I find myself not agreeing with a lot of nitpicks, but this is a good one! The article says "Contrary to what Stephen Hawking argued, black holes are not inescapable prisons." But information escaping black holes is named after him! He definitely, in the full scope of his career, was perfectly agreeable to the idea of information escaping black holes.
Hawking found that energy/mass can escape but the information remains destroyed. You can't run a black hole backwards in time and reconstruct the matter that created it and hawking radiation bears no resemblance to anything that was ever beyond the horizon.
I know what you mean and I think you're right, but I take it as the cost of doing business when trying to turn frontier physics into layperson analogies. You're not going to use an analogy to successfully complete a calculation of black hole entropy, you're going to use it to convey the high level intuition that "stuff on inside = stuff on boundary".
Because if we litigate the imperfections of analogies all day long, then you're going to react to videos titled "black holes described at five levels of difficulty" by saying the first four levels were all wrong, which may in a sense be technically true but not in the spirit of the exercise.
It's okay as long as they call it out, but the author doesn't and instead states it like a fact. They could have easily caveated it with "but a magical camera that can see magnetic and gravitational fields" or something. The analogy is fine, but it's not presented as one, so it's not clear how far the analogy actually goes. So the takeaway is "wow technically it's possible!"
As a non expert who's just curious about science but also tries to talk like a normal person, from what I can tell holography really seems like it's now the leading candidate to be the next big conceptual revolution in physics.
There's not necessarily any breakthrough right around the corner and we shouldn't rush to coronation preemptively, but there's a lot of physics "voting with their feet" for holography as the article says, and I think it's officially time to start getting hyped. It could have sanity-restoring answers to questions of quantum weirdness, albeit at the rather expensive cost of giving up even more on our day to day intuitions about space and time in favor of an apparently informational substrate.
String theory had a generation of great science communicators writing its books and singing its praises, but holography doesn't yet have equivalent public champions, and I hope that's something that changes sooner than later.
> String theory had a generation of great science communicators writing its books and singing its praises...
I would argue that has done more harm than good. Strong media personalities shouting "the next big breakthrough is here!" followed by 25 years of zero practical results have not done good things for public perception of field of physics. A layperson could be mistaken for assuming the field is literally regressing.
I don't think the distinction between holography and string theory is as clean as you're making it. The vague idea of holography predates string theory, but most of the working examples we have of holography come from string theory. That's what AdS/CFT is: It's an explicitly holographic description of superstring theory in an anti-Desitter space. It's frankly bizarre that the author of this article doesn't mention that fact. I suspect we are seeing a popular science rebranding of string theory without the word strings.
I didn't intend to assert a clean distinction, you're exactly right about its connection to string theory. What I mean is that String Theory Writ Large enjoyed a lot of popular esteem in the 00s and 2010s in public communication as being our potential new framework for what lies beneath the quantum world, but string theory is huge in and of itself.
It's more a difference of emphasis (holography in particular) than something that's outside the scope of string theory.
Well the reason I couldn't tell if you were aware is because they aren't synonyms and your comment is perfectly reasonable, but I picked up an (incorrect, it seems) vibe that you thought they were unrelated. Which, they kind of are! It's a fairly interesting story how it came about as a property of string theory but appears to be leaving it behind.
No string theory (10d) or m theory (11d) map to lower dimensions (eg 4d) via (generalisation of) Kaluza Klein compactification. Vector boson (eg maxwell or Yang mills) are internal degree la of freedom-> 6/7d graviton becomes a photon/ gluon.
There’s holography in string theory: AdS/CFT but this rather maps 4d super Yang mills (on the boundary of AdS5) in an AdS5xS5 background: which is one holography correspondence we know works.
Holography is much more common, but we only really understand it on hyperbolic spaces.
Also since it has a theory at strong coupling on one side we cannot really do calculation on that side and verify it.
Many concepts can be framed as projections onto lower dimensions. It’s the specific ways in which things are projected that makes things string theory. IOW don’t mistake the concept of a map for the territory that one type of map describes.
I honestly don't think that people's self reports of whether they have an internal monologue are super reliable. They can mean different things by it or be psychologically attached to a particular representation of their thought processes, it can be related to self concept or self esteem or personal perspective in ways that are hard to tease out.
I think something like this proved to be true when it came to folk theories of different learning styles (e.g. visual vs language based) once those started being tested in rigouros ways. People could still be right but I would be interested to see what we get if we test more directly for subvocalization or fmris for language based brain activity.
I think it's perfectly clear. It means improvements shouldn't simply advance as fast as possible and more specifically, it's a reference to a past statement of theirs to that effect. At that level of generality it's as clear as it needs to be.
I would say the burden is on you to explain why an offhand reference to a previous press release in an executive summary is a context where it's reasonable to expect it to settle the question to the degree of detail you're demanding.
That’s no more than sophisticated avoidance. The phrase remains superficial and arbitrary, which is exactly what it needs to Not be in a public discussion that it’s supposed to support. It’s a reinforcement of the blank check mentality that permeates this industry.
It's not sophisticated anything, and slow down the advancement of fastest models is perfectly meaningful and it's the right degree of detail for the context.
It's just a passing reference to a previous statement and again the burden would be on you (generic you) to explain why this context requires more detail.
>Have you considered the institutional knowledge could actually be actively preserved and distributed with AI?
Well that's what this whole debate comes down to. And, to my mind at least, it's a rare case of an actually interesting question about AI, because like the article says, it can plausibly deteriorate exactly that kind of knowledge. But as you note, it can also maintain it.
I think there's a sense in which it might do both at the same time. AI's version of on call tacit knowledge might be something like lazy-loading just-in-time tacit knowledge, but at the cost of who knows what cognitive paths we might have by keeping that knowledge resting in-house. We would gain real efficiency but we wouldn't know we wouldn't know.
>The kind of tacit knowledge that is situated and not readily preserved in a book might be absorbed by thinking machines and proliferated to the next person who needs it. The caveats would be trade secrets, skill differentiators, that people might not be willing to discuss, and manufacturing secrets of national importance. Maybe you can think of others.
It's funny that you credit AI with this (and I don't disagree), because tacit knowledge was exactly the thing Hubert Dreyfus spent a career insisting computers would never have, and his wisdom was taught to generations of undergraduates across the country and world who treated it as received wisdom and still is regarded as such in certain academic corners.
> I think there's a sense in which it might do both at the same time.
This is probably true.
Many artisan fabric techniques were lost when industrial looms displaced those jobs. But heavy industry enabled cloth to be manufactured at a rate that people were free to spend their time and money on other priorities - and now (centuries later) the society is in a sufficiently advanced stage of development that the old techniques are being rediscovered.
Perhaps the example underscores the importance of thoughtful preservation of insitutional knowledge.
I edited that sentence to try and clarify a bit, but Dreyfus was a continental philosopher out of Berkley active basically from the 1950s to the 2010s. He engaged in decades of friendly debates with other philosophers about the limits of computers.
When he described those limits, he always frustrated computer scientists and analytic philosophers because he spoke in a kind of informal philosophical vocabulary and didn't really formalize his ideas. So he would say computers didn't have things like "tacit knowledge" or "insight" and he railed against "symbol manipulation". Famously he declared chess would never surpass human expert play. He wrote a book called "What Computers Can't Do" and another called "What Computer's Still Can't Do".
I personally think his argument was laughably wrong if well intentioned. But some people think it was respectable. I think in the present day, he's often rehabilitated with a kind of apologetic reinterpretation, such that things like transformers, weights, vectors, etc were what he really meant all along.
I think he was not wrong that some higher layer of sophistication would prove to be necessary, but he was wrong, I think definitively, to think that "symbol manipulation" of computers was a kind of category error. Even today's best models are still running on logic gates over 1's and 0's, and it was his failure of imagination to doubt that those could be the conceptual bedrock for AI, tacit knowledge and all.
He passed away in 2017, which is too bad because I would have loved to have seen his interpretation of things like GPT-6 Astra.
> think that "symbol manipulation" of computers was a kind of category error
This is where we do drift off into the semantic bog. If there is tacit knowledge in an LLM, then where is it? It must be in the weights, and it must have somehow come from the training data. Therefore the weights represent "compressed" knowledge. Is that then not "tacit" since it's explicitly encoded?
You'll get no disagreement from me here. But be ready because some people live to debate this, and Dreyfus is the poster child for a whole philosophical tradition.
I think what it comes down to, is trying to turn the specialness of human intelligence into undefinable magic, essentially playing god of the gaps with the concept of human insight. So by design, it has to be something that can't be amenable to any formal representation like weights.
> Famously he declared chess would never surpass human expert play. He wrote a book called "What Computers Can't Do" and another called "What Computer's Still Can't Do".
He never made such a claim. In the introduction to the 1972 print of this book he discusses the forecasts from Turing to his time of computers' abilities to play chess and the then state of the art. He criticizes the early optimism in 1950s mentioning that in 1957 H. Simon though in 10 years computers would excel in chess.
Dreyfus goes on to discuss the history of forecasts and progress in computer chess in a nuanced and highly informative analysis.
Whatever your opinion of his work I don't think it's fair to say his arguments are "laughably wrong" at any turn. I haven't read his books in detail but from what I know he made great contributions to the dialogue about technology and I don't know any instance of his making crass predictions or anything that he wrote that could be labelled "laughable".
Dreyfus certainly claims he was mischaracterized, but what he "really" said always turns out to be a conveniently moving target.
He thought that the complexity of chess rendered it solvable in principle but "uncomputable" in practice. You're right that he was speaking to the times he was familiar with, and what he meant by "impossible in practice" was something like letting a 1Mhz computer explore all the possible chess moves from now until the heat death of the universe. Relying on that to insist that computers defeating humans in his lifetime was consistent with what he envisioned stretches past charitability and into sophistry.
And I don't think you can extend him that charity without doing the same in the other direction, which would also collapse his basic thesis. Dreyfus was disproportionately preoccupied with retelling the failures of the 1950s over and over again using them to represent the whole of computing while the world moved on, and extending the same charitable repairs in favor of AI research make it something less easily caricatured, and still based on the same logic gates and 0s and 1s he was criticizing.
If that's not enough, Dreyfus explicitly said that what was lacking in chess programs was (1) any practical ability to do the brute forcing needed, (2) any kind of nim-style logical shortcuts around brute forcing or (3) any kind of expert level heuristics because he categorically believed those simply weren't programmable. And he believed that those exhausted the options. [1]
There's no version of this that can be correct because even if you think he's right that chess engines got better by progressing to some different conceptual paradigm, that paradigm is still embodied in same logic gates and 1's and 0's that he thought only pertained to prior paradigms he was criticizing. He was wrong to assume such things as "heuristics" were outside of that scope.
>The institutional expertise started to deteriorate, to the point that America simply didn't even have the capacity, or expertise anymore to produce stuff
Right. And the spin I would put on your point: while the U.S. could never compete with outsourced labor, institutional manufacturing expertise could (you would think) still be valuable to startups finding some kind of niche in the manufacturing space.
With all this new 3D printing infrastructure, and constantly improving robotics, maybe some manufacturing efficiencies in some spaces could emerge that compete on cost and outcompete the cost of shipping stuff across an ocean. The availability of institutional expertise could be one of the necessary ingredients for mixing and matching the way to a new efficiency.
Yeah it's bleak in terms of automating away labor, but I'd like to think robotics is the next automated frontier after LLMs and we want to get there first.
I see what you mean, but I think you can draw (no pun intended) a distinction between trope following and having a skill, or at least should notionally be able to.
There's an amazing viral twitter thread where someone claimed a real Monet painting was an AI generated imitation, and it got an avalanche of comments from people who claimed it was an obvious fake and a poor imitation at that.
It's not tracking a real thing as much as people would like to think.
This is exactly the problem. Most of the time when people criticise the output of genAI, what they’re actually commenting on is the ethics of AI rather than the output of it. And they then attempt to use the demonstration as a proof of their point rather than forming an unbiased opinion of the output based on its own merit.
Now I’m not saying there isn’t legitimate criticisms that can be made about the ethics of AI, I’m highly concerned about the problems that AI brings too. But that’s a separate argument entirely.
It’s a little like people who are pompous about expensive wine, whisky’s, etc and then fail blind taste tests (plenty of studies there too).
I've generally been very impressed with genAI artwork in "impressionist" styles. But thinking about how the diffusion models work, that seems like exactly what you'd expect them to be good at. Things that call for perfectly straight lines and constrained patterns (and explicitly symbolic elements, like text) seem to be considerably harder but apparently very doable now.
There is still obvious genAI slop being put out there all the time, and you can tell it's genAI slop because it's slop: even doing something at that level by hand would be more time and effort than anyone would bother putting in unless it's paid work that then justifies getting it right and doing it professionally. But now that the sloption exists, there's a flood of people taking it.
Prose, on the other hand, is another story. It became possible to produce "grammatically correct, academic-sounding and generally using words to mean what they actually mean" very quickly, but years later it's still rarely if ever good, it just goes through varying different quirks. Maybe part of this is that the training data can't properly reflect what the target audience was for various pieces of text. A lot of it, surely, is that many people are easily impressed by "grammatically correct, academic-sounding and generally using words to mean what they actually mean", and don't themselves have much of a sense for actually good writing.
In my world view, the phrase "People are stupid" explains almost everything. Very few people are actually able to think for themselves. The vast majority are basically just sheep, they think whatever the media, their colleagues, friends etc tell them to think. They don't fact check, they don't think critically, they can't understand a well reasoned argument, they basically just believe things based on how much they like whoever said it. They won't accept evidence that disproves those beliefs.
They don't care about the truth, it's all just about being part of the right herd.
The problem with this mindset is that it isn’t very useful or actionable, regardless of how true it is.
Maybe try differentiating a bit? You could see if there certain scenarios that leave room for a better outcome for both you and a less intelligent person. You might even learn something interesting.
Right now, I’d say you are painting with an overly broad brush.
P.S. Have you done any soul searching to see if this is largely a comforting thought that helps assuage the frustrations of dealing with the BS of life? If you are open to the idea, might be valuable.
Yeah, it's not actionable. I can't fix the fact that most people are stupid. But it does provide some minor amount of comfort. It explains why the world is as it is. It explains why the most powerful nation in the world is currently lead by the world's biggest fucking clown. It explains why we can't deal with climate change - the people who make money from it simply use their puppet media to tell all the idiots what they want them to think, and here we are.
It explains why religion is so prevalent - anyone with any amount of critical thinking ability can see that religion is a bunch of bullshit. Yet most people in the world are religious, because all it takes is someone with a little authority to tell people something and they'll just believe it and that's that, you can't reason them out of it because they didn't reason themselves into it. They were just born into this herd and that's where they intend to stay.
It explains why big "green" organizations are and have been against nuclear energy - even though nuclear energy has been the obvious answer to climate change the people who want the world to take climate change seriously have been against nuclear, despite the fact that nuclear was the obvious answer to climate change. They simply don't/didn't know that nuclear was clean energy, and they never took a few minutes to learn some stuff to realize that in fact nuclear energy is clean energy. Obviously it doesn't solve the entire problem but it would have been a huge improvement over all the coal we've been burning. But they didn't know, because they're a bunch of idiots who don't know anything about anything, they just parrot whatever they've been told and that's that and here we are.
And that's the explanation for everything. Politics is just a popularity contest. Whoever says the shit the hordes of sheep have been conditioned to want to hear, get elected. If you grab a random person off the street they most likely couldn't even tell you how bracket tax works but you can be sure as shit they'd have strong opinions about taxes. And those opinions will most likely be straight up factually wrong, based on an incorrect view of how taxes work.
Everyone's just wrong about everything, nobody knows anything about anything. A few people have a decent understanding of how things work but nobody listens.
And again yeah, it's not actionable. There's nothing to be done about this, it's just the way it is. I can't stop the entire human population from being a bunch of religious cultist morons. That's just what they are. But at least knowing that and accepting it helps me keep my sanity in a world where everyone makes the wrong decisions at every turn and everything is clearly going to shit while everyone's acting like everything's fine. Except of course all the inconsequential bullshit the sheep bicker about like immigration and taxes windmills and data centers and whatever else the media has them bickering about to distract them from the shit that actually matters.
> Yet most people in the world are religious, because all it takes is someone with a little authority to tell people something and they'll just believe it and that's that, you can't reason them out of it because they didn't reason themselves into it.
Yeah, we simply should not forget that there is very different types of religions. Some religions, for example has it main belief that climate change is a big problem for the Earth and Humanity.
> It explains why big "green" organizations are and have been against nuclear energy - even though nuclear energy has been the obvious answer to climate change
Exactly. I mean my model explain that, not yours. Like in any other religion generally churches exists not to solve the MAIN PROBLEM, even if the religion says otherwise. Because churches are hierarchical structures, and on the top will end up pretty SMART people, who mainly focus on solving their personal problems, and not the MAIN PROBLEM of their religion. Often they even does not believe in existence of the problem at all.
> Whoever says the shit the hordes of sheep have been conditioned to want to hear, get elected.
I don't know. If we look at the elections of the "world's biggest fucking clown", it was more describing of his opponents. But he still got elected, twice.
Such a world view will justify any belief, because the internet will give you ample supply of the dumbest, most ill-considered opposition to any belief you hold.
Doesn't guarantee there isn't a steel version of their straw out there that you're deliberately ignoring.
If I had seen the steel version I would have considered it. But all I see is strawmen, as far as the eye can see. An ocean of strawmen, with a few steel islands here and there.
Nobody has time to fact check every single fact we need to act on.
Have you read every single study about the last vaccine you took and what the positives and negatives are and where potential problems are and so on? Of course not, we trust that the experts have done enough. Same with learning physics or driving over a bridge and so many other things.
Yeah, exactly. But many people vehemently believe vaccines are dangerous and so on. Similarly, a common talking point right now are data centers and their power and water usage. Just yesterday I was told that AI data centers pollute more than anything else. Yet when I took 10 seconds to Google it I found that data centers represented about 0,5% of power consumption and I know that electricity in general is less than half of all pollution so clearly data centers don't pollute that much. But people will parrot these types of "facts" without even taking 10 seconds to double check.
Yeah, it is extremely sad. It's why we're currently in the process of going extinct. We, as a species, know what we should be doing. But what we should be doing is not what we are doing, because what we are doing depends on the popularity contest that is politics, and politics has absolutely nothing to do with what we know we should be doing.
> Yeah, it is extremely sad. It's why we're currently in the process of going extinct.
We're not going extinct, LOL. We're more resilient than cockroaches. As a species we will survive nuclear apocalypse, climate changes short of turning the planet into Venus and even the collapsing fertility rate.
I don't think this is true. There are people who claim everything is AI – maybe even to bolster their ego.
But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well. One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity. When I read posts submitted to HN I often realize that something is bad writing before I can specify this to AI text. Pangram almost always agrees with me. Here is a recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49715657
I don't doubt that there are certain scoped tasks that certain models are quite good at. But in my every day life I constantly encounter AI slop that is so bad that I take it as a personal insult that someone thought it would be okay to subject me to it; to presume that I am so tasteless and numb and have no quality standard whatsoever.
I mean just look at the example posters at the beginning of the article. "The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad." Yes, yes it is. They are horrible. I cannot understand how anyone can describe them as anything but that.
> But for a lot of things I can with high probability discern between AI and human in every day appearance and I know many other people can as well.
It’s easy to say that when you already know the answer. But my point is people frequently misattribute stuff as being AI generated when it wasn’t. The GPs Twitter example is proof of this. And you only have to look at the number of times people accuse someone of being AI on HN because they happen to use em dash or an Oxford comma (or any other writing style that was part of the corpus models were trained on), and it’s pretty clear that “obvious tells” are just guesswork.
There was a study years ago where a group of individuals were given white wine with red food colouring, and they were asked to describe the wine. All the participants described plumb and other notes that are exclusive to red wines.
These weren’t dumb people. And the people who claim to spot “obvious AI” aren’t dumb either. It’s just very easy to identify tells if you believe you already know the answer. Unfortunately that’s just how fucked up our human psychology is.
> One of the things I look for is specifically certain types of extreme... not just flaws... just overall atrocity.
So, please forgive me, but this means that you are good at finding out some patterns in AI output. There are always a lot of false positive and negatives, and I haven’t found a convincing study showing that people are good at finding AI in general.
What helps is that the market is very concentrated so if you know GPT-isms and Claude-isms that’s basically the current situation covered. It does not mean that you can reliably identify AI in general.
How do you know you can discern AI vs human with high probability? You need some external source of truth to judge that, otherwise all you know is that you can discern bad, obvious AI. See also https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toupee_fallacy
I’d expect false positives to be low. Bad AI has a distinctive style and is easy to pick up on. Just like bad toupees are easily recognized. The false negative rate would be far more interesting.
The false negative rate would be interesting but is irrelevant in this context. I was replying to a comment claiming that most people take issue with the ethics of GenAI rather than the quality and that people have a high false positive rate. I raise myself and my experience with people I know as a counter example.
There might be AI generated things in my every day life that I do not recognize as AI, but that's not what's being discussed.
It's not irrelevant in the context, you're just saying it doesn't interest you. Just because you chose to focus on one side of it, doesn't change the fact that you replied to a broader question of "How do you know you can discern AI vs human with high probability?"
And even if you had been right that the entire thread's context had been limited to just caring about false positives and not false negatives, it still wouldn't have been a problem for wat10000 to expand the discussion by talking about false negatives, too... they don't have a duty to only reply about the parts of a subject you chose to care about!
You could either just ignore the comment, or reply explaining why that side doesn't matter to you without trying to shut them down as if they did something wrong :)
Edit: Since you've mentioned Pangram a few times in other comments, FYI a lot of people (myself included) believe Pangram's accuracy & consistency to be bad enough that it shouldn't ever be treated as more than a gimmick.
How did you check? What was your oracle when you thought something was AI and when you did not?
I mean, this situation is a textbook case of ground for a lot of common fallacies, starting with confirmation bias. We need to remember that our brain wants to be tricked. If you think you are special, you are not. You’re just not aware of it and even more prone to falling into these traps.
They are pretty shit, but the main problem is that they are the generic style of the model. So that’s what everyone gets by default. If they were a one off they’d still be bad, but at least unique.
Yes, I think this is exactly right. The labelling of a thing as “AI Generated” or “AI Assisted” makes the viewer perceive it as worse in quality. And they really do think it’s worse.
It’s similar to a well known finding about price: people value things that are more expensive more, and tend to think they are of higher quality. You can give people the same thing for a high price or for free and they’ll say the high priced one is amazing the free one is lacklustre.
It’s like an optical illusion driven by labelling.
By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation.
Similarly people may view an IKEA book stand as worse quality than one built by hand even if the hand built one has flaws. Or they might view a microwaved meal as worse than that created by a home chef.
People value the human intention and care that goes into creations. Without that it’s worse even if the output is fundamentally the same.
A drawing by my young niece may not have the same finesse as an AI generated one but I like it a whole lot more
I think a thought pattern that happens here is "Would you prefer a chair mass produced in a factory, or would you prefer a hand-crafted chair?"
Where by analogy, AI is the factory chair, human-designed is the hand-crafted chair.
And your mind imagines the most beautiful hardwood chair, with perfectly mitred joints, smoothed and waxed, your ideal handmade chair, made by a master craftsman.
Not the wobbly ugly piece of crap I would make if I tried to make a chair.
Ikea's cheapest factory-produced chair is a nicer chair than the one I would make by hand.
I’ve got a few wobbly pieces of furniture around the house. I love them!
I’ve also got a bookcase my dad made back when he was in shop class. And my mom has been using a cutting board I made her for the last 20 years.
I’m also a bad potter but love drinking out of the mugs I made and eating out of the bowls I made.
I love the artwork my friends and family have made even if they’re not super talented. It’s up on the walls.
IKEA stuff is fine. I have some, but I don’t feel much emotion around it. It gets the job done and not much more. (Though in my experience it’s not very sturdy and falls apart faster than handmade stuff.)
I would also add that back in the day there were a lot more craftsmen making high quality furniture for purchase. A lot of them have been driven out of business and so now buying that type of thing is much more expensive.
>By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation.
I think that's true enough for what it is but, as the other commenter also noted, a bit of a different topic here. The Monet example shows that people work backward from AI to direct conclusions about the quality of the work itself, which isn't the same as agreeing a work is by all appearances equivalent to Monet but lacking in underlying deliberation.
One can inform the other to be sure but that conversation exists in parallel with another conversation that's a straight one-shot assessment of quality.
> By many people’s criteria it automatically is worse, because part of what they value in art is thinking about the artist and their intentions behind their creation
That’s a bit separate to what I’m talking about, but I don’t think there are many of these people. I think this whole thing is about AI anxiety coupled with American social norms, and as soon as one of those things changes the artists are going to be left out in the cold again.
I think there are lots of people who value art for the ideas of the artist. There are also lots of people who think that they value something like quality of brushstrokes, and these are the same people, mostly. I mean they don't know what they like it for, but the raw graphical data is what's in front of them, so they ascribe their preference to its (supposedly) measurable qualities.
Hence this thing about I can tell it's AI because its graphical quality is bad. In a way that's correct though! The artist's ideas are hinted at in the brushstrokes (or whatever other graphical aspects). In the gen AI picture you get hints of a phony mind. It becomes hollow when you know that, or when you think you know that. It's not delivering the cultural experience, if the hints you pick up on are false.
There’s the idea of preferences and revealed preferences. People say their preferences and then their actions show what they really prefer. I suspect AI generated content, if curated by a human, would end up being people’s revealed preferences. There are a lot of bad artists and writers and whatever out there, AI would handily beat them.
I think at least for your niece’s drawings example, you’d probably prefer AI art if you had to choose one or the other until the end of time, not just one or two drawings that go on your refrigerator.
But of course with the gen-AI stuff you are getting put in touch with the real ideas of real artists (e.g. Miyazaki), it's just that they've been anonymized and put through a blender.
Revealed preference is a very real and useful phenomenon. But it seems to be increasingly overapplied as a convenient cop-out in scenarios where it's unclear any authentic preference is being revealed (e.g. due to confounding factors or active manipulation) and to exaggerate the extent to which real agency exists (externally predetermined outcomes).
Such as with RLHF-boosted writing from LLMs, where side by side comparisons of human vs. AI writing have been used as proof of revealed preference for AI. But an A/B test of a few sentences doesn't mean that someone would enjoy reading a 5000 word blog post in the same style, as the densely packed rhetorical flourishes become exhausting and repetitive tells start to jump off the page. Nor does it capture the signal/noise problem where despite technical ability and incredible verbosity, realization sets in that nothing in 2000 words has said anything at all while continually stringing the reader along. A side by side comparison with a few AI posters might be preferred in a five 5 minute test, but seeing the same visual elements from three frontier models in a loop on every surface for your entire life could quickly become actively repulsive.
And the problem with agency arises when limited freedom exists to truly make a different choice because the available options are externally determined. I've seen the argument made on HN that people's revealed preference is for AI maximalism, pointing to the fact that consumers keep buying products with AI, hundreds of billions of dollars are spent building new datacenters every year, workers (including creatives!) and students report using AI for daily work, etc.
But consumers aren't really given true choices that could reveal a real preference. The tech giants behind the phone duopoly have crammed AI features into both OS choices. With few exceptions every large company made an "AI strategy" their main focus since 2023 and competed to put chatbots and GenAI features into every inch of their product lines. Hyperscalers started a bidding war on datacenter buildouts in the expectation of future demand back when really only ChatGPT had any real market penetration outside the tech industry. Students and workers feel pressure to keep up with their peers by using AI to avoid getting fired/worse grades, artists struggling for work worry clients will go elsewhere if they take the time for their normal process.
Revealed preference when used haphazardly could be used to come to absurd conclusions like "people want to get scammed", "people like to be overweight", etc. Broadly and incautiously applied it just becomes a way to justify any given status quo as inherently optimally and reflective of collective will. With a creepy paternalistic implication that regardless of what you think you believe, forcing you do something against your will is secretly what you really want, and will make you happy even if you pretend not to realize it.
It's pretty questionable if a preference truly exists as "revealed" for something like AI art when it's preconditioned on active deception. An AI art-hater who gets tricked into picking AI doesn't mean they're lying/confused and actually love it. That sort of reasoning can get uncomfortably close to an anti-democratic argument for mass manipulation of people who can't be trusted to advocate in their own best interests.
Yeah, but the issue is we are getting constantly exposed to a barrage of really low quality obvious AI generated content. Except a lot of people seem to not know that it's AI and interact with like it's real. The people posting it are being reward by monetization platforms.
Low quality baiting content was a problem before but the barrier to entry has been significantly reduced and the.amount of content is growing quickly.
Unsurprising that they're both flagged. HN commenters really, really don't like to think about a world where they can't tell the difference between real and AI.
One commenter really nailed it[1]: "We didn't get worse at judging art. We just got better at doubting everything."
I’d say it’s more about confronting the ways in which art is just posturing, hype, and status games, and what it’s like to find out you’re in an “Emperor’s New Clothes” situation.
Most people aren't aware of the prevalence of stock imagery during the 2000s. AI is just synthetic stock images, which I have zero problem with.
Artists with taste are the ones creating the best AI images, just they were the ones who photoshopped the best things out of stock images when that was the main mode, and just as they created the best stuff when everything was manual typesetting and dark room photography.
That assumes that AI is only used in place of stock imagery.
In reality it is seeping into our lives at an alarming rate which I worry is disrupting our shared sense of reality (which was already tenuous.)
AI has capabilities that were impossible (or very difficult before.) You could easily generate a realistic video of me saying terrible things or kicking a puppy or doing a pornographic act. You could clone my voice and call my grandma asking for money. It’s very hard to tell what is real now and it will get harder as the capabilities improve.
These tools are also much more accessible than photo editing software. Before, few people had the skill to create realistic fakes. Now anyone can do it. This has led to a flood of fake images, videos, and text online. This crowds out real humans and makes it hard to know what is real. My older relatives especially have Facebook feeds filled with fake content they think is real.
The capabilities combined with the scale make it hard to know what is real in a way Photoshop never did.
You can see it here in the discussions for about half the stories. It gets sidetracked into people talking past each other.
The thing is, people are really bad at judging this, except for the most stereotypical cases. You have people crying wolf the moment you use "genuinely" or a dash. Different people use different criteria for their personal heuristics and the result is threads full of tedious, completely irrelevant comments from people in a crusade. People don’t seem to realise that we are very good at tricking ourselves and that a lot of the patterns we think we recognise are actually just noise.
Factor? That's not what was described: "knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else."
And no - I don't think it's fair to call the art bad when in fact what you mean is you don't like the way it was made. Saying "I don't like AI art" is not the same as "This piece is shit", which is how it is almost always framed.
Art is not evaluated based solely on the isolated output. Intent, context, and human effort are fundamental parts of why people value a work. People calling an AI piece "bad" by default are responding to that lack of human agency and intent. The process is part of the work, so factoring how it was made into your judgment is entirely fair, even as the primary deciding factor.
A fair retort is that holding every creative output to this standard, like a flyer for a community fair, is needlessly critical. That is not an unreasonable position. Still, I think it is fair for one to believe that using an AI image is a clear low-effort signal that strips away the human element that makes community events appealing in the first place. And for commercial products: if your ad is low effort, why should I believe your product is not?
Again, that is not what is being described here: "knowing it was AI irrespective of anything else."
> And no - I don't think it's fair to call the art bad when in fact what you mean is you don't like the way it was made. Saying "I don't like AI art" is not the same as "This piece is shit", which is how it is almost always framed.
I don't really feel like you engaged with the point at all. You fixated on the original commenter's exact phrasing to dodge the argument: provenance isn't separate from art.
If someone strongly values human agency and intent, knowing a piece lacks both (in part, or entirely) is a completely rational reason to call it bad. Many would argue (myself included) that the primary difference between "art" and "content" is human agency, effort, and intent. The more the outcome is driven by a black-box algorithm, the more that agency and intention are compromised.
I'm not dodging at all - I'm providing the quote which makes your point fail to land.
What is being described is not "factoring". Factoring implies multiple datapoints were merged together. The quote demonstrates that only one data point was used.
You can see it again with "provenance isn't separate from art". What the quote describes is "provenance replaces art", which is prejudice.
As GP perhaps implied, "prejudice" is "biased evaluation" with a negative tone — if you are looking to be fully objective, a different term might be better.
Ok... ? It does seem biased (judging the art without even looking at it) and it does seem negative (it's shit) so I don't understand where I'm missing the boat? Can you elaborate?
> claimed a real Monet painting was an AI generated imitation
This is like the transvestigator creeps who think they can tell with 100% accuracy who is trans but they are regularly fooled by pictures of cis women when seeded with the notion that they might be trans.
Some AI is obvious. Some much less so, and a lot of non-AI content is being caught up in the amateur dragnets.
One version of this I really loved was some viral clip that I believe was like a local newscast where one guy who really seemed to dislike vegan products was challenged to tell the difference between a real meat product and a vegan alternative, I think sausage or something. And he made a big performance of how instantly he recognized the meat in comparison to the vegan product only to be shocked to learn, after he confidently declared that one of the two dishes was meat, that both dishes were plant-based.
If nothing else, simply as a matter of self respect you've got to make your peace with a certain amount of healthy uncertainty if even just to avoid making a fool of yourself.
But more importantly, it's important to be honest with yourself about what you actually know versus what you're very motivated to believe. Because I think AI equals bad is poisoning some people's ability to talk about this in a healthy way.
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