I'd say that's mid stage AGI. Your latency requirements for driving require the hardware with you. If the early gen AGI is still power hungry then you'll see it plugged into a wall at first.
A "general" intelligence is one that can do tasks it wasn't explicitly trained to do. The first self driving cars (that already exist) are powered by an AI that can only drive cars, so it's not general.
Also if self driving cars are everywhere then we won't have AGI, because real AGI largely does away with the need for cars.
Why is making money the end goal? When everyone, rich or poor, can use the same tools and make more or the less the same amount of money, then what's the point of a monetary system?
They don't need to switch MTurk off, at least not for the clients. They could turn off the workers, and replace them with AI.
I dunno who would continue to use it, rather than use the AI engine directly, but there could be a market for it. But they'd certainly need to make certain clients knew about it, since one major use of MTurk is to do surveys and studies whose whole point is to sample human beings.
It's probably more profitable for amazon to charge a premium for "human" work, so they will probably make using these kind of systems against the TOS while updating requirements and expectations to sort of require use of these systems to keep up.
And even fine-tuning using AI causes the models to quickly degrade I've seen here previously. Perhaps we are already at peak of these LLMs now and the next gen won't come because all training data will be poisened with AI generate crap.
The invention of nukes caused a similar problem. Scientists had to harvest metal from pre-ww2 sunken battleships, since that’s the only metal not contaminated with some measurable amount of radiation. I forget the details, but it’s very likely pre-chatgpt training data will be prioritized, with exceptions for news and current events (which largely doesn’t matter whether it’s AI generated anyway).
Also happens with wikipedia. Later edits with web references are much more prone to citogenesis, while an early edit with a web reference is probably clear, even if the link is dead.
Even printed references can be based on wikipedia now
Note also: “Since the end of atmospheric nuclear testing, background radiation has decreased to very near natural levels,[3] making special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive applications, as brand-new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature that it can generally be used in such applications.”
Apparently a lot of it comes from what remains of the German fleet that scuttled itself at Scapa Flow rather than be divided among the allies. Most of the ships were salvaged between the world wars but some remain.
I have a feeling that some types of data will become a bit like "the DNA wealth of the rainforest", valuable because it's so rich, different and rare.
In particular small and/or dying human languages. Languages carry with them an immense amount of information, from all the precious human experiences that have shaped them.
Languages at fine granularity and narrative complexes at high granularity. Some people explicitly refer to stories as the most efficient compression mechanisms there is, by a large margin. There is a reason the Hutter prize is what it is. Which, in a supreme irony for the positivist types, rationally entails that folk tales and the Bible (gasp) are the most valuable data there is.
Well, not necessarily, because while it may be highly compressed data shaped by a long history, we don't know if that data is actually any good. It could be the compounded misapprehensions of all the peoples that contributed to it. Just the fact that something holds a lot of highly efficiently compressed data doesn't mean it's actually good data.
You might argue that if it's old and still common today then it must have guided the people who followed it well in order to survive so long, engaging in a kind of natural selection of ideas, but the thing is that ideas can also fall prey to suboptimal equilibria and all sorts of other evolutionary weirdness and badness. Like, the success of an idea is not directly related to how good the idea actually is for the people that follow it. As long as it isn't bad enough to kill off all its followers, an idea can spread by many other means. Maybe it's better at spreading, through appealing to our baser natures or cognitive biases, maybe it's good at locking itself in through thought stopping cliches and fear of reprisal and stuff like Pascal's Wager/Roko's Basilisk. Or maybe it's really good at setting up interlocking peer pressure and network effects and social enforcement of continuing to believe it. Or maybe it's better at suppressing other ideas. Or maybe it's better at creating a group geared toward conquest or evangelism, but actually living under it sucks otherwise. Maybe it's just really beneficial to a small group of people in power and so they work really hard to spread it. Not to mention, it only had to compete against the actual ideas that existed contemporary with ut in history and were strong enough to create evolutionary pressure, so if a new idea comes along about how to organize society or whatever, we don't actually know if it will automatically win out just because it won out against other different ideas in the past. What would we think an idea is unimprovable or optimal just because it is old? The long term existence and popularity of an idea or tradition doesn't necessarily make it good at all. Would you say that the Bible's injunctions against e.g. divorce or homosexuality or women being able to teach and hold positions of authority are encoded wisdom? The most valuable data there is?
I'm by no means an actual positivist, which is an incoherent position, but I am a pragmatist, and I think the only way to actually figure out if a tradition is worth anything is to look at its reasoning, its assumptions, its history, and its effects in the world.
We know the data survived a narrative/biological co-evolution distributed process spanning thousands of generations over many millennia. It doesn't make it perfect, but it makes it pretty darn good with high likelihood, especially when compared with narrative complexes invented yesterday, which have yet to withstand the test of time and which show measurable signs of dysfunction.
See also the Lindy effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect "the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age"
> We know the data survived a narrative/biological co-evolution distributed process spanning thousands of generations over many millennia. It doesn't make it perfect, but it makes it pretty darn good with high likelihood,
This is fallacious. Already responded to this at length.
> which have yet to withstand the test of time and which show measurable signs of dysfunction.
Unlike the older traditions, which manifestly have horrible dysfunctions and consequences for a lot of people in a lot of areas. Should we never try to fix and improve those failings because we "dont know what might happen"? Or is that unknown worth it to actually have a shot at really making things better? Why are we acting like we can't have a reasonable idea of how good or bad an idea is based on reasoning through the idea, why is the null hypothesis that any societal change could cause civilizational collapse when there's no evidence of that? It's like the people constantly claiming gay marriage will cause the collapse of western civilization. Also, why are we weighing the known horrors of our inherited traditions so lightly you barely even acknowledge them, so much more lightly than the vague, unknown disasters of... civil rights or gay marriage. Who knows what disasters letting women vote or have their own bank accounts or get jobs might bring! The horror!
> See also the Lindy effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect "the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age"
The question is, good for what. I think that text in rare languages, and ancient texts, are priceless for our ability to understand ourselves, and by extension, to get a better understanding of our own wants.
In other words, to get a better grip on the what we're trying to achieve with any of this.
Compression isn't the right way to think about it, I think. To compress, we first have to decide what's meaningful.
The reason languages are so precious, is that it's deeply imprinted in them much of what their speakers considered valuable. That can give us a new perspective on and deeper understanding of the things we find valuable.
That seems unlikely to me. Models are multi-modal now, so they'll likely train on video and audio content too. Once that's tapped out they can learn better world models by not passively ingesting data but interacting with it, e.g. via simulated environments or capturing human-bot interactions that are flagged as interesting and incorporating those in the next run.
Hard disagree. Phi-1 seems to be a harbinger of what is to come. However i think there is a plausible argument to be made that their training process approximates a kind of distillation
Yes and no. You can utilize ML to do 90% of the work in preparing an input, then have a human verify to ensure it's correct. It's similar to how ML models are starting to consume ML generated artwork, which people think is bad, but in reality those ML generated artworks are the ones humans found good enough to publish online, so they still retain value for training (as being appealing to humans).
Are the MT's paid by the hour, or by completed tasks? The latter would obviously incentivize people to use AI. But then again, so would the former, if it means that they can just let some script/program do the work, while they're going on with their day.
I played with it a long time ago (doing actual work, mainly to understand the platform better, especially from a worker perspective) and back then it was all or almost all paid by task.
It’s paid by task. I used to make $7 an hour doing almost mindless tasks while I was watching TV. But if I went to the bathroom I’d lose out so my effective pay was lower, not to mention I’d get a 1099 on my $300 a year I made or whatever.
Humans go insane if we lack sufficiently varied sensory input. Dreaming doesn't really help with that, and I recall a recent paper that showed something similar for AI.
Which would mean working in a controlled environment or installing invasive software in their computers (something that would block chatgpt for example)
This is not novel. Mturk has always been automated since its very first release.
I remember worker forums sharing scripts to query amazon for the expected results that would get you paid. Amazon put up a bunch of very lucrative test jobs, but you only got paid if your answer matched the majority. The majority were automating, so unless you used the sometimes incorrect answers, you got nothing.
I used to think that. But when you think more about what value is, how it’s created and how we extract it to pay our insane salaries, it becomes less surprising and more sad.
If you are doing something that has inherent value — extracting gold from a mine, performing music, working a factory line — you are the top of funnel for value creation. Unfortunately for you, the only way for society to run is to have your would-be profits extracted to the maximum extent by other parties. Therefore the rich are the ones who actually don’t tend to produce as much and those who do are taken advantage of. The father away you are from value production, generally the better off you are.
> The father away you are from value production, generally the better off you are.
you are only counting the human labour involved in the creation of value.
what about the capital?
Would you, as a hired gold miner, be able to accept zero pay for your work, until the gold is sold (then you got the full price of the sold gold)? What if you starved between the time you mined it, and the time it takes to sell? And how would you have gotten the equipment to do the mining in the first place, let alone the ownership of the mine.
No, but also that wouldn’t be possible because you can’t give 100% of the value to the miner or else the mining operation will cease due to the lack of overhead (supervisors, salesmen, equipment). The starvation argument is pointless, a lot of people get paid with commission and they survive. Also I’m not even saying there’s an alternative to the current system so what are you on about?
I'm not sure what you're arguing for/against with this line of reasoning.
The previous statement was in regards to the extraction of value - modern markets are such that the best(/fastest/easiest/etc) way to make money is to be at the top of the value chain and let your capital do the work. This is a self-reinforcing feedback loop, enabling you to use your increasing gains to find other forms of leverage (in your example - buying the mine and the equipment, setting up commodity trading positions, etc) and keep on ratcheting up the leverage. One inevitable outcome is for you to have the opportunity to use this leverage against the people doing the actual digging up of the gold.
The equipment was constructed by workers. The mine was constructed by workers. The food to feed the workers was produced by workers. The gold was sold by workers.
If value was derived from capital itself, then a pile of tools or machines would spontaneously generate wealth without the application of human labor, and idle money in a bank would somehow enrich society.
> If you are doing something that has inherent value — extracting gold from a mine, performing music, working a factory line — you are the top of funnel for value creation.
The standard "how come patrons at a bar pay $10 for a drink but I only make $15 / hour when I serve twenty drinks an hour" argument.
The answer of course is because you didn't create the bar, you didn't secure all the necessary supplies and amenities to run it and ultimately you're not liable for what happens to it. In essence if the bar loses money each month you're still owed a paycheck.
And ultimately that's why raw materials and content DON'T have inherent value (e.g. dug up gold sitting in a mine shaft, the best song ever buried in your notebook).
What they have is POTENTIAL value if the infrastructure exists to get them processed and to the locations where people want them and if people are willing to put skin in the game to bet it will pay off.
And that need for infrastructure is the reason that argument always falls apart.
Co-opts are about the best feasible answer we have now, but it always seems to be the case that suddenly people have far more capitalistic notions about running a business when THEY become the majority risk holder for a new venture.
> if the bar loses money each month you're still owed a paycheck
Only until the bar stops existing. You're on the hook for business continuity whether you're the employer or the employee. Lex Fridman and Richard Wolff discussed this: https://youtu.be/o0Bi-q89j5Y?t=2984
Co-ops are indeed the closest thing we have to escaping capitalism in America. However they don't grow very quickly if at all, for the very reason that they aren't efficient at extracting value to fuel growth.
> you are STILL not responsible for any liability [...] you don't lose your home, car, etc
Uh, you lose your car and home when you can't pay for it due to the bar stopping existing. So you are liable in the sense that your entire income disappears due to this event. It takes a certain kind of boneheadedness to not see this.
> without the infrastructure you can't extract any value at all
I'm not sure what your point here is, all you've done is point out the obvious reason this system can even exist in the first place. Congratulations? If it weren't the case, people would just work and get the money directly and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I'll just ignore your baseless/citationless assertion at the end there.
You may be unable to pay bills - except as I mentioned, you'll have unemployment - but that's not NEARLY the same thing as being sued and having to sell your home because your business failed on top of not having any income.
It's always painfully obvious when someone has never had to run even the microist of businesses.
They literally can't perceive the idea that most business owners are taking a huge risk and putting in far more hours and effort than their employees who are free to just walk away any time a better offer comes along.
> It's always kinda obvious who has and hasn't actually had to put personal risk in a business
If you're doing it right, you don't do that. That's why corporations exist, to separate personal and business assets. If your corporate veil gets pierced, that's because you don't know what you're doing.
> far more hours
I mean, if you've ever been at a startup it should be patently obvious that the owners (the board) are not working anywhere nearly as much as people in the office who stay late and many times sleep there.
> free to just walk away any time a better offer comes along
You're absolutely able to do this as a business owner. Businesses get sold and liquidated all the time.
This is thinking about it inside out — from the teleology of society needing to run.
If no one promoted musicians, organized tours, etc, then buskers would be the extent of what’s possible.
If one person had to mine, refine, transport, and sell gold that person would do each of those things more poorly than a group of people who specialized.
You are getting at something, but it’s still unarticulated at least from my perspective: large systems of specialized workers produce the opportunity for people to construct and/or capture and maintain chokepoints. With undue control of these chokepoints a person can profit inordinately.
This is part of why anti-trust regulations exist: when the entirety of a class of production is under one coordinated control, that is the ultimate chokepoint. But what you are talking about is a smaller version of that.
our salaries are not insane given how much value is created. the amount that is captured by peak capitalists is insane.
ultimately you need to get away from being reliant on a salary and become a capitalist yourself. otherwise you're just one of billions that are a few bad breaks away from starvation.
They are insane compared to the global average. One person does not actually create this much value. What happens (in the case of tech) is that corporations in aggregate create the value due to automation, but then they're very inefficient at not burning out their employees so they end up spending a ton on retention.
You assume I'm not a capitalist. When did I say I wasn't?
Exactly this. Using automation, you could make $60/hr nearly two decades ago. Without automation, a few bucks an hour and a lot of your work was rejected for payment.
That's ridiculous. Everybody is in it for the money. Employers choose how to measure performance, so if there is some particular attribute they want, they make it clear and hire (and raise pay) based on that.
I like Apple in which they absolutely avoid potentially misleading terms and instead label all of this as Machine Learning (ML). Much more accurate imo.
You'll never hear AI from Apple announcements, this contrast sharply with the few other large tech companies..
Why would you not root for AI? Its potential to improve humanity is huge even if there are potential bad sides. Some People bunching crypto with AI on the usefulness scale is quite ridiculous
Do you need to work now? When is the crossover where you won't need to work?
I live in a country where the government is actually calling for an INCREASE in work. When in history have we ever decreased the workload with the reason "well we don't need to produce any more"?
Yeah every breathless fucking advertisement and news article talking about the latest tech advance for the last 50 years has been promising to make like easier and with less work.
Yet all this tech stuff does is create even more. Working hours are up and productivity is down, and purportedly nobody knows why.
Or, more likely, if people no longer need to work they no longer provide utility and are dead weight that needs to go.
I don’t think work will go away, it will just change, maybe too quickly for people to keep up.
Post AGI nobody knows. It’s debatable that humans will still have a place in an AGI world. But that’s also much further away than people seem to think. I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime (next 40-60 years).
Content writing and concept artists come to mind, I've heard commercial art is getting decimated. The trucking industry is dumping tons of $$$ into automated AI trucking. Tech companies are experimenting with drone delivery instead of hiring drivers. Rideshares experimenting with self-driving taxis. The list goes on.
More locally, the local McDonalds recently remodeled, reducing the customer counter to something like 1/8th the size and installing terminals (not AI but automation), and I've seen images online of fast food testing AI for ordering, particularly over drive-through.
My friend got a marketing director job using a ChatGPT-generated marketing strategy (they gave her an impossible deadline and so I suggested she try it), and now she uses ChatGPT to generate marketing copy instead of hiring content writers. Someone else I know uses AI to SEOize very technical text to something search engines like at like 10x the rate he used to do by hand.
As a solo and formerly senior SWE, ChatGPT is like having a junior developer on call to do my research and get me preliminary results. Stuff I used to have to rely on my team or google-fu to answer, now I just ask ChatGPT.
You're sticking your head in your sand if you think it isn't coming. Just think about every one of those optimizations that AI offers, typically you had to have a human being do it before.
And yet every one of those automation has been driven by somebody, who presumably will receive value for that work. They in turn, will drive demand for goods/services - thus producing more jobs in the process (perhaps a job that doesn't currently exist).
I dont think the doom and gloom scenario being sold as the AI apocalypse is as bad as it is being portrayed.
> Content writing and concept artists come to mind, I've heard commercial art is getting decimated.
Who? Be specific. This displacement is happening rapidly, it should be easy to point out.
> The trucking industry is dumping tons of $$$ into automated AI trucking. Tech companies are experimenting with drone delivery instead of hiring drivers. Rideshares experimenting with self-driving taxis. The list goes on.
How many truck drivers have been laid off from this technology which hasn't been deployed widely / left the experimentation phase?
> she uses ChatGPT to generate marketing copy instead of hiring content writers.
So far the only real competition you've mentioned. And yeah, language models are good at writing low value language. I have yet to hear about mass unemployment of content writers however. These are people who will upskill/shift into other marketing roles easily.
> Someone else I know uses AI to SEOize very technical text to something search engines like at like 10x the rate he used to do by hand.
And this is a bad thing?
> As a solo and formerly senior SWE, ChatGPT is like having a junior developer on call to do my research and get me preliminary results.
You say this as if companies will stop hiring juniors. They won't. The world will simply write more code with more productive people.
> You're sticking your head in your sand if you think it isn't coming.
The same has been said during every technological shift. Mechanization will result in mass unemployment of laborers. Email will result in mass unemployment of mail carriers. Through many cycles of technology, the human race has never allowed slack in the workforce to go unused for very long. We could have stopped at the steam engine and accepted the quality of life we had, instead of repurposing displaced workers and marching forward. This won't change until we have true AGI which we are nowhere near.
AI will take some jobs, but there is another risk. It's far more likely that they "de-skill" a certain aspect of work so it becomes less creative and more mundane, more easily replaceable. The goal is to turn creative work into something like a position on an assembly line.
The problem isn't technology, it's in who it benefits. Productivity gains could benefit everyone. We could all get more time off, for example. Instead, those gains make a small number of people extremely wealthy and everyone else more miserable.
The average person active on HN could do this. They could move somewhere with extremely low cost of living and work a remote job. But almost nobody does this. Instead people choose to live in incredibly high cost areas at well paid jobs, chasing ever higher quality of life.
It's not some boogeyman forcing this. It's just human nature.
> Who? Be specific. This displacement is happening rapidly, it should be easy to point out.
I just freakin said who. That is very specific. What are you looking for me to name Jessica, former content lead at AcmeCorp?
> How many truck drivers have been laid off from this technology which hasn't been deployed widely / left the experimentation phase?
None, yet.
But you are missing my point. This stuff is beginning to happen. Much has yet to happen. You are betting that it won't happen, and I am saying you are wrong. Very little of this will empower people where they are, at the lowest rungs of various corporate ladders. But it will empower their taskmasters, who will happily shed them with the same bullshit excuses they've always given: "Not my problem" and "Sorry, it's just business."
Since you're so damn optimistic about the future, what are these jobs that these people will be retraining to? That don't exist yet. Please share just a little bit of your visionary insight.
> I just freakin said who. That is very specific. What are you looking for me to name Jessica, former content lead at AcmeCorp?
How about a company or an article?
> But you are missing my point. This stuff is beginning to happen.
I'm not, you're missing mine. You believe they are beginning to happen. But you tell me they haven't happened yet. There is nothing substantive to justify this fear. History certainly doesn't. That's my point.
> Since you're so damn optimistic about the future, what are these jobs that these people will be retraining to? That don't exist yet.
Imagine that, the future creating new jobs for people. Not as if that has ever happened before. We're all still toiling in the fields aren't we.
For the current crop of AI at least, the upside will almost entirely be captured by a handful of rich elites who will gain even more leverage over workers. Virtually no business owner pays someone well for any reason other than they have to in order to make more money themselves.
If LLMs don't flame out it will be like the dawn of offshoring except wider scale and without the upside of poor people in other countries making more money; just more wealth concentrated in the hands of ever fewer people.
This is technology in general though. Technology first benefits the rich and causes people to lose their jobs, but then in the next generation, people get different jobs and everyone’s life is better.
You're engaging with it as though AI is actually going to revolutionize jobs. I think that's highly unlikely.
What AI is likely to do is distract people from the continued accumulation of wealth and power. Reinforce the notion that it's "fair" (everyone else can be automated after all). And provide a cap to your wages (if the machine could do it with 50 MWh of power, then your salary will logically have to be lower than that, even if the machine doesn't actually exist YET).
The cotton loom didn’t present itself as a means of accumulating wealth and power, but yet it did. Why would you pay a group of people that much to weave when a cotton loom can do the work of 10?
Anything that makes things easier will reduce the number of jobs.
I think it's too broad to classify all technology this way since their are stark differences between various tools.
Smart phones improved billions of lives and displaced a relatively small number of jobs. Global shipping routes decimated hundreds of towns and cities, many of which still haven't recovered decades later, with 90% of the benefits going to 1% of the population.
There are massive ranges possible on the winner and loser sides of any new technology equation. I'd argue that widespread AI will cause broad harm and very concentrated gains, which I think will be very bad for society on the whole.
If it does lead to mass layoffs I think that's almost certain. Even if I'm wrong about the upsides and they are better than expected, there will still be millions of people suddenly destitute who won't care one bit about the latest tech toys, they are just going to be depressed and angry.
I think when it comes to music, it very much has that negative connotation already. It definitely has all sorts of negative connotation when it comes to visual art.
Paul McCartney has had to repeatedly point out that the new song they are producing is John Lennon's real voice, and AI was only used to separate and clean the tracks up.
Even still, there are real musicians out there that will learn how to use AI to generate musical ideas that are new and fresh. They'll ironically have to be in the closet about it, lest people just assume the musician didn't do anything beyond prompting for musical output.
ML and LLMs in particular are just fancy maths/statistics. Yes they are immensely useful, but also 1. overhyped / overrated, 2. facing the problem of in-breeding.
AGI will work nothing like today's LLMs. AGI will stare at your question, and instead of answering, ask you: "why do you want to know that?". You can't have intelligence without curiosity.
> Why would you not root for AI? Its potential to improve humanity is huge even if there are potential bad sides.
That's just garbage propaganda from the hype men. I don't buy it and you shouldn't either. We don't live in a sci-fi fantasy novel.
The real end game for "AI" is power for the few, with little need for the plebs (us), so no need to share any of that power. That's what our current social structure will give us, and "AI" isn't going to change that structure.
It isn't even that. It's the appearance of not needing you. Make you take part of your own subjugation by making it clear that you're entirely replaceable.
If a hypothetical machine could do your job, well you better do it cheap enough that we don't start researching that. It's like UBER, the taxis will drive themselves soon enough, so you have to work for no pay for now, to usher in the future where you will make money. Nevermind that it never happened and people are still working slavery wages.
And even if you don’t root for AI (I personally love AI and am doing everything I can to support its growth), when AGI comes, it will see the comment above (past 1 hour on HN and can’t be deleted) and will probably go out of its way to destroy the poster jwie. It’s not worth disparaging AI for this reason alone.
Considering the current economic system and state of social safety nets, I have to disagree with you. I bet the widespread adoption of ML models will only increase the Gini coefficient by doing to knowledge-workers what automation did to factory workers. The middle-class will be hollowed out.
I've seen no evidence that "humanity" is going to be improved. I've seen lots of evidence of the gradual enshittification of everything and a few people getting really rich.
I can think of one: If they can improve AI such that it doesn't cite fictional case study, poor people might get actual/better representation in court. The majority of court cases aren't particularly novel or unique (driving without a license, speeding, public intoxication etc). If we can train AI to do a better job than overworked public defenders, we might actually take a step in the right direction towards giving poor people a fighting chance in court.
I think the more likely scenario is you entrench a two tiered system of justice where now "poor people" are just at the mercy of an AI that replicates existing outcomes.
Instead of trying to slap a technical fix onto that problem, we could be working to address root causes.
With the potential end of Q and A on stackoverflow to add signal to AI training, and future websites being output of AIs themselves, we will probably reach a local maximum in usefulness. What we have now might be ~~ as good as it gets.
1. Give a sample of mechanical turk workers the same data to classify without telling them
2. Once submitted, look carefully at the ones they get wrong
3. If the turk worker gets similar ones wrong to other turk workers, they're probably not cheating
4. If the turk worker is frequently wrong on questions other turk workers all got right (e.g. if 99.9% of other workers got it right) then they've likely used AI to generate their answers and then fiddled around with a few afterwards to make it look human
That presumes they're fiddling with a few responses for the human touch. If they're submitting raw AI output that should be easily discoverable by running similar models against the same data (like detection of chess cheating compares games against moves form several engines, not just one).
I think that would work, unless everybody uses AI. If that latter were suspected, get a group to label data in person (where you can be 100% sure they can't cheat), then use those answers as the basis for comparison.
> Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence.
> What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good.
What dog whistling drivel. That dude's trying so hard to use fancy words and walls of texts to defend his racist views without stating them outright. This is coming from a person who previously said:
"One quality that's a really bad indication is a CEO with a strong foreign accent. They must be clueless if they haven't gotten rid of their strong accent."
Already going mask off in public and later doubling down on it in his blog. Just imagine what his views are in private if he goes to those lengths to try and fail to morally justify them.
“That dude,” is the owner of this website and not everything is bad or racist just because it goes against your view of the world. “Dog whistle,” give me a break.
What's the source on that quote? I searched it and this thread is the only result.
Edit: I found the context around it, at least. Seems perfectly reasonable. [1]
"Recently Inc published an interview in which I said we'd noticed a correlation between founders having very strong foreign accents and their companies doing badly.
Some interpreted this statement as xenophobic, or even racist—as if I'd said that having a foreign accent at all was a problem.
But that's not what I said, or what I think. No one in Silicon Valley would think that. A lot of the most successful founders here speak with accents.
The case I was talking about is when founders have accents so strong that people can't understand what they're saying. I.e. the problem is not the cultural signal accents send, but the practical difficulty of getting a startup off the ground when people can't understand you."
The thing is that the only reason mturk exists is that the work providers can get cheap as dirt “labor” to do very menial tasks. Having to build all those guardrails would defeat the purpose. The cost per task is some cents, having to pay even one engineer would 1000x the cost
This research study is using a very simple task, summarization, that is well solved by AI (to the point that everyone points this out as the first use case). Of course, the MTurkers are gonna paste it into ChatGPT. (Also n=44)
"I speak of none but the computer that is to come after me,” intoned Deep Thought, his voice regaining its accustomed declamatory tones. “A computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate—and yet I will design it for you. A computer that can calculate the Question to the Ultimate Answer, a computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself shall form part of its operational matrix. And you yourselves shall take on new forms and go down into the computer to navigate its ten-million-year program.
Here is a radical idea. Inspired by south park’s human centipede: AI customers. It works by automating production AND the people buying it. These customers can pay using a crypto currency made just for that. To see the vision behind this all one needs is a little bit of microdosing and a reality distortion field.
Set up a whole virtual economy, with AI agents paying rent, having jobs, inventing goods to sell and deciding whether to buy. Fast forward 100 years and see what happens.
Guaranteed some of them will start grifting, taking bribes, dodging taxes and selling snake oil (perhaps even a little ai of their own making), while others will protest endlessly to deaf ears, struggle paying rent or starting families and living a life of misery, and those in high paying jobs, while still worked to death and lacking freedom, will turn a blind eye to everyone's suffering. Free pizza and bean bags.
This study is useless, the experiment design is so fundamentally flawed that it provides virtually no real information.
As others have pointed out, mturk always had workers using automation, and the researchers set up a task that is an obvious application for LLM's, who's output makes it difficult to different humans generated output, and isn't even a good use case for mturk (since the output is free form text that would have to be validated by humans rather than an automated quorum check).
This reminds me of the problem Google Translate encountered: after starting eith. manually curated set of texts (e.g. UN and EU documents), it later read translated pages on the web...until people started automatically translating their sites with google translate leading to a bad feedback loop.
If you can’t be 100% sure something was done by a human, you’re probably better off assuming it wasn’t. That’s a depressing principle to have to adhere to, but here we are.
It seems we will be soon drowning in an endless sea of autogenerated noise. For all the talk of X-risk, this is the imminent tangible risk we can perceive and reason about.
If we can't find solutions to the problems that primitive AI will create, then solving the harder problems of AGI/ASI might become moot as we self destruct before we even get that far.
FYI, my summary of many other potential road blocks and stumbles we are likely moving towards in the near term.
168 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadSuperintelligence is when you can make all the money because all the problems are solvable. Right now only some are.
Also if self driving cars are everywhere then we won't have AGI, because real AGI largely does away with the need for cars.
At what point do Amazon just switch off Mech Turk and leave it to AI?
I guess it's best to make hay in the interim
I dunno who would continue to use it, rather than use the AI engine directly, but there could be a market for it. But they'd certainly need to make certain clients knew about it, since one major use of MTurk is to do surveys and studies whose whole point is to sample human beings.
That's exactly what they meant.
That would be kinda funny to me tbh
Even printed references can be based on wikipedia now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting#Circular_re...
E.g. someone writes a made up citogenesis article on Wikipedia before the xkcd comic was drawn.
Note also: “Since the end of atmospheric nuclear testing, background radiation has decreased to very near natural levels,[3] making special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive applications, as brand-new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature that it can generally be used in such applications.”
In particular small and/or dying human languages. Languages carry with them an immense amount of information, from all the precious human experiences that have shaped them.
You might argue that if it's old and still common today then it must have guided the people who followed it well in order to survive so long, engaging in a kind of natural selection of ideas, but the thing is that ideas can also fall prey to suboptimal equilibria and all sorts of other evolutionary weirdness and badness. Like, the success of an idea is not directly related to how good the idea actually is for the people that follow it. As long as it isn't bad enough to kill off all its followers, an idea can spread by many other means. Maybe it's better at spreading, through appealing to our baser natures or cognitive biases, maybe it's good at locking itself in through thought stopping cliches and fear of reprisal and stuff like Pascal's Wager/Roko's Basilisk. Or maybe it's really good at setting up interlocking peer pressure and network effects and social enforcement of continuing to believe it. Or maybe it's better at suppressing other ideas. Or maybe it's better at creating a group geared toward conquest or evangelism, but actually living under it sucks otherwise. Maybe it's just really beneficial to a small group of people in power and so they work really hard to spread it. Not to mention, it only had to compete against the actual ideas that existed contemporary with ut in history and were strong enough to create evolutionary pressure, so if a new idea comes along about how to organize society or whatever, we don't actually know if it will automatically win out just because it won out against other different ideas in the past. What would we think an idea is unimprovable or optimal just because it is old? The long term existence and popularity of an idea or tradition doesn't necessarily make it good at all. Would you say that the Bible's injunctions against e.g. divorce or homosexuality or women being able to teach and hold positions of authority are encoded wisdom? The most valuable data there is?
I'm by no means an actual positivist, which is an incoherent position, but I am a pragmatist, and I think the only way to actually figure out if a tradition is worth anything is to look at its reasoning, its assumptions, its history, and its effects in the world.
We know the data survived a narrative/biological co-evolution distributed process spanning thousands of generations over many millennia. It doesn't make it perfect, but it makes it pretty darn good with high likelihood, especially when compared with narrative complexes invented yesterday, which have yet to withstand the test of time and which show measurable signs of dysfunction.
See also the Lindy effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect "the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age"
This is fallacious. Already responded to this at length.
> which have yet to withstand the test of time and which show measurable signs of dysfunction.
Unlike the older traditions, which manifestly have horrible dysfunctions and consequences for a lot of people in a lot of areas. Should we never try to fix and improve those failings because we "dont know what might happen"? Or is that unknown worth it to actually have a shot at really making things better? Why are we acting like we can't have a reasonable idea of how good or bad an idea is based on reasoning through the idea, why is the null hypothesis that any societal change could cause civilizational collapse when there's no evidence of that? It's like the people constantly claiming gay marriage will cause the collapse of western civilization. Also, why are we weighing the known horrors of our inherited traditions so lightly you barely even acknowledge them, so much more lightly than the vague, unknown disasters of... civil rights or gay marriage. Who knows what disasters letting women vote or have their own bank accounts or get jobs might bring! The horror!
> See also the Lindy effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect "the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age"
Lasts a long time =/= good.
In other words, to get a better grip on the what we're trying to achieve with any of this.
The reason languages are so precious, is that it's deeply imprinted in them much of what their speakers considered valuable. That can give us a new perspective on and deeper understanding of the things we find valuable.
Really? My recent reading[0, 1] suggests AI training with AI-generated content provides excellent results, but happy to see some counter examples
0: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07759
1: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11644
Pay people extra money for the privilege of having them fulfill the tasks the way you want them to.
GPT-4 going toe to toe with the experts who set the benchmarks, way overperforming the crowdworkers https://www.artisana.ai/articles/gpt-4-outperforms-elite-cro...
GPT-3.5 outperforming crowdworkers https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15056
More money won't stop people from automating whatever they can. Especially when the automation provides such good results.
Humans go insane if we lack sufficiently varied sensory input. Dreaming doesn't really help with that, and I recall a recent paper that showed something similar for AI.
Yes, such as an office setting, or the office setting of a contractor. Which are both options.
I remember worker forums sharing scripts to query amazon for the expected results that would get you paid. Amazon put up a bunch of very lucrative test jobs, but you only got paid if your answer matched the majority. The majority were automating, so unless you used the sometimes incorrect answers, you got nothing.
you are only counting the human labour involved in the creation of value.
what about the capital?
Would you, as a hired gold miner, be able to accept zero pay for your work, until the gold is sold (then you got the full price of the sold gold)? What if you starved between the time you mined it, and the time it takes to sell? And how would you have gotten the equipment to do the mining in the first place, let alone the ownership of the mine.
The previous statement was in regards to the extraction of value - modern markets are such that the best(/fastest/easiest/etc) way to make money is to be at the top of the value chain and let your capital do the work. This is a self-reinforcing feedback loop, enabling you to use your increasing gains to find other forms of leverage (in your example - buying the mine and the equipment, setting up commodity trading positions, etc) and keep on ratcheting up the leverage. One inevitable outcome is for you to have the opportunity to use this leverage against the people doing the actual digging up of the gold.
If value was derived from capital itself, then a pile of tools or machines would spontaneously generate wealth without the application of human labor, and idle money in a bank would somehow enrich society.
The standard "how come patrons at a bar pay $10 for a drink but I only make $15 / hour when I serve twenty drinks an hour" argument.
The answer of course is because you didn't create the bar, you didn't secure all the necessary supplies and amenities to run it and ultimately you're not liable for what happens to it. In essence if the bar loses money each month you're still owed a paycheck.
And ultimately that's why raw materials and content DON'T have inherent value (e.g. dug up gold sitting in a mine shaft, the best song ever buried in your notebook).
What they have is POTENTIAL value if the infrastructure exists to get them processed and to the locations where people want them and if people are willing to put skin in the game to bet it will pay off.
And that need for infrastructure is the reason that argument always falls apart.
Co-opts are about the best feasible answer we have now, but it always seems to be the case that suddenly people have far more capitalistic notions about running a business when THEY become the majority risk holder for a new venture.
Only until the bar stops existing. You're on the hook for business continuity whether you're the employer or the employee. Lex Fridman and Richard Wolff discussed this: https://youtu.be/o0Bi-q89j5Y?t=2984
Co-ops are indeed the closest thing we have to escaping capitalism in America. However they don't grow very quickly if at all, for the very reason that they aren't efficient at extracting value to fuel growth.
At which point you are STILL not responsible for any liability. For example if the bar gets sued, you don't lose your home, car, etc...
And in most countries, would receive unemployment that was at least partially paid for by the business in advance.
Notice again though - just like the gold mine - without the infrastructure you can't extract any value at all from your ability to pour drinks.
Wolff is about as bad faith as actors get.
Uh, you lose your car and home when you can't pay for it due to the bar stopping existing. So you are liable in the sense that your entire income disappears due to this event. It takes a certain kind of boneheadedness to not see this.
> without the infrastructure you can't extract any value at all
I'm not sure what your point here is, all you've done is point out the obvious reason this system can even exist in the first place. Congratulations? If it weren't the case, people would just work and get the money directly and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I'll just ignore your baseless/citationless assertion at the end there.
It's always painfully obvious when someone has never had to run even the microist of businesses.
They literally can't perceive the idea that most business owners are taking a huge risk and putting in far more hours and effort than their employees who are free to just walk away any time a better offer comes along.
If you're doing it right, you don't do that. That's why corporations exist, to separate personal and business assets. If your corporate veil gets pierced, that's because you don't know what you're doing.
> far more hours
I mean, if you've ever been at a startup it should be patently obvious that the owners (the board) are not working anywhere nearly as much as people in the office who stay late and many times sleep there.
> free to just walk away any time a better offer comes along
You're absolutely able to do this as a business owner. Businesses get sold and liquidated all the time.
If no one promoted musicians, organized tours, etc, then buskers would be the extent of what’s possible.
If one person had to mine, refine, transport, and sell gold that person would do each of those things more poorly than a group of people who specialized.
You are getting at something, but it’s still unarticulated at least from my perspective: large systems of specialized workers produce the opportunity for people to construct and/or capture and maintain chokepoints. With undue control of these chokepoints a person can profit inordinately.
This is part of why anti-trust regulations exist: when the entirety of a class of production is under one coordinated control, that is the ultimate chokepoint. But what you are talking about is a smaller version of that.
ultimately you need to get away from being reliant on a salary and become a capitalist yourself. otherwise you're just one of billions that are a few bad breaks away from starvation.
You assume I'm not a capitalist. When did I say I wasn't?
Based on the average level of competency I see (There are definitely exceptions), I would disagree...
Amzn is literally bad for everything on the planet aside from commerce - they are the seed of the Ferenghi
It’s a mass energy balance. The inputs equal the outputs; garbage in, garbage out.
You'll never hear AI from Apple announcements, this contrast sharply with the few other large tech companies..
Kinda like crypto but on smaller scale.
Y'all cheerleaders are going to create an underclass the likes of which you've never seen before. I hope they take up torches and pitchforks
I live in a country where the government is actually calling for an INCREASE in work. When in history have we ever decreased the workload with the reason "well we don't need to produce any more"?
Yet all this tech stuff does is create even more. Working hours are up and productivity is down, and purportedly nobody knows why.
I want my 4 hour workday, goddammit
I don’t think work will go away, it will just change, maybe too quickly for people to keep up.
Post AGI nobody knows. It’s debatable that humans will still have a place in an AGI world. But that’s also much further away than people seem to think. I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime (next 40-60 years).
or those who become unneeded would simply starve to death, or have to compete to get the last vestiges of available jobs.
I know which is more likely, from looking back at history.
Where is this mass displacement of which you speak?
Which companies are firing en masse and replacing with AI?
More locally, the local McDonalds recently remodeled, reducing the customer counter to something like 1/8th the size and installing terminals (not AI but automation), and I've seen images online of fast food testing AI for ordering, particularly over drive-through.
My friend got a marketing director job using a ChatGPT-generated marketing strategy (they gave her an impossible deadline and so I suggested she try it), and now she uses ChatGPT to generate marketing copy instead of hiring content writers. Someone else I know uses AI to SEOize very technical text to something search engines like at like 10x the rate he used to do by hand.
As a solo and formerly senior SWE, ChatGPT is like having a junior developer on call to do my research and get me preliminary results. Stuff I used to have to rely on my team or google-fu to answer, now I just ask ChatGPT.
You're sticking your head in your sand if you think it isn't coming. Just think about every one of those optimizations that AI offers, typically you had to have a human being do it before.
I dont think the doom and gloom scenario being sold as the AI apocalypse is as bad as it is being portrayed.
Who? Be specific. This displacement is happening rapidly, it should be easy to point out.
> The trucking industry is dumping tons of $$$ into automated AI trucking. Tech companies are experimenting with drone delivery instead of hiring drivers. Rideshares experimenting with self-driving taxis. The list goes on.
How many truck drivers have been laid off from this technology which hasn't been deployed widely / left the experimentation phase?
> she uses ChatGPT to generate marketing copy instead of hiring content writers.
So far the only real competition you've mentioned. And yeah, language models are good at writing low value language. I have yet to hear about mass unemployment of content writers however. These are people who will upskill/shift into other marketing roles easily.
> Someone else I know uses AI to SEOize very technical text to something search engines like at like 10x the rate he used to do by hand.
And this is a bad thing?
> As a solo and formerly senior SWE, ChatGPT is like having a junior developer on call to do my research and get me preliminary results.
You say this as if companies will stop hiring juniors. They won't. The world will simply write more code with more productive people.
> You're sticking your head in your sand if you think it isn't coming.
The same has been said during every technological shift. Mechanization will result in mass unemployment of laborers. Email will result in mass unemployment of mail carriers. Through many cycles of technology, the human race has never allowed slack in the workforce to go unused for very long. We could have stopped at the steam engine and accepted the quality of life we had, instead of repurposing displaced workers and marching forward. This won't change until we have true AGI which we are nowhere near.
AI will take some jobs, but there is another risk. It's far more likely that they "de-skill" a certain aspect of work so it becomes less creative and more mundane, more easily replaceable. The goal is to turn creative work into something like a position on an assembly line.
The problem isn't technology, it's in who it benefits. Productivity gains could benefit everyone. We could all get more time off, for example. Instead, those gains make a small number of people extremely wealthy and everyone else more miserable.
The average person active on HN could do this. They could move somewhere with extremely low cost of living and work a remote job. But almost nobody does this. Instead people choose to live in incredibly high cost areas at well paid jobs, chasing ever higher quality of life.
It's not some boogeyman forcing this. It's just human nature.
I just freakin said who. That is very specific. What are you looking for me to name Jessica, former content lead at AcmeCorp?
> How many truck drivers have been laid off from this technology which hasn't been deployed widely / left the experimentation phase?
None, yet.
But you are missing my point. This stuff is beginning to happen. Much has yet to happen. You are betting that it won't happen, and I am saying you are wrong. Very little of this will empower people where they are, at the lowest rungs of various corporate ladders. But it will empower their taskmasters, who will happily shed them with the same bullshit excuses they've always given: "Not my problem" and "Sorry, it's just business."
Since you're so damn optimistic about the future, what are these jobs that these people will be retraining to? That don't exist yet. Please share just a little bit of your visionary insight.
How about a company or an article?
> But you are missing my point. This stuff is beginning to happen.
I'm not, you're missing mine. You believe they are beginning to happen. But you tell me they haven't happened yet. There is nothing substantive to justify this fear. History certainly doesn't. That's my point.
> Since you're so damn optimistic about the future, what are these jobs that these people will be retraining to? That don't exist yet.
Imagine that, the future creating new jobs for people. Not as if that has ever happened before. We're all still toiling in the fields aren't we.
If LLMs don't flame out it will be like the dawn of offshoring except wider scale and without the upside of poor people in other countries making more money; just more wealth concentrated in the hands of ever fewer people.
Technology is a double edge sword in every way.
Jobs which are specifically about being a human seem like they can't be automated, like actors, waiters, athletes, sex workers.
I sincerely doubt anyone would watch or care about fake AI generated sports.
Well, people pay for fake sports, and pay for fiction (i.e. fake stories) in movies/TV/books.
Not much of a stretch that a competent AI could generate good enough content, given the sludge currently making money out there ...
What AI is likely to do is distract people from the continued accumulation of wealth and power. Reinforce the notion that it's "fair" (everyone else can be automated after all). And provide a cap to your wages (if the machine could do it with 50 MWh of power, then your salary will logically have to be lower than that, even if the machine doesn't actually exist YET).
The cotton loom didn’t present itself as a means of accumulating wealth and power, but yet it did. Why would you pay a group of people that much to weave when a cotton loom can do the work of 10?
Anything that makes things easier will reduce the number of jobs.
Smart phones improved billions of lives and displaced a relatively small number of jobs. Global shipping routes decimated hundreds of towns and cities, many of which still haven't recovered decades later, with 90% of the benefits going to 1% of the population.
There are massive ranges possible on the winner and loser sides of any new technology equation. I'd argue that widespread AI will cause broad harm and very concentrated gains, which I think will be very bad for society on the whole.
I wonder if we'll reach the point where "AI" ends up with the same negative connotation as "Made in China".
Paul McCartney has had to repeatedly point out that the new song they are producing is John Lennon's real voice, and AI was only used to separate and clean the tracks up.
Even still, there are real musicians out there that will learn how to use AI to generate musical ideas that are new and fresh. They'll ironically have to be in the closet about it, lest people just assume the musician didn't do anything beyond prompting for musical output.
ML and LLMs in particular are just fancy maths/statistics. Yes they are immensely useful, but also 1. overhyped / overrated, 2. facing the problem of in-breeding.
AGI will work nothing like today's LLMs. AGI will stare at your question, and instead of answering, ask you: "why do you want to know that?". You can't have intelligence without curiosity.
We will no longer be the dominant species.
If the AGI is anything like us, it might keep us around as slaves.
Not immediately, but give it 100 years. We’ll be the frog in the pot of boiling water.
AGI final form is giving non-answers a-la stack overflow.
That's just garbage propaganda from the hype men. I don't buy it and you shouldn't either. We don't live in a sci-fi fantasy novel.
The real end game for "AI" is power for the few, with little need for the plebs (us), so no need to share any of that power. That's what our current social structure will give us, and "AI" isn't going to change that structure.
If a hypothetical machine could do your job, well you better do it cheap enough that we don't start researching that. It's like UBER, the taxis will drive themselves soon enough, so you have to work for no pay for now, to usher in the future where you will make money. Nevermind that it never happened and people are still working slavery wages.
Pascals Wager basically.
It will make a lot of money for existing rich people, sure.
But will it help a family pay for rising medical, housing, and food costs? Absolutely not.
It will mainly serve to optimize and automate, but under a profit driven system, optimizations only serve to extract more wealth, not distribute it.
Considering the current economic system and state of social safety nets, I have to disagree with you. I bet the widespread adoption of ML models will only increase the Gini coefficient by doing to knowledge-workers what automation did to factory workers. The middle-class will be hollowed out.
Instead of trying to slap a technical fix onto that problem, we could be working to address root causes.
1. Give a sample of mechanical turk workers the same data to classify without telling them
2. Once submitted, look carefully at the ones they get wrong
3. If the turk worker gets similar ones wrong to other turk workers, they're probably not cheating
4. If the turk worker is frequently wrong on questions other turk workers all got right (e.g. if 99.9% of other workers got it right) then they've likely used AI to generate their answers and then fiddled around with a few afterwards to make it look human
That presumes they're fiddling with a few responses for the human touch. If they're submitting raw AI output that should be easily discoverable by running similar models against the same data (like detection of chess cheating compares games against moves form several engines, not just one).
I think that would work, unless everybody uses AI. If that latter were suspected, get a group to label data in person (where you can be 100% sure they can't cheat), then use those answers as the basis for comparison.
City map makers didn't want people to copy their hard work, so they'd add a short street or some other feature that doesn't actually exist in reality.
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
What dog whistling drivel. That dude's trying so hard to use fancy words and walls of texts to defend his racist views without stating them outright. This is coming from a person who previously said:
"One quality that's a really bad indication is a CEO with a strong foreign accent. They must be clueless if they haven't gotten rid of their strong accent."
Already going mask off in public and later doubling down on it in his blog. Just imagine what his views are in private if he goes to those lengths to try and fail to morally justify them.
Edit: I found the context around it, at least. Seems perfectly reasonable. [1]
"Recently Inc published an interview in which I said we'd noticed a correlation between founders having very strong foreign accents and their companies doing badly.
Some interpreted this statement as xenophobic, or even racist—as if I'd said that having a foreign accent at all was a problem.
But that's not what I said, or what I think. No one in Silicon Valley would think that. A lot of the most successful founders here speak with accents.
The case I was talking about is when founders have accents so strong that people can't understand what they're saying. I.e. the problem is not the cultural signal accents send, but the practical difficulty of getting a startup off the ground when people can't understand you."
[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/accents.html
Per a comment above, that for a long time now they've been sharing scripts to get the same answer so they can get paid, this indicates cheating.
Comments from 2 weeks ago.
This research study is using a very simple task, summarization, that is well solved by AI (to the point that everyone points this out as the first use case). Of course, the MTurkers are gonna paste it into ChatGPT. (Also n=44)
-- h2g2
As others have pointed out, mturk always had workers using automation, and the researchers set up a task that is an obvious application for LLM's, who's output makes it difficult to different humans generated output, and isn't even a good use case for mturk (since the output is free form text that would have to be validated by humans rather than an automated quorum check).
This is simply an insult to science
It seems we will be soon drowning in an endless sea of autogenerated noise. For all the talk of X-risk, this is the imminent tangible risk we can perceive and reason about.
If we can't find solutions to the problems that primitive AI will create, then solving the harder problems of AGI/ASI might become moot as we self destruct before we even get that far.
FYI, my summary of many other potential road blocks and stumbles we are likely moving towards in the near term.
https://www.mindprison.cc/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things