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An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

(theaiunderwriter.substack.com)
1503 points participant3 | 3 comments | 03 Apr 25 17:55 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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flessner ◴[04 Apr 25 02:55 UTC] No.43577885[source]▶
Everyone is talking about theft - I get it, but there's a more subtler point being made here.

Current generation of AI models can't think of anything truly new. Everything is simply a blend of prior work. I am not saying that this doesn't have economic value, but it means these AI models are closer to lossy compression algorithms than they are to AGI.

The following quote by Sam Altman from about 5 years ago is interesting.

"We have made a soft promise to investors that once we build this sort-of generally intelligent system, basically we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return."

That's a statement I wouldn't even dream about making today.

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nearbuy ◴[04 Apr 25 05:17 UTC] No.43578592[source]▶
> Current generation of AI models can't think of anything truly new.

How could you possibly know this?

Is this falsifiable? Is there anything we could ask it to draw where you wouldn't just claim it must be copying some image in its training data?

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mjburgess ◴[04 Apr 25 10:19 UTC] No.43580253[source]▶
Novelty in one medium arises from novelty in others, shifts to the external environment.

We got brass bands with brass instruments, synth music from synths.

We know therefore, necessarily, that they can be nothing novel from an LLM -- it has no live access to novel developments in the broader environment. If synths were invented after its training, it could never produce synth music (and so on).

The claim here is trivially falsifiable, and so obviously so that credulous fans of this technology bake it in to their misunderstanding of novelty itself: have an LLM produce content on developments which had yet to take place at the time of its training. It obviously cannot do this.

Yet an artist which paints with a new kind of black pigment can, trivially so.

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1. nearbuy ◴[04 Apr 25 16:17 UTC] No.43584568{3}[source]▶
Kind of a weird take that excludes the vast majority of human artwork that most people would consider novel. For all the complaints one might have of cubism, few would claim it's not novel. And yet it's not based on any new development in the external world but rather on mashing together different perspectives. Someone could have created the style 100 years earlier if they were so inclined, and had Picasso never existed, someone could create the novel style today just by "remixing" ideas from past art in that very particular way.
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2. pesus ◴[04 Apr 25 17:24 UTC] No.43585389[source]▶
I would argue that Picasso's life experiences, the environments he grew up and lived in, the people he interacted with, and the world events that took place in his life (like the world wars) were the external developments that led to the development of cubism. Sure, an AI could take in and analyze the works that existed prior, but it couldn't have the emotional reaction that occurred en masse after WWI and started the breakdown of more classical forms of art and the development/rise of more abstract forms of art.

Or, as the kids might say, AI couldn't feel the vibe shift occurring in the world at the time.

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3. nearbuy ◴[04 Apr 25 22:24 UTC] No.43588361[source]▶
Of course Picasso's life experience influenced what he chose to make. This isn't what the parent comment is talking about.

The claim was that current LLMs (though I assume they meant generative AI in general, since we're talking about image generation rather than text) are unable to produce anything novel. Meaning they either don't think Picasso's work is novel, or they don't think a human could have prompted an AI to make a new type of abstract art before having trained it on it. Whether the AI would want to do this is irrelevant. AIs don't want anything. They do what a human prompted. And while WWI may have shaped Picasso, learning data from WWI isn't necessary in order to make a cubist painting when prompted to stitch multiple perspectives into a painting. It's blending perspectives that are available from old data. And blending things in a new way is novelty. Most novel art falls into that category.