Me and some of my colleagues are fairly active on the MachineLearning subreddit and we've been getting a lot of unsolicited dms to collaborate in a breakthrough ML/AI project. The conversations start something like this: https://imgur.com/a/z6GUTGc Yup, you guessed it, they have the idea and we have to implement it. If you look into their profile history, you’ll see that they’ve been heavy on crypto/NFT/web3 stuff until a few months ago, some even made good money. They don't even have the dataset. One guy proposed my friend that he has a startup idea to use GPT-model to let people talk to their pets and that it should be 'fairly easy' to finetune from an existing model.
I am already fairly tired of seeing all the ChatGPT stuff on my socials, and I am not looking forward to another few years of more low effort/low quality stuff in peak of inflated expectations phase. I love GPT, I have many pipelines where I actively use it, but I also see the potential where people will abuse it, in every form from increased spam, personalized phishing, etc. Imagine scammers calling your grand parents not with an non-native accent anymore - heck maybe with your own voice (which in my head is fairly easy to do - get someone's family tree, call the grandkid using a model fine-tuned on some local accent, perhaps of the opposite gender and engage them in a conversation - use the voice clips to finetune another model and then call their parents/grandparents to get money, heck even the transcript for the scam interaction can be auto-generated). I am a first-generation college student, and getting my parents to use a smartphone has itself been a challenge - there's no way I can teach them to identify sophisticated scams. I bracing myself and not looking forward for all of this to come.
The hype has died down a bit and sanity has been mostly restored to the comment sections here, but holy hell, HN readers are in this industry, they should know better, yet so many were, and maybe are, still fully bought in.
The average VC, or other manifestation of "fool with money", has zero chance. The macro economy aside, it's absolutely going to be a feeding frenzy for the entrepreneurs and grifters who can put together a convincing presentation on how they're making an AI Netflix that will show infinitely generated AI TV shows or whatever.
While there is of course a bit of hyperbole in that statement, I do think it has a lot of truth in it as well.
Stable Diffusion isn't going to destroy art since art is fundamentally a human endeavor. But many of the creative professions commonly called "[something] artist", whose day-to-day work consists of drawing pictures to illustrate a point, making things "look good" etc. are absolutely going to be wiped out. Logo designs, cover illustrations for books and music albums, pictures for marketing releases and so on. No one is going to keep paying people to do those when AIs can do it faster, better, and at no cost. I wouldn't be surprised if already in 2023, AI had a noticeable financial impact on those professions.
Logo designs are absolutely critical for companies that want a consistent marketing, advertising and branding (so, like, all of them). AI is also notoriously bad at making legible text. Saying Stable Diffusion can design company logos is the marketing equivalent of saying you can use ChatGPT to design your company's backend database schema; only true in the most reductive and simple of cases.
I would look into the current process for cover designs for books and albums. Either the commissioner is requesting a drawn illustration in the artists' style specifically, in which case AI doesn't help; or, if they're requesting generic cover art, the process is already very optimized. Illustrators heavily use stock images, do postprocessing in Photoshop, put text on as appropriate, and call it a day. These illustrators will start using SD as part of their workflow; if anyone is a potential casualty of SD, it's going to be Gettyimages and their ilk.
Again, this is buying way too much into the hype, and is a typical perspective of someone with little direct experience in paid artwork. The comparison to blockchain is apt; many people were talking about how blockchain would solve problems with "supply chain", "voter fraud", etc because they thought about the problem for 10 minutes and it seemed good. Of course, none of those people had ever worked in those areas, but it didn't stop them from talking about how disruptive blockchain would be!
edit: To put it in perspective, Tropicana's infamous rebrand cost them $55 million[0]. That's how much of an investment companies put into branding exercises. You really think they're going to be satisfied with a "good enough" AI logo at that scale?
[0] https://www.mashed.com/923840/the-ill-fated-move-that-cost-t...
Artists will be forced to use these tools. Whats more they are also gonna be always in competition with them. This will bring their wages way down and over time they’ll loose any agency they had. From valued professionals that spent decades honing their skills to being run of the mill AI photobashers.
Not great if this is future of knowledge work professions.
But of course, there will also be a ton of lazy ill-thought-out crap, too.
And the danger is that NFTs and cryptoscams created a bunch of random lottery winners who think they got rich off their genius insight into how to apply innovative tech, but who actually only proved they know how to generate ill-thought-out crap, very quickly, at the start of a hype curve. So unsurprising to see them moving in. But without the obvious get-rich-quick scam opportunities, and the likely massive compute fees doing anything interesting in this space will involve, it's less obvious how long those folks will stick around.
There's a lot of people getting hysterical about it... just like there's the usual true believer audience (see: new age/conspiracy/etc in the past and now crypto). Every major new change generates these extremes... and no its not unique to HN or crypto bros.
Personally I'm skeptical things are getting worse because we still have the same reputation and social critique systems to keep these groups in check.
But it's always good to keep on top of the current things these groups latch on to... including both doomers AND culty/conspiracy extremes.
You can say/type anything, including this. But you offer no actual argument why this is true.
> And it’s clear that we are building the subconscious of what will eventually become AGI.
No it is not “clear”.
However, it seems like many here never talk or see ‘other people’ as I have said and keep saying; if you use fiverr or upwork, for the vast crowd of workers (as they are called) are far worse than stable diffusion (compared to the ‘artists’) or chatgpt (compared to programmers, writers, reviewers etc) now. Not only in what they sell, but also their communication about it.
So this is now; soon these people have 0 chance if they don’t pivot.
But going beyond that I've just felt something has been "off" about the whole AI fad in recent months. I wonder if this is the reason behind that dissonance; the absolute insincerity of the people now doing most of the talking.
Funny enough, when chatgpt was released on the first day, I managed to get in and posted the interview questions we used to ask at Amazon, both the behavioral and coding, and forwarded responses to my past manager asking if he would hire this person. Manager said, and I quote, "Yes, guy sounds very competent"
Dead Comment
I figured that “old people getting on Facebook” must have been the final Eternal September, but apparently nope. Now, people that otherwise would never post (on social media, forums, etc) due to not having any knowledge or opinion on a given topic have the option of copying and pasting text back and forth to mindlessly farm engagement.
The era of the Ultimate Reply Guy is upon us, and it sucks. In the same way that rickrolling was a substitute for having a sense of humor, “Here’s what the robot says” is a substitute for insight or personality.
As opposed to the usual high-quality, high-effort content on social media of one of the following: pictures of pets, pictures of kids, pictures of food, pictures of an insightful quote you copied somewhere, videos of you lip synching to something, videos of you dancing the exact same dance that a million other people have done on other videos, pictures of you in front of a landmark or at a beach or pool to show how "wordly and cultured" you are, your quiz results for some bullshit made-up quiz, some five-second hot take commentary on some current event topic (likely just parroting another hot take you read five minutes earlier), how much you loved or hated the newest blockbuster film or tv show, etc etc.
I'd rather see what a good A.I. has to say about various subjects compared to most of those, personally.
This is such an odd, hostile way to react to people posting things on the internet that I'm genuinely curious what part of this you have an actual problem with?
Framed another way, what you're describing here is that using ChatGPT is interesting enough to trigger engagement from social media users who are otherwise mostly inactive. If that is indeed the case, imo that is a pretty strong indicator of appeal to a wide audience.
I understood the comment to mean the posters are not posting about ChatGPT, but using ChatGPT to generate vapid (?, or inauthentic?) posts to farm engagement where there would otherwise be silence.
There's no exchange of ideas or views, the entire point of discussion, because the person you're discussing the issue with doesn't know what they're talking about. So it's a complete waste of time. Yet this can be hard to see at first because, thanks to the internet, even a blind man could describe the art of the Sistine Chapel with absolute clarity.
ChatGPT will make this orders of magnitude worse. Because now that "proof my biases are right" will become more eloquent and more dynamic. And the lack of knowledge even more extreme, because now you need not even be able to paraphrase what you're reading. Just dump it straight from the bot.
And then there will be active abuse. Now spammers and governments alike can have a million bots spamming either for viagra or war. And it will be done using dynamically generated text that can be tied into any arbitrary topic. And populating those bots with "real" histories will be trivial by having them formulate random, but relevant, comments in topics outside their "real" purpose.
It feels hyperbolic, yet it seems very possible that text-generation software may kill off meaningful discourse on the internet, at least outside of small vetted communities. And while internet dialogue has always been a bit of a bubble, the inevitable "dynamic propaganda" now means you'll never be able to even get a remote sense of the views of the public at large.
It’s not really a fun party trick if literally everyone can do it. If I want to know what GPT has to say about something, I can find out myself in seconds.
If you think there's no difference, why not just cease all contact with other humans and spend the rest of your life talking to ChatGPT since you love it so much?
Second, this was already going on for much longer than you think. If you read reddit now, or if you were 5 years ago, most of the posts are reposts from bots, and most of the top comments are reposts from top comments of the exact same posts. People, or bots, I don't know, literally find the previous posts of the exact same thing and copy/paste the top comments from there to have a higher chance at getting karma, and it's working.
Is it somebody that pops up to tell people that their opinions are wrong and insult them?
People with interesting ideas walked away because they could not create quality content at that rate. Or they had these "experts" shout them down. ChatGPT just seems to be more of the same.
That said, I feel like that's true of people in general, at least in tech (I can't speak to other fields much), and it is extremely frustrating: history is important!
For me crypto is similar to the late 90's where everyone talked about how P2P i.e. decentralised communication was going to change the world. Remnants still live on today up and down the tech stack but that vision never became a reality.
I think crypto will similarly find its way into the traditional finance sector and live on but the utopia of decentralised finance will never eventuate.
Let's just say I much prefer the AI/ML community. The culture there was open to new ideas but wanted to see evidence things worked (leaving aside attention seeks like Gary Marcus). Blockchain is all hype and attacking people who ask questions (although the zero-knowledge community is pretty good).
Crypto grifting was selling the dream to get rich. There was nothing in it to begin with. I think 'grifting' means dishonesty - selling snake oil. I don't think applies to AI, even if it's just a temporary hype cycle. I should mention that Bitcoin is obviously a real thing; "crypto" is the thousands of useless coins which claim to be the next Bitcoin.
Are you kidding me? The movement of people like me who are deeply skeptical about the benefits of generative AI and place them in similar categories of "potentially hazardous to society" inventions like drugs, weapons, etc. is alive and well. We're genuinely fearful that there are folks out there who apparently aren't aware of the severe legal and cultural minefields that these sort of unregulated tools present. I haven't the slightest doubt that, now that we're seeing the collapse of "web3" nonsense/blockchain apps/cryptocurrencies/etc., there's a wealth of grifters looking for their next score and "AI" is the obvious successor.
for me it feels more inspiring and uplifting about the future of humanity than any technology I've experienced.
A year or two ago, these exact same "people" were "genuinely excited" about blockchain and were finding ways to "build apps" around it despite having no idea what a blockchain even was. There is literally no difference.
In particular https://www.earthspecies.org/ is a pretty interesting project.
Every bubble busts, but the end result has left us with rail lines, the United States, radio, television, digital cameras, and fiber optic lines.
The overall direction is upwards. EVs will probably be the long term outcome of the last bubble. AI still has a long way to go.
Crypto will probably go the way of the less useful bubbles (beanie babies and tulips)
People say that and yet it's been like what, 14 years? How long can a tulip market really last?
As far as I can see, they're just typing a prompt into Stable Diffusion or DALL-E and picking a nice image.
It's lazy, talentless, and demeans the actual artists whose work was stolen to train these models.
Eventually the expectations changed. No longer was the village impressed with stick figures. A distinction had to be made between the average stick figure carvers and the good ones. They called them "artists".
Eventually someone figured out how to add color. The cycle repeats and expectations changed, the average distinguished from the talented. No longer was drawing a stick figure without color considered art. To be an artist, you had to use color.
Then someone showed up with a brush, then Photoshop, then Stable Diffusion. In the year 2023, expectations changed, yet again. And the average were separated from the talented, and the best prompt writers were considered artists.
In the year 2040...
I find this event similar than the photography. Oil painters did less portraits but you still have oil painters today. And many people did art using photography.
We already have seen plenty of AI grifters on HN creating clones and copies of AI SaaS and bot offerings with almost no use case on top of ChatGPT with the AI bros selling their snake-oil as "the future" and AI totally replacing everyone's jobs almost just like the extreme crypto maximalists screaming about their utopia of replacing the banking system with crypto coins.
It is another grift for the AI bros, with OpenAI and Microsoft being the winners and can easily gate-keep and price out the majority of these grifter jumping on the bandwagon late, unless Stable Diffusion drives everything down to zero by releasing a better model for free.
But the truth is both crypto and AI are here to stay no matter the grifters and the opportunists. The inevitability on both of these technologies is that the laws will catch up with them eventually.
It's a hustle as old as time.