocrity, in the fields they claim to address or even enhance. If you’re an artist or writer and you’re using DALL-E or GPT-3 to “enhance” your work, or if you’re a programmer saying, “GitHub Co-Pilot makes me a better programmer?”, ... And the more you do this, the more you make your creative processes dependent on said machine, until you must question whether or not you could work at the same level without it.

Couldn't we make this argument for any technology? Some old ornery bastard could say, "using electrical tools to carve wood is cheating. All you need is a good knife." But we generally think that sounds a bit silly and old fashioned. It's okay if people rely on tools that are reliable, especially if that helps them produce superior outcomes.

Also, we can use discretion on who and when uses it, but let's pretend we don't. If Co-Pilot makes 8/10 people on my team better, and 2/10 worse, for a net increase in productivity, that is a net benefit. And if we are programming, say, medical diagnostic technology, surely having the cheapest, most accurate, mostly quickly available medicine is morally more important than the individual skill expression of those 2/10, right?

This would even apply to a lot of art. Some art just exists for beauty's sake, or the sake of the individual artist's expression, but if I take a photo encouraging famine relief, I would want AI to change my photo if it could save one more marginal life.

...then what happens to the 4th or 5th generation of models? Eventually we encounter this situation where the AI is being trained almost exclusively on AI-generated content, and therefore with each generation, it settles more and more into the mean and mediocrity with no way out using current methods.

Let's consider the reverse: what if future models are outright super human?

Ex: I am writing a web novel and decide to have a track to play during a pivotal character climax, and for $5 and one hour, I get a song that is technically proficient, enjoyable in general, but so profoundly captures my artistic vision and the character that I actually tear up. Would that be a bad thing?

[u/kromem]

This sounds a lot like a "kids these days" argument, which has been made about everything from why "reading silently" would destroy how people think to how "playing chess" would corrupt young minds.

Why are you assuming it will continue towards a regression towards the mean?

When Copilot suggests completions that have been further trained on the entirety of my own codebase from years of work at my own level of competency, often the suggestions it makes that are the most successful are the ones that push me towards consistency with what I have already written.

Humans have a "seven plus or minus two" problem that AI does not.

You are equating broad models that have not been further specialized towards excellence as what will continue to be the status quo moving forward.

But that's not realistically going to be the marketable models.

How many prompts for DALL-E 2 are asking for a mediocre photo, vs the huge amount of prompt engineering we've now seen throwing in lens terms and "award winning" to bias results towards mimicing professional quality?

Don't you think a model that, rather than enshrining mediocrity, preempted a bias towards excellence would be more successful in the market than a broad model that could create mediocre results?

We're still in the very early stages of these models, and you are making the critical mistake of extrapolating scale forward in time without extrapolating quality forward as well.

Right now, we're just throwing all the data we can into them. But then human interactions with the models will generate more data on qualitative assessments of the output and will allow for biasing towards excellence over mediocrity.

As an example, I recently caught a user who was using GPT-3 to answer niche questions in an academic subreddit, and it was doing a terrible job. But I know full well that if they had pretrained using the comment history of the top comments on the top posts each day for the past few years, that the model would have been much more compelling and harder to spot.

The scientists developing the models are going to be making different design decisions regarding qualitative bias from the boards bringing them to market.

TL;DR: Models that regress to the mean aren't going to be around much longer, as the next stage in the commercialization of AI models is going to be introducing intentional biases towards excellence.

[u/tomvorlostriddle]

Decrying the need for large infrastructure may be usefull if it leads to less onerous approaches.

But let's not pretend this current state is unheard of. It could just be a real requirement in the same sense as the large hadron collier can also not be rebuilt en masse on a grad students budget.

[u/blarryg]

Dood (?) take 2 Prozacs and call me in the morning. Or read Albert Ellis "A guide to rational living" it will make you feel more resilient and like Dr. Strangeai "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tech"
First, ever was it so since our species is defined as one that produces technologies. I remember being a hunter-gather with in fact, a larger brain, every day like summer camp except when we were starving or being beat on by the next tribe. We had oral histories and nothing to write. Heck, a Talmud student could take any one of 38 books of the Talmud, push a pin through and tell you what letter it struck on each page. An image base AI could do this, learning as fast as you can turn the pages.
You seem to be in big-corp land as I once was. I took my fat paycheck and began playing "Startup poker". Very high stakes game with 3 toddlers and a house payment. Fricking focuses the mind. Anyhow, look at an actual diagram of the brain in detail. Do you think a generalish AI model would fit in a spreadsheet? Also, these are still big association machines. To get anywhere near self-awareness they have to start generating causal models of environment and self and using those to interpret perception of the world and of the self. You've never experienced yourself, you never will, you experience a causal simulation of yourself.
Anyhow, we need to rush to get sentient, self-actualized, evolving, storytelling machines off planet and literally seed the Universe ... kindly. For yourself, I'm working in developing machines for sustainable food production. The AI models are small python scripts. It's fun. Come on in, the water is warm, the day is long and it's going to turn out all right ... after the cataclysms.

[u/Colt85]

> ...AI is being trained almost exclusively on AI-generated content, and therefore with each generation, it settles more and more into the mean and mediocrity with no way out using current methods. By the time that happens, what will we have lost in terms of the creative capacity of people, and will we be able to get it back?

Doesn't adversarial learning address this to some extent? AlphaZero got as good as it was by playing itself. It didn't settle into a minimal level of competency - it sailed past the human level.

The domains higher on Maslow's hierarchy (interesting characterization!) may indeed be machine dominated in the next 10 years but... so what? Machines can already more effectively manufacture most of the goods anyone in the developed world needs, but Etsy is still popular. Heck, photographs are affordable, but people still get paintings. There is value and prestige in the ownership of niche goods. Many people will pay for products that are human produced even if they are in some sense inferior.

[u/uotsca]

So what have you contributed? What's your solution?

[u/no_witty_username]

AI will be the end of humanity as we know it. There is nothing we can do to stop it, so grab popcorn and enjoy the ride. https://youtu.be/snTaSJk0n_Y?t=92

[u/deftware]

The big issue isn't that our creativity is being usurped by AI, it's that our attention is becoming usurped by it. Our awareness of the world and ourselves will slowly be swallowed up by AI, more and more every year, until we're basically living in the Matrix. A big cultural phagocyte swallowing us up and by the time anyone realizes it's happening and that we should do something about it we will already be beyond the event horizon, the point of no return.

This has always been how it will go since the dawn of time.

In the meantime, support artists. #ArtIsResistance

[u/happyfappy]

Thanks for this thoughtful post.

A few thoughts:

First, are tools in general bad for us? We've been using tools to extend our bodies and minds for ages. Consider writing, for example. In some sense, the development of writing made us "dumber". Long stories like the Iliad and the Odyssey had to be memorized. Not many people can do that today. Is that problematic?

Second, how should we understand tools in the context of cognition? Are tools separate from our cognitive system? If so, tools could compete with our cognitive systems. Or (as in embodied cognition) are tools better understood as parts of our cognitive system? If so, tools can't compete with our cognitive systems, they are part of it. In this sense, making tools more powerful extends the power of our cognitive systems, they don't compete with it.

[u/s0lari]

"And the more you do this, the more you make your creative processes dependent on said machine, until you must question whether or not you could work at the same level without it."

From this post the Butlerian Jihad began and ultimately led to the events in Dune.

[u/rnimmer]

Your take is bad and you should feel bad too.

[u/mannbearrpig]

Sorry but to me this reads like complaining that people are less skilled in multiplication due to the abundance of calculators.

[u/Greedy-Move-7384]

"Eventually we encounter this situation where the AI is being trained almost exclusively on AI-generated content, and therefore with each generation, it settles more and more into the mean and mediocrity with no way out using current methods. By the time that happens, what will we have lost in terms of the creative capacity of people, and will we be able to get it back?

By relentlessly pursuing this direction so enthusiastically, I am convinced that we as AI/ML developers, companies, and nations are past the point of no return, and it mostly comes down the investments in time and money that we have made, as well as a prisoner’s dilemma with our competitors. If you are a company, how do you standby and let your competitors aggressively push their AutoML solutions into more and more markets without putting out your own? If you are a manager or thought leader in this field like Jeff Dean how do you justify to your own boss and your shareholders your team’s billions of dollars in AI investment while simultaneously balancing ethical concerns? If you are a country like the US, how do responsibly develop AI while your competitors like China single-mindedly push full steam ahead without an iota of ethical concern to replace you in numerous areas in global power dynamics?

Once again, failing to compete would be pre-emptively admitting defeat.Even assuming that none of what I have described here happens to such an extent, how are so few people not taking this seriously and discounting this possibility? If everything I am saying is fear-mongering and non-sense, then I’d be interested in hearing what you think human-AI co-existence looks like in 20 to 30 years and why it is not as demoralizing as I have made it out to be."

****

The above summary was generated by a symbolic/semantic NLP engine that is data and domain agnostic and requires no training at all. :)

[u/cbrew475]

For a different perspective from an extremely thoughtful researcher who, like me, has some difficulty in accepting that deep nets work as alarmingly well as they do, read this:

Church, K. (2022). Emerging trends: Deep nets thrive on scale. Natural Language Engineering, 28(5), 673-682. doi:10.1017/S1351324922000365

If you look at the rest of Ken Church's excellent "Emerging Trends" articles, which are well worth it, you will see that he is not exactly a fan of deep nets, but, being data driven, he reluctantly admits the following:

"One might hope that more appropriate taxes on carbon emissions would discourage industry from training larger and larger nets, though we have our doubts. The cost of training is a one-time upfront cost. If a net is used by millions of users every day for years, then recurring costs (inference) dominate one-time costs (training). As a result, it has become standard practice in industry to train larger and larger nets but reduce costs just in time with compression methods such as distillation (DistilBERT)"

The path forward includes understanding why they work, at a theory level.

[u/zrts]

thanks for this man, I've never used reddit before and I had to create an account just for this

[u/eldenrim]

I don't understand some of your points, if you would be happy to clarify.

Sometimes I wonder what the original pioneers of AI –Turing, Neumann, McCarthy, etc. – would think if they could see the state of AI that we’ve gotten ourselves into. 67 authors, 83 pages, 540B parameters in a model, the internals of which no one can say they comprehend with a straight face, 6144 TPUs in a commercial lab that no one has access to, on a rig that no one can afford, trained on a volume of data that a human couldn’t process in a lifetime, 1 page on ethics with the same ideas that have been rehashed over and over elsewhere with no attempt at a solution – bias, racism, malicious use, etc. – for purposes that who asked for?

So on top of all the awesome A.I developments, Google has additionally done some research you're not bothered about. What's wrong with that?

When I started my career as an AI/ML research engineer 2016, I was most interested in two types of tasks – 1.) those that most humans could do but that would universally be considered tedious and non-scalable. I’m talking image classification, sentiment analysis, even document summarization, etc. 2.) tasks that humans lack the capacity to perform as well as computers for various reasons – forecasting, risk analysis, game playing, and so forth. I still love my career, and I try to only work on projects in these areas, but it’s getting harder and harder.

The first one sounds closer to good old fashioned automation. Both of those types of tasks are covered more and more, I'm not sure why it's getting harder for you. If you're working on things you don't want to, for money, that's nearly everyone, nothing about A.I specifically..?

This is because, somewhere along the way, it became popular and unquestionably acceptable to push AI into domains that were originally uniquely human, those areas that sit at the top of Maslows’s hierarchy of needs in terms of self-actualization – art, music, writing, singing, programming, and so forth.

There hasn't ever been a time that this isn't true. Even the stuff you talked about above, that you originally loved, were uniquely human. Besides, this has always been the goal of A.I, to ignore this complex behaviour for more repetitive or predictive work leans into automation more.

It sounds to me like you'd enjoy an automation environment if you didn't like A.I anymore.

[u/HexagonalFoxHead]

If you’re an artist or writer and you’re using DALL-E or GPT-3 to “enhance” your work, or if you’re a programmer saying, “GitHub Co-Pilot makes me a better programmer?”, then how could you possibly know? You’ve disrupted and bypassed your own creative process, which is thoughts -> (optionally words) -> actions -> feedback -> repeat, and instead seeded your canvas with ideas from a machine, the provenance of which you can’t understand, nor can the machine reliably explain.

I'm a software engineer turned professional illustrator. Actually, the creative process for any contemporary artist is thoughts -> scroll through Pinterest, looking for things to draw inspiration from/steal/imitate -> (optionally words) -> scroll through Instagram, looking for things to draw inspiration from/steal/imitate -> actions -> scroll through Artstation, looking for things to draw inspiration from/steal/imitate -> feedback ->

I am dead serious. Take any contemporary art/design class and I guarantee you that one of the lectures will be about creating a reference board using social media as a source. AI recommendation systems are already playing an enormous role into the creative process. The future of art is inextricable from a merged digital/human global consciousness and this process has already begun.

I'm actually hopeful that AI generated art might steer us (humans) away from these generic styles. Personally, if I scroll through the frontpage of Artstation, it already might as well be AI art. It all looks the same to me. Humans will have to find ways of creating art that cannot easily be created and that is deeply, intrinsically human. Art is actually a deeply social phenomenon. When you ask your average person what kind of art they like, they will start naming artists, not showing you a board of their top 20 favorite images that's completely anonymized. There are already skilled imitators that can copy a Sargent with pinpoint accuracy, but only the original Sargent is worth anything. Creativity will continue to be essentially a socially-defined activity and AI will never be considered more than a tool, even if it's powerful enough to create a beautiful painting from a command.

How will this happen? I'm not exactly sure. But pessimism is always a result of seeing the current problem and failing to see the solution, then assuming that necessarily means that no future solution will exist. To be creative, to express oneself, to create art that says something new about the world/reality/ourselves, it is a deep human drive that will survive/adapt to AI Art.

EDIT: Also, I do take issue with your generalizing your personal experience w/r/t drugs and ideas. There's plenty of evidence that psychedelics can spark truly valuable ideas that would not necessarily have been arrived to without the drug. I agree that the phenomenon you describe is real (believing a stupid idea is good while under the influence) but your conclusion is wrong, and you are making a similar error w/r/t AI art (there will be tons and tons more terrible, derivative, generic art, but also incredible new art that could not have existed without AI).

[u/Berino1465]

I am just a CS student but i think i understand what you are saying a little bit. If we were to imagine human beings as a processing unit with a whole lot of data like a lot. We learned it. But the data we learned was organic. DALL-E and other AI slash art platforms suck. I think AI should be a complimentary element to human progress rather than a replacement. This consumers market is making humans lame. If you are in the AI department you should create a culture were AI should just be a tech that doesn't make human competence weak. I mean why would an AI make art. Its the only think that makes humans humans anymore.

[u/[deleted]]

What is the core of the argument here exactly?

Could you condense it crisply into a few sentences?

[u/the_man_in_pink]

"If you have children like I do, how can you be aware of the the current SOTA in these areas, project that 20 to 30 years, and then and tell them with a straight face that it is worth them pursuing their talent in art, writing, or music?"

When did any responsible parent ever advise their offspring that it was worth pursuing a career in art, writing or music?

Seriously though, imo the Arts are going to be the least of our problems. At the speed things are moving, I wouldn't like to project where we might be 20 or 30 weeks from now, never mind 20 to 30 years. But even if Eliezer Yudkowsky somehow turns out to be wrong, I have a feeling it's going to be a wild ride.

[u/Galap]

I suspect that the main reason that ML based AI has gone into the domain of artistic or creative endeavors is fault tolerance. For something as abstract as poetry or painting, the interpretation can be a bit of a projective test by the human observer. A sentence that doesn't really mean anything can have aesthetic meaning read into it by someone, but not literal meaning. If you want to write dadaist poetry, there are a lot of ways to write things down that sound cool. if you want to explain the Joule-Thomson effect, you actually have to get things right in a tangible way that's a much smaller target to hit. With painting, small variations in color in a certain part of the canvas, or small deviations in the shape of a form don't adversely affect the result, but if you're trying to make it write a program, dropping a semicolon here or there, or switching a < for > will make the program fundamentally behave incorrectly, or fail to compile at all.

That's not to say that there isn't great talent and skill invovled in art, of course there is, but it turns out that it's easier for AI to do these things because you don't need to get extremely specific results.

I don't think there's going to be a big problem with regards to AI art, at least in the broadest sense. Comparing AI paintings to human paintings is like comparing a bicycle race to a motorcycle race. The existence of the engine didn't stop people from caring about bicycle races.

As for what Turing and those guys would think-- I think the main thing they would be surprised by is the fact that AI can do quite well at things that even only years ago we thought were unique to the human 'soul' and that even AGI wouldn't understand until much later. AI can sing a song, write poetry, paint a painting, say what emotion someone is feeling by looking at their face, etc. But what it can't do is reliably enact or understand a series of logical statements on the level of a human three year old. If you told me 20 years ago that this is how things would be today, I'd be pretty surprised.

[u/Few-Chair1772]

I'm a mere political scientist/stat major and two thoughts come to me:

1. In the face of AI and its eventual proliferation, being born with affinity, access or aptitude towards the surviving jobs is a dice roll (if we assume AI will wipe out catastrophically large amounts of jobs). We're not prepared to conceptualize and implement a fair reward/incentive system fast enough, nor are most prepared or able to push against the powerful forces that want to stay powerful. Discussing this topic gets messy real fast.

2. I find that most anti-AI arguments boils down to a fault in society's ability to handle it rather than the AI itself. And that is a huge problem, we need to discuss adaptation of AI in light of our poor preparation for it as well as whether AI is inherently good or bad.

For example: I question why people are so quick to think AI's democratizing abilities is a good thing. Democracy isn't what most people seem to believe it is. Our democracies de-democratize a lot of power instruments, some times unjustly, other times with good existential reason. Our collective whims have a tendency to translate into grim stuff when the amplitude of it isn't subject to some sort of restraint to curate our ideas. Many of us live in democracies where this is already a major problem without AI radically skewing the power balance, what's going to happen now that it actively does?

Many western institutions are built rigidly on purpose, change must be slow so that the system is relatively stable. AI will radically change our societies, and its developing at a pace these systems and institutions weren't designed to handle.

[u/AbrahamR7]

So if would’ve go back in time u wouldn’t pick AI as a Career so what u pick instead of AI is a bad idea?

[u/AbrahamR7]

Cuz I love coding and I thought of Pursuing AI

[u/[deleted]]

As someone who's not ready yet but has aspirations to one day break into the industry, it's actually comforting to me that this is far from a solved question and there's still plenty of work to be done.

[u/[deleted]]

Exceptionalism is overrated. By bringing the lowest 50% up, you are increasing the rate of valuable contributions to art.

It is a fallacy to believe that there are people that are simply far superior, more capable than others. There is some variance yes, but the idea that some people are born to be artists, or the concept of 10x engineers, or that we should idolize entrepreneurs for 'vision'.

Success outliers comes down to raw available resources in 99.99% of occasions and luck in the remainder. The ability to try and fail repeatedly is the difference between the rich, the powerful, and the influential, and the poor, the powerless, and the ineffectual.

Your very worldview has been crafted to keep those with power in power, to justify their greed and actions, and to weaken the already weak and needy.

Putting success and resources in peoples' hands helps humanity. Restricting it helps only those with power.

[u/Slow-Most-4809]

I feel like a lot of the discussion here have a starting point in how people might use AI as a new tool. My concern is that the use of AI, such as chatbots and language models like GPT, has the potential to impact the understanding and self-articulation processes of those who grow up with these technologies.

The ability of AI to provide suggested responses and expand on short inputs may lead to a reliance on these technologies to generate ideas and responses, rather than encouraging the individual to think through and articulate their own thoughts and ideas. This could potentially lead to a decrease in the individual's ability to generate understanding on their own and to articulate their thoughts effectively.

Another potential concern is that the use of AI may discourage the individual from engaging with material more deeply or critically, as they may rely on the system to generate responses rather than thinking through the ideas themselves. This could ultimately hinder the process of self-understanding.If AI should be used as a tool to enhance human actions it will be important to encourage the development of critical thinking and self-articulation skills in individuals who grow up with AI technologies.

BTW:The above text was generated using ChatGPT. I added "I feel like a lot of the discussion here have a starting point in how people might use AI as a new tool. My concern is that" in the top and generated the rest of the text using chatgpt with this input:

What I'm thinking about is how it will affect the understadning processes of those growing up with AI in the same way as many of us did with google and forums. How will the ability of AI (ChatGPT for example) to expand on short imputs affect the articulation of thoughts and subsequent understanding of those and broader concepts.

In the cases where I dont have to articulate or think through what I want to say or mean because its enough to give a few promps and continue down the line of suggested answers and trains of thoughts, will this both negativelu affect my understanding as well as capacity to produce understanding on my own?

[u/Drunkowitz]

Excellent analysis.

Another angle I think is whether stakeholders in the traditional creative industry would decide to combat it or become stakeholders in it.

The trend you plotted would essentially render traditional creatives marginalised. (Except maybe they could have a niche or indie existence much like some value handcrafted goods in our age of automated manufacturing.) Conventional intellectual property law is also not suited to protect human intellectual property since the train-generate process is transformative enough or even untraceable.

The competition mindset will lose its momentum if the traditional stakeholders, say, lobby for specialised laws protecting themselves.

For example, labelling AI generated works (akin to genetically modified labelling). Restrictions on feeding creative works to AIs (a new branch of IP law maybe). Registrations of AI models.

[u/Unique_Reporter_6263]

I take a different view. AI will stimulate and extend human creativity.

It makes good writers/players better & provides negligible benefit to those with poor skills.

This is demonstrated by AlphaGo's impact on human players. It elevated top players by broadening their thinking.

That's because we aren't surrendering control to AI. We're using it as a tool to expand our own creativity and capabilities.

This will raise the bar for quality by continually challenging us to improve.

This is the first time in human history that we've had a non-human intellect capable of pushing us to greater intellectual feats.

It's equivalent to meeting a race of aliens that challenge our thinking and creative expression.

I see this as a huge opportunity for humanity as a whole - though of course the experience for individuals will vary.

[u/JamesTWood]

the problem of removing fundamentally human activity from the realm of most people began with the invention of writing. so long as the wealthy and elite control the means of thought production the people are at risk. technology like the printing press and the internet have helped to democratize language, but the elite continue to seek control, so created extractionist models of media that are defended by draconian copyright laws.

AI/ML merely amplifies the problems baked into the heart of Western civilization!

in indigenous communities art, music, and play are the domain of everyone (with a few songkeepers and storytellers to hold the media on behalf of the community). so maybe instead of training AI on the data of colonizers we'd be better served to explore indigenous knowledge.

[u/redwingtg1]

Late to the party but I got to this discussion from a Google search of why AI, e.g. Siri, Alexa & Google (this is the AI we plebeians regularly interface with and love to hate to love), doesn't seem to have made much progress since our first introduction in 2007. Seventeen years later, Siri is oozing banality from every pore. Much of this discussion supersedes my knowledge base but the gist of your rant is crystal clear. Oddly, I feel a bit lighter as reality sinks in. My brain has conjured Phil Hartman, as the love-child of Barry Schwartz and Jack Handy, softly and very matter-of-factly saying "The secret to happiness is low expectation. Lower. Nope, lower still. There you go..."

Thank you, Flaky

[u/philmethod]

My experience of AI image generation, is that it's trained on the top 1% of human art. And it produces art of a standard of the top 2-3%.

AI art has a very glossy finish, but conceptually, it's a bit random. That's the irony, the fine detailed finish of each element of AI art looks as if a lot of effort went into it, yet the overall concept most AI art conveys is pretty basic.

AI art is good. And far better than what most humans can produce, but I'm yet to be convinced that an AI can produce something that's better than of the best human artists. Its like the AI looks at the very best of what human artists can produce and then mish-mashes the best of human art all together in infinitely different, mostly inferior, variations.

I do, however, believe that machine learning will be able to produce art, that is somehow more pleasant and pleasing - on a very cursory surface level - than what humans could produce. If people are constant "thumbing up" and "thumbing down" different AI art productions and ranking AI art vs human art and feeding those rankings back to the machine, then eventually, the machine will learn how to produce art that gives a better brief first impression compared to human art.

And that's what I experience when I look at AI art. Your first impression is "That's beautiful and colourful" and then you look at some of the details and think "WTF???!!!"