Black Mirror creator unafraid of AI because it’s “boring”::Charlie Brooker doesn’t think AI is taking his job any time soon because it only produces trash
Black Mirror creator unafraid of AI because it’s “boring”::Charlie Brooker doesn’t think AI is taking his job any time soon because it only produces trash
The thing with AI, is that it mostly only produces trash now.
But look back to 5 years ago, what were people saying about AI? Hell, many thought that the kind of art that AI can make today would be impossible for it to create! …And then it suddenly did. We’ll, it wasn’t actually suddenly, and the people in the space probably saw it coming, but still.
The point is, we keep getting better at creating AIs that do stuff we thought were impossible a few years ago, stuff that we said would show true intelligence if an AI can do them. And yet, every time some new impressive AI gets developed, people say it sucks, is boring, is far from good enough, etc. While it slowly, every time, creeps on closer to us, replacing a few jobs here and there in the fringes. Sure, it’s not true intelligence, and it still doesn’t beat humans, but, it beats most, at demand, and what happens when inevitably better AIs get created?
Maybe we’re in for another decades long AI winter… or maybe we’re not, and plenty more AI revolutions are just around the corner. I think AIs current capabilities are frighteningly good, and not something I expected to happen this soon. And the last decade or so has seen massive progress in this area, who’s to say where the current path stops?
I think the breakthroughs in AI have largely happened now as we’re reaching a slowndown and an adoption phase
The research has been stagnating. Video with temporal consistency doesn’t want to come, voice is still perceptibly non-human, openai is assembling 5 models in a trenchcoat to make gpt do images and it passing as progress, …
Companies and people are adopting what is already there for new applications, it’s getting more common to see neural network models in lots of solutions where the tech adds good value and is applicable, but the models aren’t breaking new grounds like in 2021 anymore
The only new fundamental developments i can recall in the core technology is the push for smaller models trainable on way less data and that can be specialized for certain applications. Far away from the shock we all got when AI suddenly learned to draw a picture from a prompt
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Wow, this is some spectacular hyperbole!
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And ridiculously difficult to copyright any of it because it was generated.
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Lol this reminds me of when Kramer from Seinfeld asks if we’ll still be using napkins in the year 2000 or if this “mouth vacuum” thing is for real.
There’s already been court cases suggesting that AI art isn’t copyrightable.
The AI art I’ve seen so far is about as compelling as random crap from deviant art. The only difference being at least the starving artists on there know how many fingers are on a hand.
Yes, AI doesn’t work with copyright.
And since AI is here to stay, we better replace our failed copyright system with something proper. Disney be damned.
I’d like that? But if you’re expecting the “we” in here to be the current people in their current power structures I suspect you’ll be waiting an awfully long time for that result.
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I want to note that everything you talk about is happening on the scales of months to single years. That’s incredibly rapid pace, and also too short of a timeframe to determine true research trends.
Usually research is considered rapid if there is meaningful progression within a few years, and more realistically about a decade or so. I mean, take something like real time ray tracing, for comparison.
When I’m talking about the future of AI, I’m thinking like 10-20 years. We simply don’t know enough about what is possible to say what will happen by then.
By its nature, Large Language Models won’t ever be truly innovative, after all they rely on expected patterns. But a lot of the media that we consume is also made to appeal to patterns that we expect: genres, tropes, usual messages. AI could replace a lot of it and frankly, that’s scary to think in a world where we need to work to earn our living.
Truly groundbreaking art may not be what people usually seek, it’s often something they don’t even know they want until they experience it, or they might even fail to appreciate it. But it likely won’t be automated unless AI achieves full consciousness, but if it does we will have a much more complicated situation in our hands than “we can command AI to make art better than we can do ourselves”.
Still, getting paranoid over the uncertain latter won’t help us with the former that is just around the corner.
Good points.
One problem with replacing everything with AI that people don’t think about: middle managers will start to be replaced too. There’s no way to ask a LLM “why did you do that”? Fewer people will need to be managed.
It seems unwise to replace managers with LLMs because LLMs don’t understand the real world implications of their responses, they don’t have awareness of the real world, they simply give you often used language patterns, which can be innacurate or biased based on flawed human data. But it would be a great way for sketchy human executives to offload responsibility for unethical actions and feign objectivity or uninvolvement, so I don’t doubt they will try.
Even if we imagine a perfect AI that does takes into account every objective fact and philosophical argument, that still leaves the question of how will the people who get replaced in all these intellectual, artistic and service jobs will make a living. That’s not an answer that technology will give us, that will a nasty political situation.
No, you misunderstood. The managers are fired because there’s fewer people to manage.
That makes sense too. Overall, a lot of people’s jobs are threatened, but I don’t think “learn AI” is going to cut it this time. Not for all these people.
LLMs don’t, but specialised AI trained for that specific purpose would.
Everyone in these threads likes to talk about being impressed by these llm or not being impressed by them as being some sort of intelligence test. I think of it more as a test of a person’s sense of creativity.
It spits out a lot of passable text very easily, but as you’re saying here its creativity is essentially nil. Even its “hallucinations” are just versions of things it borrowed from elsewhere injected slightly to wildly out of context in order to satisfy a prompt.
I tried to play a generative AI RPG builder game online and it came up with scenarios so boring I can’t imagine playing it for longer than ten minutes.
I also find the same with generated content in other video games. At its best it’s passable and that’s about it. No man’s sky has infinite worlds full of weird ligar creatures and after you’ve visited a couple dozen worlds they’re pretty much all the same.
And who is to say that we humans don’t process creativity exactly the same way? By borrowing from things we encounter.
Even the earliest creative expats of humans was just things we saw in nature, which we drew on cave walls.
We humans just have more experience since we existed longer, so the line feels a lot more blurred.
I also encountered games made by humans that were so boring I couldn’t manage more than 10 minutes.
That’s part of it, but it’s definitely not all of it.
There’s more creativity in the average prompt than there is in any response I’ve ever seen from ChatGPT.
If creativity were as simple as mashing a few things together as you’re saying, ChatGPT would be there already because that’s obviously what it’s doing.
Me too, but that’s an indictment of a single creator or team’s idea that was boring, not an indictment of a system. This thing was basically a framework with the llm being the central “creator” at the center. It would find the most boring aspects of the prompts and lean into them. This is of course a subjective assessment, but I’d argue that it’s not an uninformed one.
Minecraft would like to have a word with you…
Minecraft isn’t generating new animals or narrative. Landscape generation is relatively straightforward from an algorithm / computation perspective. If it started generating its own models or characters or character dialogue I suspect it would very quickly fall into the territory of what I’m talking about.
There’s just a feeling of emptiness to me that’s pervasive in games with main parts of narrative or gameplay that are randomly generated.