This is a continuation from my other reply. Read the other comment first. Or not, it's rather long. I type fast.
>These days I struggle to watch a movie, there are just too many options, AI is only going to make this problem worse. We'll be drowning in shit.
Holy shit. Now you need to hire a guy to choose the movie for you. Pay him a movie directors wage. Clearly this choosing stuff is so hard we need experts! No I'm kidding. Let's be honest, choosing things is easy.
>Nothing is as simple as it seems.
The irony here is that your conclusion is the simpler one. It's the easy way out. People are optimistic by default and pessimism is actually the harder path because it's so much uglier to admit. The truth is actually more inline with pessimism as the world is more or less built on competitive darwinian fundamentals with cooperation existing only as a side effect. The brain paints a delusional reality in such a way so that you don't get constantly scared or depressed. If you find your thoughts always being overly optimistic there's a good chance you're biased.
>From the perspective of psychology, I think the most salty people are those who don't do art, it's almost like people hope this is the end of people being able to freely express themselves. Kind of like the quest to crush artistic freedom is in progress.
I look at this statement and there are things about it that are obviously wrong. And I wonder how come you're blind to it? Like you're obviously referring to me somewhat. But that's not even the issue.
The most salty people are the people who entered into a lawsuit. You have to be really fucking salty to spend the time and the effort to do that. Who's in the lawsuit? Not me, I don't give a shit about artists. Let me spell it out: Artists are suing AI companies because Artists are the ones that are the most SALTY. That's not even a huge revelation. The revelation is how this came to be NOT obvious to a pretty smart person like you?
You use psychology to imply I'm the one out of touch? Take a look in the mirror.
A better analogy for this is oil companies and climate change pre 2000s. I'm the environmentalist saying something is fucked up here. You're oil baron. You're the person in Software who's in denial about how Software and ML is about to make some drastic and extremely negative changes to the way the world works. I can assure you oil barons couldn't face the cold hard truth and grasped at every positive angle they could get there hands on to build a universe where they weren't responsible for harming the world. They couldn't face the reality. Can you.
Can you face the truth that the artist working for your company is about to become useless. Can you fire him and tell him that to his face? No. You need a narrative. What about your own skills as a software engineer. Are you able to face a reality where your job is basically within 10-20 years going to be phased out for AIs? Likely not. So consider the possibility that you're the one that's biased and you're the one with the overly rosy outlook.
>You're just arguing some people are afraid of being replaced by AI, new flash?
No I'm saying many people are afraid enough such that they organized a law suit against AI. Something that never happened before. THAT is sufficient evidence in support of the fact that AI has surpassed certain limits and CAN replace certain occupations. THIS point is OBVIOUS and YOU know this.
Why are you delivering talking points to make me explain what's obvious?
>Art isn't really about money, it's about self-expression,
You have got to be joking. You realize art is a HUGE part of business right? Movies, Video Games, Websites, Comic books ALL ARE businesses that use art. I think it's gotten to a point where you're just grasping for concepts to defend a point and you're not realizing how obviously wrong these concepts are. Art is Categorically a business. It is also self-expression at the same time but you are delusional if you think it's not business.
>Artists already knew this and photographers too, there were more photos and images available online for free or next to nothing, than you could ever imagine or possible consume. It didn't change much, people still did art and people still got hired and not much will change. People will still be involved in art and photos. For fun and for money.
Photographers didn't riot for three reasons. First reason, it doesn't take much skill to be a good photographer. So it's not a huge thing when something takes it over because most people never invested much into it. For art there's huge investment into getting good at it.
Second Reason. The technology came too slowly. It's not as sudden as AI and art. Smart phones turning everyone into somewhat good photographers and even consumer cameras before that took several decades of progress and gradual improvement to be where we are at today. When something comes slowly people don't really react, JUST like how global warming will fuck the world up but it's so slow nobody can bring themselves to care.
Third Reason. AI is not actually replacing all forms of photography. AI is like art. People know it's made up. There's still actual demand for captured stills of reality AND that is a separate niche from captured made up stills that don't exist in reality.
>I guarantee you there is a whole group of people who see using DALL-E to generate new interesting ideas as being a thing too, who see it as an opportunity. Similar to who Chess players are using AI to study new moves.
Sure.
>If it's your profession, yeah it might suck, but on the other hand, I choose to hire artists because I enjoy working with people and building something together, it's a whole different creative process and in my opinion, creates better products for the specific use case. I actually wouldn't mind sitting with artists who use AI to create things?
Of course. But you see there's a difference here. In the past if I wanted a person to paint me some really high quality and completely original fantasy art, I'd dish out a lot of money because such a skill is hard to find. Now I can hire any person who just has a bit of design sense and HE can use AI to do 99% of the work at minimum wage. I get all the benefits of personal interaction while I reap way more rewards by paying lower wages. ART skill was expensive, The comradery of working with someone was and still is cheap. But now the world is changing and art is just as cheap as comradery.
>You're naive actually about how these things work, these things use statistics to draw pictures based on statistics, they don't understand anything, it's why when I use DALL-E, it makes some nice stuff, but when I look more closely it also does weird things like, has objects sticking out of peoples heads. So no it doesn't do the same thing, it doesn't "understand" anything. I would understand if I was asked to draw a picture of someone that it would be strange to have a wooden stake sticking out of their ass. DALL-E doesn't. Go and get it to draw you a photo of children playing, it will be quite a nightmare.
Bro. Most of the things these things draw ARE already better than anything you can do. It's better than the average human being at drawing already. You're pointing out flaws but even with those flaws it's STILL better than average.
That being said this is just DALL-E. Other Generative Models that are trained more thoroughly on specialized sets produce WAY better output. MidJourney for example.
>While this stuff is impressive, it's a very, very big leap to go from painting by numbers to understanding something and being creative in that way. I personally think it will be a fun and exciting time when this happens, but fundamentally, it's quite a different system.
Painting by numbers? Bro. This thing is CLEARLY not painting by the numbers. You give it a sentence DALL-E gives you SEVERAL variations that are on par with what a human would do in terms of creativity. Just go onto deviant art and it's all similar from the perspective of originality.
Lack of Creativity or "painting by the numbers" isn't the issue. The issue is translation accuracy. Some things are "off", hands are inaccurate, some things are misplaced. AI is already killing it in terms of creativity. The problem now is to fix these artifacts. Fixing artifacts is not in your words "a huge leap". Once those artifacts are fixed and these AI models generate pictures with pixel perfection it's over.
>I actually get the feeling as humans, we're also overlaying our own ego onto how great these creations we've created are without being practical and objective enough to actually figure out if these things are actually important.
This is cliche. You're repeating what everyone has been parroting all over HN that these AI's have limits, they aren't as good as humans, yadayadayada. What your saying is EASY to believe. It's a common trope and the deceptively obvious conclusion. It takes extra effort to get passed this bias and see the extent of AI. I'm not amazed because I'm just taking the easiest conclusion. No. I'm amazed because I took steps to overcome my bias.
Think of it this way. You know of the turing test? For the longest time and for most of my life this test: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Turing_test was basically the standard test to see if something was more or less an actual intelligence and self aware. It was quite obvious to most people that this test was virtually impossible for an AI to pass and if an AI passed it, it's more or less a self aware intelligent being.
Yeah we just rocketed passed this test. LLM's regularly can beat this test, TRIVIALLY. But then there's a whole bunch of clones with your outlook. You guys move the bar higher and higher everytime a milestone is hit. Beating that test would be impressive in the past, but now that something actually beat it, it isn't sufficiently impressive anymore. You unconsciously place the bar higher without realizing and begin nitpicking and magnifying the little issues AI still has. You guys will forever think there's lightyears to go before AI matches human intelligence no matter how many turing type tests AI surpasses.
>Style, design, etc is more than just "having the image". Selection is important, for example musicians write thousands of songs and never actually record them. There is a time and a place for specific art to be deployed, consumed, displayed, I don't think this is going away either, "style" and having an eye for the correct imagery is not something that will be replaced anytime soon. Essentially, having infinite images also means making the right choice becomes harder, that will be a new trade in itself.
You think these models will only output pixel?. It can output anything that can be described in a natural language. Be it English, pixels or HTML styled with CSS. That's the first part. The second part is, it takes 100000x less talent to SELECT something that was ALREADY created then it does to CREATE something that didn't exist. EVEN when you have a lot of selection. You want proof? The internet and amazon has INCREASED my shopping selection choices by a huge magnitude. You still don't see me paying 200k to an expert chooser to choose for me what to buy. Why? Because selecting these things will be EASY.
Previously you pay 200k to each of 5 artists to do some art job. Now you pay one person minimum wage to do AI to do the same thing. That's 4 people with no job and one person being paid minimum wage. That's the future.
Nothing wrong with this being on the front page. Just posting this here as a question. Is the reason why this is on the front page because a good number of software engineers addicted? Maybe you don't have the numbers but you yourself who's reading this may be personally interested in a vaccine?
A child is well aware of the parent-child hierarchy that is more or less universal across all modern cultures. You've been conditioned by this book to follow a fringe belief.
Be real. You can convince people to read a book without having to copy all 600 pages here. Saying that you're incapable of doing so when every book on the face of the earth has summaries, snippets and reviews to promote themselves is just plain dishonest. It's so obviously dishonest that it's, in fact, a form of trolling. I'm sorry, but this conversation is over as this type of thing is against the rules here.
>Which part of it? ;) Leading a team of software engineers? Identifying and negotiating vague parts of business requirements? Designing technical specs? Or maybe the part where I am responsible for software actually working correctly as business expects it to?
All of it. Only one human leader to write queries. Everything else designed by an AI.
>Neural networks are great for task where minor details are largely unimportant compared to overall "impression" - generating visuals, informal texts, music, probably image/video decompression, etc. On the other hand, while they can mimic "overal look", they can't guarantee (and in practice they always fail in that regard) that each detail of the produced artifact is correct. Which means you can't reliably or productively use them for programming, legal texts, construction design (though it can be used to draw inspiration for the overall image), etc.
You're just regurgitating a trope that's Categorically false. You're a NN did you realize that?
>I never said it's not revolutionary. I merely point out its hard limits.
And you're wrong. You have thoroughly expanded the limitations and you are mistaken about this.
>Technically artists are starting lawsuits due to copyright. Also, technically, an artist can easily tell the difference between raw NN output and an actual drawing, sometimes even non-artists, as the images often look somewhat uncanny.
No. corps and AI's and bots have been scraping pics off the internet for years. Google is one. No lawsuit of this nature has been filed until AI came out. Artists are threatened and they are reacting as such that's why the lawsuit is filed now instead of before.
>These are two completely different tasks. You are comparing apples and oranges, that can't really be put on a same scale, unless by "HARDER" you specifically imply the amount of brainless tedious work required to complete the job.
No, ENGLISH is written in a language written with tokens of symbols. The other, PICTURES, is written in tokens of language as well. A pixel is 3 numbers of RGB and in the computer it is represented as a language with a format before translation onto your monitor. It is a translation problem and it is treated the same way by experts. Both DALL-E and chatGPT utilize very similar generative models translating English to English in the case of chatGPT and english to numbers which can be further translated to pixels for DALL-E.
>Also, in practice artists just use and process real photos when they aim for "photorealistic" - no one actually draws photorealistics from scratch, normally (but one can obviously invent any kind of challenge for themselves if they want to)
Not true. A good amount do.
>Who told you that there is a bootcamp that can produce a fine software engineer in a year? It takes (a talented-enough person) at the very least 5 years of rigorous study and practice before one can actually start working somewhat autonomously without constant supervision, while also delivering appropriate quality.
There's many bootcamps that make that claim and there's PLENTY of people who can live up to that claim. But NONE for artistry.
>Don't kid yourself thinking that these two are similar or comparable sets of tasks.
Kid myself? It is literally the same type of neural network. There's no kidding here. It's not a coincidence that chatGPT and DALL-E came out back to back. These models are called generative models. It's a single new technology that's responsible for this.
>That's actually not true and I never made such a claim. ChatGPT is EXTREMELY useful in a professional environment, but only for a specific set of tasks, while being used as a tool by an expert with actual responsibilities.
No it's not. There's no guard rails users can ask it anything and take it anywhere. It can't stay within a defined task. It's also wrong enough times that it can't be used in prod for virtually most tasks.
>The first GPT and GANs were heralds. ChatGPT is already a relatively mature and refined technology. I don't know why you expect to see low base effect here - the base is already actually pretty high.
No they weren't heralds. Text generators have always been around it got better. But never displayed signs of true understanding or even self awareness as it does now. Literal self awareness.
>Notice how each one of them also for some reason mentions a kind of business and languages and frameworks, which are totally unrelated.
I told it to do that. So that the responses wouldn't be generic. chatGPT is following my instructions.
>Not sure what you mean here by "squishy stuff" or "SPECIFICALLY". ChatGPT is a language model trained on a huge-ass volume of non-specific text corpus.
It is ALSO trained using humans to pick and choose good and bad answers. This training is non-specific and they used just regular people. If they used programmers and had programmers pick and choose good answers from programming questions, chatGPT will begin outputting really accurate code.
>Nope, that is merely a property and a limitation of the NNs. At best, you can use them to build up "intuition" to bruteforce problems (like AlphaFold for protein folding), but obviously it only works for simple-enough stuff that can actually be bruteforced, when the output can be easily formally verified fast-enough.
You are categorically wrong about this. 3 neurons can be trained to become an NAND gate which can then be used to simulate any computational network or mathematical equation that doesn't have a feedback loop. It can model anything with just an input and an output. This also has been demonstrated in practice and proven theoretically.
>This. The educational system, willingly or just incompetently manages to instill a sense that human intelligence somehow grows monotonically with historical time.
Several remarks here. It is growing with time. Average IQ grows every year such that they have to re-normalize it all the time. This is on a very short timescale though.
Second, there is logic behind an actual theory that prehistoric humans were actually SMARTER then modern day humans. A human back in the day had much more to deal with in order to survive. Nowadays you can get away with working at menial and repetitive jobs. This implies that there is less recent evolutionary pressure for maintaining high intelligence indicating at the possibility of humans becoming stupider in modern times.
No one is obliged to do anything. I am saying your attitude makes it so that other people who haven't read the book are less likely to read it when they read your words. You are actively making your viewpoint less popular. You are not obliged to correct or change your attitude. Keep it if you want.
You are also not an educated or unbiased source. There are posts under this topic that lend genuine controversy around the authors of DoE. Your complete and utter failure to acknowledge alternative viewpoints and dismissing questions as uneducated leaves a bad taste in everyones mouth. Especially for some other reader on HN who might've read this book otherwise.
>This sort of argument--that those reports must be inaccurate, because--well, I'm not sure why you you think these reports are inaccurate, except that you think they must be. And that's not a reason.
This is just an educated guess. If you provide actual sources I can verify what the academic community thinks of these reports or findings, and really that's the only best available metric I can go off of.
>I'm also pretty sure any linkage of serotonin to hierarchy is unproven.
Science cannot prove anything. Be very careful with your language. Especially in the social sciences where things are less quantitative... proof is fundamentally impossible. There is only evidence in favor of and evidence against.
My opinion is the status quo of anthropology. Your claiming that the opinion is wrong and not inline with reality? Do you have evidence other then something along the lines of "read the book or your delusional?"
I can tell you other people reading this thread who also believe in traditional anthropology aren't liking what your presenting.
At the very least offer something from the book. Wow. Just wow.
I just started reading this. I'm hopeful but the forward and the first chapter don't look good.
First off at least one of the authors is into social justice. Social Justice tenants run completely counter to many of the findings of anthropology. It's a source of bias.
Second the first chapter comes from the perspective of introducing a better anthropological narrative given a lack of non-depressing stories of human civilization. I'm here for the truth, I'm not looking for narratives that are good or bad. Literally the book goes into "political implications" of alternative "narratives". I quote:
"HOBBESIAN AND ROUSSEAUIAN VERSIONS OF HUMAN HISTORY HAVE DIRE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS."
all caps literally first chapter. Why even bring up politics at all? Let's talk about truth. The consequence of the truth is irrelevant to the truth.
It could be the authors built this book with a pre-existing agenda.
Whatever, if it has this many accolades I'll read it.
There's no magic here. There's no claim that chatGPT is useful either. The claim is that chatGPT is a precursor to a technology that will replace many human jobs because it's showing tell tale signs of intelligence that is quickly catching up to human intelligence.
I don't know why you're so focused on the rm -ff / thing. Like it literally just demonstrated awareness of a terminal shell, a filesystem, awareness of the internet, of apis and finally self awareness.
That is a herald for the future. This is despite all the rough imperfections chatGPT has. You are downplaying it. I'm sorry.
The whole statistical thing is a misnomer. If the output of chatGPT can be modelled as a statistical phenomenon then so can the output of the human brain. It's a distraction. What is going on here is indeed creativity, awareness and imagination, if you want to call it a statistical phenomenon that's fine, you're just saying all of intelligence can be modeled as a statistical phenomenon.
Not from an anthologists perspective. Obviously my perspective is not as in-depth as that. I'm coming from a more general laymans perspective.
If you're saying a more detailed anthropologist perspective can change my viewpoint then I'm open to changing it. However I can't change viewpoint just off of being told that my viewpoint is inaccurate. Even so I think what I say is still true. From both viewpoints it is a fact that the vast majority of modern societies have hierarchies. Is there nuance about this fact that you want to elaborate on?
Also a bit of a branching; Do you know of refutations from the biological and evolutionary perspective? Serotonin and ranking? Primate societies with no hierarchies?
What is the point of coming onto this thread other then to see if the book is worth reading or not? It's fair to assume a lot of people on this thread haven't read it.
I never Denied examples didn't exist. I stated your arguments of "you're wrong" prove nothing without evidence. YOU didn't present evidence on this thread; I Did; That's all I said.
I'm sure it's not a "good look" to people who've read the book, but your attitude guarantees that you alienate people on the other side. It is not only a good look to people who believe in the anthropologic status quo, but it's the one look that should matter. I mean are you here just to toot your own horn? This is essentially what I'm seeing from you: "I read the book, you do it too because you're wrong." I came seeking reasons from people like you on why this book should be read.
This book is obviously more of a fringe perspective on anthropology so it does not do you any good at all to project that attitude.
Hierarchies are places where one relies on many. That is the point of a hierarchy... so that a few can control and rely on many. It is the most unfair way to organize.
The forward of the book stated this about one of the authors:
"He was an activist and public intellectual of international repute who tried to live his ideas about social justice"
I worry that this book may be under the same light as creationism. An attempt to retrofit evidence such that it forms an awkward scaffold that maintains an existing belief about social justice. The authors clearly have a bias against the academic status quo the same way a Christiaan has a bias against the same thing.
Clearly modern anthropology does run against the grain of what a lot of social justice warriors claim to be true about human nature, so such a hesitation is not out of place.
Nevertheless, a social justice background does not necessarily preclude someone away from unbiased analysis. I will read.
>These days I struggle to watch a movie, there are just too many options, AI is only going to make this problem worse. We'll be drowning in shit. Holy shit. Now you need to hire a guy to choose the movie for you. Pay him a movie directors wage. Clearly this choosing stuff is so hard we need experts! No I'm kidding. Let's be honest, choosing things is easy.
>Nothing is as simple as it seems.
The irony here is that your conclusion is the simpler one. It's the easy way out. People are optimistic by default and pessimism is actually the harder path because it's so much uglier to admit. The truth is actually more inline with pessimism as the world is more or less built on competitive darwinian fundamentals with cooperation existing only as a side effect. The brain paints a delusional reality in such a way so that you don't get constantly scared or depressed. If you find your thoughts always being overly optimistic there's a good chance you're biased.
>From the perspective of psychology, I think the most salty people are those who don't do art, it's almost like people hope this is the end of people being able to freely express themselves. Kind of like the quest to crush artistic freedom is in progress.
I look at this statement and there are things about it that are obviously wrong. And I wonder how come you're blind to it? Like you're obviously referring to me somewhat. But that's not even the issue.
The most salty people are the people who entered into a lawsuit. You have to be really fucking salty to spend the time and the effort to do that. Who's in the lawsuit? Not me, I don't give a shit about artists. Let me spell it out: Artists are suing AI companies because Artists are the ones that are the most SALTY. That's not even a huge revelation. The revelation is how this came to be NOT obvious to a pretty smart person like you?
You use psychology to imply I'm the one out of touch? Take a look in the mirror.
A better analogy for this is oil companies and climate change pre 2000s. I'm the environmentalist saying something is fucked up here. You're oil baron. You're the person in Software who's in denial about how Software and ML is about to make some drastic and extremely negative changes to the way the world works. I can assure you oil barons couldn't face the cold hard truth and grasped at every positive angle they could get there hands on to build a universe where they weren't responsible for harming the world. They couldn't face the reality. Can you.
Can you face the truth that the artist working for your company is about to become useless. Can you fire him and tell him that to his face? No. You need a narrative. What about your own skills as a software engineer. Are you able to face a reality where your job is basically within 10-20 years going to be phased out for AIs? Likely not. So consider the possibility that you're the one that's biased and you're the one with the overly rosy outlook.