Black Mirror creator unafraid of AI because it’s “boring”
Black Mirror creator unafraid of AI because it’s “boring”
Charlie Brooker doesn’t think AI is taking his job any time soon because it only produces trash
Black Mirror creator unafraid of AI because it’s “boring”::Charlie Brooker doesn’t think AI is taking his job any time soon because it only produces trash
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?
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.
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".
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.
Parlor trick is a perfect description.
People don't get that these things aren't anymore intelligent than their smartphones predicting the next word. The main difference is instead of a couple words it has thousands to choose from.
Half of the trick is how it uses the prompt to decided what words to start with.
LLM's are like an interface to allow computers to talk to humans.
They are a necessary step in order to create general AI, because a general AI that can't generate text wouldn't be able to convey what they learned.
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.
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.
Everyone in these threads likes to talk about being impressed by these llm or not being impressed by them as being some sort of intelligence test. I think of it more as a test of a person's sense of creativity.
It spits out a lot of passable text very easily, but as you're saying here its creativity is essentially nil. Even its "hallucinations" are just versions of things it borrowed from elsewhere injected slightly to wildly out of context in order to satisfy a prompt.
I tried to play a generative AI RPG builder game online and it came up with scenarios so boring I can't imagine playing it for longer than ten minutes.
I also find the same with generated content in other video games. At its best it's passable and that's about it. No man's sky has infinite worlds full of weird ligar creatures and after you've visited a couple dozen worlds they're pretty much all the same.
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
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.
I miss the old Black Mirror…
I'm legit wondering what crack were they smoking in the latest season.
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.
I couldnt even finish this season, it was just so boring
They just ran out of ideas because they used all the good ones in the first seasons.
I just recently started rewatching some of the older episodes and I realized that "Be RIght Back" was inadvertently an LLM episode. Having a computer absorb the online presence of a loved one to allow you to talk with them after they've passed is honestly something that seems within reach for these models.
Fun fact, that's what Replika was originally designed for, before they realized they could make more money marketing it as a therapist and/or erotic roleplay partner.
Bold of him to assume that companies would not just publish the trash - and that people would not watch it anyway.
Yeah as if there already isn't complete trash, presumably it will just be cheaper and easier to produce, so expect more ubiquitous and niche trash!
"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.
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.
“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.
Chatgpt was not open source in the first place
Guess I'm wrong here, some AI went closed source recently?
There are plenty of open source GPTs and they are pretty good. It's only a matter of time
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.
Ever since Netflix took over, it's been a step down in quality
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.
The first two episodes were great in my opinion.
It's hard for AI to beat charlie brooker, it can beat a lot of other people though
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
This. I think the only one I really thought was good was the Aaron Paul one where they went into space... I might be someone neo-ludditish but that movie shows some true terrors of those who want to eradicate technologies and the individuals associated with them. Cold ending...
By far my favorite episode of this season, it felt like a refreshing scifi 50's comic, it felt like reading something new from asimov. The retro-aesthetic was a nice artistic decision to tell us that tech doesn't have to be super advanced to tell a good story. On top of this, they subverted my expectations at least 3 times:
spoiler
First, when the guy who draws sees the wife of aaron, I immediately though the story would be that she cheats on him and they both play mindgames on aaron who eventually looses his family. But no, she does feel something about the other guy but to my surprise, never cheats on aaron
spoiler
When the guy started to paint the house I though that "of course, he paints the wife naked because they have sex, and then aaron discovers this". Indeed it happens, but interestingly, not because the other astronaut had sex with aaron's wife
spoiler
By the end it was veeery clear to me that the other guy will either kill aaron, or trap him in some way to take control of him and live his life. It was obvious to me that the other astronaut was going to eject aaron from the ship an cast him away in space to then report that aaron had gone missing on space. I was extreeemely confident about this in the scene where the door is taking long to be opened, but no. Actually, yes, the other guy fucks aaron, but by killing his family so that he learns to value what he has, I found that quite unexpected and interesting
What I didn't get from the episode was what they were tying to tell with the child, I'm not sure what is that meant to communicate
Lmao black mirror feels like it was written by an AI so quite a statement
Last season was painfully bad
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
I also find the "just look how bad the hands are heh heh heh" thing so dumb .. it's going to learn how to draw hands pretty quickly
The problem atm it's that chat gpt has pretty terrible memory. It couldn't write a coherent show if it wanted to
Most of telly is trash already, if it’s cheap enough for entry then it can saturate the market and there will be no need for the expensive “good” writers
Didn’t he just make an episode of Black Mirror depicting the opposite?
I don't think so. He says he isn't afraid of AI replacing creative jobs because it's incapable of originality and as a result, boring. The episode you're referencing didn't depict the opposite. There was a quantum computer that was only capable of producing a show that recreated data from the protagonist's life in real time. It was always limited by actual events as they played out. That episode seems fairly consistent with his views.
Lololol if ain't that some bullshit 🤣