[HN Gopher] The makers of Eleuther hope it will be an open sourc...
___________________________________________________________________
The makers of Eleuther hope it will be an open source alternative
to GPT-3
Author : webmaven
Score : 110 points
Date : 2021-03-29 13:39 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| jdonaldson wrote:
| It's funny how behind the times that Wired is getting. Even my
| parents know about how scary good these text models are getting.
| grapecookie wrote:
| The fact that there are no advanced AI chat-bots because they
| might (I mean they will lol) say something offensive is absurd.
| we are such babies.
|
| General AI is already here. It should be implemented on twitter
| or wherever and used to teach us about ourselves. driven by
| engagement, untethered by morals. A dispassionate glimpse into
| what sells. An AI that exploits our engagement, for good or evil.
|
| The bot would become infamous and in due course banned. Teaching
| us even more.
|
| But we are so fragile.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| What are you on about? There are AI driven chat bots. When they
| aren't used it's not because they might say something
| offensive. General AI is not here by any definition or
| redefinition of General AI. We are not fragile.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| AI driven chat bots are routinely deployed, yes. But it's
| also true that at least one bot generated content that
| spooked its owner:
|
| "The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed
| for human engagement. As it learns, some of its responses are
| inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions
| some people are having with it. We're making some adjustments
| to Tay." (Microsoft statement)
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-
| ch...
| claudiawerner wrote:
| This is because Twitter users, some coordinated on 4chan's
| /pol/ board, decided to train the bot on extreme racist
| input:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)#Initial_release
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I mean we're very fragile, which is why if we had General AI
| we shouldn't release it at all, but that's of course not what
| OP was saying lol.
| grapecookie wrote:
| General AI is not here: https://openai.com/blog/image-gpt/
| lol
| leereeves wrote:
| What do you mean by General AI?
|
| If you mean AGI (artificial general intelligence) it's
| definitely not here yet.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Ah yes, the only possible issue with releasing fully general AI
| is that it might say something offensive. Not because we don't
| have it at all, not because if we did we shouldn't just let it
| out like a lion in the gazelle pen to see what it does, because
| of those snowflakes!
| grapecookie wrote:
| Wrong, gpt4 is new and has not been implmented as a chat bot.
|
| Also wrong that previous chat bots were not shut down for
| being offensive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Mmm, and was Tay General AI also?
| moistbar wrote:
| One data point in a sea of billions does not a pattern
| make.
| stellaathena wrote:
| GPT-4 doesn't exist mate.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Couldn't Google build the the world's most powerful NLP AI? They
| scraped the whole web and have DeepMind to pull it off on top of
| Google's powerful and massive data centers.
| wongarsu wrote:
| They probably could, but what for?
|
| They did develop BERT and use (used?) it for parsing search
| queries [1]. They probably use NLP models in the ranking
| algorithm too. But those use cases are about getting a good
| enough result with the throughput/latency requirements, which
| necessarily makes them less "powerful" than models like GPT
| that pay little attention to performance.
|
| https://blog.google/products/search/search-language-understa...
| minimaxir wrote:
| As someone who works on a Python library solely devoted to making
| AI text generation more accessible to the normal person
| (https://github.com/minimaxir/aitextgen ) I think the headline is
| misleading.
|
| Although the article focuses on the release of GPT-Neo, even
| GPT-2 released in 2019 was good at generating text, it just spat
| out a lot of garbage requiring curation, which GPT-3/GPT-Neo
| still requires albeit with a better signal-to-noise ratio. Most
| GPT-3 demos on social media are survivorship bias. (in fact
| OpenAI's rules for the GPT-3 API strongly encourage curating such
| output)
|
| GPT-Neo, meanwhile, is such a big model that it requires a bit of
| data engineering work to get operating and generating text (see
| the README: https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neo ), and it's
| unclear currently if it's as good as GPT-3, even when comparing
| models apples-to-apples (i.e. the 2.7B GPT-Neo with the "ada"
| GPT-3 via OpenAI's API).
|
| That said, Hugging Face is adding support for GPT-Neo to
| Transformers
| (https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/pull/10848 ) which
| will help make playing with the model easier, and I'll add
| support to aitextgen if it pans out.
| nipponese wrote:
| Totally off topic: can you fix the pip3 installer for
| aitextgen? I just filed an issue on GH issue tracker.
| pabe wrote:
| Did anybody set up a webinterface for testing this already?
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| I apologize for joking on Hacker News, but go to Google and
| type in anything to do with a consumer product comparison, and
| you'll get a billion results of webpages filled with text
| indistinguishable from AI generated blather.
| holstvoogd wrote:
| I believe we are reaching a singularity.
|
| Like 90% of content is written by marketeers for bots. SEO
| they call it. Now we can take out the middle man. Bots
| writing crap for other bots. And then we use that content to
| train more bots to write even crappier blog spam. And finally
| the bots decide the actual recipe is no longer needed on the
| recipe blogs and they kick us of the internet.
| frockington1 wrote:
| I wish it were possible to break down how much of twitter
| is bots reading other bots and then creating content for
| bots. They would never admit to how many 'users' are this
| but it has to be significant
| [deleted]
| spideymans wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see how colleges and universities react
| to GPT-3. Students will surely use it to write entire
| assignments.
| b0rsuk wrote:
| Corporate speeches, sermons, motivational talks, poetry, and
| political speeches. They are either not required to make sense
| or no one dares to interrupt.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Anecdotally, but I know a number of people who do university
| assignments for money. Many of the clients for the folks I know
| are at the university level are folks with poorer then average
| English language skills and are usually in intro writing
| courses. I'd be terrified if I were one of them right now.
|
| GPT-3 would be a godsend for cheaters, but still requires a
| human to jump in and rewrite whole sections.
|
| No, if you want to REALLY want to cheat using AI, you should
| most likely utilize either 1. Abstractive Summarizers (e.g.
| Pegasus) or 2. paraphrasing tools (e.g. like at
| https://quillbot.com/). I believe that Quilbot is primarily
| powered by MLMs like BERT rather than CLMs like GPT-2 (but
| someone who works there can enlighten me more).
|
| Copy and paste a text that you want rewritten in your own words
| (e.g. the ideas of a really smart individual), and then it
| rewrites it using totally different language but preserving the
| same meaning. (old) Plagerism detection tools don't work and
| hell, it's not hard to fool the never ones. You can try tools
| for detecting if something is AI written by a particular model
| and weights (e.g. to prove if they used GPT2-Medium), but if I
| fine-tuned those same weights, than proving it was plagiarism
| will become exceedingly difficult.
|
| Welcome to the brave new world of cheating. Also, techniques
| like this are coming to a CS department near you (in the form
| of source code generation powered by NLP models).
| charcircuit wrote:
| GET-3 is just as much of a cheat as using a thesaurus. New
| writing tools shouldn't be banned just because old people
| didn't have those tools.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| Even long before GPT-3 a friend of mine did his thesis with
| generated text, in an engineering university and received a B.
| This is 6 years ago. I have my own beefs with thesis' in
| general already, since 2 thirds of it seems to be filled with
| redundant text to prove that you went to university. I guess
| it's a little bit different, since back then he had to actually
| work to generate it and now it's a lot easier
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > his thesis with generated text
|
| 6 years ago = probably LSTM.
|
| He wrote an entire thesis with this and got a B? That seems
| implausible to me, but maybe I'm used to higher grading
| standards. Did he just use it to fill in parts of it?
|
| Also, the plural of thesis is theses, not thesis' which
| implies the possessive.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| How does that work? Don't you have to defend a thesis?
| pedalpete wrote:
| A friend started a AI to improve writing (https://outwrite.com)
| and when the initially started, they had a detect plagiarism
| feature that teachers could use, I think they stopped
| developing that eventually.
|
| If I recall correctly, the way it worked was to build up a
| model of this persons writing, and how it compared to to other
| people, and then would measure the likelihood that sentences
| and paragraphs matched the rest of the writing.
|
| I suspect something similar could be done with GPT-x
| vmception wrote:
| Wolfram Alpha has been solving calculus problems for 12 years
| and it is barely a footnote in how the college experienced has
| changed
|
| So I would say this likely will just be there. It just is. Wont
| change anything, universities will acknowledge it, a headline
| or two will occur when its use was discovered in a paper that a
| student didnt even skim to make less obvious, and most papers
| will fly under the radar.
|
| Other kinds of assessments will still do their job.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Have you read much gpt3 stuff? While it's coherent in a
| sentence it is very rambling over paragraphs to pages. It could
| probably do fine for a grade school or bad highschool paper. I
| think if you turned it in for college you'd get an f.
|
| On an unrelated note my fake daughter is now a TA and the
| professor lead off saying "we are in a golden age of cheating".
| They're going for way more short assignments as it's a lot more
| work to cheat on those than one make or break test.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Have you read college freshman essays? While it's coherent in
| a sentence it is very rambling over paragraphs to pages.
| grogenaut wrote:
| yes I've read them, would those pass an English composition
| class in college? This comment generated by Gpt3
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think GPT essays could definitely pass a freshman
| expository writing class. I went to a pretty good
| university and when we did peer review I was pretty
| surprised at (what I considered) the low average quality
| of the writing.
| bluetwo wrote:
| Examples?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Looking back, I think freshman me was perhaps a bit harsh
| in my assessment of my peers. Here are two excerpts, one
| my own writing and one from a peer. Rereading them, I am
| not sure GPT3 could recreate either of these, but you can
| judge:
|
| Peer: > The Gaza Conflict Gave Hamas what they needed to
| build an even deeper anti US narrative and anti-israeli
| narrative. The reasons that Israel was able to act the
| way it did so during these conflicts were:The civil
| war/Russian invasion of Ukraine, especially after the
| July 17 downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17;
| President Assad's brutal tactics in the Syrian civil war,
| which seemed to be paying off at the time; and advance of
| the Islamic State in northwest Iraq and the horrific
| videos of their executions. As a way to show 0 tolerance
| for Islamic Radicalism President Obama and his
| administration gave Israel full support at the start of
| the Gaza operation.
|
| Me: > Eleven years later, peace in Israel and Palestine
| seems no closer. Despite being ousted by Fatah from the
| West Bank, continually targeted by economic sanctions,
| and subject to military action, Hamas seems no closer to
| disappearing than when it was first founded (Milton-
| Edwards 212) and continues to be a major political force,
| particularly in the Gaza strip. What has changed,
| however, is that Hamas has grown desperate. In "A rare
| opportunity to influence Hamas," Daniel Nisman argues
| that the increased isolation experienced by Hamas due to
| the international community's pressure is in fact
| counterproductive.
| nl wrote:
| Here's some samples using the _small GPT-2_ (emphasis:
| small GPT-2!) in AiTextGen, seeded using "The Gaza
| Conflict Gave Hamas what they needed " (1st 3 samples,
| not cherry picked):
|
| > The Gaza Conflict Gave Hamas what they needed to
| survive and that's not something Israel can afford.
|
| > The Gaza Conflict Gave Hamas what they needed to take
| control of Gaza. In the past few days I have had a few
| conversations with people who have been in Gaza who are
| very critical of the IDF. These people are often very,
| very angry. They are also very angry about the way the
| IDF is doing what it is supposed to be doing and what it
| is supposed to be doing. So in my mind, the issue of
| Hamas being in control of Gaza is not something that
| should go away. It is something that needs to be
| addressed. Q: What have you been hearing about since the
| war started? A: The IDF has been saying that it is going
| to allow Hamas to take over Gaza. Q: What has been
| particularly troubling to you lately? A: I have been
| hearing about this as well. Q: What has been more
| troubling to you recently? A: My friends have been saying
| that they want to call it Operation Protective Edge. Q:
| And, you know, what do they mean by that? A: They mean
| that they want to use it to make sure that they have
| enough force to take control of Gaza. Q: And that means
| that they want to make sure that they have enough
|
| > The Gaza Conflict Gave Hamas what they needed?"
|
| The UN is now considering whether to send military
| advisers to Gaza to assist the country's military forces.
| The Security Council is considering whether to send the
| equipment, along with the training, to a military
| operation in the region. The US is also considering
| sending a team of US special forces to assist the
| Palestinian armed forces in the conflict.
|
| The United Nations is now considering whether to send
| military advisers to Gaza to assist the country's
| military forces.
|
| Kerry's comments come as the US has been in touch with
| the Palestinians to offer support in exchange for a full
| ceasefire, and as the US continues to support the PA and
| Hamas, the two groups have been engaged in a long-running
| conflict with Israel in the Gaza Strip.
|
| In January, Kerry condemned Israel's "continued offensive
| against Gaza," saying the blockade was the "worst
| violation of international law on the part of the Israeli
| government and the civilian population of Gaza."
|
| The US is now considering whether to send military
| advisers to Gaza to assist the country's military forces.
| According to Reuters, the US Secretary of State John
| Kerry said this week that "there is no guarantee" that
| the US will send special forces "to the Gaza Strip
|
| So yeah - not fantastic, but interestingly not terrible
| either. The non-factual but coherent nature of it is very
| troubling.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| From reading these (esp. the last), you would think the
| US is allied with Palestine against Israel!
| gwern wrote:
| Well... https://www.eduref.net/features/what-grades-can-
| ai-get-in-co... https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.03300
| troelsSteegin wrote:
| Will anyone care to read it? In a reductive dystopian way, I am
| just looking for the authority figures in my ideological
| landscape to signal to me what my position should be on this or
| that topic. In this landscape, argument and evidence matter less
| than just communicating an "actionable" judgment. Maybe there
| could be a Rush Lim-bot. I suppose some iteration of GPT-foo will
| be good at generating genre-consistent narratives, but could that
| instead be screen plays that render as tiktok videos? The tech is
| super cool, but I struggle with the "why, really?". Does anyone
| benefit beside platform operators?
| k1rcher wrote:
| While the fraud implications of convincing generative text is
| quite daunting, it's great to see progression in this field.
| aaron695 wrote:
| > the Eleuther team has curated and released a high-quality text
| data set known as the Pile for training NLP algorithms.
|
| This includes HN [i] HackerNews 3.90GiB 0.62%
|
| Which if SciFi has taught me anything means we are all uploaded
| now and will live forever.
|
| [i] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.00027.pdf
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| "Wintermute was hive mind, decision-maker, effecting change in
| the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was
| immortality. ... Wintermute [had] the compulsion that had
| driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer."
| worik wrote:
| I thought that the important barrier to building these sorts of
| systems is the cost of, indirectly the energy required for,
| training the model. Is that still correct?
|
| How does a Free Software or "Open Source" project get around
| that?
| sodality2 wrote:
| Distributing the trained models.
| worik wrote:
| I should have read the article more carefully!!
|
| The Eleuther project makes use of distributed computing
| resources, donated by cloud company CoreWeave as well as
| Google, through the TensorFlow Research Cloud, an initiative
| that makes spare computer power available, according to
| members of the project
| vmception wrote:
| "Man GPT-3 is such an inaccessible naming convention and it uses
| a prohibitive license"
|
| Solution:
| doesnotexist wrote:
| How many internet forum prophecy cults (you know like the q one)
| are or will be powered by these language models? It's often
| assumed or at least easier to imagine the evaluator in Turing's
| test is a rational actor that possesses a high-degree of
| skepticism. But it seems that a lot of the human population is
| ready and willing to believe wild claims with little or no
| evidence and many people seek out information that confirms what
| they already believe.
|
| As the cost of making such models becomes less and less, it seems
| inevitable, spin up many such models and see what sticks and/or
| combine some evolutionary process for feeding back user-
| engagement to fine-tune and adapt the models. How many of these
| influence machines will latch onto the language of existing
| religious traditions and how many might invent or spur on the
| development of entirely new ones? Maybe not exactly the "Age of
| Spiritual Machines" that some futurists predicted...
|
| How far are we from "Show HN: I started a cult by training a
| model on the sermons of televangelists and MLM copy."
| caslon wrote:
| This thought process is something I think is a common
| misconception with how cults work.
|
| A machine to autogenerate cult-ish nonsense isn't needed.
| Humans are already _incredibly good at doing this on their
| own._
|
| Not only this, but another thing about this is that cults
| generally fine-tune themselves to fit their members.
|
| A machine generating convincing lies still wouldn't
| meaningfully do as much as a human-operated, human-targeted
| attempt at a cult. Creating one is something basically any
| human can do; the required skillset is something most people
| possess.
| nutanc wrote:
| I have recently started an experiment to generate an AI generated
| newsletter[1]. All posts are generated by GPT-3. I work as the
| editor. It works well for some topics and not so well for some
| topics. Since I curate the content, I dont publish topics which
| are not done well. For example, I tried to make it generate a
| nice article on the Suez canal crises. But it was harder than I
| thought it would be.
|
| It generates buzzfeed kind of stories very well though :)
|
| [1] https://aifeed.substack.com/
| starik36 wrote:
| Are you using OpenAI API to generate these?
| I_Byte wrote:
| How do you go about generating these posts? I think I would
| like to play around with something like this but I am not sure
| where to start.
| hooande wrote:
| GPT-3 doesn't know anything about the Suez Canal blockage. It
| only knows what it could have learned by googling "suez canal"
| on the date the last update was released. I imagine the
| newsletter content it created for you was mostly general
| background info about the canal.
|
| Whenever GPT-3 is updated or a new version comes out, it will
| be able to speak much more intelligently about the topic. But
| of course any update will require re-doing all the careful
| tuning of prompts and models...
| girlinIT wrote:
| AI can also convert audio to text, one of great examples is
| https://audext.com/. What do you think?
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I don't know why the eleuther project riles me up so much. Their
| work on the pile gets to me because they're so cavalier about
| copyright (while I defend myself by training on similarly pirated
| text datasets, but feel different because I don't redistribute
| them and am honest that it's pirated. to be clear, i'm rolling my
| eyes at my rationalization right here). Their work on gpt-neo
| riles me up because they do such a weak job comparing it to the
| models whose hype they're riding. It also riles me up because so
| many people just eat it up uncritically.
|
| But it's all out of proportion. I think it's that last part (the
| uncritical reaction) that makes me blow this out of proportion.
| stellaathena wrote:
| > Their work on GPT-Neo rules me up because they do such a weak
| job comparing it to the models whose hype they're riding.
|
| Building open source infrastructure is hard. There does not
| currently exist a comprehensive open source framework for
| evaluating language models. We are currently working on
| building one (https://github.com/EleutherAI/lm-evaluation-
| harness) and are excited to share results when we have the
| harness built.
|
| If you don't think the model works, you are welcome to not use
| it and you are welcome to produce evaluations showing that it
| doesn't work. We would happily advertise your eval results side
| by side with our own.
|
| I am curious where you think we are riding the hype /to/ so to
| speak. The attention we've gotten in the last two weeks has
| actually been a net negative from a productivity POV, as it's
| diverted energy away from our larger modeling work towards bug
| fixes and usability improvements. We are a dozen or so people
| hanging out in a discord channel and coding stuff in our free
| time, so it's not like we are making money or anything based on
| this either.
| stellaathena wrote:
| Hi! I'm the EAI person who your criticism of the Pile is most
| directed at. I'm curious if you read Sections 6.5 and 7 of the
| Pile working paper and, if so, what your response to it is. As
| you note, virtually everyone trains on copyright data and just
| ignores any implications of that fact. I feel that our paper is
| very upfront about this though, going as far as to have a table
| that explicitly lists which subsets contain copyrighted text.
|
| Also, I realize that you don't have any ways of knowing this
| but we also have separated out the subset of the Pile that we
| can confirm is licensed CC-BY-SA or more leniently. This wasn't
| done in time for the preprint, but is in the (currently under
| review) peer reviewed publication. Unfortunately the conference
| rules forbid you from posting materials or updating preprints
| between Jan 1st 2021 and the final decision announcement. But
| we will be making the license-compliant subset of the Pile
| public when we are able to and will give it equal prominence on
| our website to the "full" Pile.
|
| Also, we will be releasing a datasheet for the dataset but
| again conference limitations prevent us from doing so yet.
|
| If you're interested in talking about this in depth, feel free
| to send me an email.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Hi again! We had a back-and-forth about this a while back
| regarding the paper and I think we didn't end up on the same
| page regarding the "public data" definition in the paper
| (found it! [0]). I love that you're upfront in the paper,
| because it's silly how most people just don't acknowledge it
| (though they usually don't redistribute it publicly like the
| pile does).
|
| I think the gist was us disagreeing about the relevance of
|
| > _Public data_ is data which is freely and readily available
| on the internet. This primarily excludes ... and data which
| cannot be easily obtained but can be obtained, e.g. through a
| torrent or on the dark web.
|
| That last phrase is what got to me. It puts things in the
| same category that feel too different. E.g. the harry potter
| books in vs this comment I'm writing. They're both available
| within a few clicks from the search bar (one because I put it
| there, another because it was put up against the wishes of
| the author and owners), but that commonality doesn't feel
| relevant.
|
| Excluding torrents especially seems like a cop out explicitly
| to get around the issue of "X is the top result when i google
| it" being so common as a torrent. I think you're trying to
| exclude that content as public because then it defines too
| much as public? But torrent vs ftp doesn't feel at all
| relevant when it's just google plus a click or three. Or
| searching on pirate bay plus a single click.
|
| I imagine a judge looking at the copyright status of
| someone's pirate site and saying they can't redistribute the
| content, and the pirate responding "okay we'll take down the
| ftp server and put up a torrent instead, so that it's not
| public. If you google us (or search on pirate bay), the top
| result will stop saying 'X download' and now it'll say 'X
| download torrent'" and expecting the law to be on their side.
|
| I didn't really buy the arguments in section 7 either. The
| usage points seem legitimate, but don't cover redistribution.
|
| > But we will be making the license-compliant subset of the
| Pile public when we are able to and will give it equal
| prominence on our website to the "full" Pile.
|
| This is fantastic and I want to sincerely thank you for that.
|
| I'm trying not to be combative, but I feel like publicly
| redistributing other people's work does raise the bar quite a
| lot higher than just using it to train.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616218
| nl wrote:
| I don't have a dog in this fight, but I think you should
| re-read this: _data which cannot be easily obtained but can
| be obtained, e.g. through a torrent or on the dark web._
|
| It's an extra piece of engineering to reliably scrape
| torrents and the dark web and exclude spam traps. "Easily
| obtained" is probably as much about this vs the copyright
| aspects.
|
| The person you are replying to is correct in saying that
| most people train on the "public web" (eg, common crawl
| data). The copyright implications of this haven't been
| tested in court as yet.
|
| It is worth noting that common-crawl data is widely
| distributed and would seem to raise the same issues you are
| identifying here.
| andyxor wrote:
| that's not an AI
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/MxlnQ
| everdrive wrote:
| People already believe garbage at a pretty alarming rate. It's
| easy to guess at a number of possible outcomes here:
|
| - More junk text moves the public to doubt legitimate information
| even further than they currently do.
|
| - There is so much human-generated junk text that adding more of
| it via AI actually doesn't have much of an effect.
|
| - People return to lean on experts, perhaps even more than
| before. (just as a number of tech-literate folks have now
| returned to relying on brand name.)
|
| Speculation is easy of course, so who knows what will actually
| happen.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > People return to lean on experts
|
| The problem with this is that people look at anybody confirming
| their bias as an expert. I can't tell you how many FB posts
| I've seen where some armchair poster claims that a researcher
| is wrong because of xyz and it's being reposted thousands of
| times.
| burlesona wrote:
| I think we may come to see the era of roughly 1990-2010 as the
| golden age of information: relative abundance creating new
| opportunity, before the noise drowned it all out.
|
| I suspect that in the future people will, ironically, return
| more strictly to tribal knowledge, as the media and the
| internet will be (already is) a vast ocean from which you can
| pull anything you want to believe. Thus nothing you see or hear
| from mass media or the internet can be trusted, there are no
| experts, and you go back to information scarcity as you have to
| rely on your immediate human network for trust. Actually I
| think we're already seeing the return to tribal authority, the
| early waves are already here on Facebook and YouTube... they
| just haven't devolved to strictly local circles of trust yet.
| api wrote:
| Concrete prediction: There will be a global cult similar in
| nature to Qanon driven by an AI spitting out generated bullshit
| within the next ten years.
|
| That's assuming some percentage of Qanon word salad isn't the
| output of Markov chain generators. A lot of it resembles low-
| order statistical text generator output after having been
| trained on a corpus of 1990s Usenet alt.conspiracy and the
| Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| People believe what's believable (even if backed up by
| garbage). GPTs dont make believable stuff, but they can be used
| to flower up some b.s. idea. Nothing that can't be done with a
| few hired trolls, and the proliferation of garbage will
| endanger the troll industry, as people will start becoming
| suspicious. So i doubt its impact can go beyond generating spam
| and noise.
| isolli wrote:
| > just as a number of tech-literate folks have now returned to
| relying on brand name
|
| out of curiosity, what are you referring to?
| everdrive wrote:
| In the early-ish days of the consumer internet, consumers had
| a new and huge information advantage over companies. People
| moved from relying on brand name, to reading online reviews.
| Often finding niche brands which they had otherwise not heard
| of.
|
| Now, in 2021, that experience is flipped on its head. Amazon
| reviews are gamed and cannot be trusted. Companies build
| niche brands like fly-by-night companies, and the lesser
| known brands have a very high chance of being both seriously
| inferior, and also short lived.
|
| At least, this has been my experience, and the experience of
| some others.
|
| [edit]
|
| And as further anecdotal proof that things have come full
| circle, my elderly mother in law keeps getting tricked by
| Amazon purchases. "The reviews were good," she'll say before
| returning something.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I just rely on reviewers like NYT Wirecutter and then buy
| whatever the reviewers suggest (and is cheap) on Amazon.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ElFitz wrote:
| True. But a simple API to generate junk text? It can scale,
| cheaply, beyond measure.
|
| No need for a troll farm, hiring, managing and training tens or
| hundreds of people.
|
| A reasonable amount of cash, a bit of motivation, some moderate
| technical skills, and voila! Anyone can compete with the
| Russian troll farms now and build their own networks of
| hundreds or hundreds of thousands sufficiently credible (as
| humans) fake accounts spewing garbage and patting each other on
| the back via likes, retweets and whatnots.
|
| All with the appropriate fake news blogs and sites happily
| churning out grammatically correct nonsense that makes (enough)
| sense.
|
| Basically, this kid's dream:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-ma...
| jackTheMan wrote:
| But even Russian/Chinese bots can step up as it is much
| easier now to flood forums (like reddit) etc, where e.g. a
| China critic article appears to kill any discussion.
| luckylion wrote:
| I find it easier to identify humans that flood forums
| though. Especially non-native speakers usually are somewhat
| easy to spot, I assume that's true in any language. That's
| different for ML-generated texts. On the other hand, human
| texts are more "on message", but if all you want to do is
| create noise, I guess you don't need to have targeted
| communications.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| > if all you want to do is create noise, I guess you
| don't need to have targeted communications.
|
| This is key in anti-extremist operations on anonymous
| boards. 4chan and other similar sites are absolutely
| nothing like they were a decade ago, I presume because of
| such bots flooding them with noise.
| [deleted]
| ElFitz wrote:
| Oh, definitely. Existing operations also absolutely can
| leverage that in order to amplify their reach and
| capabilities.
| TriNetra wrote:
| And unfortunatley, the web will be forced to move toward
| verified human identities to fight with such junk and
| anonymous browsing will become a thing of the history.
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| There is a market (well, a need at least) for nonsense
| detectors that work similarly to the way ad blockers work.
| Detect internal inconsistencies, non-sequiturs, low information
| density and other similar reasons to avoid reading the text --
| and visibly flag or block that.
|
| That should eliminate 80%+ of existing human generated text
| content and lead to text generators composing useful articles.
| mfDjB wrote:
| It's very nice to see Eleuther fulfill the Open promise of
| OpenAI.
|
| I'm scared that more and more big model advancements are being
| denied access from the general public, which will just make the
| inequality between big corporations and startups even greater.
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