> But to what end are we harnessing the technology that some of our brightest minds claim is more revolutionary than fire? Cheating on exams. Spamming science fiction literary magazines with so many AI-generated stories that they have to pause submissions. Replacing low-level content creators trying to build skills and experience with cheaper machine-generated content.
I get their point, completely, but not sure why their hopes were so high here.
Almost every person in the US has a device in their pocket capable of unlimited, free learning, of anything and everything. Instead we mainly use them for selfies, porn, and memes.
> Instead we mainly use them for selfies, porn, and memes.
Don't you see the warning in the writer's words?
All the marketing for iOS and Android talked about a computer in your pocket allowing for all kinds of creation. Then they locked everything down to the point until there's no computer left, just a $1000 passive consumption machine with a nice camera. Actual computer-phones like the full-Linux Nokia N900 failed. The selfie machines won.
Commercial products leveraging AI are headed the same way. For every GH Copilot there will be 100 SaaS products offering better ways to maximize engagement with your blogspam or write a better VC deck.
I agree they are not true general purpose computers anymore, but I think the point was that this passive consumption machine can still be used for consumption of educational material. It has never been easier to get access to learning materials. You also don’t need a CS degree to still use them for learning programming.
That’s not what we do though, let’s be honest here. The traffic speaks volumes. Everything goes to bullshit and porn. And because of that, that’s where the money is.
You can do a ton of creating things on iOS. People just don't. It's not remotely because the devices are "locked down," it's because consuming content is easy and satisfying.
> Then they locked everything down to the point until there's no computer left, just a $1000 passive consumption machine with a nice camera.
This is nonsense. Have you seen Obsidian.md and its plugin ecosystem for not just writing but a (ahem) bicycle for the mind?
Have you run VSCode against a remote code-server from the park, coding all day on 5G and still having a pretty full battery?
Have you use Affinity's content creation suite with the Pencil 2?
What about M365 Office?
All this works on a full size full quality keyboard with a touchpad and 13" touch screen on an iPad that also cheerfully works with a USB-C cable or dock to also drive an external 4K screen with stage manager, full two screen windowing manager, and other things like hardwire Ethernet.
You can do much of that from an iPhone 14 Pro Max as well. Obsidian.MD and M365 Office both work fine with a full size bluetooth keyboard/charge stand, along with mobile Xbox cloud gaming with a Razer kishi controller and Plex of my own content at home, over HDMI to a hotel TV.
A computer can write, run and deploy code inside of itself. No remote desktop or SSHing required; no system gatekeeper telling you what code you can or can't run. Apple and Android fail these conditions.
Everything you are describing besides Affinity suite is remote software running on a dumb client. Not exactly the lofty visions of the future that these companies allude to in their marketing. 10 years after the first iPad, the current crop of commercials literally call it "not a computer".
Android has (through FDroid, as Google Play Store no longer permits it) Termux, The Only App Which Does Not Specifically and Precisely Suck[tm] (though as before, Einkbro is increasingly stiff competition).
Termux offers an arguably rich Linux userland, with over 2,500 packages (2,581 listed as I write this). That's still a small fraction of the total number of Debian packages, which now exceeds 57,000, but the tools which are available are a highly useful set and includes numerous scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, Node.js, etc.) and compilers, along with several repositories associated with those tools. All told, Termux is far more than a toy.
But ...
... it's still hampered by numerous Android limitations:
- No root access unless your device is rootable (and rooted).
- No multi-user capabilities or security.
- Limited to the default Android filesystem limitations (including being locked out of most of the filesystem), and limited filesystem permissions capabilities.
- Subject to Android's process-management and process-reaping "features", which mean your shell session(s) may be killed off at any time.
- Limited on-board keyboard support. Even with an external bluetooth keyboard there are quirks and issues.
I can do, and do do quite a bit with the system. It remains limited and crippled in numerous ways though I can often avoid the sharpest of edges.
There's no full-fledged equivalent on iOS, and many years of attempting to provide even a fraction of Termux's capabilities (through ISH) seems to be running into even steeper headwinds than Termux has had to deal with.
It seems like a calculator. Starting out learning how to actually compute answers is useful, but after grade school its just a waste of time. After the calculator genie was let out of the bag, the "computers" job (the job description that some people used to have) was deprecated.
But a calculator is just a brain tool, letting people offload rote calculations. AI of the sort we're talking about here isn't just that. It's about machines replacing people doing human things.
It seems like the definition of "human things" is shifting. At least in it's current form, it's just a more advanced tool that allows people to be more productive.
not sure when that come into the equation? People have been creating crap before generative AI. It seems to me like the author doesn't like the process of creation using generative AI techniques. For some people, generative AI allows them to express their art. So, there you go.
Humans will continue to produce valuable art, with or without generative AI. Until a computer and the brain are indistinguishable, the expression of thought will be valuable in it of itself. I think, therefore I am. We are far from having "thinking" machines--whatever that may even be. We don't understand consciousness and the goal posts for what is AI / AIG keep moving.
With that said, we know what the end-state may be. Singularity for instance, would be a game-changer.
Pretty soon you may not even be able to have that prejudice, because who will be able to definitively say your favorite author isn't using generative AI?
This really isn't any different than the "hand crafted" trend. People like hand crafted even in cases where it's objectively worse than machine made. Also, it's often hard to know when something is really "hand crafted", or indeed where the line is before you can call it that. E.g. how many parts needs to be made by hand to say it's "hand crafted"?
Also for writing, even today you don't really know if an author has used a ghost writer to help them.
You say that but I highly doubt you're going to completely stop reading new things at all. People probably said similar things when other inventions were made but humans adapt, the hedonic treadmill is real.
I don't think it's so easy to find a group of good writers (let alone convincing them to let me join!)
But, yes, that would be an option. Honestly, though, if this sort of future actually comes to pass, I think I'll have much larger problems to find ways to handle first.
If the story is good, I'll read it, regardless of whether it was written by an AI, a human, or a dog. I don't really see humans as being special, of only wanting to read stories that have the "human touch," whatever that is.
Fair enough, but I absolutely see humans as being more special than machines. What interests me in a story, art, poem, whatever, is that it's a human communication. Even if a machine can do it technically as well, or better, I want the human one, not the computed one.
A world where everything is generated by a machine is a dystopian world, in my view.
> What interests me in a story, art, poem, whatever, is that it's a human communication.
I guess we are different in this case, as I primarily read something for its content, rather than its author (although the author is often a good proxy for the quality of the content). A world where I can instantly generate whatever content I want is a utopia for me, rather than a dystopia.
I think you are massively over-estimating the reaches of your imagination. The whole point of good art is to expose us to things we didn't conceive of. If your world and your reality is a horse-drawn buggy, no amount of AI prompting is going to turn that into a car.
I disagree, at a certain point the AI will be able to create new things for me. To think only humans have some innate fundamental notion of creativity is foolish, in my opinion. We're just biological machines, if you follow the physicalist school of thought.
I don't understand why you (and others) think this is an important point, though. Let's say, for the sake of argument, not just that you're correct, but that we're not even made of flesh. That we're actual robots called "humans".
I don't see how that changes anything. I'd still prefer "human" communication over communication from a different machine pretending to be "human".
Why? Because what others of my species/model feels and thinks has a unique importance and meaning to me, and having fake versions of that communication around reduces my connection to others of my species/model and devalues the society of them that I am a part of.
That's good for you, I never claimed otherwise, that one shouldn't have an affinity for their own species. My claim was merely that nothing about creativity is innately and only a human property.
That very much depends on the level of detail required in the description right?
And we have to do this to some degree to simply navigate the world of content. I already filter for action films or documentaries depending on my mood.
Sure, a world where I have to already know the entire script for a film to have it appear is (while technically astonishing) not great for me individually, one where I can say I want a new Poirot and get it is incredible.
I doubt human created art will ever go away, if only for the mere fact that there are people who share your view who want human made art. People still buy artisan, handcrafted products.
Human-made art becoming so rare that it's "artisan, hand-crafted" is such art not really existing, in my view. It would mean that 99% of all the "art" I see around me is effectively alien and meaningless. It would be very hard to actually take part in such a society.
I would argue 99% of the art you already see is effectively alien and meaningless, as it's all mass-produced and commercial, designed by committees, and its only purpose is to brand or advertise a product. Almost no mainstream "art" communicates anything honest or sincere, it's all soulless mind-control and emotional manipulation by the corporate capitalist machine. That there are humans involved doesn't make it meaningful, after all, there will be people writing prompts for AI as well.
But at least a lot of those people will be trying to express something even if all AI can give them is an approximation of what they would make if they had the talent.
I admit that I was excluding commercial art here, but you're right (although even commercial art is human communication).
But that just makes the issue more important. I don't want to lose what little meaningful art is actually left. Art serves a critically important social function, and if that art is no longer from people, that function is no longer served.
Humans are also machines. Some might give us special properties such as souls, depending on your religious beliefs, but there is no science backing that up. All living creates are incredibly complicated and convoluted biochemical machines, shaped by evolution.
For me, it's really a case of it being ruined because someone told me an AI wrote it.
The content may be entertaining, emotional, and compelling. But I just won't view it the same way, because I am not in communion with an AI the same way I would be with a conscious, mindful human. There's no space for meaning because half of the author-reader relationship is missing.
A cynical mind would suggest I am seeking not the communion itself, but the rewards such a communion provides and they're probably right. If you lie and claim a human wrote it (and it is otherwise indistinguishable from human work), I will probably appreciate the work the same way I would a human-written work.
If AI were a conscious being, I don't think I'd mind that they aren't human, the same way I wouldn't mind reading the work of a space alien. There would still be a mind on the other end. But until and if that ever happens, if I know about it, I don't think it'll ever be the same for me.
For some content I agree with you. For example, a heart warming story about a girl losing her mother to alcoholism and how she coped. I don't want to read that from an AI. The literal exact same story feels different if I know an Ai built it.
In contrast, a new virtual world for GTA 8 -- I don't care if that is from an AI or a human. I feel like either could be just as immersive as the other.
I actually agree with this. Probably because virtual worlds are already ahuman to begin with. They're artificial, machine worlds and so there's nothing lost by having them generated by machine.
I certainly don't find things particularly meaningful in the folds of a terrain, the placement of trees, or the exact shape of a background building. This is all 'canvas' and I pretty much assume a computer did most of the work with humans doing some combination of providing input and output to the program. If AI took this over entirely, I don't think it would change anything.
However, placing particular buildings, terrain features, or what-have-you can be meaningful. A bar next to a church may be cliché, but if a human did it, there is meaning to be had; if an AI did it, it's just two buildings and either a coincidence or the same cliché that the AI has learned.
Put another way, I think virtual worlds function as both canvas and art. AI handling the canvas doesn't change anything for me. AI handling the art, does.
This view is actually a fallacy and it’s why we’re ruining the environment.
You’re not a machine, you’re part of an ecosystem, you’re like a plant, but for some reason you can move around more freely than a plant so you think you’re detached from the earth and that you’re some software running in hardware but you’re not, you’re integrated into the biosphere. Is the planet a machine ? Maybe, but comparing ourselves to machines is just an analogy to help us understand ourselves.
A human can go into space but not for long, even when we do go we need to take the environment , at least the atmospheric conditions with us to survive. While man has walked on the the moon, we never touched another planet with our own hands.
We're definitely not just meat robots. We agonize over what we are and what we're supposed to do with our lives. Meat robots don't do that, and I suspect hardly any animals do either.
Art is a way in which we grapple with such questions. I am yet to see a surprising contriubtion by an AI.
Robots can be thrown in the trash when the newer models come out. Describing humans as robots with an adjective tacked on is, quite literally, dehumanization - a favorite tactic of fascist creep. Hence why, despite not being religious myself, I always view people like you who profess such views with more than a little suspicion.
I think there is something fundamentally wrong and blasphemous about a human, the apex living being we know of, in some ways the most incredible achievement of nature itself, to say "we are not that special" compared to a machine that can write an EULA in Speakesperean English.
I mean that's cool, but have you seen life itself? What about conscious matter that can observe itself? The goodness of AI is relative to us, the one that invented it. By some definition we will always be better than it because we created the damn thing in the first place.
Seeing ChatGPT and saying we're not that special is just utterly wrong to me. Even if it is true, accepting that as a fact is dangerous, if not traitorous in some way — reminds me of the Adventists in The Three-Body Problem (massive spoiler ahead) having such a low opinion of humanity that they would rather be destroyed by an alien race.
/philosophical rant I keep coming back to and I need someone smarter to expand upon
I meant "special" in terms of uniqueness of ability to reason and perhaps have sentience and sapience. If there were life on other planets, it might be wholly new and also be very interesting, but that doesn't necessarily mean that life on Earth is somehow more special than life on another planet. So too with this regarding AI in the future.
I'm not sure I understand the argument (granted, twitter is not always the best medium for that). If I understand the quote correctly, Lanier's argument is "if we don't believe humans have a soul beyond the phyiscal then we can't make a society or make things that serve humans"?
But here's the problem. This saying: "Humans are not special" is completely true. To deny this idea is to deny the truth.
Ultimately to save ourselves, our culture must engage in self deception. We must trick ourselves into believing that AI content is inferior and thereby maintain economic demand for content not created by AI. I can see it happening as a mass hysteria similar to how the public was resistant against "new coke" (https://www.damninteresting.com/the-american-gustation-crisi...)
You will see that many people, including people on HN, are already doing this. There's a large cohort of people generating huge adamant denial on the potential of AI.
The OP is sort of being a bit too honest with himself, most people who flat out refuse to acknowledge AI will do so with the idea that AI is inferior and will always be that way.
> This saying: "Humans are not special" is completely true. To deny this idea is to deny the truth.
That's your truth. Humans get to decide what humans consider special. Your perspective is fair: humans are not special to you.
But they are certainly special to me and most other humans. That's my truth. That's not denying some objective truth, because "specialness" isn't an objective thing that can be measured. It's, effectively, an opinion.
You and I measure "specialness" differently.
But even if I agreed with you (and I could easily argue your side of this debate), it still wouldn't affect my attitude towards AI pretending to be human. Humans don't have to be special in some grand sense to consider that problematic.
>That's not denying some objective truth, because "specialness" isn't an objective thing that can be measured. It's, effectively, an opinion.
Well then let's talk about what I mean by "special".
If I gave you some art whether it's written, drawn or filmed and I asked you to tell me whether this "art" was created by a human and an AI, and you have trouble identifying the difference... then objectively speaking humans are no longer special. That is the definition I am using here.
There's no point in making up "opinions" and discussing those because they will always be different. Thus when communicating we are always talking about a shared reality. That includes the "term" special. I have defined what I mean by "special" here concretely so we can keep the conversation consistent rather then diverge onto branches according to our own personal definitions of "special".
>Humans don't have to be special in some grand sense to consider that problematic.
I never said it wasn't problematic. I said it was truth. The truth is the problem. Being honest and aware of reality is the intrinsic problem here. Being delusional is the cure.
So what was the last dog-authored book you liked? /s
Most people can distinguish good writing from that which is merely serviceable, but un-engaging. Reading the latter is like a slow death if its in book form or attempting to be literary fiction.
For news articles and other stuff that's being automated, it's replacing what is already a heavily templated process. The writing there is fine. It's not what I'd call interesting though. That's the difference an actual writer can make.
What if I tell you that this page ,including all our comments, is entirely created by LLMs? Sometimes the process of creation is just as important as the end result. You would not go to the concert to hear hi-fi speakers playing pre-recorded or generated music, although with your eyes closed you won't hear a difference.
> You would not go to the concert to hear hi-fi speakers playing pre-recorded or generated music, although with your eyes closed you won't hear a difference.
I would. Concerts are pretty bad, people go for the atmosphere or the drugs, strictly speaking the actual music is usually objectively worse than the studio recordings for the same tracks.
It's coming through the speakers either way, the artists are not my friends, I do not care.
> You would not go to the concert to hear hi-fi speakers playing pre-recorded or generated music, although with your eyes closed you won't hear a difference.
What do you think EDM concerts are? They're all prerecorded, the DJ most of the time doesn't actually do anything up there on the stand. And yet people go to these concerts, because it's about the music itself, not who makes it.
> What if I tell you that this page ,including all our comments, is entirely created by LLMs?
So what? If it's good content, it's good content. I've had debates with ChatGPT on a variety of issues and sometimes it brings up a good points that I hadn't considered before on the topic, so if HN were entirely AI driven, it doesn't really matter either. Hell, solipsism is entirely built on the notion that no one besides oneself is real, this would simply be an extension of that concept.
Agreed, and there is always a wide range of people that just do nothing but complain about new things. It is true, that there is a strong human nature to go against change.
So if humans aren't special at anything, then humans don't really have a purpose. I envision a future similar to the one in Wall-E and it's not exactly bad so long as the AI actually acts in our interest.
My purpose is to sit while AI takes care of everything and keeps me happy. I want to live in the matrix where I have 30 hot model wives and not know any better. The simulation of course will make me a chad and emperor of the world. That's my purpose.
This is what I believe we already have with social media , a primitive version of the matrix where you fish for likes and validation, and it’s what VR will create, there may not be a technological singularity but rather, a place where each ego is stroked so intensely that we care less of reality.
You can be totally distracted from your real existence for 90% of you life, you won’t need anything else. Just have “20 hot wives” or whatever superficial thing makes you happy.
That's great, if that's what you want your purpose to be then go for it. Lots of people already live similarly, like hikikomori. Your comment changes nothing about the fact that a person's purpose is not driven externally by society or by the fact that one is human, it is derived entirely from oneself.
An evolutionary biologist might say (in a candid moment), that our purpose is to increase our fitness (=fecundity) and the fitness of those genetically related to us.
Brain facilities that were previously evolved to gain a darwinian competitive edge through strategic intelligence can now be utilized to break the mold of natural selection.
There was no direct selection pressure that coordinated the development of your ability to understand evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is a side effect of intelligence. Breaking past our darwinian purpose is a side effect of our meta understanding of evolutionary biology and intelligence. As someone else said we, to a limited extend, can make our own purpose.
It will not. It will serve the capitalist class as an instrument to enrich at the expense of the masses. And it will be done while telling most people that they just didn't "work hard enough".
If you're a writer try not to use AI or have the gallantry to say so if you do. Who's/how work is done is not a fading question
This sentimental, out of breath tone of this beleaguered experimenter could be in AI or a hippie drugster called Larry in Ashbury park SF who's also taking a step back.
I don't think there was ever there in there, and you've just tired yourself out. That's it. There'no cosmic reveal here.
Folks can we get grounded in life, politics, and AI? The hyper emotional whiplash of breezy predictions is nonsense.
Just had a conversation about this. Creativity is not reproducible by AI. It is a mashup by AI. People will still be in charge of creativity. And by extension in charge of creative uses of AI.
Is creativity not a mashup in and of itself? A human brain learning a bunch and then combining what it knows throwing some randomness in there to create something... "New"
In pure scientific reasoning I agree the models need to be able to encode logic somehow.
In any event, by mashing things up you might concede that these models can at least encourage human creativity
Well, that's one individual who has looked past the techno shiny object that is ChatGPT/AI.
Unfortunately, if the idea behind Moloch [1] has any credibility (which I think the collection action problem does) someone else will _by the nature of the beast_ continue doing so.
>Well, that's one individual who has looked past the techno shiny object that is ChatGPT/AI.
I think your wording suggests that it isn't actually useful except as a gimmick, whereas it sounds like OP is if anything upset that it is too effective and might someday replace humans.
I don't think a single individual who chooses to "bow out" of AI-generated content will have any impact in the long run. Apologies if my meaning was confused.
The stories in this page are bad. Good decision. I write stuff using LLMs all the time, back from 2020 when i used the paid service of OpenAI till today. I have so much fun writing my stories, it is freaking amazing. If no one reads my stories, i wouldn't care less, because i am enjoying them tremendously.
A recent thread on HN was about 75% percent of Hollywood movies that got lost forever. A story i am writing for almost a week, alongside with GPT of course, introduces the holy trinity of the computer internet, which solves this problem. This will get published in a day or two.
The problem of the Holy Trinity of the Computer Internet, cannot be solved by the machine, and it is not solved by humans either. I had to use a powerful statistical engine, like GPT, to really tackle this problem effectively, to put the words in a perfect sequence. GPT enables a sentence to be written, in a perfect average way, so perfect average it seems like super-average.
> We’re focusing the power of this new lens on amplifying the rewards flowing to capital holders because, of course we are. I want technology to be an aid to human creativity, not a necessary crutch. I want to make life better, not shove people aside because they are no longer needed to feed the capitalist greed beast.
It’s a bit odd to see this from a writer that joined substack 10 months ago. When it was already famous for associating online blog writing with subscription fees, locking content behind paywalls and so on. Which was too big of a change from the more open wordpress/blogspot/etc. norm for someone to claim ignorance.
So I don’t quite buy this anti-capitalist rant, the writer even set up a custom domain name with their substack account, so they clearly understood, implicitly accepting a more monetary blogging system at the very least.
There are a lot of greedy people in this world, who probably are mostly self-interested to an unattractive degree, though the folks who are fine associating with them when convenient and denounce them when inconvenient are not any better.
I'm not sure I see your point here. You are saying that because the writer signed up to a paid blogging service, and paid for their own domain, their opinion on how AI may replace humans is not valid?
A blogging service provides utility. It enables this writer to publish their content, and they've obviously decided that the paid service is better than alternatives. They are expressing concern that AI will replace people current paid to create things, because it's cheaper and will make people more money. The two situations seem completely different to me, I'm not sure I understand your comparison.
The writer was fine with associating their online blog writing with subscription fees, locking content behind paywalls and so on 10 months ago.
So they were fine with monetization in a scenario when it benefited them, and against when the scenario, AI assisted writing, wasn’t as favourable for them.
> You are saying that because the writer signed up to a paid blogging service, and paid for their own domain, their opinion on how AI may replace humans is not valid?
This is nonsense, personal opinions can neither be valid nor invalid by definition.
They are not against monetization, you have made that leap. They are against AI replacing humans simply because it will be cheaper. Your comparison is flawed.
> They are not against monetization, you have made that leap. They are against AI replacing humans simply because it will be cheaper. Your comparison is flawed.
If they are fine with more expensive AI replacing humans, instead of cheaper AI, then that seems to be an even more objectionable position?
I doubt they have such bizarre views. But it’s possible the writer could have incoherent thoughts.
For me, the most sensible reading is that they’re against any monetization of AI writing period. Not that they’re fine with AI writing if it’s beyond what most people can afford.
> If they are fine with more expensive AI replacing humans, instead of cheaper AI, then that seems to be an even more objectionable position?..I doubt they have such bizarre views. But it’s possible the writer could have incoherent thoughts.
I am not sure if you are being willfully obtuse, serious, or comedic here, but you made me smile either way, thank you.
> So they were fine with monetization in a scenario when it benefited them, and against when the scenario, AI assisted writing, wasn’t as favourable for them.
Yes. So what? Not every business is identical. Some businesses are more greedy and ruthless than others. Some provide more societal benefits than others.
When a smaller business starts openly declaiming against the system they benefited from 10 months ago, because shadier businesses are competing them out of the market, it tends to raise eyebrows.
> Yes. So what? Not every business is identical. Some businesses are more greedy and ruthless than others. Some provide more societal benefits than others.
This was written in the context of your analogy of different businesses competing.
So much of this discourse is like:
Act 1: Person builds a brand partly based on AI
Act 2: Person achieves moderate success
Finale: "I created a monster!!!"
I honestly think that, if LLMs go the way enthusiasts hope, there will be a large number of people working on them that will regret the world they've made.
I get their point, completely, but not sure why their hopes were so high here.
Almost every person in the US has a device in their pocket capable of unlimited, free learning, of anything and everything. Instead we mainly use them for selfies, porn, and memes.