Will we see this in a publicly facing AI? Creativity relies on avoiding existing truths, and embracing/testing “hallucinations”, something that’s being actively stomped out for “safety”.
Thats one take on 'creativity' -but I don't think it's the only one.
I am an AI skeptic these last 40 years. Personally, I don't think we will see it in my lifetime, if ever. I think what we have now is at best a predictive model which can expose inferences and aide people, humans, to make inductive reasoning outcomes. Its a decision-support mechanism.
The false data is a huge problem. It's very easy to make disastrous decisions on apparently reasonable inductive reasoning, and thats what I think GPT does at BEST. At worst, more normally? It's "regurgitating"
AGI is not in this. Sorry if thats a downer, but I don't think even openai think there is any evidence of a pathway to AGI from what they're doing.
Do you have examples of human-created "new things" that aren't essentially novel combinations of old things? Because I come up blank. And this current crop of AI generators are very good at combining old things in novel ways.
I do agree with your general point that these generators aren't really "intelligent", however. Will have to ponder if I agree about the induction bit.
RSA, and the GCHQ PhD equivalent from the 1970s were really remarkably new. Crypto systems before then were symmetrical. Inventing a form of encryption which was a-symmetrical was new.
One time cipher streams were new.
the invention of packet switched networks (Louis Pouzin, Len Kleinrock) was new. It wasn't inherent in prior methods, it's an inductive consequence of time division multiplexing but with addressing and routing.
There is no good analogue in nature to either the internal combustion engine, or the steam engine: the conversion of linear force to rotary force and vice-versa was a really novel thing. I would argue the wankel engine as a diversion from pistons was pretty good reasoning.
But in the same way Kurt Vonnegut says there is a small fixed number of plot models for a novel, almost all late-stage human endevour is derivitive. It's in the nature of the beast. To claim GPT is therefore 'meeting the mark' because the burden of human existence has less discovery and more inductive reasoning simply comes back to my first point: where's the evidence of the GPT doing inductive reasoning with discrimination, beyond the syllogistic?
That's a fascinating list and far beyond my capacity to argue, so thanks for that.
> To claim GPT is therefore 'meeting the mark'
Pretty sure the vast majority of people who are attributing some kind of personhood to GPT aren't doing so from an analytical perspective, but because the conversational generation exceeds whatever human-detection threshold they have that is inbuilt. Asking for evidence of genuine inductive reasoning won't make a dent on those feels. The nature of the systems involved lack any reasoning, deductive or inductive. It's all statistics.
The rest of the positive camp is claiming that "the mark" is the production of useful work, I think. At most, this is seen as a step towards AGI, not the finish line.
Well said. I think we are in agreement that most "it's alive" is feeling based hype because people see a step function (I want to avoid saying a quantum leap) in quality compared to e.g. Markov chain games on a corpus.
I would dispute that this is a step toward AGI. I agree it's what proponents are saying. I just think they're wrong. We are no closer to understanding what underpins intelligence and this statistics model isn't informing us of the basis of it, or a purported AGI in particular.
Why write your thoughts on the web when AI/GPT is only going to steal and paraphrase it? Nobody sees what you write and everybody thinks GPT is the genius.
Just saw something today where the wife of TotalBiscuit, who died of cancer several years ago, is contemplating deleting all of his Youtube videos[1] to prevent people from using A.I. to make him say terrible things.
Did give me a bit of a pause about putting stuff out there. Although I think I'd still rather have my data be used for training A.I. than not (and I probably am already in the training data anyway, I believe I saw that one of the datasets it's been trained on was Hacker News comments).
Given that the "AI" community apparently couldn't care less about treating intellectual property rights with wanton abandon, I can't say such a response would be unwarranted.
Dire circumstances call for drastic measures, as they say.
Quite a sad, but completely understandable reaction. The saddest part is probably that it's already too late to prevent people from generating TB deepfakes and other content. Cloning a voice takes half an hour if clips now, any downloaded live stream should be enough already.
It's sad to see AI on a path to destroy years of collected internet content. I expect the internet archive to receive loads of takedown requests in the coming months and years because of this.
The current (legal) answer is "unclear". There are indications that training is fine, but producing and using the generated content is questionable at least. As many IP issues, it will solved only when someone will try that in court and go all the way until a verdict. Some cases are actually being processed but it might take years to get an answer.
> The general problem of "AI"s being trained on copyrighted content
> The current (legal) answer is "unclear".
European Union was ahead of times for once. The 2019 copyright directive, article 4, makes it legal to scrape the web and make and keep local copies of copyrighted works, for data mining purposes. Unless the copyright holders set up a machine readable exception (such as robots.txt file).
The cat is out of the bag, and I don't see any reason training should be any more controlled than me personally viewing something and 'training' my brain on it. Using either to duplicate copyrighted works is already clearly illegal.
It is illegal for you to download copyrighted material and distribute it as your own. Models trained on such data can (and are statistically more likely) to produce similar output as their (training) input.
So training must consider licencing where copyright material is used and not consume all data.
Your brain is not a model. You can not reproduce most of what you see. You're not "training" your brain by glancing at an image as your recall concerning that image will be terrible.
My brain can certainly recreate something it’s seen before. And it can certainly create something similar to a thing it’s seen before. It’s legal to do the latter and illegal to do the latter. Imperfections on the exact recreations don’t affect the legality of it.
Am I violating copyright law because I am merely capable of producing a copy of something? Obviously not. Why should the model be?
It's because you (and all of us) have a teeny human brain, and these are terrible at remembering things, so the teeny little bits you can remember are protected under Fair Use.
For the same reason that the police being able to have a person look up in a physical printed file who owns a particular car via its license plate is not the same as having a network of cameras and computers that track every car in the city.
Yeah I don't have any problem with that too. If a cop has a right to see me, he should be legally allow to record me (and in fact would prefer all cop interactions were recorded). A camera + AI allows for massive cost savings on basic police work, enabling police to be more efficient. A camera has a lot less bias than a cop.
I think it’s not very hard; if the AI companies believe the data they trained on is public domain/open because they scraped it of the internet, then their trained weights must publicly available as well. They cannot claim ‘but training is expensive’; if they do, then they should pay fees for the hosting and storage and writing time of all data they scraped. I prefer open weights as it’s more practical. Your weights have a sliver of GPL source in it? Well that infected the entire thing as GPL does: it is ours now too!
Why write your thoughts on the web when other humans are going to steal and paraphrase it? I mean... you're on HN. Don't tell me you didn't notice people often regurgitate tech influencers like Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky's thoughts.
Imagine a friend asks for help in a class. You can either spend some time and try to teach them the subject or let them copy off you during the exam. The former generally feels good despite taking more effort. The latter often feels bad even if it doesn't impact you negatively in any way and helps your classmate more than if you did nothing.
The human to human connection that a blog or social media conversation creates feels a lot more like teaching your classmate while the AI feels a lot more like someone cheating off your work. Plus the AI didn't even bother to get your approval before copying from you. The whole thing feels ethically compromised regardless of the ultimate result.
Anonymous people regurgitate the thoughts of well-known individuals such as Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky. The fact that their thoughts are regurgitated is a testament to how well known they are already and how much their content is read by other people. Nobody is going to steal their limelight only on the basis of paraphrasing their ideas. However, if someone does write original ideas of their own, they may gain some notoriety for themselves.
Now imagine that Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky were able to read everything being written by every anonymous unknown on the internet, and create content paraphrasing any and every original thought that was created by anonymous individuals at will. How do the original creators of these thoughts have any chance to succeed on their own merit, if Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky (who everyone knows already as sources of ideas) are able to write the same stuff as soon as the anonymous person has made it public?
If Paul Graham is expressing every conceivable thought then he’s not a very interesting person to read because he has no perspective on anything.
But if a model starts generating better content than Paul Graham in a nice curated form, then yeah, Paul Graham ought to find a better way to spend his time because he is not adding value.
Becoming part of the cultural lexicon is the ultimate goal of thought leadership.
Just look at how many people say stuff like “Two women can’t make a baby in 4.5 months”. Someone (Brooks) had to invent, write down, and popularize that analogy.
I would like to make the opposite argument. All these days I didnt share my thoughts because everyone else was and my voice would be drowned in a sea of voices. In post GPT4 era its easier to stand out if your thoughts are actually original and refreshing because most people sound like their thoughts have been written by GPT.
To rephrase it another way, the reign of the conformist ends here and the reign of the contrarian begins now.
I was trying to say that what most people say is mostly unoriginal and is very reminiscent of GPT style writing. What data GPT trains on or pays attention to is another question.
What if all characters other than waldo were just dressing the same because they were trying to ape each other to get fictitious points on social forums. Internet has trained an entire generation to make arguments to get validation on social media that definitely reflects in the ideas that are put forward.
Gosh, why would anybody bother archiving Yahoo answers, Angelfire, Geocities, Tumblr, Myspace, Friendster, old BBSes, old Apple II and C64 and PC floppies, Usenet, forums... what value does any of that have?
For a time. but as we bring audio/visual AI online then it will have another boom of incorporating humanities data in that form. Then we'll have another boom of AI robot learning by experiment with reality.
After that point it gets tricky to figure out what if any booms will be next. When you get near AGI lots of horizon problems crop up.
A lot of the ground truth for AIs (and it's not just training data - it's also ongoing validation of quality) is coming from companies like Appen, Sama, DefinedCrowd, Q Analysts and many others. There's a lot of variation, but the trend is moving towards low-wage/gig work/outsourcing.
I think Paul means someone will be writing content, but whatever the form it's going to be a whole class of low-wage workers enabling tech from here on.
Or the AI will trigger people to provide necessary training data. If I would run OpenAI I would provide a free version of ChatGPT that is slightly tuned to extract useful knowledge out of the people who use it. There might be adverserial attacks but overall enough people will use it blindly and provide useful information. People even trusted Eliza. Needless to talk about what we typed into Google.
Are you familiar with what is called "the drunkards walk" Because if you think stochastic inputs will not unfortunately admit of less benign paths being taken inside the dataset.. I think you're probably wrong.
I have very little doubt the primary problem in the GPT<x> model is going to remain: it is capable of reproducing highly believable crap. In a world of pizzagate, that has a risk of becoming highly weighted "I told you so" and self-reinforcing.
In both directions, even. Cunningham's Law ("the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer") comes to mind.
I mean people forget that this is just a tool that makes a noisy compression of large data sets. It can be used to generate data that would be repetitive and tiresome to generate yourself and you still need at least one pair of eyes to discern it.
What goes in needs to be curated and what goes out too. It's getting more precise and varied in what it can do, but it's still a tool.
Seems like there would be an upper bound (probably a pretty low one) on how much useful data you could produce with AI.
If it has no way to check itself (i.e. having true data poured in continuously), hallucinations would just spiral out of control wouldn’t they?
Even if that’s not true, still every player in the space will use that method, negating their advantage and ceding advantage again to those who can layer real data on top of what everyone else is doing.
With AI doing things like image recognition it seems like real life observations and behavioral data may be unlimited at some point. How useful that will be, i guess we'll see.
Verging off-topic, but is there a specific reason that so many of the replies to the tweet are applying the argument analogously to index-fund investing?
I'm not even sure whether the spirit of those replies is mostly to criticise the argument by showing it is absurd (on the premise that index investing is a known good choice), or whether they aim to criticise index investing itself (on the premise that the argument is good).
Maybe I am missing some context. Has Paul Graham strongly supported index funds, and so are these replies some kind of "gotcha"? Or is there some general disdain for index funds in some circles, and so are they just taking the opportunity to disparage the value of index funds by using this argument?
I think criticizing the argument. It's so common for a non-positive logical conclusion to be sort of a half hearted reductio ad absurdum (disproving by showing the consequence is absurd) that many people mistake this for happening when it's not. So, they argue against the sub-text that may or may not actually be there.
Or, maybe they're just copying the joke. (The joke aspect being that even when saying how AI won't dominate everything, he's referring to human works as "training data", so it's at least dominating the framing.)
I am both an index investor and an AI enthusiast, and I think it’s an excellent analogy.
If you are an investor who does not have interest in maximizing your returns and you just want a place to park your savings, an index fund is great, and will return the market average return.
Similarly, if there is a skill that you need that is not your “special” skill, it makes sense to subscribe to the “market average” of that skill, as implemented by a statistical language model, which is in a sense “averaging” over the collective language skill of the entire internet.
In both cases, the ingredients of the “average” are formed by the people who try to do better. Active investors, including hedge funds and short sellers, think they can do better, and they provide signal that in turn feeds back into the index.
Similarly, anybody who thinks they are better at writing than the language model is free to try to outperform it, and eventually will feed back into the training data.
I didn't realize others also did. They felt isomorphic to me. If the AI generated content is regurgitation of previous content, novel human-generated content will stand out and human-generated content will become valuable. i.e. the balancing mechanism is that novelty will beat dumb replication in the same way that an active manager who has true alpha can beat a passive fund.
Now, personally, I think that multimodal LLM-groups plus feedback plus many more sensors is not far from where we are, so I mentioned that if AIs do become creative it's not a problem - they will be us or better! I, personally, believe that's where we'll go.
Anyway, I'm not too inclined to discuss in this forum (though we can chat if you're in SF) since it's easy to misunderstand and jump into argument spirals, but I just wanted to make it clear that it's not a "gotcha" or a dunk or anything like that. Nothing is being disparaged.
It's just a conversation like a normal conversation where you bring up what you think and mention ideas you have that others might find interesting. If many others have brought it up, about the best I can say is that in this respect it appears I am not particularly inventive - perhaps the best evidence that LLMs are already human-like ;)
Even a minimal amount of curation - e.g. generating multiple options and choosing the "best" one, or applying a filter where you don't post some of the generated data because it's bad - results in valid, usable training data, because the distribution of that slightly curated data differs from the generating model's distribution in exactly the direction which the curating human found most important.
So even if we all do use AI, the training data will get generated unless we don't get involved at all and AI does literally everything 100% solely on its own, at which point we could concede that it probably doesn't need any more training data.
"But after saying it out loud, as it were, I realized that with current models of AI, at least, the more people shift to using AI, the more influence accrues to those who don't."
The last humans shouting into the AI models echo chamber might have all influence, but that does not imply that they have anything even remotely resembling control. That joke/not-joke isn't half as consoling as it might seem at first glance.
And companies that can generate the training data at scale will be the highest value ones.
These LLMs are the shiniest thing in AI/ML right now b/c the data they use for training is already freely available and massive in scale via the internet.
There's an entire universe of data that hasn't been collected, curated, and leveraged in the right way yet:
- The DNA sequences of all living things
- The DNA sequences of all of humanity
- The CAD files for all manufactured goods
- The motion data for humans working manual jobs
- The words spoken by multiple peoples across their entire lifetime
To me the end game of this all is a self replicating machine. I'm watching this whole thing with curiosity, waiting for the first image model to be trained on schematics and circuit diagrams.
I want to be able to ask an AI to give me the schematics of the machine it runs on, with instructions on how to build that machine, by hand if need be.
And then I want to ask it how to build a humanoid robot that can do the same work, and I'll build the humanoid robot and let it build the machine that the AI runs on.
I'm not sure what happens then. I think that might be the end of the economy as we know it. Or perhaps the real start of an economy, and everything that we've experience before then had just been a crude approximation of what a real economic system could be.
Perhaps. I'm more interested in using them to build large objects like rockets to facilitate asteroid mining and the construction of Von Neumann probes.
How are you and your goals involved in that machine being able to survive and multiply? You are made of carbon which that machine might put to better use.
I think the cat is out of the bag. Once people.know that these things can be made, they will seek to do it themselves
How do you think that 'they' will stop that?
At best they can do a holding pattern that keeps people a couple years away, but I mean like, what are they going to do, ban semi conductor fabrication?
I’m not sure you want to find out but it probably goes something like taking your computers away from you, using government controlled AI to monitor your movements etc...or, restrictions on the classes of device that people can access. So a high-end graphics card will be treated like a weapon.
I actually can see this kind of thing happening sooner than we think, thanks to ideas like yours.
The government will team up with corporations and they will do the “research” and provide for us and we will be at their mercy with regards to technology we can access.
People will actually be asking for this pretty soon once the general public get wind of the dangers we are facing, it’s really not hard to believe. Look at covid lockdowns and times that hysteria by 10x.
Nice dystopia…this might end a lot more like 1984 or blade runner rather than some crazy wild amazing sci-fi movie.
Edit: I actually think this is already in play, see America, Taiwan and Netherlands restricting China's access to high-end semi-conductor production. I think there you can actually see the writing is already on the wall and where it's going from here.
Restricting access to high-end semiconductors will only delay their progress a bit.
If strong AI is going to be the next nuclear weapon then no sanctions will stop other countries from developing it.
The USA could not even prevent North Korea from getting nukes. And the North Korean economy is ridiculously small.
If China, Pakistan, North Korea, Russia, Iran or India decide that development of strong AI is the key to achieve their strategic goals - what are the West going to do about it?
My opinion is that of all the countries you've listed, they're much less likely to give their populace access to such systems. So I think it's less of a problem, albeit a problem.
North Korea, for example, if they developed an AGI or whatever advanced AI, aren't going to give it to their citizens to play with, it's again, 1984 there already, and it will continue that way.
They might not give it to their citizens, but they would certainly allow their military industrial complex and spy agencies to use it.
Would be stupid to waste time arguing about AI ethics in the West while getting our political systems totally wrecked by advanced AIs of hostile nations.
Because the AIs that their citizens could access would still be more powerful than those in the West if there's no obsession with AI ethics and crap like that over there.
Even if the best stuff is kept for the military/spies.
I mean, in general in the world if you live in a country with a rule of law and you said something like "Hey, I'm working on a project that's going to kill a lot of people" some nice little armed men would show up at your door and arrest you and put you in a concrete and iron cage.
But in the same sense I do agree, because that same group that controls the armed men will say to themselves "wow, we should build an AI to monitor everybody on the planet" and then we're in the same position where we've created the world eating monster, but now with even more authoritarianism.
I think its good not to overthink this idea of a self-replicating machine. In the GPT-4 paper, the system was given some access to some cloud apis and was able to do things like requisition more resources from the cloud. I imagine the first stage of "self-replication" for these LLMs or their successors is going to be like ordering CPUs from Amazon rather than setting up silicon fabs. You need to get far beyond single human level intelligence and effort to start building chips and we are probably not even there yet!
That sounds like it would be ripe for abuse. If companies get $$$ for big samples, there is an incentive to fake it. And garbage in=garbage out. Quality of AI/ML models might even degrade if the "raw material" is contaminated. Pre-GPT 3.5 data will be really valuable.
After playing around with Stable Diffusion for a while, I'm convinced that big media conglomerates like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are going to have a huge advantage here because they're in a position to pipe absolutely massive media libraries into models that are big enough to legally become "copies" of the involved works. While some of the angry rhetoric from artists whose work has been used to train models may be overblown, it's far from a stretch to suppose that companies like OpenAI and Stability AI, if they were being sloppy, could overfit to copyrighted training data to the point that the models and some outputs are infringing. I suspect they're aware of this risk. For instance, the differences in consistency and detail between a batch of SD outputs using "American Gothic painting" vs. "Dark Side of the Moon album cover" are very striking; the former is reproduced with remarkable fidelity and consistency, while the latter was clearly observed but has a much more abstract relationship to its iconic source image. I don't think that difference is accidental; I think they went to some effort to ensure that only public domain images were so firmly encoded into the model. That sort of thing is not a problem for entities that own the involved copyrights or have a such a broad license that they might as well own them (and, even failing that, are in a strong position to demand such concessions from artists going forward).
These technologies aren't really going to help big rights holders nearly as much as they're going to help small players and indies. Big rights holders already have efficient pipelines, automation and well tuned art departments. They can already crank out movies that are so effects laden as to be visually overloading non-stop. These tools might let them achieve similar or slightly better quality for less, but it's not going to fundamentally change anything. For example, if Avatar 2 VFX cost 200 million, maybe it'd come down to 20 million, but the other production costs would still be significant.
On the other hand, small indies can now do respectable VFX without resorting to CGI, needing expensive makeup/props or green screens. They could film in a field with actors in Halloween costumes, then place them in locations built using simple geometry in blender, and then AI will texture, style and light everything, modulate voices, etc. It'll be a game changer in terms of the types of films people will be able to make at the <100k price point.
> in the entertainment industry the
animation industry the expressiveness
the ability to create new films and new
ideas has exploded and as an end result
has created actually more jobs and
budgets have actually gone up if you
look at the budgets now compared to what
they were back in the 90s they're
doubled
> ...
> it's something that people want to go to
and laugh and cry and be scared and be
moved and and learn something from
those are the things that people are
going to go and watch and
um if you can do that then the
technology will follow the technology
will create new jobs I'll guarantee you
I've seen it happen I've been I've been
doing this for 35 years and I've seen it
happen I've gone through it a couple of
times
> so at the end of the day do I think it's
a threat? No I don't think it's a threat
I think it's exciting I think it's
really exciting so I'm just going to sit
here I'm going to sit here and continue
drawing on my hand-drawn animated short
snow bear and I want you to go out
embrace the technology embrace the
things that are new see how you can
express yourselves through them put some
beauty back into the world and I'll talk
to you next time thanks
Big media conglomerates might be able to pay to create enough art for their own models. Or at least figure out some scheme to do it, where the artists freely sign away this right. That model could then be licensed to others.
A website like YouTube could probably do this for voice or sound generation, if they haven't already. Offer creators an extra 5% of ad revenue and in exchange they get to mine the video for data for AI. Or some other such benefit.
I think the biggest value would be products tracking users, just as it currently is, like Google, Facebook etc. If assuming AI could learn from low quality data like humans could now, these companies have a huge dataset consisting of multiple GBs per living person that is available to them now including (verified) human written texts, search history, browsing history, video call logs/transcripts, translation transcripts etc.
In future company could even pay users to get access to their keyboard and mic to get the data that is verified to be human.
He’s right. The rise of AI will mean that specialty, proprietary data will only become more valuable. The use of encrypted communication in place of social networks will also rise. Nobody is going to post anything on the internet for free in a place where it can get vacuumed up as training data and regurgitated, without credit or compensation.
I realize I am posting this on a public forum that is almost certainly being used as a training corpus, but I’ve mostly withdrawn from public social media at this point and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that happen with more people.
Are those same people also going to stop speaking in public? Throughout human history, anyone can profit off of hearing something you said in public. You should be fearful of a timeline where people are compensated for whatever they post on the internet. I shudder to think what those discussions would look like
> Throughout human history, anyone can profit off of hearing something you said in public.
I think the big difference here is that this will now be automated. This comment I'm writing right now is being "donated" to any company that wants Hacker News on their dataset, but they didn't even need to go through the work of reading my comment to use it, they just feed along with hundreds of terabytes of random text they get from the internet and apply heuristics/other models to filter the dataset.
I feel somewhat uneasy about it, specially when writing code now. I don't think my code is good in any way shape or form, but there's a reason I license them as GPL, I don't want it used without being contributed back in some way, I write that for the greater good. License infringement was always a touchy subject since it's quite hard to find license infringement in proprietary software, but now that an opaque black box is involved in that process the people write the software might not even know they violated a license.
Just throwing ideas, I'm not really in favor or against LLMs using public datasets. At least on one side, it levels the playing field among all participants. On the other side, however, big tech will always have an edge in training and testing these large language models. My current stance is to just wait and see what happens, and then react accordingly.
"Nobody is going to post anything on the internet for free in a place where it can get vacuumed up as training data and regurgitated, without credit or compensation."
Virtually nobody's going to care enough to change their behavior.
Yeah just like people in Detroit stopped buying Chinese made goods because all of the jobs went there and then all of the jobs came back because of it and everyone lived happily ever after.
> Yeah just like people in Detroit stopped buying Chinese made goods because all of the jobs went there and then all of the jobs came back because of it and everyone lived happily ever after.
What
What are you on about? The Detroit auto industry failed due to Japan producing a superior product.
> By the end of the 1970s, the Japanese automakers dominated the domestic producers in product quality ratings for every auto market segment, representing a formidable competitive advantage (National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council, 1982, p. 99). The quality gap between U.S.-produced cars and foreign cars was beyond dispute (Kwoka, 1984, p. 518) [1]
I have seen this take on a few HN threads and I don't know where it comes from. People didn't stop reading books just because audiobooks got popular.
Why would people suddenly just turn to AI for all their entertainment? Part of the reason people love art is because they relate to it.
Like, in 2023 with the internet, blog posts, youtube, reddit, movies, etc, there's still enough demand for books that people buy them. Just because a new medium is created doesn't mean it suddenly just becomes the only medium.
People stopped reading handwritten books once the printing press became a thing. So yes, new technology sometimes does completely eliminate the old. We aren't sure where on the line this tech will fall, maybe a future LLM will be good enough to generate endless stories at high quality, or maybe they will always feel soulless, we don't know.
When I said "Medium" I meant the medium itself. A handwritten book and a typed book are both still a book. The printing press made books skyrocket in popularity because they became easier to produce.
Long form messaging like letters is close to dead due to the effect of telephone and SMS.
Internet eliminated the need to go to library to find information.
Hell, even books/writing changed the way people acquired and stored information and people no longer needed to be present in the university. Plato was against writing in a time when writing was just becoming accessible in a widespread way, and in just 2000 years we literally can't imagine a world without writing.
Is this similar to people moving away from giving their code as open source when companies take it, repackage, and sell it while the authors get nothing?
A lot of open source licenses demand that if the licensed code is included in a derivative work, that new work has to carry the same license. GitHub Copilot is straightforwardly violating these terms in many cases, and I hope the pending class action lawsuit sets statutory boundaries around the inclusion of data in a training set, and that those boundaries are retroactive.
It's possible that people looking back will consider that the mistake was putting all the content online. Perhaps even upstream of that: the first mistake was digitizing things. The music industry certainly didn't realize when they adopted CDs that they were starting down the path to self destruction... the newspaper industry likewise didn't notice how profound taking their newsprint product and packaging it as HTML would be...
And now we're unleashing ML training on all that digital, online data. Which industries will discover that this is the thing that means putting your data online, digitally, was a mistake? Certainly artists are feeling it now... maybe programmers, too, a little.
So how do you put the genie back in the bottle? Live performances, with recording devices banned? Distribute written material only on physically printed media - but how to prevent scanning? Or just escalate the DRM war - material is available online, but only through proprietary apps on locked down platforms?
Or is this going to take regulation - new laws to protect copyrights in the face of ML training?
It wasn't always the case, that you could assume that if some information exists, it should show up in a single search. That's an expectation we invented only about 25 years ago. It's possible that the result of all this is that we figure out that we can't actually sustain the free sharing of information that makes that possible.
The problem is, to borrow a phrase: information wants to be free...
We’ve known for a long time that “information” doesn’t want to be free. The owners of platforms want you to not value your information, so that you give it away for free, and they can turn it into something they can sell. That was a hard, bitter lesson, and its so important for people to learn it, quickly.
In less than 24 hours, there will be (conservatively) 100 different people independently saying this very point at different corners of the internet. It all mostly redundant.
Don't get tricked by the past decade or so's focus on the idea of "content"! This was all mostly a ploy by YouTube et al to get people to make more channels so they could sell more ads.
There is no real value to your sense of individuality in an economic sense, you shouldn't worry about it being exploited. Don't confuse the (beautiful) experience of your own interiority with a commodity.
But regardless of all that, I feel like this is an incredibly weird way to intepret what he is saying. Its not about the rising value of human generated datasets, its about the fact that there is still necessary well of labor that all this stuff must pull from in order to eliminate other forms of labor. That is why he says "not everyone can use AI." Not "proprietary data will become more valuable."
If it will be valuable, who will own this value? Probably not the same people generating and curating it, and those are precisely the people who can't use AI.
(And there are at least 1000 people making my very point this very moment..)
Ah! The HN echo chamber. The world at large vastly does not care at all. Govs are banning TikTok apps on gov employees phones all over; does anyone care and use less TikTok? Only HN and probably many there are lying about it. Privacy and this type of content abuse prevention is valued by a handful of people unfortunately.
How valuable, in terms of general knowledge, is the free-to-scrape social media posts of people who don’t think about any of this?
I don’t think people are going to continue investing time and effort into giving away high quality knowledge on the internet just so Sam Altman can train an AI to repeat it, put it behind a paywall, and charge you for it.
Yes, people will still post memes. How useful is that as training data?
But, again, some specific sub people of reddit know this, HN knows this, lobste.rs knows this and already for months now; everyone keeps writing valuable materials. Even more so now that many became interested in AI.
It is also not only Sam Altman; many good people value this information, not limited to open source AI scientists. Let’s not build our lives around a few grifters, otherwise you might as well just quit and do up and flip old houses for money; that’s beyond the reach of AI for the foreseeable future and at least then you don’t have to deal with scammers and people who make society worse at scale.
I agree that proprietary data will become more valuable. It is, even today, mostly not accessible for AI training and holds so much value. We are working on Flower (https://flower.dev), which enables training AI on private data without the data owner having to share it.
> Nobody is going to post anything on the internet for free
If there’s one thing I refuse to believe people will ever stop doing, it’s posting.
I’m genuinely curious how much time you spend with non-techie people to come to the conclusion that your opinion comes close to representing the masses. Try to make this argument to a 16yo posting dances on TikTok or a boomer reposting poems about their grandkids.
“Don’t you understand?! The big tech companies are vacuuming up your posts as TRAINING DATA! It’s going to become part of the CORPUS! You have to be like me and WITHDRAW from public social media!”
True - we can't all use AI. AI in its current form is only useful for investors to profit off the hype cycle. The rest of us are continuing to produce content for microsoft to steal and re-sell (or "training data").
Do openai etc respect robots.txt, or has the world decided a few billionaires can repackage everyone else's work and sell it back to them no matter what?
OpenAI most likely does. But the folks at places like civitai and 4chan most likely don't.
The tech being open source means that if someone wants to steal your drawing or writing style then they will do it and there's nothing that you can do to stop it.
One day, a social network will require a real-time connection with a Neuralink connected to a live human to confirm that a live human is typing/speaking. That will only work until an AI is trained well enough to spoof Neuralink's signals.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] threadI'd ask for my stuff to be added to that, but companies would probably use your list to find such content and steal it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34960377
I'll take it. Thanks for responding.
Never will this be used for a LLM.
Very artificial. Not very intelligent.
I am an AI skeptic these last 40 years. Personally, I don't think we will see it in my lifetime, if ever. I think what we have now is at best a predictive model which can expose inferences and aide people, humans, to make inductive reasoning outcomes. Its a decision-support mechanism.
The false data is a huge problem. It's very easy to make disastrous decisions on apparently reasonable inductive reasoning, and thats what I think GPT does at BEST. At worst, more normally? It's "regurgitating"
AGI is not in this. Sorry if thats a downer, but I don't think even openai think there is any evidence of a pathway to AGI from what they're doing.
They are pretty overtly riding the hype wave.
I do agree with your general point that these generators aren't really "intelligent", however. Will have to ponder if I agree about the induction bit.
One time cipher streams were new.
the invention of packet switched networks (Louis Pouzin, Len Kleinrock) was new. It wasn't inherent in prior methods, it's an inductive consequence of time division multiplexing but with addressing and routing.
There is no good analogue in nature to either the internal combustion engine, or the steam engine: the conversion of linear force to rotary force and vice-versa was a really novel thing. I would argue the wankel engine as a diversion from pistons was pretty good reasoning.
But in the same way Kurt Vonnegut says there is a small fixed number of plot models for a novel, almost all late-stage human endevour is derivitive. It's in the nature of the beast. To claim GPT is therefore 'meeting the mark' because the burden of human existence has less discovery and more inductive reasoning simply comes back to my first point: where's the evidence of the GPT doing inductive reasoning with discrimination, beyond the syllogistic?
> To claim GPT is therefore 'meeting the mark'
Pretty sure the vast majority of people who are attributing some kind of personhood to GPT aren't doing so from an analytical perspective, but because the conversational generation exceeds whatever human-detection threshold they have that is inbuilt. Asking for evidence of genuine inductive reasoning won't make a dent on those feels. The nature of the systems involved lack any reasoning, deductive or inductive. It's all statistics.
The rest of the positive camp is claiming that "the mark" is the production of useful work, I think. At most, this is seen as a step towards AGI, not the finish line.
I would dispute that this is a step toward AGI. I agree it's what proponents are saying. I just think they're wrong. We are no closer to understanding what underpins intelligence and this statistics model isn't informing us of the basis of it, or a purported AGI in particular.
Did give me a bit of a pause about putting stuff out there. Although I think I'd still rather have my data be used for training A.I. than not (and I probably am already in the training data anyway, I believe I saw that one of the datasets it's been trained on was Hacker News comments).
[1]: https://kotaku.com/totalbiscuit-john-bain-youtube-delete-vid...
Dire circumstances call for drastic measures, as they say.
It's sad to see AI on a path to destroy years of collected internet content. I expect the internet archive to receive loads of takedown requests in the coming months and years because of this.
> The current (legal) answer is "unclear".
European Union was ahead of times for once. The 2019 copyright directive, article 4, makes it legal to scrape the web and make and keep local copies of copyrighted works, for data mining purposes. Unless the copyright holders set up a machine readable exception (such as robots.txt file).
So legal in EU, "unclear" in US.
'copyright fair use' : https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/what-is-fair-use/
It has been frustrating.
So training must consider licencing where copyright material is used and not consume all data.
Your brain is not a model. You can not reproduce most of what you see. You're not "training" your brain by glancing at an image as your recall concerning that image will be terrible.
I'm sure the millions of people who violate copyright law daily with absolutely no repercussions care very much about that.
You cant setup a cinema and charge ticket for the movies you stole.
Its the money making side that matters - not individuals ij a private house
Am I violating copyright law because I am merely capable of producing a copy of something? Obviously not. Why should the model be?
The human to human connection that a blog or social media conversation creates feels a lot more like teaching your classmate while the AI feels a lot more like someone cheating off your work. Plus the AI didn't even bother to get your approval before copying from you. The whole thing feels ethically compromised regardless of the ultimate result.
Now imagine that Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky were able to read everything being written by every anonymous unknown on the internet, and create content paraphrasing any and every original thought that was created by anonymous individuals at will. How do the original creators of these thoughts have any chance to succeed on their own merit, if Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky (who everyone knows already as sources of ideas) are able to write the same stuff as soon as the anonymous person has made it public?
But if a model starts generating better content than Paul Graham in a nice curated form, then yeah, Paul Graham ought to find a better way to spend his time because he is not adding value.
Just look at how many people say stuff like “Two women can’t make a baby in 4.5 months”. Someone (Brooks) had to invent, write down, and popularize that analogy.
I think my days of sharing things freely on the web are over.
To rephrase it another way, the reign of the conformist ends here and the reign of the contrarian begins now.
Train it to be wrong on purpose, for a joke.
Gosh, why would anybody bother archiving Yahoo answers, Angelfire, Geocities, Tumblr, Myspace, Friendster, old BBSes, old Apple II and C64 and PC floppies, Usenet, forums... what value does any of that have?
After that point it gets tricky to figure out what if any booms will be next. When you get near AGI lots of horizon problems crop up.
I think Paul means someone will be writing content, but whatever the form it's going to be a whole class of low-wage workers enabling tech from here on.
I have very little doubt the primary problem in the GPT<x> model is going to remain: it is capable of reproducing highly believable crap. In a world of pizzagate, that has a risk of becoming highly weighted "I told you so" and self-reinforcing.
In both directions, even. Cunningham's Law ("the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer") comes to mind.
What goes in needs to be curated and what goes out too. It's getting more precise and varied in what it can do, but it's still a tool.
If it has no way to check itself (i.e. having true data poured in continuously), hallucinations would just spiral out of control wouldn’t they?
Even if that’s not true, still every player in the space will use that method, negating their advantage and ceding advantage again to those who can layer real data on top of what everyone else is doing.
I'm not even sure whether the spirit of those replies is mostly to criticise the argument by showing it is absurd (on the premise that index investing is a known good choice), or whether they aim to criticise index investing itself (on the premise that the argument is good).
Maybe I am missing some context. Has Paul Graham strongly supported index funds, and so are these replies some kind of "gotcha"? Or is there some general disdain for index funds in some circles, and so are they just taking the opportunity to disparage the value of index funds by using this argument?
Or, maybe they're just copying the joke. (The joke aspect being that even when saying how AI won't dominate everything, he's referring to human works as "training data", so it's at least dominating the framing.)
If you are an investor who does not have interest in maximizing your returns and you just want a place to park your savings, an index fund is great, and will return the market average return.
Similarly, if there is a skill that you need that is not your “special” skill, it makes sense to subscribe to the “market average” of that skill, as implemented by a statistical language model, which is in a sense “averaging” over the collective language skill of the entire internet.
In both cases, the ingredients of the “average” are formed by the people who try to do better. Active investors, including hedge funds and short sellers, think they can do better, and they provide signal that in turn feeds back into the index.
Similarly, anybody who thinks they are better at writing than the language model is free to try to outperform it, and eventually will feed back into the training data.
I didn't realize others also did. They felt isomorphic to me. If the AI generated content is regurgitation of previous content, novel human-generated content will stand out and human-generated content will become valuable. i.e. the balancing mechanism is that novelty will beat dumb replication in the same way that an active manager who has true alpha can beat a passive fund.
Now, personally, I think that multimodal LLM-groups plus feedback plus many more sensors is not far from where we are, so I mentioned that if AIs do become creative it's not a problem - they will be us or better! I, personally, believe that's where we'll go.
Anyway, I'm not too inclined to discuss in this forum (though we can chat if you're in SF) since it's easy to misunderstand and jump into argument spirals, but I just wanted to make it clear that it's not a "gotcha" or a dunk or anything like that. Nothing is being disparaged.
It's just a conversation like a normal conversation where you bring up what you think and mention ideas you have that others might find interesting. If many others have brought it up, about the best I can say is that in this respect it appears I am not particularly inventive - perhaps the best evidence that LLMs are already human-like ;)
So even if we all do use AI, the training data will get generated unless we don't get involved at all and AI does literally everything 100% solely on its own, at which point we could concede that it probably doesn't need any more training data.
The last humans shouting into the AI models echo chamber might have all influence, but that does not imply that they have anything even remotely resembling control. That joke/not-joke isn't half as consoling as it might seem at first glance.
These LLMs are the shiniest thing in AI/ML right now b/c the data they use for training is already freely available and massive in scale via the internet.
There's an entire universe of data that hasn't been collected, curated, and leveraged in the right way yet: - The DNA sequences of all living things - The DNA sequences of all of humanity - The CAD files for all manufactured goods - The motion data for humans working manual jobs - The words spoken by multiple peoples across their entire lifetime
I want to be able to ask an AI to give me the schematics of the machine it runs on, with instructions on how to build that machine, by hand if need be.
And then I want to ask it how to build a humanoid robot that can do the same work, and I'll build the humanoid robot and let it build the machine that the AI runs on.
I'm not sure what happens then. I think that might be the end of the economy as we know it. Or perhaps the real start of an economy, and everything that we've experience before then had just been a crude approximation of what a real economic system could be.
Because we designed them that way.
How do you think that 'they' will stop that?
At best they can do a holding pattern that keeps people a couple years away, but I mean like, what are they going to do, ban semi conductor fabrication?
If people get away with illicit cannabis operations they can get away with illicit AI operations.
I actually can see this kind of thing happening sooner than we think, thanks to ideas like yours.
The government will team up with corporations and they will do the “research” and provide for us and we will be at their mercy with regards to technology we can access.
People will actually be asking for this pretty soon once the general public get wind of the dangers we are facing, it’s really not hard to believe. Look at covid lockdowns and times that hysteria by 10x.
Nice dystopia…this might end a lot more like 1984 or blade runner rather than some crazy wild amazing sci-fi movie.
Edit: I actually think this is already in play, see America, Taiwan and Netherlands restricting China's access to high-end semi-conductor production. I think there you can actually see the writing is already on the wall and where it's going from here.
If strong AI is going to be the next nuclear weapon then no sanctions will stop other countries from developing it.
The USA could not even prevent North Korea from getting nukes. And the North Korean economy is ridiculously small.
If China, Pakistan, North Korea, Russia, Iran or India decide that development of strong AI is the key to achieve their strategic goals - what are the West going to do about it?
North Korea, for example, if they developed an AGI or whatever advanced AI, aren't going to give it to their citizens to play with, it's again, 1984 there already, and it will continue that way.
Would be stupid to waste time arguing about AI ethics in the West while getting our political systems totally wrecked by advanced AIs of hostile nations.
They US government or military would just hire the best people to work behind closed doors?
Even if the best stuff is kept for the military/spies.
There is no NRA equivalent for graphics cards.
Making a machine that could do what you say above probably isn't that hard.
Making the machine that could do the above without destroying the world is impossible.
But in the same sense I do agree, because that same group that controls the armed men will say to themselves "wow, we should build an AI to monitor everybody on the planet" and then we're in the same position where we've created the world eating monster, but now with even more authoritarianism.
On the other hand, small indies can now do respectable VFX without resorting to CGI, needing expensive makeup/props or green screens. They could film in a field with actors in Halloween costumes, then place them in locations built using simple geometry in blender, and then AI will texture, style and light everything, modulate voices, etc. It'll be a game changer in terms of the types of films people will be able to make at the <100k price point.
This is Aaron Blaise ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Blaise ) reacting to the Corridor Crew AI animation video.
(please pardon the copy of the auto-transcribe)
It concludes with:
> in the entertainment industry the animation industry the expressiveness the ability to create new films and new ideas has exploded and as an end result has created actually more jobs and budgets have actually gone up if you look at the budgets now compared to what they were back in the 90s they're doubled
> ...
> it's something that people want to go to and laugh and cry and be scared and be moved and and learn something from those are the things that people are going to go and watch and um if you can do that then the technology will follow the technology will create new jobs I'll guarantee you I've seen it happen I've been I've been doing this for 35 years and I've seen it happen I've gone through it a couple of times
> so at the end of the day do I think it's a threat? No I don't think it's a threat I think it's exciting I think it's really exciting so I'm just going to sit here I'm going to sit here and continue drawing on my hand-drawn animated short snow bear and I want you to go out embrace the technology embrace the things that are new see how you can express yourselves through them put some beauty back into the world and I'll talk to you next time thanks
A website like YouTube could probably do this for voice or sound generation, if they haven't already. Offer creators an extra 5% of ad revenue and in exchange they get to mine the video for data for AI. Or some other such benefit.
In future company could even pay users to get access to their keyboard and mic to get the data that is verified to be human.
I realize I am posting this on a public forum that is almost certainly being used as a training corpus, but I’ve mostly withdrawn from public social media at this point and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that happen with more people.
Just throwing ideas, I'm not really in favor or against LLMs using public datasets. At least on one side, it levels the playing field among all participants. On the other side, however, big tech will always have an edge in training and testing these large language models. My current stance is to just wait and see what happens, and then react accordingly.
Virtually nobody's going to care enough to change their behavior.
What are you on about? The Detroit auto industry failed due to Japan producing a superior product.
> By the end of the 1970s, the Japanese automakers dominated the domestic producers in product quality ratings for every auto market segment, representing a formidable competitive advantage (National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council, 1982, p. 99). The quality gap between U.S.-produced cars and foreign cars was beyond dispute (Kwoka, 1984, p. 518) [1]
[1] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6309861.pdf
Because it is a prisoners dilemma.
If you personally stop posting, it has very little effect on the job market.
Because other people will still be posting this content.
This, you are at a disadvantage, even if in agregate it hurts you for this content to be posted.
More likely some sort of physical reaction, hopefully not a violent one.
Why would people suddenly just turn to AI for all their entertainment? Part of the reason people love art is because they relate to it.
Like, in 2023 with the internet, blog posts, youtube, reddit, movies, etc, there's still enough demand for books that people buy them. Just because a new medium is created doesn't mean it suddenly just becomes the only medium.
Internet eliminated the need to go to library to find information.
Hell, even books/writing changed the way people acquired and stored information and people no longer needed to be present in the university. Plato was against writing in a time when writing was just becoming accessible in a widespread way, and in just 2000 years we literally can't imagine a world without writing.
And now we're unleashing ML training on all that digital, online data. Which industries will discover that this is the thing that means putting your data online, digitally, was a mistake? Certainly artists are feeling it now... maybe programmers, too, a little.
So how do you put the genie back in the bottle? Live performances, with recording devices banned? Distribute written material only on physically printed media - but how to prevent scanning? Or just escalate the DRM war - material is available online, but only through proprietary apps on locked down platforms?
Or is this going to take regulation - new laws to protect copyrights in the face of ML training?
It wasn't always the case, that you could assume that if some information exists, it should show up in a single search. That's an expectation we invented only about 25 years ago. It's possible that the result of all this is that we figure out that we can't actually sustain the free sharing of information that makes that possible.
The problem is, to borrow a phrase: information wants to be free...
Don't get tricked by the past decade or so's focus on the idea of "content"! This was all mostly a ploy by YouTube et al to get people to make more channels so they could sell more ads.
There is no real value to your sense of individuality in an economic sense, you shouldn't worry about it being exploited. Don't confuse the (beautiful) experience of your own interiority with a commodity.
But regardless of all that, I feel like this is an incredibly weird way to intepret what he is saying. Its not about the rising value of human generated datasets, its about the fact that there is still necessary well of labor that all this stuff must pull from in order to eliminate other forms of labor. That is why he says "not everyone can use AI." Not "proprietary data will become more valuable."
If it will be valuable, who will own this value? Probably not the same people generating and curating it, and those are precisely the people who can't use AI.
(And there are at least 1000 people making my very point this very moment..)
Ah! The HN echo chamber. The world at large vastly does not care at all. Govs are banning TikTok apps on gov employees phones all over; does anyone care and use less TikTok? Only HN and probably many there are lying about it. Privacy and this type of content abuse prevention is valued by a handful of people unfortunately.
I don’t think people are going to continue investing time and effort into giving away high quality knowledge on the internet just so Sam Altman can train an AI to repeat it, put it behind a paywall, and charge you for it.
Yes, people will still post memes. How useful is that as training data?
It is also not only Sam Altman; many good people value this information, not limited to open source AI scientists. Let’s not build our lives around a few grifters, otherwise you might as well just quit and do up and flip old houses for money; that’s beyond the reach of AI for the foreseeable future and at least then you don’t have to deal with scammers and people who make society worse at scale.
If there’s one thing I refuse to believe people will ever stop doing, it’s posting.
I’m genuinely curious how much time you spend with non-techie people to come to the conclusion that your opinion comes close to representing the masses. Try to make this argument to a 16yo posting dances on TikTok or a boomer reposting poems about their grandkids.
“Don’t you understand?! The big tech companies are vacuuming up your posts as TRAINING DATA! It’s going to become part of the CORPUS! You have to be like me and WITHDRAW from public social media!”
“Yeah I don’t care lol”
The tech being open source means that if someone wants to steal your drawing or writing style then they will do it and there's nothing that you can do to stop it.