zebomon

This exactly. I don't understand the argument that seems to be, if it were real intelligence, it would never have to learn anything. It's machine learning, not machine magic.

https://gardnermcintyre.com

I saw him perform 26 times in my life, and still those were rookie numbers. Still I thought there would be so many more too. Thanks for all the music, Bobby Weir.

I've been doing pretty much the same thing since 2019. The only big change I made was in early 2023, when I started saving a new version of the long txt file each day. It works very well for me but I recognize it isn't the right system for everyone!

I won't be providing my full name and email without more information, like at least a peek inside. Interesting legal argument regarding the brand though.

The author's argument seems to be a practical one and two-part: 1) without death, there's nothing to motivate us to live life well and 2) unless we live life well, there's no point in living.

I just disagree with both postulates, and that's fine. The author can go on thinking that life needs to be something specific in order for it to be desirable. I myself like being productive. I also like eating fast food every once in a while. I think I'd be able to go on living (with some happiness to boot) if I never had another productive day or another McD's burger ever again.

Life can be its own end. If we manage to end death by aging, someday there will be children who have never known another world, and they'll marvel at all the death-centric thinking that permeated the societies of their past.

It honestly seemed like pretty sharp marketing to me already when I read about it on AV Club.

I first used Duolingo back in 2018. That was how I started learning French. I majored in Classics in college and had taken Spanish all eight years of middle school and high school, so my vocab progress was very fast. Within that year, I felt like Duolingo had become too slow, and decided to switch my learning over to reading books and watching movies in French.

Earlier this year, I got back on Duolingo because my partner and her brothers were trying it out, so it was more a social thing than anything. I was on it for about a month before we all agreed that the quality was too poor and the pace too slow for it to be worthwhile.

Duolingo is a case study in a good-enough-to-ship product that needed improvements and instead got dark-patterned into something much, much worse than it had been previously. I'm sure there are many superior platforms for language learning online today. I've gone back to books and movies. I'm currently enjoying watching Blaise le blasé (a Quebecois cartoon) and reading Chair de poule (Goosebumps in translation).

I can see that your approach would be effective at shutting down conversation and stopping people from telling you their wild conspiracy theories.

I think that with my experience, I've had to recognize how fragile some of the most important incentives are. Like the safety that underpins trust. To have trust, it needs to be safe for people to be wrong. That means I often have to listen respectfully to views that I find abhorrent, in order to get to the point that I can share my own thoughts fully.

My experience has been very different from the one you're describing.

The person I was talking to is someone who cares deeply for me (and whom I care for deeply too), someone I've known for almost my whole life. He wasn't having fun contradicting me. In fact, it was making him visibly uncomfortable to do so. He was engaging in the conversation in good faith. He just doesn't have the foundation to understand what he doesn't understand. I'm optimistic that even though he came away still disagreeing with me irrationally, there is a chance that by exposing him to a fuller explanation, he'll seek out more information for himself at some point in the future.

It's a combination of never having learned the basics of science and now seeing the falsehoods they've been fed as equivalent to science.

Take the Tylenol thing. You can explain to one of them the scientific method, what a survey of studies is, why correlation often appears when there is no causation, etc. I experienced this last week: at the end of my explanation, the person (a 45-year-old) replied that he "simply disagreed."

The coal, the climate, etc. are all the same. There is a broad sense that because they've been convinced of the value of expanded oil drilling through lines like "Drill baby drill," their current perspective on it is of the same merit as actual scientific research.

I think providers of so-called "answer engines" will read the writing on the wall and find new ways to support content creators in order to keep their databases fresh, relevant, and centered on human perspectives. I also think that to see how the economics will play out, you only need to look at similarly centralized systems like Apple's App Store and Google's AdSense.

Because the providers will act as a single tunnel that all content passes through before reaching the end user, the tolls they collect will be large. So, I don't doubt that there will still be opportunities for content creators to earn money as answer engines siphon off more and more of the web's traffic, but expect those opportunities to be broadly low-paying, falling decidedly in the "side hustle" category.

AI providers will want to incentivize content creation. There will still be a glut of ready providers, and little reason for providers to make anything but small, nominal payments.

I've been using the voice chat in ChatGPT more and more frequently. I'm curious now to see how the costs associated with this would work through the API on some user-facing features. It's a cool update at a glance.

Intriguing analysis. I'll be following along with interest!

This is very interesting. I think a lot of people may be quick to overlook the value of such simulators when thinking about AI agents at the extremes. (Either they're not good enough to trust or they're so good they'll leapfrog over any economic value here.)

My own experience makes me lean toward thinking that the truth is somewhere in the middle in this situation, and that simulators like these will be valuable. I've been experimenting a lot with computer use on my website Bingeclock, passing through different prompts along the lines of "make a movie marathon based on X." The newest agents are consistently impressive, while also being consistently imperfect in surprising and interesting ways.

Whether or not all the labs are already running this kind of thing internally for themselves, you would know better than I. But it's an idea that seems very useful nonetheless. Congratulations on the launch!

I think this attitude is here to stay: people don't like reading something only to realize that it's been written by an LLM. That's only partially because of what the author describes here (low value to word count ratio). More fundamentally, if a human couldn't be bothered to write it, then there better be a very good reason that I as a human am being bothered to read it.

This attitude provides a clue as to 1) the ways we're using LLMs now that will soon seem absurd (an LLM should never make writing longer, only shorter) and 2) the ways LLMs will be used after the novelty wears off, like interpreting loosely specified requests into computable programs and distilling overly long writing to maximize relevance.

Creator here, just seeing this. Thank you very much for the share! I'm reading all the comments now and will make updates to our database accordingly.

Very engaging look at a very difficult topic to approach analytically.

I'm reminded of something I learned about the founder of Stormfront, the internet's first white supremacist forum. His child went on to attend college away from home, her first time away from her family, and over a period of roughly two years, she attended dinners with a group of Jewish students who challenged each of her beliefs one at a time. Each time, as she accepted the evidence her friends presented to her about a particular belief, she nonetheless would integrate the new information with her racist worldview. This continued piece by piece until there was nothing left of her racist worldview at all.

It's both heartening and disheartening at the same time, because if this person can change her mind after almost two decades of constant indoctrination during her formative years, then surely anyone can change their mind. That's the heartening part: the disheartening part is, of course, that the effort it took is far from scalable at present and much more difficult to apply to someone who remains plugged into whatever information sources they are getting their current fix of nonsense from.

Good read. I've been reflecting recently on the idea of demand-side economic growth as something that happens across two variables: consumption and reproduction. Until very recently in history, only the reproduction variable ever moved the big number much at all. It could be that as each of our own energy needs continues to increase, especially as compute-hungry AI proliferates and personalized medicine extends lifespans, it becomes culturally more normal for populations to fall.

Though as others have pointed out, nothing about our society seems to be set up to accommodate that at all, which makes it terrifying.

This is very exciting given the rumor that OpenAI will be launching a (presumably not open source) browser of their own this summer. I've joined your Discord, so will try it soon and report back there. Congrats on launching!

I researched and built this over the holiday weekend. It's an (attempt at an) exhaustive guide to the technologies Star Trek suggested and the researchers, scientists, and builders who are making them reality. Ad astra per aspera!

I would greatly appreciate any feedback general or specific. Thanks for looking!

This is impressive. The video chat works well. It is just a hair away from a very comfortable conversation. I'm excited to see where you have it a year from now, if it turns out to be financially viable. Good luck!

I agree!

It certainly would be! I think for many students though, there's something lost there. I was a student who got a lot more value out of my take-home work than I did out of my in-class work. I don't think that I ever would have taken the interest in writing that I did if it wasn't such a solitary, meditative thing for me.

It may be possible that with enough data from the two categories (copied from ChatGPT and not), your keystroke dynamics will differ. This is an open question that my co-founder and I are running experiments on currently.

So, I would say that while I wouldn't fully dispute your claim that attributing authorship from text alone is impossible, it isn't yet totally clear one way or the other (to us, at least -- would welcome any outside research).

Long-term -- and that's long-term in AI years ;) -- gaze tracking and other biometric tracking will undoubtedly be necessary. At some point in the near future, many people will be wearing agents inside earbuds that are not obvious to the people around them. That will add another layer of complexity that we're aware of. Fundamentally, it's more about creating evidence than creating proof.

We want to give writers and students the means to create something more detailed than they would get from a chatbot out-of-the-box, so that mimicking the whole act of writing becomes more complicated.

Kindly read past the first line, friend :)

The writing is irrelevant. Who cares if students don't learn how to do it? Or if the magazines are all mostly generated a decade from now? All of that labor spent on writing wasn't really making economic sense.

The problem with that take is this: it was never about the act of writing. What we lose, if we cut humans out of the equation, is writing as a proxy for what actually matters, which is thinking.

You'll soon notice the downsides of not-thinking (at scale!) if you have a generation of students who weren't taught to exercise their thinking by writing.

I hope that more people come around to this way of seeing things. It seems like a problem that will be much easier to mitigate than to fix after the fact.

A little self-promo: I'm building a tool to help students and writers create proof that they have written something the good ol fashioned way. Check it out at https://itypedmypaper.com and let me know what you think!

I'm expanding my website Bingeclock (online since 2014) into mobile. Both the iOS and Android apps were approved for open testing last week, so I'm very happy about that!

https://www.bingeclock.com/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bingeclock...

https://testflight.apple.com/join/YtfK4enW

Working as a freelance writer on Fiverr for the last ten years, I would receive daily inquiries from students asking me to write their papers. I always turned them down. It was explicitly against Fiverr's rules, and I wasn't going to help them cheat anyway. I often wondered whether or not they ended up finding someone else to do it for them. Those inquiries don't find their way into my inbox anymore, so I guess I have my answer.

A little self-promotion here. I'm building a tool to help combat this issue. If you're a teacher, I'd love to talk to you about it. Give it a look: https://itypedmypaper.com

Thank you! I remember having a great time putting that one together!