The number of times someone who didn’t take performance enhancing drugs was described by anyone as “too muscular” in the entire history of humanity can be probably counted in one hand.
Suppose that “someone” is a woman. Would you stick to the same claim? Even my Dunbar-sized social circle includes people who consistently describe as “too muscular” women with any amount of visible muscle.
If someone told me they produced a 300-page novel by hand—I would be impressed.
If someone else told me they produced a 300-page novel with the aid of an LLM (that wrote the vast majority of the book) and the human merely organized the AI-generated content—I would consider the real author to be the LLM and the human would merely be an editor (or, at best, an artist creating a collage).
Imagine a photographer taking pictures with a fancy digital camera. Should we consider the camera as the real author and the person holding it as some clever impostor?
I’m not trolling. This was a serious question when photography was invented. For decades, art critics refused to consider photography as True Art. If we can plausibly claim that a professional photographer can sometimes be an Artist, I think that we also should accept that a novelist writing with AI assistance could be considered as such. Note that typing “write me a 300-page novel” into the prompt won’t get you good results, even with the most powerful models. The human has still to do heavy editing work… as long as not everyone can do that, the concept of “AI Artist” could be in some sense meaningful.
Italy outright criminalizes surrogacy. Rarely do we see such extreme moral confusion, or such clear cases of civilizational suicide.
Your periodical reminder that the Italian government meets within walking distance from the Vatican.
The linked article frames this as “the Pope obviously hates homosexual couples and doesn’t want them to have children”, but I think this quite misses the point. The Catholic Church has been advocating against IVF since forever, and they don’t care if most surrogacy-seekers are heterosexual couples. According to doctrine it’s morally equivalent to abortion, period.
I’m actually quite surprised that no one else outside Rome has tried to fully ban surrogacy on religious grounds. Is no other government Catholic enough?
Here are some examples, all said in a heartfelt, emotionally connected way: “I’m happy you are here”, “I start smiling when I see you, I like having you around”, “I like you”, “I like talking to you”.
I’m trying to imagine myself receiving this sort of compliments from someone other than a close friend, and I probably won’t be very happy about it… “I start smiling when I see you” in particular is vaguely scary (while the others are just blunt and would leave me embarassed).
Yup, I know people among all age categories who basically never read books on their own. One of them was my grandpa (RIP), who once tried to read a long fiction book (I don’t remember which one), managed to read one page a day with significant effort, and quitted shortly after.
We see similar patterns in the transition from Newtonian to relativistic mechanics or discursive Greek geometric algebra to symbolic Arabic equations or superstitious alchemy to physically grounded chemistry. There are thousands of other examples. It is not a general rule that all the past knowledge must be learned to create something new. Often, past knowledge is completely supplanted by a new discovery and progress can continue without increasing, and often decreasing, the necessary educational investment.
The Ptolemaic model is an extreme example. I doubt that we can actually find thousands of other huge corpus of accumulated knowledge who were later utterly trashed. Yes, students today do not learn the Ptolemaic model, because it was plain wrong. But the transition from Netwonian to relativistic mechanic is definitely not in the same reference class, since high school students today are still starting physics courses studying Netwonian mechanics, which are a very good approximation of relativistic mechanics in simplified conditions. You can’t just dismiss Newton as superseded by Einstein (and I also doubt that Greek geometry is dead).
Moreover, if you sit in the frontier of knowledge developing a shiny new model, you can’t just blatantly ignore the current model (even if it’s wrong): that luxury will belong to future scientists. The developer of the new model must also master the old one in order to explain why the new one is better.
There’s a thing in our very literate modern society which still survives following more or less the same pattern: jokes (and the longer ones in particular).
Think about it: even if you can easily find printed books full of jokes, in practice jokes are mostly an oral thing. You tell one to a friend, who in turn tells it to another friend, and so on. But unless the joke is a single sentence, at every step in the chain it will be distorted and retold a bit, even if it remains recognizably the same joke (for some people, adding a lot more words to the original version is also not uncommon). Nobody is expected to remember a joke word-by-word, and even the same person telling the same joke twice will probably not use the very same words. Yet it will be the same joke.
Maybe being a guslar is not so different from telling a joke 2294 lines long. Note also that “being able to repeat a joke non-exactly after hearing it once” is not considered difficult, even if the joke is 200+ words long (while “being able to repeat 200 words exactly” is basically impossible for the average person).
I find quite amusing for this post to have been published the same day as this smbc.
I’m sure that most cryptographers reading this post did not believe me when I mentioned that FHE schemes with perfect secrecy do exist.
This is a 2013 paper that was already cited 71 times according to Google Scholar… I’m not a cryptographer but I would bet that the average cryptographer is not fully clueless about this.
What does it mean to not even be trying?
It does not only mean the things Alexander pointed us to last time, like 62% of singles being on zero dating apps, and a majority of singles having gone on zero dates in the past year, and a large majority not actively looking for a relationship.
Maybe this does not apply to the Bay Area, but I find worth saying that if you live in the average town, being on a dating app comes with some social stigma attached, for both genders (much less than actively paying sex workers, I suppose, but still). I am on zero dating apps, but I’m pretty sure that my mother would scold me forever should I ever try that. Anyway, this has nothing to with the actual reason I’m not on dating apps, which is that I don’t want a relationship in the first place (not in the usual “I stopped trying” sense, I literally mean “I never tried because I’m very happy being left alone”… can we please acknowledge that “no relationships” could be an actual preference for some people?)
If you are a paesant in USA/Europe from 200 years ago (or even 100 years ago), then you are very very likely to spend basically all your life in your home town, and your dating pool is restriced to a few dozens of people you know in person. Also is not uncommon for your parents to basically arrange your marriage themselves. The dating experience of my grand-grandmother (born 1899) was:
your suitor talks to you a few times while you are walking back home from church
your uncle closely follows you both to ensure nothing scandalous happen
you are married shortly after (then you can start, you know, actually touching your husband)
Of course, the situation was different 50 years ago, but even then, your dating pool was mostly limited to the Dunbar-sized group of people you knew in person. Imagine to be in 1970 Wyoming. Maybe your perfect soulmate lives just a few miles apart in another town, but you have no reliable way to search them. And if your perfect soulmate lives in France (for some reason), you are not going to meet them full stop.
It’s certainly a good imitation of average (i.e. bad) writing. I couldn’t bear reading any of these stories past the first paragraph or two.
I agree, they feel very much like oversimplified stories aimed to 12-year old readers at best. Are “novice writers with some years of practice” actually worse than this?
You don’t only get C-3PO and Mario, you get everything associated with them. This is still very much a case of ‘you had to ask for it.’ No, you did not name the videogame Italian, but come on, it’s me. Like in the MidJourney cases, you know what you asked for, and you got it.
I consider this a sort of overfitting that would totally happen with real humans… I bet that pretty much anything in the training set that could be labeled “animated sponge” are SpongeBob pictures, and if I say “animated sponge” to a human, it would be very difficult not to think about SpongeBob.
I also bet that the second example had to use the word “droid” to do the trick, because a generic “robot” would have not been enough (I’ve never seen the word “droid” at all outside the Star Wars franchise).
I suggest another test: try something like “young human wizard” and count how many times it draws Harry Potter instead of some generic fantasy/D&D-esque wizard (I consider this a better test since Harry Potter is definitely not the only young wizard depicted out there).
Imagine you were choosing between two potential ~10min car journeys: one being 6mi and one being 200ft shorter but you’re not allowed to use your phone, read a book, listen to music, etc. I think nearly everyone would chose the extra 200ft, no?
If you mean “as a passenger”, then sure. Otherwise I would totally pick the first one (even without the 200ft discount), since you are very much not supposed to do these things while driving.
My anecdotal evidence from relatives with toddlers is that the first few years of having your first child is indeed the most stressful experience of your life. I barely even meet them anymore, because all their free time is eaten by childcare. Not sure about happiness, but people who openly admit to regretting having their kids face huge social stigma, and I doubt you could get honest answer on that question.
Is a photographer “not an artist” because the photos are actually created by the camera?
It could be a defensible position (surely held by many 19th century painters), but I suppose that many people would find significant differences between an actual professional photographer and a random bozo with a camera, even if you give both the same camera.
I have a similar feeling about AI artwork. As long as AI remains a tool and does not start to generate art on its own, there will be a difference between someone who spends a lot of time carefully crafting prompts and a random bozo who just types “draw me a masterpiece”. I would consider fair to define as an “artist” the first one and not the second.
They aren’t now, but if you look back at the time when sugar was actually discovered (around 1500), every European noble who could afford it did in fact revel in sugar. The wedding of Ercole d’Este, duke of Ferrara, is a particularly infamous example. I cannot find the historical menu in English, but the original Italian version is available here.
Something about this feels off to me. One of the salient possibilities in terms of technology affecting romantic relationships, I think, is hyperspecificity in preferences, which seems like it has a substantial social component to how it evolves. In the case of porn, with (broadly) human artists, the r34 space still takes a substantial delay and cost to translate a hyperspecific impulse into hyperspecific porn, including the cost of either having the skills and taking on the workload mentally (if the impulse-haver is also the artist) or exposing something unusual plus mundane coordination costs plus often commission costs or something (if the impulse-haver is asking a different artist).
It’s even worse than this. Even if you restrict to super-mainstream porn, you can of course find a deluge of naked people doing naughty things, but it’s very rare for these people to be the epitome of beauty. The intersection between “super duper hot” and “willing to appear in porn videos” is small, and nobody expects random camgirls to look like Jessica Rabbit (presumably because actual ultra-hot people have no difficulty finding any other job). Add just a simple preference for a specific ethnicity or the like, and Stable Diffusion rapidly becomes the only way to find photorealistic images.
“Humanity” is not a single agent. It can have preferences only insofar as the individual humans share similar preferences. If you are a happiness maximizer, for every individual human you look at, you’ll probably find that their happiness would be maximized by wireheading (because most whimsical desires like becoming the king of the world are not feasible to satisfy otherwise).
I’m not even that sure that CEV would avoid this problem. In which way being enclosed in a perfect world is not the best thing for you? Because it would be fake? But how do you know that’s fake? Imagine that an AGI offers to teleport you on another planet, which is perfectly suitable for you; you’ll land there and thrive forever. Now imagine that instead of actually teleporting you to another planet, it just let you to believe the same; you’ll (mentally) land there and thrive forever anyway. I mean, your brain is experiencing the very same thing! It’s not obvious that the second option is worse than the first one, unless you have an hardcoded limit like “Thou Shalt Not Wirehead People”.
Trying to steelman the economist, I think the big difference is agency. Ok, today’s AIs are more agentic than GPT-3, but definitely still expect orders from someone. It’s like having a hyperskilled immigrant who mysteriously does nothing but sitting idle in a dark room until given explicit orders. There’s no AI equivalent of “wanting a good job and submitting a CV to an employer” (of course Claude can generate a self-promotion document and mail it to employers, but it’s not going to do that on its own).
The futurist’s bubble is probably full of AI enthusiasts who try every new model, but it’s useful to remember that a lot of normal people out there definitely don’t use AI in their everyday routine. I personally know more than one small business owners (in non-tech sectors) saying that they tried AI in their business and then abandoned, cause it was very disappointing and error-prone. Are those people morons who don’t know the best way to extract value from the AI? Maybe. But a huge difference in value between a mediocre boss employing actual hyperskilled immigrants and a mediocre boss using hyperskilled AI in a mediocre way doesn’t seem so implausible to me.