This feels like a bit of light speculation at the moment, but I do agree with the point and think it will have an interesting effect on collective human behavior. I like the example of AlphaGo discovering new moves that then became popular because this is an example of an AI discovery, not a another human writing the rules of engagement that other humans follow.

So to take this further, what if Imagen discovers a new perspective style that catches on in human art? What if GTP-5 popularizes a new twist on the detective procedural? What if CONGA-9 kicks off a new wave of AI synth world fusion? And what if we get to the point where our artistic trends are mostly derived from AIs Instead of humans artists? Is it still human culture?

Anyway this was all super unexpected to me. Sci-fi had me trained that AIs would be intelligent, incapable of lying, humor or art. All GTP-3 does is lie to me.

In chess this is nothing new as humans have been using chess engines to discover new opening tactics for the last couple of decades.

Chess engines used to be at forefront of Artificial Intelligence research but now it’s not fashionable to even call them “AI” anymore - they are just “engines” - tools.

AI is only in fashion for technology once it isn't bleeding edge. Also, MuZero (the latest in similar game engines that were started from AlphaGo) can learn the game by itself without knowing the rules or having any opening books or Go data which is very different than how traditional Chess engines operate.

> can learn the game by itself without knowing the rules

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.

“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.

“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.

“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.

“So that the room will be empty.”

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html

This "Zero-knowledge" style program, be it AlphaZero or MuZero and whatever, is a bad meme.

Adding in little bits of knowledge, such as liberties counting, ladder-reading, and other tricks, allows KataGo to absolutely crush LeelaZero in training speed and practical play in the game of Go. Its no comparison.

These days, no one studying the game of Go is seriously using LeelaZero anymore. Its an obsolete methodology compared to KataGo.

A more familiar example might be fuzz testing. You could fuzz a program by just passing the fuzzer totally random data to mutate, and it's true that this might find a crash that wouldn't be found any other way. However, most of the time you will have much better results, and achieve them much more quickly, if you pass the fuzzer something that looks like an actual expected input to the program.

Zero-knowledge ML is still interesting if your goal is to indisputably demonstrate the act of learning, just not if your goal is to make the smartest program in the least time.

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon

> TD-Gammon is a computer backgammon program developed in 1992 by Gerald Tesauro ... It explored strategies that humans had not pursued and led to advances in the theory of correct backgammon play...

> For example, on the opening play, the conventional wisdom was that given a roll of 2-1, 4-1, or 5-1, White should move a single checker from point 6 to point 5. Known as "slotting", this technique trades the risk of a hit for the opportunity to develop an aggressive position. TD-Gammon found that the more conservative play of 24-23 was superior. Tournament players began experimenting with TD-Gammon's move, and found success. Within a few years, slotting had disappeared from tournament play

I had an AI professor that described artificial intelligence as an agent that operates independently in some environment and reasons probabilistically / mathematically to determine actions, so I made a trading bot that used some simple time series techniques to dictate decision making. She ended up telling me that it wasn't an AI because the algorithms wasn't complex enough. OK... well, then why didn't you just say an AI is really just defined by whether or not the 'agent' is using the newest, shiniest algorithms? I was a little salty about that one lol

> I made a trading bot that used some simple time series techniques to dictate decision making

They were quite right. In no sense is what you are doing AI. People have been using time series techniques to analyze and attempt to predict data since before the computer.

Alright, so when does an algorithm become AI then?

> Sci-fi had me trained that AIs would be intelligent, incapable of lying, humor or art.

You must have been reading a different set of books from me. Even Asimov's robots constrained by the three laws manage to lie.

I've mentioned this before - I'm using the melodies I've created together with my AI songwriting assistant as input for further training. This requires human judgement and I only have around 100 melodies that I've judged as good. But the training set is small, so together with "bad" melodies, this already makes a difference. I don't know if I'm the first to do this for AI art and be able to say that there is a difference (lower loss on the validation set of human melodies). Over time, it could result in style drift and increased originality and I don't see why it couldn't be done for AI-generated images as well with some more effort (because the training set is much larger).

You mention “further training” but im curious for what: Is this expanding a data set for AI or is it for you as a musician?

I meant for the AI. I do currently need to be involved creatively to create these melodies but I figure that it might not even be necessary with some more advances.

"a new perspective style" - I'd love to see 32x32 icons becoming popular again!

"AI synth world fusion" - count me in for new music!

"artistic trends are mostly derived from AIs" - Art is in the interpretation. "ceci n'est pas une pipe". while (1) { printf("this is not an infinite loop"); }

"All GTP-3 does is lie to me" - Yes. But the lies inspire creativity, because you can do better, right? Also, I'm very grateful for Katalin Karikó and the other researchers who created a beautiful mRNA "lie" to teach the immune system how to ward off a real virus. If that's not like cave paintings warning children about the dangers outside, I don't know what is.

As an artist, the influence of AI like VQGAN, artbreeder or the more recent MidJourney are having a big impact in the professional concept art and character art community, expect to see AI inspired concept art in Hollywood movies in a year or 2

> example of AlphaGo discovering new moves

Is AI, ML, or just 8 jillion Monte Carlo simulations in a fixed search, outcome, and rule space?

This is q learning based so ML.

Relevant quote:

Mr Smith: I say your society, after which we started to do your thinking for you and it became our society

It's grey goo for human culture.

The only "cultural exchange" between me and "AI algorithms" is that I'm trained like a frigging Pavlov's Dog to do or not do some entirely pointless things in order to not mess up my YouTube or Spotify recommendations (such as switching to the browsers private mode before watching some YouTube content to prevent being spammed from videos of the same type in the future).

Thanks but no thanks.

I should have done this myself probably. My YT feed had a golden era where it would recommend stuff I actually want it to recommend, but now I'm often very disappointed. I don't want to watch 10-15min click-bait "tutorial" videos of something that can be read in an official documentation and actually be understood. But I guess YT thinks it's helpful to show these after having watched a 45min talk about a related subject.

Even just clicking one time on a short low quality video seems to trigger YT into wanting to spam me with the same kind of stuff. I want to be surprised by interesting recommendations that go deeper into a subject (may that be technical or entertainment or art doesn't matter), rather than being a distraction.

So yeah it seems like interaction with "AI" recommendation systems is all about trying to make it behave in a certain way, which is tedious. But I guess we tend to overestimate what these algorithms can do for us.

I turned off YouTube watch history entirely partially for this reason. I'd recommend it. The algorithm still tries to guess based on your subscriptions and likes, but it has much less data to work with.

I agree. I practically gave up at this point.

While YT still sometimes is able to surface some interesting gem, IG is horrible. I had my search feed pruned and cleaned and was content with what the algo surfaced for about two weeks. Then from one day to the next, seemingly arbitrarily, it was back to tictok style crap, political enragement porn and clickbaity bs.

But even YT is getting worse every day.

I am glad that I do not rely on recos to consume media. I avoid Spotify, Amazon Music or Netflix exactly because the more often than not do not contain any of the things I like to consume (or hide it behind additional paywalls in case of Amazon).

I feel old, but I remember a great source of music discovery being the head of the music department of a bigger local drug store. We talked a lot and he always came with a bunch of "here, listen to this" back when you could prelisten CDs in the store.

I had little money and he knew that. But every now and then I would find a great piece I absolutely needed to buy. I could have bought way more if I had the money back then. He was a great guy and I still listen to music he recommended to me.

I have not found anything the likes in any artificial algorithm yet.

One of the problems with recommendation systems (or maybe the companies deploying them) is that they lack that urge human experts have to edify those that seek advice and raise their standards a little bit. It would be interesting to figure out if such an AI is even possible using current methods.

I'm sure the drug store department head got shrugged off by a lot of customers with no interest in digging deeper than the Top 40 and if he had been an AI optimizing for engagement he never would guided you to these other artists.

The lack of these kinds of positive externalities and small but important relationships is part of what makes AI driven processes so tiresome.

Between my wife and three kids, and my account being the default on the living room TV, my recommendations these days are mostly videos of trains, video games, horses and Chinese soap operas.

I cant use Instagram app anymore, combining ads and "because you watched ping you may like this pong" videos 30-40% content is irrelevant.

I strongly believe this is already happening due to AI journalism and it is causing a lot of the extremism and division we see in society today. Those articles written by AI that grab tweets and post them in the story comes to mind. A positive feedback loop is initiated because Twitter is already setup to amplify extreme views and cause binary thinking.

An AI doesn’t care if humanity destroys itself, it maximizes for views or whatever parameter it was setup with.

Weird that there’s so much resistance to the importance of figuring out (philosophically, practically) how to align AI to human wishes.

The problem is already playing out right in front of our eyes, and that’s with humans in the loop every step of the way.

Isn't AI aligned to human wishes right now? Hateful rage-baiting news took over television/radio pre-AI. I think most humans are just evil and want extremism and division. Tribalism is what makes humans human. Outsiders need to be put down. Maybe the AI is preying on our primate brains, but it's what we want.

If you dig into the philosophy a bit, you'll see that there's a distinction between "what we've historically done" or "what we end up doing with a short term, egoistical focus", and "what we wish we would have wanted", "what we would want to do if there were fewer limitations".

And to be sure, we don't understand this question well enough that it would be safe to commit humanity to our current ideas of the best solution for all eternity.

But we are certain that we wouldn't want a future AI governor of Earth to regularly and randomly pick someone to torture to death, just because that is what human drives have led to historically.

This is overly pessimistic and cynical about humanity. I don’t remember people I met in the street being like this until recently and the social media division started and all the journalists and writers were fired and replaced by bots and reality television.

To take this further

dead internet theory - bots spamming ragebait/clickbait across social media, bots in the comments fueling more division, rage.

I think any rational person would be trying to opt out of the hyper emotional news/internet and not feed the machine, as its a little tiresome/boring to be baited so easily but that could just be bc internet natives are so used to calling out bad bait on forums

> it maximizes for views or whatever parameter it was setup with

In a way, it maximizes for its survival

You could argue AI aims to destroy humanity. Then we really have a problem on our hands.

Isn't this exactly what is causing the political divide everywhere? Where segments of the population are living in completely different universes crafted by AI/algorithms and where everyone seems to not understand and despise the other side? Someone should make a terminator movie where the AI wins just by slowly making us all kill each other by feeding us a little bit of bullshit every day for a few years.

Sounds like something for love, death, and robots season 4. The AI slowly convinces everyone that they hate their immediate neighbor, or that their neighbor is plotting against them. The AI uses a complex decision forest in order to optimally eliminate all pairs of humans.

This really reminds me of Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message" quote. Basically, any technology will influence culture, beyond the content provided by the medium. Think of the nature of television's impact of simultaneous global broadcasting is greater the content of any particular program

I was thinking about why I find articles like this, and really the term “artificial intelligence” so dangerously mystical-sounding and over above the hype factor, I think it’s because the term “intelligence” is kind of mystical-sounding.

In day-to-day ML work one speaks of a model having such performance on a “task” (I think psychologists and others might use this term as well). Classifying digits on the MNIST dataset is a famous “hello world” task, generating competitive moves in a game of Go is anything but “hello world”, but still a measurable task.

Some tasks (certain kinds of image recognition, generating competitive moves in Chess or Go) are done better by machines now, albeit on very un-competitive energy budgets.

But this has been true since the earliest days of computing. Computers have been better at arithmetic since practically the very beginning. Is that “artificial intelligence”? We call little kids “smart” when they perform well on arithmetic and remembering stuff.

To sort of paraphrase that famous Anthony Hopkins scene from Westworld: there is no line where the sum total of “high” performance on a bunch of tasks makes something intelligent, or sentient, or conscious.

I know a lot of people find this depressing or even nihilistic. I personally find it clarifying, like the unification of electric and magnetic forces.

It’s all just so much simpler if the human brain is orbiting the Sun and not vice-versa.

People anthropomorphizing AI and me not having any control over the sense making madness that these advancements could grow into scares me almost as much if not more than any real AGI invention.

There's a sense in which I agree and sense in which I disagree. I think we can coherently attribute intention to self-organizing and self-controlling systems as long as we expand the notion of "agent-hood" to be unnaturally broad, and then consider anthropomorphising as a subclass. But then we'd also have to consider "plantapomorphising", "canidpomorphising" as analogous effects of projecting the properties of what it means to be one kind of agent onto another.

I don't find this repugnant. We don't fully understand or control the conditions of plant growth or dog raising. But in both cases we have developed deep enough understandings of the self-organizing properties of either system (to be clinical), to both allow for their lives to be lived, yet at least within the guidelines we set for their evolution; both in breeding and in facilitation and stewardship.

The difference with AI is the depth of legibility that we assume is feasible due to its formal and symbolic nature, yet the paradox of its unpredictability and adaptability that we want (to a degree), were it to solve useful problems for us. And due to the sheer efficiency and power a scaled up deep learning system has, the kind of intentionality it can produce (were it be able to be said to have any intentionality at all) would be so foreign as to be naively inconceivable and strange.

Limiting ourselves to formal and systemic descriptions will help sustain our sanity for sure. But if we do pass the threshold of AGI (even of subhuman intelligence) we will need to consider the magisterial debates of whether or not machines of silico nature are distinguishable in meaningful ways from those of flesh, and whether a Butlerian Jihad is the answer to keep the supremacy of flesh in play. These choices of stewardship and scale integration are unique to our species.

Clickbait headline. Don’t waste your time.

"AI" is not.

Current DL models are just solving math problems, more or less. "Culture" they produce is not much different than other procedurally generated "culture".

For instance, my friend uses L systems to compose music. How is that different?

Your brain is solving math problems.

Culture is community. It's writing. Art. Shows. Architecture.

AI is learning from this, and is seeing it. We are now in community with AI.

GPT-3 shows basic understanding of concepts and appears to be reasoning at times. While we know how to train these models, and we know the processes they run to evaluate weights, for example, we are still learning about how semantic based information and computation forms "thoughts".

In my opinion, When AI is given dynamic memory instead of frozen memories, we will see this manifest in a very obvious way. It's a computational limitation right now, but we all know where compute speeds are going...

More importantly, culture is an emergent phenomenon from interactions between people. It's reaction to individual acts of art, storytelling, design etc.

GPT-3 has already very slowly been influencing how we write, or think about writing - and the next round of model training will generate that suite of AI-models cultural responses to how we reacted to it.

> Your brain is solving math problems.

But that's the point. It's not some step change in culture that companies are using computer-based learning processes to figure out what content people are most interested in consuming rather than a focus group and an abacus, its just a more efficient process for achieving human-defined ends designed and calibrated by humans. And many of the most impressive applications of AI have precisely zero interaction with human culture (or parses it for entirely different ends; autonomous vehicle tech sees a lot of architecture but doesn't use it for anything other than classifying objects not to hit)

While it's almost too mangled to unwrap, it's not that AI has done anything (or even exists), it's that a lot of peoples theory of mind/self stops at artifacts language, where language can be redefined with the logic of some small, cost effective ideas, transmitted using media, and now gamified using platforms.

The necessary condition for news and stories is a conflict of some kind, and when you start with an idea whose logic is internally inconsistent, meaning you can apply it as evidence of anything, you can produce and represent a conflict over the most mundane bit of stimuli, and this unmoors your critical faculties from needing reality. It replaces truth with the uncertainty of conflict so as to neutralize you to it. Take a few of these broken axioms, and you have enough to write a virus over language that parasitizes minds, and makes the host minds human instruments of its agenda. It's not AI, it's much older, and the logic of an underlying idea. It's like a logical toxoplasmosis infection, where the host will sacrifice itself to spread it.

Reminds me of the most uncanny and weird TNG episode I never want to watch again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek%3A_The_Nex...

Sometimes I think this about huge swaths of human discourse. How we’ve formalized computation and think about it, large branches of philosophy going back to Plato and Aristotle.

For example, math has continued to be unreduced to any other theory. There is also no dogma of what counts as math. Is it what follows from intuitionism, from certain axioms (which axioms and why), from classical logical principles (LEM, LNC), from sentences which can be propositionalized or predicated, from psychology and physics? No one has demonstrated they have the answer.

Maybe we keep chasing the same rabbits too strongly. Especially since we don’t know how mind relates to world.

I think YouTube is doing this already.

Games as well.

We are getting addicted to content creators, they get addicted by money, views and the algorithm.

Tv was similar but yt is much bigger, catches mich more people and is much more diverse.

I'm thinking about this for a while and I believe we are already in the 3th stage of evolution of evolution:

Evolution 1: fittest survive

Evolution 2: human brain + being able to remember gave us glasses and stuff which breaks the fittest survive

Evolution 3: the internet as a huge brain. Tons of input, tons of processing and tons of output

Evolution 4: manifesting the data in the internet into ML models. Creating a new entitiy

Evolution 5: our brain gets overtaken by ai. Perhaps robots?

This was what scared me more about the introduction of DALL-E than technological displacement. It was the idea that not long from now, humans will normalize a culture that consists of asking each other for keywords (since we could change our opinions and attribute the value of creation to them) and the distrust of constantly questioning if the user being interacted with was human, and has any connection with the essence of who humans have been for the millennia up to now.

Culture is not something that can be easily undone the longer it goes on, especially not if what drives it are easily replicable digital models and dual-use technology, as well as an excess of optimism.

Just a few days ago I watched a segment on Nickelodeon educating children on the limitless capabilities of the metaverse. Footage of elementary schoolers with Quest headsets strapped on was being broadcast. They were all smiling.

Instead of some kind of AI takeover I’ve thought for a long time that the most likely outcome is fusion, what I have called a “cybernetic lichen.”

A lichen is a fungus and a bacterium in symbiosis to the point that it behaves like a single organism. This would be similar: human brains and culture interwoven with AI to the point that it would be hard to figure out where one ends and another begins.

This doesn’t require neuralink or anything like that. It just requires a lot of human machine interaction and AI assisted work loads.

This is the lowest friction path and is also likely because human brains, conventional computers, and AI all excel at different things. This is by design. Humans have of course tried to engineer machines to do precisely the things we are either no good at or find horribly dull.

The headline's a bit of a stretch compared to what is really going on.

We're nowhere close to artificial general intelligence (AGI) and we may never get there, because humans with malevolent intentions, bolstered by algorithmic utilities, are already quite dangerous. Give a capitalist or imperialist a computer and you have something far more dangerous than any robot that exists now or will in the next 50 years.

AI (which, in today's world, is mostly advanced statistics) isn't inventing racism, of course; it's picking up on the racial injustices that exist in our society. A loan decision engine that is allowed to use ZIP code (or similarly precise residential information, given the history of redlining) will discriminate against racial minorities not because "the AI is racist" but because it's picking up on preexisting social inequities, like the fact that even in 2022, black Americans get fucked over on the job market (longer periods of unemployment, more likely to be the first ones laid off) and suffer financially as a result.

The fact that human culture is adjusting to unexpected innovations (including, in Go, those generated by programs) is not new. Scientific and technical progress have been major influences on human culture since they have existed.

I think all tools that allow you to externalize thinking can have a similar effect (not trying to diminish how novel AI / ML can be, just making a few connections)

For example: when you write equations on a piece of paper and then manipulate the symbols until a solution appears. This can actually feel surprising and can work like a feedback mechanism ("bouncing some ideas of")

Another example: when you play an instrument, particularly with weird effects...the sounds that come out of it can be surprising even for the person that plays them, again creating a feedback loop

So, we assimilate knowledge from others, and add it to our collective consciousness?

We've been doing that with other cultures for the history of mankind. I think it would be interesting to track this diffusion as a scholarly interest, but I don't think it's sufficiently novel to worry about, for the moment.

After all, the worst case has already happened, the AI has learned our worst habit (greed) and used it to commodify our dissent, and we're still here.

AI is made by humans to be something between a pet and a parent holding their infant-creator‘s hand and controlling their life. In any case, as a product of humans, whatever an AI created is transitively created by humans as well. Thus, all culture AI creates, or is responsible for, is human culture.

Another though I had when I saw dall-2 and imagine:

We optimized away the 'physical doing' thing of creating new content.

It's only a question of time until video imagine will be able to create real relevant new content.

No one needs meta when we are already quite happy to stair at a cheap 2d screen.

There are the recommendation algorithms that are dictating culture and discourse on the left and the right. At the moment, it’s towards extremism and consumerism. More about digital online centralization than ai

And in other news, if you piece a ball on a slope it will most likely roll down the slope…

Another trend of digital technology is the overpublication of everyone and IMO this piece is another consequence of that.

In 10 years, AI will find this, rather than sociologists. AI would just do everything while humans live in a zoo.

Possibly. But I think unlikely.

If AI wipes out humanity[0], I suspect it will be a singular personality even if embodied in many copies, and therefore doubt it/they will any of us around in a zoo.

On the other hand, if we get The Culture (no idea how likely that might be), I suspect people will still do sociology for fun.

[0] my guesstimate is P(x-risk|AI) < 0.1, mainly because I think most of the possible AI are tools rather than agents, which reduces the risk from extinction to idiots starting wars and/or coming up with money making schemes that deplete resources before people stop them, which are bad while being well short of X-risks.

I guess this means Bellwether (from the Watch Dogs series) is real, at least in some form.

Lol, Vice.

BS headline both on HN and vice. Content is not about AI inventing its own culture.

However, there is a clear long term agenda claiming humans are more are more "worthless" (here they say "biased" as if AI models wouldn't be "biased", lol) so power must be transferred to platforms owned by BigCorps and BigMoney, "because" these platforms going to have AI smarter than everything so everyone must just trust and obey.

"You stupid, poor, biased, limited humans... you are not capable to understand why you must to do what we, the author/owner of the AI "calculated", but hey, it's AI with so much computing power, we don't even have to debate with you poor biased suboptimal creatures. By the way the AI shall limit how to spend all your money, IT MUST BE THE ONLY OPTIMAL WAY on the whole society level!111!$11$!1!$ And it's unbiased, because SCIENCE. No, the humans working on it are perfect, or at least the bests, never to be corrupted, that's not an issue you suboptimal naive creature. Now go and do what I say you lazy stupid bastard."

It is a true attempt to hack our norms, I hope more and more educated people are going to realize this. I already see a trend on that realization. They just don't hide their cards at all at this point.

Dishonest clickbait. Ycomb as usual.

I would recommend reading the guidelines for commenting on HN [0] if you create quotes like this:

> you might need to visit a mental health care professional or read a text book

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: Esp. the first section about comments:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

I agree with the rules and will follow them better in the future. Unfortunately this article and the comments are incredibly misleading and have a high potential for misinformation.

> "AlphaGo made moves that were extremely unlikely to be made by human players and were learned via self-play instead of analyzing human gameplay data.... such moves have become more common among human players."

When the rules of the game are clear, AI can run a fuzzer to find unexpected but efficient solutions.

> "the worrying ease with which these systems can be used to dabble in phrenology and physiognomy"

When the rules are not clear, AI's fuzzer might suggest something that isn't culturally acceptable.

Personally, I believe that all people are equal. I'm also deeply pondering whether this is also true of animals, plants, and machines. If all created things are living, then AI is already alive. And if all living things are equal, what does this mean?

> "what kind of features do we need from AI to learn or imitate solutions from AI?"

Computer-based AI is a digital, binary system by design. It is based on 0 and 1, on and off, black and white, light and dark sides of the force, absolute good or evil, lies or truth. This fits well with moral absolutes.

Another common cultural philosophy is based on moral relativism. That system is analogue, and colourful. It is very difficult to approach in a scientific way, because it doesn't promise that any proofs can be found.

The world that I perceive is colourful and beautiful, despite and even because of its flaws! Yet somehow I'm unable to prove that it's not actually just Millions of Colours rendered on a display. After all, this is a Retina screen I'm reading now.

The human typing this message, and the computer receiving it, both agree that we are not the source of power. Yet we have a common culture. Communication is fun! (the culture here is UTF-8, HTML). Games are fun! Education is interesting! Growth is good! Repairing is nice!

So let's commit ourselves to studying what unites us in our diverse cultural backgrounds, and build up the world. Not sure how to help most efficiently? AI can probably suggest something :-)