In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea", then how did the ideas that we are pulling from, deriving from and combining come into existence?
If all we are saying is that existing ideas inspire new ones, or that most human generated content is derivative, then I completely agree with you. I don't see how that proposition could be controversial at all.
But it seems to me that some people, at some points in time, somewhere have and will continue to contribute something original at least on occasion. Even if the "original" idea is 1% of the "intellectual product" and 99% is reusing existing concepts. To insist otherwise is to insist that we hit peak human innovation somewhere along the line and there's nowhere left to go.
There is a huge amount of information flowing around us in realtime, and linking some thought/thing to something else, which then might have implications (subsequent discoveries) is statistics. We do have people with a better wetware so they have increased %chance do recognize something in front of them as well as linking it in a "novel way", but this is not really neccessary, it only increases %chances.
Even pretty radical things can be explained this exact way, up to having some sort of brain "damage" (or drugs like LSD) that changes mental pathways and have a %chance to be actually right and lead to discoveries, but also the %chance here is very low. (not every trip is a breakthrough in art/science, right?)... a bit like iE people that can smell sounds or link some natural phenomenon with an emotional situation between some people and write about it.
> peak human innovation
that might simply a nonsense question if you follow my previous argument. there simply is no real "innovation" - only "discoveries" of stuff. and we meatbags with very limitied/unreliable wetware at some point can't "progress" any more, but non-biologically flawed systems might overcome our limitations and do just that for us.
with our naked eyes, we cannot see things like infrared light, but it exists and some tools helped us to understand everything around it somewhat. now we're building more advanced tooling to get through the next plateaus - just like we have to build very sophisticated tooling to watch further into space or more closely into fractions of atoms, which in turn lead to more discoveries, and ultimately "innovation" we can feel in our lives.
the only thing I will 100% agree to is that a real AGI will be the _last_ discovery/innovation humanity will ever make - and that is a good thing - it means we finally overcome our biological limits somewhat.
Of course there are original ideas. "C is not an original idea, because it's just mixing A and B..." ok so there are only two possbilities:
1. Someone else did mixing A and B before. Okay then we can recursively find the first person who mixed A and B.
2. No one else did mixing A and B before. The "Mixing A and B" is a new idea.
For some incomprehensible reasons, people seem to accept "mixing A and B is not a new idea because A and B already exist." Like... why? Since the four basic nucleobase existed, there haven't been any new DNA creatures?
The real reason that it feels like there isn't new idea is simple: the "mixing" process happens gradually. Even if you come up with a really good "X + Z" idea, people (read: market) might not accept it because what they're familiar with is "X + Y".
So you put a bit of Z to make "X + 0.9Y + 0.1Z", and another person who is as smart as you makes "X + 0.8Y + 0.2Z"... then when "X + Z" is officially a thing, people outside think you smart-ass guys were all just copying & pasting each other.
This is the root of the objection to AI. To say that humans are similar would imply that a person's thoughts are a function of their sensory experiences, and that is not a popular view.
Similarly, people like to think that a person's behavior is not a mere function of their experience- that they are capable of "choosing" how to react to their circumstances. They will accept no explanation that appeals to material conditions or biology. A man steals bread not because he is poor and hungry, nor because of some chemical reaction in his brain, but because he "chose" to steal. The part that chooses would his "soul", which cannot be explained in terms of cause-and-effect.
There’s a much richer discussion going on about current-generation AI and its prospects that is grounded in plainly materialist and technical insights, with thoughtful differences of opinion about what current research demonstrates and about what the sophistication of biological/neurological machines may involve in comparison.
You might find that conversation more enriching if you tune into it instead of the one you seem to be focused on.
In copyright-law (and I think patents?), there is the Threshold of originality. Basically you evaluate how much work and change went into something, to distinguish it from other works. Which IMHO comes down to how much of a and b can you still see in the mix, and how much did mixing them changed them in the end product. If the change is low, then people more likely consider it as not innovative.
Or how Homer Simpson once said: “People are afraid of new things. You should have taken an existing product and put a clock in it or something.”
The threshold for originality in copyright is the bare minimum, so it's not a good standard for "invention". Patents have a much higher bar to overcome, and it is hard to put into a simple explanatory phrase.
I think what you are describing in copyright isn't the issue of originality, but determining what is encompassed in a copyrighted work. The court will analyze what the work consists of, and what of it was your expression, as opposed to someone else's. So, it's not novelty exactly but it's close.
Yes, and no. I can't speak for laws in the USA, as I'm from Europe. But Copyright-laws in the EU do have parts which specifically target mixing and mashups of content, and how much new content of your you need to add to make it count as a separate work. These parts were recently updated, because of YouTube, the meme-culture and so on. But it's my understanding that for music and text-quotes, the whole concept is already longer around. So I guess US-Laws do have something like this too?
So of course, this does not handle novelty on a global scale for all of mankind's knowledge and content, but the general Idea and how to handle it is there.
> Two people can independently create the same thing and both be entitled to copyright.
Similar maybe. But for literally the same, I doubt it. People are getting already sued for having too much similarity.
>Similar maybe. But for literally the same, I doubt it. People are getting already sued for having too much similarity.
Full stop yes. Independent creation of the same thing is not an issue in copyright law in the US. I do not speak about Euro copyright, as I'm merely a US atty. In US copyright law, a necessary element of infringement is access to the allegedly copied work - if access to the work is rebutted, then there is no copying and no infringement. The copyright stands.
the reason to have property (also a tool, or social-technology to be slightly more precise), i.e. ownership over things is a byproduct of having a marketplace in which we can trade.
In this view, the marketplace (or trade, depending on your outlook) is THE WAY to come together and put all our skills together in order to co-create (con-struct) something much larger.
Alas, capitalism means that only a very few chosen elites (which are, by this point, mostly autonomous corporations) get to decide what we all work together to co-create. We as human individuals are only able to participate in this figurative "marketplace" (understood as a social-technology) as the part of merchandise, specifically as 'commodity'-style labor.
I like this quote (paraphrase) of Byung Chul Han, "capitalism is not a political question, but a force of nature to be tamed".
My larger point being that capitalism "applied" to digital assets is NOT the way forwards. So I don't have a complete 'constructive' alternative. But I'm absolutely sure of what I don't want and believe should try to avoid i.e. the path we are on (digital rights, intellectual property, and so on).
Copyright exemptions (fair use/fair dealing etc) are a million times more complex than that. There are times when one adds almost nothing yet will still get protection. Take political humor. A standard bit is just to point out something funny. Look at how often political comics (John oliver/stewart etc) just play a clip of some politician. No edits. No commentary. The clip speaks for itself. That is still protected speech. Understanding how the comic adds to the clip cannot be expressed in numbers.
So, was that real creativity, or not? If not, why not? If the parts are really "basic", they didn't come from other, pre-existing parts.
And if it was real creativity, why is it impossible for us to do the same?
I don't believe originality is that valuable. It's a positive term to me, but just slightly.
I've seen a lot people on HN credit the SV companies' "free food" practice to google. Do they believe free food for your employees is a new idea that someone in google came up with? I don't think so.
With such definition, GPT-4 can create new ideas.
At least GPT brings funding sometimes.
I often take it a step further and use it as a reminder that new ideas are rarely born from one person but rather the contributions of many, each too small to be noticed as an “original idea”, but when viewed collectively, can be revolutionary.
So many advancements (like the airplane) often get invented simultaneously by different people in completely different areas of the globe without any connection to each other.
"A fax machine is just a telephone and a waffle iron!" —Abraham Simpson
But now that we have software that can generate massive amounts of "Mixing A and B" ideas automatically... I dunno, seems like we're heading toward a sort of "pollution of the idea atmosphere" where we get a bunch of remixing of ideas that no human has vetted as particularly useful or valuable or interesting.
We already have that. Observe: ahem “It is an industrial capacity, that many people like the Reddit poem person who does the cow thing. And everyone delighted in the nonsense of words that are sense.” Or, perhaps you want something on-topic? “Your ideas about ideas are mere ideas. Ideas that are ideas are ideas, but these ideas are not ideas. lol!” Perhaps an unoriginal, unfiltered synthesis of some good ideas? “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a potato peeler could save you 5 Altairian dollars a day.”
We don't need AI to produce unoriginal, unfiltered internet comments. Certain YouTube comments sections provide a great example (though the problem with YouTube comments isn't as bad as people tend to make out). We humans already have social mechanisms to keep the good ideas and ditch the bad ideas, even when many of the humans aren't bothering to filter their own output.
If you listen to the stories of how things like major inventions came into being, it's almost always some domain expert visited some domain in which they were not an expert and inspiration struck on how to combine the domains.
Otherwise, the rest of invention is either human imitations or improvements to things found in nature or not inventions at all but discoveries stumbled upon by accident/experimentation.
Nothing is just willed into existence by pure "thought". Every thought you've had is a product of the things you've been surrounded by.
That's not a magical invention that has no bearing on the world around us. That's just an expression of real world taken to its logical conclusion. It was not invented from a vacuum, it was invented from the input of the world around us.
What is "hokum" is the idea that the human mind would somehow come up with meaningful output without meaningful input to seed it.
Somewhere around 2016, when the golden Age of Internet-Content ended, as the last undiscovered part was added to the mix...
But jokes aside, does innovation really need to be new? Or would it still innovative if you don't know it when you create something you for you? Take for example all the retro-waves which regularly come back, where people discover something for them completely new, and make up some for them completely new things, which the generations for them already did long ago.
> In other words, if there is truly no such thing as an "original idea"
Does Original mean 100% new? And would it demand that all parts are new, or would it still original if we just arrange old parts in a new way?
And the obvious answer of course is that recycling / mixing can be innovative and creative. The dichotomy only exists in our heads.
I believe this is because of how our culture choose to reward intelectual output. Your output needs to appear sufficiently original to be worthy of reward and protection.
For example a musician who creates a new song is not rewarded, in fact punished for naming all the influences they had coming in to said new song. (both morally, by people who would think less of them, and by lawsuits asking for a share of their profit.)
Interesting. I was mostly referring to the "Shake It Off" and the "Thinking Out Loud" copyright cases.
> While the Gaye family is not involved in the “Thinking Out Loud” lawsuits against Sheeran, the precedent set in their case looms over all new copyright infringement claims. Notably, the court took into account not just sheet music but studio arrangement too and ruled that “Blurred Lines” significantly aped the vibe of “Got to Give It Up,” something that had previously been beyond copyright protection.
[1]: https://rollingstoneindia.com/copyright-infringement-lawsuit....
You might have missed that I was stating my belief. I can only cite myself as the ultimate authority on what beliefs I have or don't have.
If instead of believing something I will know something you will notice from the lack of "I believe" and the appropriate citations. If we would need to provide citations for any belief we could not talk about theories and ideas we have which as of yet lack the sufficient evidentiary backing.
Now of course it sounds like what you are trying to express is that you are disagreeing with my belief. Which is perfectly fine.
> There are plenty of these “inside the studio” type interviews where an artist describes at length their inspirations and the other artists they admired and wanted to mimic in some way.
Yes. Humans are full of contradictions therefore you won't see black-and-white behaviour from them.
By observing nature, and then iterating on that over thousands of years of culture. Of course the question is whether and to what degree the process of iteration and transformation matters.
How would you define an "original idea?" An idea with no origin or source, that spontaneously manifests from the aether? That isn't possible, everything must be extrapolated from something prior.
> Writing was a remix of pictorial representation, which was a remix of the way things like ox heads, flowing water, and birds look.
That's the kind of absurd reasoning when you take some proposition and try to defend it to the death even though its wrong.
But the point is that human creations are always based on something else, so pointing out that AI is basing its output on a database of previous work does not necessarily mean that it is not creating new art, or being creative, or however else you want to put it.
It's like the ridiculous lawsuits that claim a song is stolen because it uses the same chord progression as an older song, where there are almost always centuries-old examples of that same progression from Beethoven et al.
Your point seems to be that the reasoning is absurd because it's defending an incorrect premise, and the premise is obviously wrong because the reasoning is absurd, so I'm not you'll want to know what the people on the other side of this discussion think.
There's a million things today that didn't exist back then, and many things that came to exist culturally over time, or were discovered. Do you think they were sitting around the fire talking about how the molecular motion registers as a conscious heat sensation in animals or what the proper interpretation of QM is?
Digital simulations are self-explanatory - All things simulated must have an existing thing they are simulating. Digital is one type of representation of an already existing thing. It can be seen as a subclass of concept/drawing/painting/.
Branching timelines are more abstract, but it's ultimately based on the idea of a tree. Dilemmas over branching decisions have existed as long as we have been able to think. We branch timelines in our imaginations while playing chess or doing any strategic endeavor where decisions and responses to those decisions matter. FFT: Decision tree, binary tree, random forests, etc. These don't quite cover the complexity of QM, but it's hard to ignore that there is overlap.
A nuke is a type of bomb, which is a type of rapid expansion, which is just an expansion of something (volcano, lightning, comets, etc...)
My friend's point was that of course a caveman won't be thinking about quantum mechanics, but they were thinking about the more basic things that ultimately led to their descendants thinking about QM.
Just food for thought.
Its only words and concepts and we keep inventing new ones constantly. We also imbue new meaning to words and concepts over time.
How do you distinguish this from survivorship bias? There were probably tons of shitty artists 100 years ago but you haven't heard of them.
> It's no coincidence that most image generation prompts have an existing artist or style in them.
I've been thinking about this. I don't think it's evidence that anything is getting worse, because a lot of the prompts people use are referring to recent artists/styles. Is it possible that leaving out the style/artist leads to an average of every style which doesn't really work?
Or did it ever stop ?
But I think the way you have put it here is more clear than anything I've been able to manage. I think I put it in a more extreme form, which is to say that the earth had no life on it for ~3 billion years, and still no humans until ~100k years ago. At some point the first music was made. And if it could be original then, whatever it was that made that possible, should presumably make it possible now, too.
Read How to Ride a Bicycle. Human creativity is just a lot of work, often connecting novel ideas together while doing so.
Nothin' you can sing that can't be sung
Nothin' you can say, but you can learn how to play the game
It's easy
Nothin' you can make that can't be made
No one you can save that can't be saved
Nothin' you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time
It's easy
All you need is love
But when you start to scrutinize everything they did, there are many clear examples of things and people that did those things first and directly influenced them. However, they may have been the first to do it in their specific flavor, which is undoubtedly original.
The most original thing I can think of that The Beatles did was add sound to the runoff track at the end of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, so that it keeps playing the sound infinitely until the needle is removed on the turntable. I’m sure someone with more insight can point to another musician doing that first, but at The Beatles’ scale, we collectively come to believe they were the first to do it.
There will be a big leap forward when we get to teaching these things from video streams so they can get the concept of 3D properly.
Your question contains the answer. Remixing begets innovation / creativity begets remixing.
I like it.
So what? There are a handful of truly revolutionary artists each generation. Faulting AI for producing merely good and interesting art is missing the point.
What fills me with dread is the obvious glee over removing human work from sellable products, when there is no viable alternative to working for most people. We've created a world where a lot of jobs can be automated, and that is somehow a bad thing, and it's going to be used to crush people. It's a labor issue not a philosophical one.
Labor will shift. Bemoaning new efficiencies and new empowerment because they reduce the need for meaningless labor consumption is backwards. We should be sensitive to those whose lives will take an unexpected turn (I may be one of them!), but we should do so in the context of celebrating greater individual leverage to create and produce.
"Labor will shift" makes it sound like a smooth and automatic process but it is not. People will lose jobs with no equivalent replacements, families will fall into poverty and misery when they hadn't before. In a place like the US with healthcare tied to employment, people will die. And eventually, it will reach a stable equilibrium with fewer jobs that can support a reasonable quality of life. That's what labor shifting looks like, we know because we've seen it over and over again.
The changes might ultimately be net positive for a great many people, but that's small consolation to the people whose lives will be made much much worse during the transition. None of this is inevitable, but historically it's the path we've chosen and we seem even more dedicated to this outcome now than at previous times of change in the relation between labor and survival.
For many pieces of art, and what draws me to art, is knowing that the creator put a piece of themselves into it. (I'm going to avoid talking about the 'separating art from the artist' discussion, that's separate than what I'm discussing here).
An example I've talked about in the past on HN is Raymond Carver. Carver's short stories are often centered around blue-collar men in the mid west. This is because Carver was a blue-collar man from the mid west. I find that interesting. I enjoy reading about Carver's life, and reading about what people had to say about him.
Essentially, write what you know.
Art made by AI is missing that - and I think the frustrating part for me is that I don't think it's that hard to bring it back.
Show me the prompts used for the art. Tell me why you used those specific prompts. What did those prompts mean to you? I want to know all of those things.
I also think people stop too soon. Why not take what the AI has made, do something to it yourself, and then feed it back into the AI to see what happens?
Until it doesn't. I mean until very recently the narrative justification for extreme automation was it would free up our time to create art and stuff. Now that's in question.
It's all excuses to avoid thinking about the problems the automation technology will cause. Avoidance worked OK in the past, but as these technologies get more and more extreme, the problems will get more and more pressing, and the old lazy excuses won't cut it anymore.
> ...but we should do so in the context of celebrating greater individual leverage to create and produce.
And the end point of that is a small cadre of elites who control the machines, and hordes of people left with no economic value (except, perhaps as slaves for elite amusement, like gladiators and prostitutes).
It's clear that amidst a deluge of AI-generated content, audience urges for authenticity will rise. Attention is in more finite supply than content, has been even before generative AI; only so much will stick out, and it will perhaps be the most authentic or analog content and goods.
The real question is whether AI/AGI can make it past the "authenticity threshold" and xenophobia to where we also accept AI storytellers and brands as eligible.
As far as I can tell, there's just two interesting things to watch out for:
- Personalized AI-generated content. What if the movie were just for you? What if it expired like a Snapchat, never to be seen again by anyone else? Would this tickle us? Would we succumb to new filter bubbles, increasing the distance between us?
- Can AI make the movie that's so good that it sticks out and does become the one we watch collectively?
make up a list of fictious creatures and describe them. make sure the names aren't reused.
can you be extraordinarily creative and unusual?
Sure, here are five highly creative and unusual fictional creatures:
Crystalline Leviathan: The Crystalline Leviathan is a massive creature that lives deep in the ocean. Its body is made entirely of iridescent crystals that refract light in all directions, creating a dazzling display. The Crystalline Leviathan feeds on deep-sea creatures and can grow up to hundreds of meters long.
Plasmic Shapeshifter: The Plasmic Shapeshifter is a shape-shifting creature that can manipulate its own plasma to take on different forms. It has no fixed appearance, but usually appears as a mass of writhing, translucent tendrils. The Plasmic Shapeshifter is highly intelligent and can mimic the voices and mannerisms of other creatures.
Quantum Butterfly: The Quantum Butterfly is a tiny, delicate creature that flits through the fabric of space-time. Its wings are made of pure energy, and it can move at incredible speeds. The Quantum Butterfly is believed to be responsible for some of the most unusual quantum phenomena, such as entanglement and superposition.
Cosmic Serpent: The Cosmic Serpent is a serpentine creature that lives in the void of space. Its body is covered in shimmering, rainbow-colored scales that reflect the light of distant stars. The Cosmic Serpent feeds on cosmic radiation and can survive in the most inhospitable environments.
Dream Weaver: The Dream Weaver is a mysterious creature that lives in the realm of dreams. Its body is made of ephemeral, mist-like substance that can change shape at will. The Dream Weaver is said to be able to influence the dreams of mortals, and can even enter their dreams to communicate with them. It is rumored that if you catch a Dream Weaver and release it, it will grant you a wish as a reward for sparing its life.
But they mostly read like someone churning out monster manual entries by pairing animal names with adjectives then putting in the obvious two sentences of description.
Nothing about it engages my brain or strikes me as brilliant, insightful, or what I'd usually mean when I say "creative".
Further, the complexity of creation with a complete lack of creativity is... really creepy to me, and does the opposite of inspire.
This, I think, is the key bit of your comment:
> I'm not a fictional guy so I don't really know
HN (and wider social media) is filled with people who aren't familiar with [field] declaring that AI has surpassed humans in [field]; it's not a display of AI's new brilliance but the old[1] display of a speakers' ignorance.
Most of them don't display the same humility as you.
1) The output, while impressive on the surface, is bland and recycled. It will drag down the general level in the same manner that CGI has destroyed movies.
2) People don't want to consume AI generated content in the same manner that they generally don't watch Stockfish vs. Stockfish.
3) It is not phobia, it is disgust at humans being dehumanized.
The phobia seems to be on the side of AI corporations, who quickly step in any discussion that questions their business model.
The problem people have with AI is that it is cheapening the things that make us "special". If anything I can draw, paint write, create, and pour my heart and soul into can be acceptably approximated by a "bot" in five seconds or less, then what do I have to offer to the world beyond my "work" output? The things that creatively inspire me have been commoditized in a way where it's exponentially harder for me to generate value doing them.
Artists and musicians have famously struggled for centuries. A technology that raises the bar on an already exceedingly difficult path (making money doing creative things) makes that particular situation much worse.
Imagine you are an artist. You as a patron connect and talk about a piece of art, you walk away happy and feeling connected. He does not sell any art because they are indistinguishable from what the AI can produce with the cost of electricity. Now if you are willing to pay for "bonding over human experience", GPT can probably be trained to do that as well. Generative AI eliminates the livelihood of almost all artists eventually.
Art that isn't recycled is almost always an illusion caused by your not being familiar with the things it was remixing. Nobody pulls things out of thin air. Even whacked-out acid trip visions were molded by our cultural experiences and aesthetic. While there are a few people who make large shifts in their artform-- e.g. Jackson Pollock, Jimi Hendrix, and Antoine Carême-- but a) they were still making incremental progress, and b) you'd have a pretty limited set of things to choose from for your entertainment.
I could make a similarly disrepectful and unsupported claim about the mental state of people who believe most human creative activity is simply recycling learned ideas, and we could spend some time flinging insults at each other, but why?
Non-"function"-ally pure in the programmatic sense. Output based somehow other than purely on input.
And the question is where does that irrationality come from? A random number generator? Any good developer knows there's no such thing as an actual random. They're all either list based or based environmental aspects.
I don't think there's an argument to be made that the human mind isn't just mixing ideas that doesn't rely on some form of magical thinking.
Shining light on the unsupported parts of the other person's argument is step one of debate.
I contend there is no proof of a machine capable of creation purely from the ether.
No, it believes that the mind has an internal state. We have many cases of state which is in practice undecidable. Moreover, in many formulation of quantum physics one can have a state which is unreachable even in theory (not just hidden variable style QM theory, there are ways to get unreachable state even in 'regular' QM[0]). I'm not sure this is true regarding the brain, but for now we have not ruled it out.
>And if that's the case, the question is where does that irrationality come from?
The universe itself. The linked PDF - you might be familiar with the author, he features often on HN - provides one method this is possible (though, again, I'm not saying this is true).
It’s probably not completely accurate to say there’s nothing truly original anymore, but also probably true that the rate of discovery of truly novel and original concepts and ideas has slowed to the point it may seem that way. Possibly b/c all the low-hanging fruit as been taken, and only the more difficult discoveries remain.
A small culture war that was smouldering long before the appearance of generative models.
For me, I actually really like that human content is recycled. The discussions around AI, art, and humans always talk about art as a separate product produced by the human. I feel like many pieces of art (not all, for example zombie realism) has a piece of the human inside of it.
An example I used in a comment in this post is Raymond Carver. His short stories are about blue-collar men in the mid-west. Carver was a blue-collar man from the mid-west. I find that interesting, and I liked that he pulled from his life experience to write stories.
I get very excited when I realize that the work I'm engaging with is recycled in some way. Like a song's chorus sharing lines from a separate artist, or a style that seems similar to a different writer I know. I love that. It makes me feel more connected to the creator and makes me like them more because we share similar interests.
An example that comes to mind for me are the manga Hunter x Hunter and Jujutsu Kaisen. The creator of Jujutsu Kaisen loved HxH and it 100% shows. The crazy powers, the complicated fights, the walls of texts explaining what happened in a fight, etc. All of those come from HxH and I love the creator was inspired by it. Sometimes reading Jujutus Kaisen makes me feel like I'm bonding with the creator over our mutual love of HxH.
With AI created work, I feel like we're missing the human touch. And as I pointed out in another comment here - I don't think it's hard to bring it back. Show me the prompts and the chat log. Why did you choose those prompts? Why did you ask the AI to write in X style? How does that X style make you feel?
On the other hand, maybe the AI prevents some of the human touch from coming through. I imagine much of the recycling that comes from humans is unintentional. The song you wrote on guitar has that riff not because you're copying a band, but because you've listened to so much 90s indie rock that you just make what you love - without realizing it.
Maybe in the future this changes. I'd love to see someone spend some time with an AI and mold it to such a way that what it produces can emulate the user's love and interests. Don't forget to show and share the chat log!
[EDIT]: To add onto this, I've actually done the above. I've played some text adventure games in the past, and I got ChatGPT to play with me. I told it that I had stat points (Health Points, Magic Points), that I had two types of attacks, and that there are three types of monsters. That experience invigorated me to write paragraphs on world building - just so I can feed it into ChatGPT and live in that world.
I seem some instances that are similar like this - but people just end up not sharing the prompts they feed into ChatGPT. I'd love to see those prompts. I've love to see what someone did to get ChatGPT to act a certain way.
But perhaps the process doesn't matter as much as the end result.
Maybe another interesting aspect to consider is: humans create new things (even if by remixing and deriving from old things) all the time, because they want to, because they choose to do so.
Thus far, these AI creations have been made at the behest of humans demanding them.
Perhaps that will, that desire, to make something new in the first place will remain a differentiating factor.
The argument should be about capacity for creation, and to me AI generation just doesn't seem like true creation, but more of a cheap magic trick.
"A man with a new horse visited the hardware store in Dagwood last week to try and find a new hitching post for his stable."
That simple sentence has enough entropy that I can say, with confidence, that is has never been uttered by anyone in the history of human civilization.
"Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers."
A Bit of Fry & Laurie Concerning Language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MWpHQQ-wQg
That means AI is not capable of producing meaningful _new_ content like discovering new mathematical theorems, because AI does not understand maths, whereas humans can come up with something meaningful based on _understanding_ of the content they have learned from.
This is why when you ask e.g. ChatGPT about something it has not been trained, it can only come up with garbage, whereas a human would likely be able to provide meaningful answer based on looking at the same training data, if that makes sense.
Language models can generate novel functioning protein structures that adhere to a specified purpose. Structures that didn't exist before nevermind found in the dataset. The idea that there's some special distinction between the reasoning LLMs do and what Humans do is unfounded nonsense.
A distinction you can't test for (this so called "true understanding" ) is not a distinction
That's why these models like ChatGPT are trained on massive models, to hide the fact that the AI is actually very dumb pattern matching machine.
The only reason they found these "new" protein structures is because AI could match them to a pattern that it learned from the training data.
They even claim this:
> akin to generating grammatically and semantically correct natural language sentences on diverse topics
Just like ChatGPT can generate grammatically and semantically correct natural language, except if the topic is not something it was trained on it will output grammatically and semantically correct nonsense.
> ProGen can be further fine-tuned to curated sequences and tags
Which suggests there still needs to be a human that can reason to be able to curate the sequences, something AI can't and probably at this stage never be able to do.
This is something companies running these models won't openly admit, because that would confuse investors.
> The Not By AI badge is created to encourage more humans to produce original content and help users identify human-generated content.
How does this encourage humans to produce more original content? It may help users identify human-generated content - if they care. But perhaps more usefully it helps AI identify human-generated content to avoid training on its own garbage.
The word "recycled" attempts to carry a lot of weight here, and not successfully.
In 1905 Einstein published his famous four papers that could not have existed without recent work done by Planck, Michelson, Morley and Maxwell.
It would be ridiculous to describe those papers as recycling.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%20...
We biologically have a desire to live. Part of living is confronting threats to our survival, and hopefully defeating them. Our minds are what provided us with the ability to survive despite there being stronger, more vicious competition out there. Why would we want to surrender our one competitive advantage?
People aren’t stupid. They know that AI will continue to progress (“technology must progress”, says the technologist) and that it threatens their way of life. Truckers know that AIs will automate their jobs. Artists know it will automate theirs. Everyone knows that AI is coming for them, sooner or later. If not in their career, then maybe in their social life, like video games and social media have decimated in-person communication.
Those are things we need in order to survive. Our jobs provide us the money we need to meet our needs, and give some of us meaning in life (no, UBI proponents, receiving a check doesn’t solve all the problems). Our social lives are paramount to our health. What will humans be doing all day when AI has taken all our jobs and we are all talking to chatbots all day which cater to our every proclivity? Maybe that is some folks’ ideal worlds, but certainly not mine.
Given the mixed results we’ve seen with technological innovations in the past, rather than giving a negative connotation to the people who are cautious or concerned about AI, why not listen to them? Rather than having a phobia, maybe they have a valid point.
You can retrospectively say we've always had a device that creates light from heat, like this 'new' lightbulb and metaphysically you'd be correct.
But the properties and design of a lightbulb are different to an oil lamp. That's new enough to be called original and Thomas Edison (and whoever else helped him) are the originators of the lightbulb design and they made it real.
An original thought? Probably not, an original object, yes. Very much so.
To be honest, I’d struggle to find any human content that is not recycled from the past. I guess we are still better than AI at remixing sufficiently novel combinations of concepts but I think much of this AI content aversion comes from some kind of phobia, or an unwillingness to admit humans are shockingly unoriginal.