Readit News___rubidium___ commented on Is DALL-E 2 ‘gluing things together’ without understanding their relationships? unite.ai/is-dall-e-2-just... · Posted by u/Hard_Space
The reason for my final question at the end is this: can AI emerge out of AB? The child eventually grows up and (hopefully) stops bullshitting everything. But, do they actually stop bullshitting, or is the human ability to reason itself somehow built out of bullshit?
That's a very good question. The child eventually learns to stop using symbols and instead begins to copy the shapes, negative spaces, curves, etc. in front of them and makes an assemblage of otherwise-meaningless shapes, lines, curves which is interpreted by viewers as a representation of the real thing. Does AI have the potential to do that? I don't know.
This might be a very non American problem, but people forget that there are social pressures to follow when you are middle class that cost more money.
It's also an American problem. I notice it most in the pressure to have a nice front lawn. In some American neighborhoods, if you don't regularly cut your grass, people will call the police.
I have a phrase I'd like to coin in contrast to AI. "Artificial Bullshit". AB.
I of course mean "bullshit" in the highly technical sense defined by Frankfurt [1]. The defining feature that separates a bullshitter from a liar is that a liar knows and understands the truth and intentionally misrepresents the matters of fact to further their aims, whereas a bullshitter is wholly unconcerned with the truth of the matters they are discussing and is only interested in the social game aspect of the conversation. Bullshit is far more insidious than a lie, for bullshit can (and often does) turn out to be coincident with the truth. When that happens the bullshitter goes undetected and is free to infect our understanding with more bullshit made up on the spot.
DallE generates the images it thinks you want to see. It is wholly unconcerned with the actual objects rendered that are the ostensible focus of the prompt. In other words, its bullshitting you. It was only trained on how to get your approval, not to understand the mechanics of the world it is drawing. In other words, we've trained a machine to have daddy issues.
A profoundly interesting question (to me) is if there's a way to rig a system of "social game reasoning" into ordinary logical reasoning. Can we construct a Turing Tarpit out of a reasoning system with no true/false semantics, a system only designed to model people liking/disliking what you say? If the answer is yes, then maybe a system like Dalle will unexpectedly gain real understanding of what it is drawing. If not, systems like Dalle will always be Artificial Bullshit.
[1] http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_...
I think you're right, but I would qualify that the AI is bullshitting in the same way that a child's drawing of a stick figure, house, and smiling sun is bullshit designed to get approval. The AI is giving symbols--very visually stunning ones, to be sure, but symbols nonetheless--of what it is prompted to create, just like a child learns that "circle with lines coming out of it" is a symbol that can be read as "sun" and praised by adults.
Fascinating. I've noticed the same problem with Midjourney and Nightcafé as well.