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?
Nah, nah to all of it. LLM is a parlor trick and not a very good one. If we are ever able to make a general artificial intelligence, that’s an entirely different story. But text prediction on steroids doesn’t move the needle.
Sam Altman (Creator of the freakish retina scanning based Worldcoin) would agree, it seems. The current path for LLMs and GPT seems to be in something of a bind, because to seriously improve upon what it currently does it needs to do something different, not more of the same. And figuring out something different could be very hard. https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of-giant-ai-models-is-already-over/
At least that’s what I understand of it.
The best ones can literally write pretty good code, and explain any concept on the Internet to you that you ask them to. If you don’t understand a specific thing about their explanation, they can add onto their explanation, and they can respond in the style you want (explain as if I’m ten, explain as if I’m an undergrad, etc).
I use it literally every day for work in a somewhat niche field. I don’t really agree that it’s a “parlor trick”.
It’s just regurgitating info that people already know.
No they can’t. Your phrasing is misleading. It’s a Chinese Room test output and nothing more. I had an Encarta CD that could do rudimentary version of this in 1995. That was more impressive, tbh.
If you’re really comparing LLM’s to your Encarta cd from 1995 and saying the Encarta CD was the superior experience…
I’m afraid there’s not much left for us to discuss… Our views are too far apart.
In humans, abstract thinking developed hand in hand with language. So despite their limitations, I think that at least early AGI will include an LLM in some way.
I’ve been having a lot of vague thoughts about the unconscious bits of our brains and body, in regards to LLMs. The parts of our brains/neurons that started evolving back in simple animals as basically super primitive ways to process visual/audio/whatever input.
Our brains do a LOT of signal processing and filtering that never reaches conscious thought, that we can’t even reach with our conscious thought if we tried, but which is necessary for our squishy body-things to take in input from our environment and turn it into something useful instead of drowning in a screeching eye-searing tangled mess of chaotic sensory input all the time.
LLMs strike me as that sort of low-level input processing, the pattern-recognition and filtering. I think true generalized AI would have to be built on pieces like this–probably a lot of them. Ways to pluck patterns out of complex but repeated input. Like, this stuff definitely isn’t self-aware, but could eventually end up as some sort of processing library for something else far down the line.
Now might be a good time to pick up Peter Watts’ sci-fi book Blindsight. He doesn’t exactly write about AI in it, but he does write about a creature that responds to input but isn’t exactly conscious like you or I.
FYI Blindsight is free for audible members.
some sort of processing library for something else far down the line
This is what I meant.
pick up Peter Watts’ sci-fi book Blindsight
I just got the EPUB, thanks. Looking forward to reading it.
Parlor trick is a perfect description.
People don’t get that these things aren’t anymore intelligent than their smartphones predicting the next word. The main difference is instead of a couple words it has thousands to choose from.
Half of the trick is how it uses the prompt to decided what words to start with.
That is not how it works. Your smartphone has all the dictionary available, same as LLM. It is simply something very different. People super confidently discussing about AI on lemmy are the real hallucinating parrots
There is an inverse relationship between the intelligence of a person and their amazement at what these large language models can produce.
People who aren’t amazed at what LLMs produces have no clue how complicated it is to generate plausible language in the first place. Dunning–Kruger and all that.
The ability to generate plausible language was a lack of compute power. The actual programs running the LLM is not complicate.
The model that is produced is complex.
Its training required compute power that was not previously available but the math/code behind these systems is not complex. They are resource intensive. There is a difference that a layperson often cannot comprehend.
I heard the same for people who downvote on lemmy when notified about being an exemplification of the dunning Kruger effect
Have you ever even bothered to play around with any of the LLMs or are you just parroting what you heard in badly written articles?
The fact that the LLM predicts the next word does in no way shape or form limits its intelligence. That’s after all the same thing you do while writing your post.
These idiotic claims about AI not being intelligent really make me questions if humans are.
Yes. I’ve used them. I have used it beyond the point of it hallucinating.
I am also a software engineer and have deeper understanding of how these systems work than your average user.
The software community tends to approach these things with more caution than the general population. The media overblows the capabilities of these systems.
A more concrete example is autonomous vehicles which were promised for decades and even now with a form of them on the road, they are still closer to remote controlled vehicles than the intelligent self contained systems we have been promised.
The difference between predictive text on a smart phone and predictive text of an LLM is my smart phone is predicting what I am likely to type next based on things i have typed in the past, while the LLM is predicting what comes next based on a larger body of work from source pulled from all across the internet. The LLM is then tuned by humans. This tuning step is under reported.
The LLM is unable to determine the truth of its own output. I would argue that is a key to claiming intelligence but determining what intelligence means is itself a philosophical question up for debate.
The LLM is unable to determine the truth of its own output. I would argue that is a key to claiming intelligence but determining what intelligence means is itself a philosophical question up for debate.
Yeah exactly and a great way to see this is by asking it to produce two viewpoints about the same subject, a negative and positive review of something you’re familiar with is perfect. It produces this hilarious “critic” type jargon but you can tell it doesn’t actually understand. Coincidentally, it’s drawing from a lot of text where the original human author(s) might not understand either and are merely themselves re-producing a jargon-heavy text for an assignment by their employer or academic institution. If AI can so accurately replicate some academic paper that probably didn’t need to be written for anything other than to meet publishing standards for tenured professors, then that’s really a reflection on the source material. Since LLM can only create something based on existing input, almost all the criticisms of it, are criticisms that can apply to it’s source material.
It’s not really “intelligent” though, as in it’s not thinking about what it’s doing. What AI will do very well is reproduce jargon, and if it’s jargon that we associate with intelligence then it appears intelligent. Academic papers for instance it can do a very convincing job because that format is so repetitive and jargon heavy.
You can do an experiment by asking it to produce a positive review of something niche and academic you’re familiar with, then ask it to produce a negative review of the same subject. It will produce convincing dialogue for either scenario, but it does not know which is more true/accurate, and it will come across as a student writing about something they didn’t do the reading for.
The “question if humans are [intelligent]” is the more relevant thing here. We’re constantly expected to communicate with thoughtlessly reproduced jargon, and many of us can do this very well in a way that gives the impression of intelligent thought. The fact AI can do this, and that people are concerned about how intelligent it appears, is more a reflection on how derivative our notions of intelligence can be in these settings.
The fact that you believe an LLM is “intelligent” tells me you have no clue how they work and your comments on the matter can be ignored.
Oh look, another parrot.
Still waiting for any of you to actually define “intelligent” in some way that ChatGPT fails at or are you just going to pull the old boring “human exceptionalism”-card out of the hat?
Nah, nah to your understanding of LLM’s
No it’s not true intelligence. Yes, it makes humans much faster at their work
It has really sped up my work, especially when coding in unfamiliar languages.
It’s silly to compare it to a parlor trick or text prediction.
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.
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.
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.
I miss the old Black Mirror…
I’m legit wondering what crack were they smoking in the latest season.
Removed by mod
I mean it’s literally never “computer bad” / “technology bad” it’s always Humans bad, using this technology this time.
I thought this season was way better than the season before it. I was glad they went with something different like the horror theme. The season prior was a shit show of boring tropes.
I couldnt even finish this season, it was just so boring
I just recently started rewatching some of the older episodes and I realized that “Be RIght Back” was inadvertently an LLM episode. Having a computer absorb the online presence of a loved one to allow you to talk with them after they’ve passed is honestly something that seems within reach for these models.
Movie and TV executives don’t care about boring. Reality shows are boring. They just care if they make money.
AI is nowhere near the point where it can actually write a script. It doesn’t even remember what it has written to you 5 minutes ago, how is it going to keep shows and TVs consistent? Even when you tell it what you want it to do and that it’s wrong it still provides wonky information.
AI is nowhere near the point where it can…
ChatGPT is 10 months old, not even a whole year. And it was never fined tuned for story writing in the first place. A little bit premature to proclaim what AI can and can’t do, don’t you think?
ChatGPT isn’t the entirety of AI, AI research has been going on much longer than ChatGPT has been around
Isn’t chatGPT just a beefed up predictive text engine?
Yes. Honestly it’s crazy how much people read into ChatGPT, when in practice it’s effectively just a dice roller that depends in incredibly big dataset to guess what’s the most likely word to come next.
There’s been some research about this, the fact that people are assigning intelligence into things that ML does. Because it doesn’t compute for us that something can appear to make sense without actually having any intelligence. To humans, the appearance of the intelligence is enough to assume intelligence - even if it’s just a result of a complicated dice roller.
And that’s exactly why we should be scarred. ChatGPT is just the popular tip of the AI iceberg, there is a whole lot of more stuff in the works across all kinds of domains. The underlying AI algorithms is what allows you to slap something like ChatGPT together in a few months.
AI has been being developed for 50 years and the best we can do so far is a dunning-kruger sim. Sure, who knows what it “can do” at some point, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
The recent deep learning AI efforts only started around 2012 with AlexNet. They were based on ideas that were around since the 1980s, but they had been previously abandoned as they just didn’t produce any usable results with the hardware available at the time. Once programmable consumer GPUs came around that changed.
Most of the other AI research that has been happening since the 1950s was a dead end, as it relied on hand crafted feature detection, symbol logic and the like written by humans, which as the last 10 years have shown performs substantially worse than techniques that learn from the data directly without a human in the loop.
That’s the beauty of it. Most of this AI stuff is quite simple on the software side of things, all the magic happens in the data, which also means that it can rapidly expand into all areas were you have data available for training.
You smug idiots are proud of yourself that you can find a hand with an additional finger in an AI image, completely overlooking that three years of AI image generation just made 50 years of computer graphics research obsolete. And even ChatGPT is already capable of holding more insightful conversations than you AI haters are capable of.
Removed by mod
(it’s not, il the underlying tech is much older than that).
ChatGPT was released Nov 2022. Plain GPT1/2/3 neither had the chat interface nor the level of training data and fine tuning that ChatGPT/GPT-3.5 had and in turn were much less capable. They literally couldn’t function in the way ChatGPT does. Even the original Google paper this is all based on only goes back to 2017.
LLMs are physically incapable
Yeah, LLM won’t ever improve, because technology improving has never happened before in history… The stupid in your argument hurts.
Beside GPT-4 can already handle 32768 tokens, that’s enough for your average movie, even without any special tricks (of which there are plenty).
Depends on the ai though. With koboldcpp you can make memories for the ai to come back with. Even text personalities (like bitchy and sassy responses) when using tavernai together with kobold.
This. You have to baby it and then if you want it to do something different you have to tell it a hundred times in a hundred different ways before it stops producing the same stuff with the same structure with slight differences. It is a nightmare.
I agree, but at some point it will advance to the level where it can write boring, predictable scripts.
Bold of him to assume that companies would not just publish the trash - and that people would not watch it anyway.
It’s not just trash, it just wouldn’t make sense.
AI would kill off a character only to forget that the character was dead. There would be no chronology, it would be unwatchable.
“…and somehow, the Emperor returned!”
Haha, I wonder if AI could produce better Star Wars sequels than Disney. Although my stance has softened on them recently compared to when they first came out.
100% correct. The IRC channel I hang out in has a bot utilizing ChatGPT and it does a summary of the most recent conversations when someone joins.
Sometimes, it does a great job! It impresses me how well it’s able to summarize multiple ongoing conversations in a succinct way.
…and often times, it gets shit quite wrong. Not the actual topics, those it’s good at – but it is outright terrible at correctly indicating who actually said what.
Granted this is all to be expected – it’s an LLM, not really AI.
They wouldn’t have AI produce the whole show like that, it’s like feeding it a context to create dialogue within set parameters.
That would be better, but just seems more trouble than it’s worth for the quality. People ultimately do want to watch good well written shows. Apart from those who don’t!
Overall yea, but there’s a thing about how the more niche and specialized content is to a person’s interests, the more they’re willing to sacrifice on quality. So I think what will happen, because this will also reduce production costs so much (in theory), is we’ll get these incredibly specific shows made for smaller and smaller target audiences. I’m hoping this ends up generating some hilarious content that just seems absurd to people who aren’t targeted. Instead of catering to universal human experiences it will be like, “a show centered around a support group for people who love black licorice, and the challenges they face in their relationships with people who hate black licorice.”
Yeah as if there already isn’t complete trash, presumably it will just be cheaper and easier to produce, so expect more ubiquitous and niche trash!
“I was frightened a second ago; now I’m bored because this is so derivative.” - Me, while watching some of the Black Mirror episodes, proudly made by fellow humans.
I’m not to worried about AI. Isn’t the next iteration of GPT closed source? Technology is made best as a research or passion project, but once profits become the focus everything goes down hill. That and when you consider the global supply chain required to manufacture the chips that AI depends on, well things aren’t looking too great in that department.
Tl;DR humans will shit all over the prospect of scary intelligent AI well before we get there.
Chatgpt was not open source in the first place
OpenAI started out as a non-profit and has since than mostly switched to a for-profit company. ChatGPT was never open source.
Screw humanity and technological progressions, I want cash money
Guess I’m wrong here, some AI went closed source recently?
There are plenty of open source GPTs and they are pretty good. It’s only a matter of time
It’s hard for AI to beat charlie brooker, it can beat a lot of other people though
Charlie Brooker is one of the only intelligent people left.
He’s also so so funny! I expected a dark humour but he is so sharp and witty.
Maybe the 5th episode of the 6th season was written by an AI and they were playing some 4D chess game all along with our minds, because otherwise, I wonder how such fucking trash got the green light to be produced 🤗
Edit: Typo
It’s only producing trash now. Already there is a decent jump in quality from GPT-3 to 4, and it’s only gonna get better.
Plus it can do a lot of heavy lifting – tell it to make 20 scripts with different prompts and then a single writer or team can Whittle them down. That’s how a lot of scripts end up in production anyways, but now you ain’t gotta deal with writers and can make rapid, drastic changes
I also find the “just look how bad the hands are heh heh heh” thing so dumb … it’s going to learn how to draw hands pretty quickly
The problem atm it’s that chat gpt has pretty terrible memory. It couldn’t write a coherent show if it wanted to
Lmao black mirror feels like it was written by an AI so quite a statement
Last season was painfully bad
Lololol if ain’t that some bullshit 🤣
