Black Mirror creator unafraid of AI because it’s “boring” : technology

[-] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 109 points 10 months ago

The thing with AI, is that it mostly only produces trash now.

But look back to 5 years ago, what were people saying about AI? Hell, many thought that the kind of art that AI can make today would be impossible for it to create! ..And then it suddenly did. We'll, it wasn't actually suddenly, and the people in the space probably saw it coming, but still.

The point is, we keep getting better at creating AIs that do stuff we thought were impossible a few years ago, stuff that we said would show true intelligence if an AI can do them. And yet, every time some new impressive AI gets developed, people say it sucks, is boring, is far from good enough, etc. While it slowly, every time, creeps on closer to us, replacing a few jobs here and there in the fringes. Sure, it's not true intelligence, and it still doesn't beat humans, but, it beats most, at demand, and what happens when inevitably better AIs get created?

Maybe we're in for another decades long AI winter.. or maybe we're not, and plenty more AI revolutions are just around the corner. I think AIs current capabilities are frighteningly good, and not something I expected to happen this soon. And the last decade or so has seen massive progress in this area, who's to say where the current path stops?

[-] Telodzrum@lemmy.world 50 points 10 months ago

Nah, nah to all of it. LLM is a parlor trick and not a very good one. If we are ever able to make a general artificial intelligence, that's an entirely different story. But text prediction on steroids doesn't move the needle.

[-] fsmacolyte@lemmy.world 17 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The best ones can literally write pretty good code, and explain any concept on the Internet to you that you ask them to. If you don't understand a specific thing about their explanation, they can add onto their explanation, and they can respond in the style you want (explain as if I'm ten, explain as if I'm an undergrad, etc).

I use it literally every day for work in a somewhat niche field. I don't really agree that it's a "parlor trick".

[-] state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de 24 points 10 months ago

LLMs are awful for facts, because they don't understand what facts are. You should never rely on them if you require factual correctness.

They are OK for text summation, formatting and just making shit up. For summation a human with experience still produces nicer output, because they understand the content and don't just look at words. As for making shit up you will get the statistically most likely output, so it's usually trite and boring. I think the progress is amazing, but there are still so many problems to be solved.

Right now I use them for boiler plate stuff, like writing a text with some parameters and then I polish it. For code I find them quite useless, because with an IDE I can write boiler plate just as fast as when I polish the prompts until the LLM delivers useful stuff. And with the IDE I don't get references to methods or entire libraries that just don't exist.

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[-] sudoreboot@slrpnk.net 9 points 10 months ago

I use LLMs for having things explained to me, too.. but if you want to know how much salt to pour in that soup, try asking it about something niche and complicated you already know the answer to.

They can be useful in figuring out the correct terminology so that you can find the answer on your own, or for pointing some very very obvious mistakes in your understandings (but it will still miss most of them).

Please don't use those things as answer machines.

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[-] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 16 points 10 months ago

Sam Altman (Creator of the freakish retina scanning based Worldcoin) would agree, it seems. The current path for LLMs and GPT seems to be in something of a bind, because to seriously improve upon what it currently does it needs to do something different, not more of the same. And figuring out something different could be very hard. https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of-giant-ai-models-is-already-over/

At least that's what I understand of it.

[-] TheWiseAlaundo@lemmy.whynotdrs.org 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

He's not saying "AI is done, there's nothing else to do, we've hit the limit", he's saying "bigger models don't necessarily yield better results like we had initially anticipated"

Sam recently went before congress and advocated for limiting model sizes as a means of regulation, because, at the time, he believed bigger would generally always mean better outputs. What we're seeing now is that if a model is too large it will have trouble producing truthful output, which is super important to us humans.

And honestly, I don't think anyone should be shocked by this. Our own human brains have different sections that control different aspects of our lives. Why would an AI brain be different?

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[-] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de 11 points 10 months ago

In humans, abstract thinking developed hand in hand with language. So despite their limitations, I think that at least early AGI will include an LLM in some way.

[-] IonAddis@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago

I've been having a lot of vague thoughts about the unconscious bits of our brains and body, in regards to LLMs. The parts of our brains/neurons that started evolving back in simple animals as basically super primitive ways to process visual/audio/whatever input.

Our brains do a LOT of signal processing and filtering that never reaches conscious thought, that we can't even reach with our conscious thought if we tried, but which is necessary for our squishy body-things to take in input from our environment and turn it into something useful instead of drowning in a screeching eye-searing tangled mess of chaotic sensory input all the time.

LLMs strike me as that sort of low-level input processing, the pattern-recognition and filtering. I think true generalized AI would have to be built on pieces like this--probably a lot of them. Ways to pluck patterns out of complex but repeated input. Like, this stuff definitely isn't self-aware, but could eventually end up as some sort of processing library for something else far down the line.

Now might be a good time to pick up Peter Watts' sci-fi book Blindsight. He doesn't exactly write about AI in it, but he does write about a creature that responds to input but isn't exactly conscious like you or I.

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[-] TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 16 points 10 months ago

By its nature, Large Language Models won't ever be truly innovative, after all they rely on expected patterns. But a lot of the media that we consume is also made to appeal to patterns that we expect: genres, tropes, usual messages. AI could replace a lot of it and frankly, that's scary to think in a world where we need to work to earn our living.

Truly groundbreaking art may not be what people usually seek, it's often something they don't even know they want until they experience it, or they might even fail to appreciate it. But it likely won't be automated unless AI achieves full consciousness, but if it does we will have a much more complicated situation in our hands than "we can command AI to make art better than we can do ourselves".

Still, getting paranoid over the uncertain latter won't help us with the former that is just around the corner.

[-] KevonLooney@lemm.ee 7 points 10 months ago

Good points.

One problem with replacing everything with AI that people don't think about: middle managers will start to be replaced too. There's no way to ask a LLM "why did you do that"? Fewer people will need to be managed.

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[-] ezchili@iusearchlinux.fyi 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I think the breakthroughs in AI have largely happened now as we're reaching a slowndown and an adoption phase

The research has been stagnating. Video with temporal consistency doesn't want to come, voice is still perceptibly non-human, openai is assembling 5 models in a trenchcoat to make gpt do images and it passing as progress, ...

Companies and people are adopting what is already there for new applications, it's getting more common to see neural network models in lots of solutions where the tech adds good value and is applicable, but the models aren't breaking new grounds like in 2021 anymore

The only new fundamental developments i can recall in the core technology is the push for smaller models trainable on way less data and that can be specialized for certain applications. Far away from the shock we all got when AI suddenly learned to draw a picture from a prompt

[-] lloram239@feddit.de 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The research has been stagnating.

It utterly baffles me how people can make that claim. AI image generation has exists for not even three years and back than it could do little more than deformed Avocado chairs and shrimp. This stuff has been evolving insanely fast, much quicker than basically any technology before.

Video with temporal consistency doesn’t want to come

We have barely even started training AIs on video. So far it has all been static images, of course they aren't learning motions from that and you can't expect temporal consistency when the AI has no concept of time, frames or anything video related. And anyway, the results so far look quite promising already. Generators for 3D models and stuff is in the works as well.

Far away from the shock we all got when AI suddenly learned to draw a picture from a prompt

What the heck do you expect? Of course going from nothing to ChatGPT/DALLE2 will be a bigger jump than going to GPT4/DALLE3 (especially considering most people skipped GPT1,2,3 and DALLE1), that doesn't mean both of them aren't substantially better than previous versions. By GPT5/DALLE4 you might really start to worry about if humans will still be necessary at all. We should be happy that we might still have a few more years left before AI renders us all obsolete.

And of course there is plenty of other research going on in the background for multi-modal models or robots that interact with the real world. Image generations and LLMs are obviously only part of the puzzle, you are not going to get an AGI as long as it is locked in a box and not allowed to interact with the real world. Though at the current pace, I'd also be very careful with letting AI out of its box.

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[-] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 10 months ago

I want to note that everything you talk about is happening on the scales of months to single years. That's incredibly rapid pace, and also too short of a timeframe to determine true research trends.

Usually research is considered rapid if there is meaningful progression within a few years, and more realistically about a decade or so. I mean, take something like real time ray tracing, for comparison.

When I'm talking about the future of AI, I'm thinking like 10-20 years. We simply don't know enough about what is possible to say what will happen by then.

[-] Sylver@lemmy.world 56 points 10 months ago

I miss the old Black Mirror…

[-] overkill0485@lemmy.ml 32 points 10 months ago

I'm legit wondering what crack were they smoking in the latest season.

[-] Pregnenolone@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

I thought this season was way better than the season before it. I was glad they went with something different like the horror theme. The season prior was a shit show of boring tropes.

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[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 56 points 10 months ago

Movie and TV executives don't care about boring. Reality shows are boring. They just care if they make money.

[-] homoludens@feddit.de 54 points 10 months ago

Bold of him to assume that companies would not just publish the trash - and that people would not watch it anyway.

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[-] deafboy@lemmy.world 47 points 10 months ago

"I was frightened a second ago; now I’m bored because this is so derivative." - Me, while watching some of the Black Mirror episodes, proudly made by fellow humans.

[-] thefloweracidic@lemmy.world 37 points 10 months ago

I'm not to worried about AI. Isn't the next iteration of GPT closed source? Technology is made best as a research or passion project, but once profits become the focus everything goes down hill. That and when you consider the global supply chain required to manufacture the chips that AI depends on, well things aren't looking too great in that department.

Tl;DR humans will shit all over the prospect of scary intelligent AI well before we get there.

[-] darth_helmet@sh.itjust.works 17 points 10 months ago

“Open”AI is entirely proprietary and closed-source.

Meta’s Llama series are kind of open source, but don’t publish the weights and so can’t really be reproduced with full accuracy without a ton of manual effort.

These and many other companies in the hype-space are using the same published research from a few years ago, which is why they have similar qualities.

[-] Evotech@lemmy.world 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Chatgpt was not open source in the first place

[-] lloram239@feddit.de 8 points 10 months ago

OpenAI started out as a non-profit and has since than mostly switched to a for-profit company. ChatGPT was never open source.

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[-] quindraco@lemm.ee 27 points 10 months ago

Did he not watch the latest season? Fuck, one episode was literally devoid of scifi entirely. Latest season only had one good ep in it.

[-] Cheesus@lemmy.world 16 points 10 months ago

Ever since Netflix took over, it's been a step down in quality

[-] MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world 24 points 10 months ago

Eh, I never bought this. The show has always been wildly uneven. The first season was very strong with two great episodes but the first episode is not great. The second season is pretty bad overall with the exception of Be Right Back. White Christmas was a good one off. The first Netflix season had some really strong showings with Nosedive, Shut Up And Dance and my personal favorite of the whole series San Junipero. I even thought season 4 was pretty decent overall. Also, banderanatch was actually pretty cool, especially if you really dug into all the paths.

The last 2 seasons, 5 & 6 were pretty bad overall with only one good episode each and some particularly bad ones. But honestly Charlie is probably just running out of ideas and I can't really blame him at this point. I suspect he's just trying different things. Sometimes big swings work and sometimes you just get Mazey Day.

[-] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 10 months ago

I really, really could not get behind the premise that the PM of the UK would fuck a pig to save a princess.

In the real world, it would have been "we do not make deals with terrorists" and that would be that, ratings be damned. Like holy shit, did he start with a completely unrealistic premise.

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[-] linearchaos@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I think he's trying to steal the lightning from the episodes that resonated well with the audiences to make new episodes and it's just not hitting quite as hard.

The old formula was amazing stories meets Twilight zone meets tales from the crypt we're 8 out of 10 times the protagonist gets right fucked for just trying to be a good person.

It feels to me like the take away from san junipero was that people like happy endings so they're trying to apply it to everything

The reason you got Maisy day is because he got access to Miley Cyrus and had to write something that she would be happy with.

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[-] frequenttimetraveler@lemmy.world 14 points 10 months ago

It's hard for AI to beat charlie brooker, it can beat a lot of other people though

[-] dangblingus@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago

Charlie Brooker is one of the only intelligent people left.

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[-] egeres@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Maybe the 5th episode of the 6th season was written by an AI and they were playing some 4D chess game all along with our minds, because otherwise, I wonder how such fucking trash got the green light to be produced 🤗

Edit: Typo

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[-] quams69@lemmy.world 10 points 10 months ago

Lmao black mirror feels like it was written by an AI so quite a statement

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[+] nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br 8 points 10 months ago

[deleted]

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[-] psmgx@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

It's only producing trash now. Already there is a decent jump in quality from GPT-3 to 4, and it's only gonna get better.

Plus it can do a lot of heavy lifting -- tell it to make 20 scripts with different prompts and then a single writer or team can Whittle them down. That's how a lot of scripts end up in production anyways, but now you ain't gotta deal with writers and can make rapid, drastic changes

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