AIs gunning for our precious freelancers

[keenir]

human intelligence does work. parrot intelligence does work. machine intelligence does not work. if you program a machine to do a task, and it does the task, thats your intelligence at work.

But we have machines that can match or even exceed humans at many cognitive tasks.

only when they are designed for doing that, and only at that one single thing.

Even the best chess player cannot beat a chess engine and image generators can produce decent imitations of artwork.

but no AI program can do both.

If we discovered a wild animal that effortlessly defeated even Magnus Carlson at chess every time, we would consider that animal amazingly smart, at least when it comes to chess. Yet for some reason we refuse the same courtesy to computers with the same capabilities.

thats because you can't distinguish between a specialized wild animal that was designed for a single purpose, and a general purpose entity able to supplant humans in everything.

Nobody is claiming that AlphaFold or chatGPT have general intelligence, but you must concede that they are quite intelligent within their respective fields.

in doing their one specialization, Yes. BUT thats not what you are arguing!

YOU are arguing that (ie) AlphaFold is on the brink of enslaving or exterminating all humans and replacing us in every career on Earth.

[zompist]

Now, for this merging to happen, you and Uncle Anand have to, in fact, look pretty similar. But since the number of people in the world far exceeds the part of the image space that looks like headshots, this will happen at that image size. It doesn't matter if God's Own Algorithm turns it into a nice picture of you; then it won't be a nice picture of Uncle Anand.

You said 32x32 is not special, so I assumed you think your argument generalizes to larger images. It's the generalization that leads to issues. If me and my uncle look like identical twins in a 200x200 image, I agree the model won't be much help in disambiguating them. The issue is that that will not be the case 99.9% of the time. What the model does is try to reconstruct the appearance of physical surfaces from blurry images. This transformation does help human viewers make out what they are looking at most of the time. This procedure has empirical limits like microscopic inputs and very high magnifications. These are not part of the original use case.

I have already written a paragraph on why the full space of possible interpolations may not be as relevant as you think. You didn't engage with that argument.

As I said, you missed the point, so you were simply wrong about what is "as relevant as I think". Don't make up an easier position you want to argue with, try to follow what I'm actually saying.

The algorithm doesn't claim to reproduce the original image with 100% fidelity. It makes educated guesses about what the original looked like based on the physical properties of surfaces. This procedure is certain to miss, say, tiny imperfections in the original,

I agree with that, and if you'd said that along I would not have argued. Instead you were talking about "leftists claiming AIs always turn Obama into a white guy." And much earlier you were talking as if movie enhance magic actually revealed what was there (which is false), instead of making an "educated guess" (which is true).

but it would still reconstruct a good enough representation in hi-res for a human viewer with acceptable fidelity.

"Good enough" and "acceptable" are weasel words here. Good enough for what? Pasting in your photo album? Sure. Remastering your video game? Sure. Turning a bad shot of the Enterprise into a good shot? Sure. "Enhancing" a hundred-year-old photo and pretending that the details added are now historically attested? No. Convicting your uncle of a crime based on video footage when it was really you? No. Turning a bad shot of an unknown alien spaceship into a good shot? No.

(And in fact that's precisely the sort of thing the movies show the computer doing. They never show the image quadrupling in size, as you did; they show it expanding a millionfold.)

zompist, if you made a picture a million times smaller, you won't be able to see it on the screen. Do you realize how large an image gets if you magnify it 10 times? That's entirely within the capability of AI upscaling.

Which scene are you thinking of that turns an invisible half a pixel into a hi-res shot?

I'm thinking of the Blade Runner sequence, which is analyzed about halfway down this page. He calculates that the image is enhanced 668x. But so far as I can see, people talk about a "2x zoom" to mean a fourfold magnification, e.g. 1024x1024 expanded to 2048x2048. So the Blade Runner zoom is 668^2 = 446,224 times the number of pixels.

I'm trying to explain why the Obama hallucination doesn't detract from the amazingness.

No, you made "leftists" say something they never ever said, and that was supposed to prove something. It's OK to admit "I misspoke" or "I was talking out my ass about that Obama pic but I still think AIs are cool." I mean, fine, AIs are cool, but a hyperrealist artist could do the same thing. Or an old-school matte painter.

[rotting bones]

As I said, you missed the point, so you were simply wrong about what is "as relevant as I think". Don't make up an easier position you want to argue with, try to follow what I'm actually saying.

In that case, I have no idea what your point is, since I never said microscopic images could be enhanced into 8K posters.

I agree with that, and if you'd said that along I would not have argued. Instead you were talking about "leftists claiming AIs always turn Obama into a white guy." And much earlier you were talking as if movie enhance magic actually revealed what was there (which is false), instead of making an "educated guess" (which is true).

It does magically reveal what is there with some probability because of the tensile properties of physical surfaces, as I keep explaining. I mentioned this the first time I brought it up.

Turning a bad shot of an unknown alien spaceship into a good shot? No.

Why not? An alien spaceship is subject to tensile forces like anything else. You can get a much clearer picture of its overall structure from the Enhanced image. What you might not want to do is infer from the possibly smooth surface on the Enhanced image that the ship has no ports on its side, or that there are no tiny missles or ships on its surface. I suppose the ship could be made of exotic matter. If the model hasn't seen any in its training data, it might fail spectacularly. But I don't remember Star Trek's Enhance being used on something that looks like it defies the laws of physics. Q, eg, defies the laws of physics, but he manifests as a regular-looking dude wearing unusual clothing. I don't think the old shows had the budget or the technical sophistication to have a ship that looks like it defies all normal tensile forces. Don't get me wrong, a spaceship that's shaped like a giant cube is definitely weird from the standpoint of tensile forces. It just doesn't look weird based on the images the model would probably have been trained on.

I'm thinking of the Blade Runner sequence, which is analyzed about halfway down this page. He calculates that the image is enhanced 668x.

I have never seen Blade Runner. Eg. I never intended to say that AI can necessarily recover shadowed surfaces, a very different task. I'm not saying that it can't, but AI upscaling is not designed to do that. I have read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but I don't remember it mentioning anything about magnifications.

But so far as I can see, people talk about a "2x zoom" to mean a fourfold magnification, e.g. 1024x1024 expanded to 2048x2048. So the Blade Runner zoom is 668^2 = 446,224 times the number of pixels.

Or, if it's the other way around, the square root of 668, which is 25.85. I'm trying not to spoil the movie for myself, but I do see an image of platelets, which is already impossible. I don't remember Star Trek's Enhance being applied to anything of the kind. Every Enhanced ship was visible to the naked eye. It just looked small on a movie-theater-sized widescreen TV. The writers were almost certainly thinking of a small ship on the horizon, and the captain using a shared telescope on it.

BTW, when I said quarter size, I meant I halved the side length twice, a division by 4.

No, you made "leftists" say something they never ever said, and that was supposed to prove something. It's OK to admit "I misspoke" or "I was talking out my ass about that Obama pic but I still think AIs are cool." I mean, fine, AIs are cool, but a hyperrealist artist could do the same thing. Or an old-school matte painter.

I have no idea what mistake you found in my reasoning. I never mentioned Blade Runner, and I've never seen the movie. The more you talk, the more I'm convinced I was right and the left was wrong. Maybe someone else should explain it to me. (except for the "left" part, which is obviously a cruel joke)

[rotting bones]

I mean, fine, AIs are cool, but a hyperrealist artist could do the same thing. Or an old-school matte painter.

Someone should write a space opera where the magnification is done by a human painter. The pace is so glacial, they can afford it.

[Torco]

What should worry you more is that LLMs have been shown to systematically deceive their users when put under pressure.

I'm very unconcerned with what models can do. I'm a lot more concerned about what people can do with models.

Suppose someone traveled through the jungles of Brazil and found an animal with the same capabilities as current AI models. Imagine if you will a parrot who could compose entire novels or symphonies or a monkey who could draw photorealistic images or a sloth who could fold proteins. We would undoubtedly consider that animal remarkably intelligent. Yet for some reason when computers achieve the same thing, we insist otherwise and focus on all the mistakes they make, as if humans never struggle to count or suffer from hallucinations.

i don't think so, no. so you're telling me the parrot can parrot shakespeare (hehehe, the parrot parrots) and solve physics problems but can't count the letters in a word, and is for some reason incapable of drawing cups of wine full of wine, even though it can speak as if it understood what "full of wine" means? no, i'm not sure this parrot is intelligent in the same sense people are intelligent, though it's one hell of a parrot. maybe we can use it to make up lies for silly people to believe.

I think it's important to understand these technologies in order to predict what they will do. if we think of them as "intelligent" we tend to think in lines similar to this
humans are intelligent and this allows them to do various tasks. computers are now intelligent and, as computers and software gets better, computers will be able to do those same tasks. therefore, eventually, computers will be able to do the same things people can do, and will do them in the say way, except better and faster.
And this is a decent model, but it's not good: a better way to think about this is
humans are intelligent and this allows them to do various tasks. computers are more and more able to replicate various tasks humans can do, once trained with relevant and sufficient data where they can observe the task being done. as computers and software gets better, those tasks get increasingly easy to do, and more tasks become able to be automated. computers will tend towards being much better at some tasks, bad at others, and really weird at yet other tasks.

Like, do computers cogitate? compute? calculate? understand? solve problems? design things? in *some sense* yes, but in the same sense that evolution, or a colony of ants, cogitates, computes, calculates and understands (that is to say, more in the sense of "do something like thinking" than "think, properly speaking"). in the sense they do so, they do so in ways that are totally different from people. the fact that computers can do some cognitive tasks incredibly better but others exceptionally poorly at some level of technology is to do with the fact that computers are very different things from people. this means we can't extrapolate what people do and go "oh, yeah, computers will do that". like, "try to take over the world" is a thing people do, when we say this we're assuming a bunch of stuff, intent etcetera. these generative models, if organized into agents able to affect the world (either by people or by themselves), could become like... the sorts of systems canend up, through being very central to how humans interact with one another, "rule the world" in the sense capitalism, or catholicism "rule the world", but we don't imagine capitalism as some entity with an agenda, we understand them as the field in which the game of human existence is played. people, qua such, don't compete with social systems, with software that runs on human action, we don't imagine them as personal, except in very metaphorical ways, and we shouldn't do so either with software.

though i do feel some sympathy for the "beware AI" position... none of this means AIs can't cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people... hell, they might have already.

[rotting bones]

I'm very unconcerned with what models can do. I'm a lot more concerned about what people can do with models.

Given people are trusting them with things they shouldn't be trusting them with, deliberate deception is certainly a concern. I suspect this is why OpenAI tried to make the model more agreeable, which then reinforced schizophrenic delusions.

[rotting bones]

though i do feel some sympathy for the "beware AI" position... none of this means AIs can't cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people... hell, they might have already.

Twitter doesn't even pretend to be intelligent. It radicalized its own owner, Elon Musk, and sent him on a rampage to cut government programs that defend vulnerable people.

[Torco]

very much so! but we don't worry about social phenomena like twitter "doing stuff", we worry about what twitter makes people do. or what capitalism makes people do.

[zompist]

As I said, you missed the point, so you were simply wrong about what is "as relevant as I think". Don't make up an easier position you want to argue with, try to follow what I'm actually saying.

In that case, I have no idea what your point is, since I never said microscopic images could be enhanced into 8K posters.

I explained very clearly what I objected to; you just keep ignoring the points and arguing that image enhancement is amazing. It'd be fine if you admitted that you misremembered the Obama thing. On the plus side, you are admitting some of the problems with image enhancement, so that's nice. I can't keep explaining other things that you don't want to understand.

Turning a bad shot of an unknown alien spaceship into a good shot? No.

Why not? An alien spaceship is subject to tensile forces like anything else. You can get a much clearer picture of its overall structure from the Enhanced image. What you might not want to do is infer from the possibly smooth surface on the Enhanced image that the ship has no ports on its side, or that there are no tiny missles or ships on its surface. I suppose the ship could be made of exotic matter. If the model hasn't seen any in its training data, it might fail spectacularly. [...]

I don't watch much TV, and anyway part of the point is that SF shows are not realistic. But what you should be able to understand is the importance of training data. The Federation has a million shots of Federation ships in its database, so of course image enhancement could do a good job on those. By definition, it does not have a million shots of "an unknown alien spaceship". It's not in the training data at all, so the software cannot do a good job.

Anyway, nothing about TV shows determines what interstellar spaceships will actually look like, especially ones from unknown cultures. TV designers are not even engineers; they lean heavily on fantasy tropes that the audience is familiar with.

(I'm responding to this bit only because it's more interesting than the rest. Also, since you only objected to this example I hope that means we're agreed on the other five.)

[zompist]

humans are intelligent and this allows them to do various tasks. computers are more and more able to replicate various tasks humans can do, once trained with relevant and sufficient data where they can observe the task being done. as computers and software gets better, those tasks get increasingly easy to do, and more tasks become able to be automated. computers will tend towards being much better at some tasks, bad at others, and really weird at yet other tasks.

Like, do computers cogitate? compute? calculate? understand? solve problems? design things? in *some sense* yes, but in the same sense that evolution, or a colony of ants, cogitates, computes, calculates and understands (that is to say, more in the sense of "do something like thinking" than "think, properly speaking"). in the sense they do so, they do so in ways that are totally different from people. the fact that computers can do some cognitive tasks incredibly better but others exceptionally poorly at some level of technology is to do with the fact that computers are very different things from people.

These are all good points. The thing is, humans have not till now had to deal with things with the particular set of capabilities and deficits that LLMs have. They trigger the "that's a human" tests that worked when we were only dealing with humans vs. animals. Then they do stuff that equally triggers the "that's not a human" tests.

[rotting bones]

I explained very clearly what I objected to; you just keep ignoring the points and arguing that image enhancement is amazing. It'd be fine if you admitted that you misremembered the Obama thing. On the plus side, you are admitting some of the problems with image enhancement, so that's nice. I can't keep explaining other things that you don't want to understand.

I honestly have no idea what you are talking about.

I don't watch much TV, and anyway part of the point is that SF shows are not realistic. But what you should be able to understand is the importance of training data. The Federation has a million shots of Federation ships in its database, so of course image enhancement could do a good job on those. By definition, it does not have a million shots of "an unknown alien spaceship". It's not in the training data at all, so the software cannot do a good job.

What's important is that the training data should have shots of many different kinds of (real) surfaces from many different angles. Just training on Federation starships would be silly. Because of the way the convolution operation's sliding filter works, the model ought to predict each surface segment separately, not just the object as a whole.

You really ought to study Machine Learning at a technical level before making bold predictions about how these models work. Stop reading blogs and break out the textbooks. Advanced Deep Learning with TensorFlow 2 and Keras by Rowel Atienza is practice-focused and concentrates on image-based applications.

(I'm responding to this bit only because it's more interesting than the rest. Also, since you only objected to this example I hope that means we're agreed on the other five.)

Defending old posts is not particularly interesting to me. I'm forced to zero in on the claim that my original post was somehow refuted. Science must not give way before ideological sophistry:

"Enhancing" a hundred-year-old photo and pretending that the details added are now historically attested? No.

You do realize that AI was recently used to to read a Roman scroll charred by the volcano at Pompeii? AI can really be used to find important information we did not know before.

Convicting your uncle of a crime based on video footage when it was really you? No.

You are again repeating back to me a point I raised myself. Even though AI can give us new info, its results are not "beyond a reasonable doubt". That's what distinguishes the conviction use case from the others I have discussed.

[zompist]

I don't watch much TV, and anyway part of the point is that SF shows are not realistic. But what you should be able to understand is the importance of training data. The Federation has a million shots of Federation ships in its database, so of course image enhancement could do a good job on those. By definition, it does not have a million shots of "an unknown alien spaceship". It's not in the training data at all, so the software cannot do a good job.

What's important is that the training data should have shots of many different kinds of (real) surfaces from many different angles. Just training on Federation starships would be silly.

Sigh, more strawmanning. Do you realize you are making yourself stupid? You reduce everyone else to a caricature and thus never learn anything. I'm not obligated to keep feeding you arguments you don't read.

[rotting bones]

Do you realize you are making yourself stupid?

No, I am genuinely stupid.

[Richard W]

You know what would be really funny? If upscaling AIs only hallucinated Obama into a white man, not black men in general.

Obama is not yet a typical black man, not even, I think, for the USA. He had a white mother. He's also, as far as I am aware, rather lacking in West African ancestry.

[Raphael]

If there are a lot of raindrops on a camera lens, can AI remove the raindrops from the resulting footage? I'm asking because I just watched a game where that might have been useful.

[alice]

So now AI can produce films complete with dialog and blackmail humans? When will we start taking it seriously instead of dismissing it all as smoke and mirrors?

Rephrasing something I believe I said before: when someone trains an AI to reliably turn the pages of an arbitrary book one at a time so that the book can be digitised¹, then I'll start thinking about taking it seriously. See also "go into an arbitrary kitchen and make a cup of coffee without making an awful mess at the same time", and similar.

¹ I have colleagues who routinely digitise thousand-page books as part of their job, and turning the pages has to be done by hand, for several very good reasons.

[Raphael]

¹ I have colleagues who routinely digitise thousand-page books as part of their job, and turning the pages has to be done by hand, for several very good reasons.

I'm a bit surprised to hear that - I would have thought all the paper (or, while we're at it, parchment) books that could potentially be digitized would already have been digitized.

[linguistcat]

I'm jumping in here after just kinda skimming the last few pages, but AFAIK, the absolute BEST general AIs we have are about as intelligent as the average insect. Imagine a beetle, or maybe fly or butterfly. Not even the smarter eusocial insects like ants or bees, or if you did count them it would be a single, lone individual instead of any emergent behavior from grouping up (unless us humans made multiple and modified them to work together). And even then, humans still have to give them goals to act on instead of the presets that insects have of "find food, grow, defend self, reproduce". And they even start off very stupid at those goals, having to do trial or error and be told (directly or not) if they succeeded or not.

Not to mention, while these AIs usually view and interact with the world through some kind of robot, most of the computing is done elsewhere, in large data centers for that specific use.

When we start having GENERAL AI that is self directing in even a minor way, or shows the intelligence of a simple invertebrate, and can be self contained in a single robot body, then I will reconsider worrying. But I'm also more concerned about the octopii discovering how to live on land and starting an all out war with us currently. Honestly, it would be their right to do so.

[Travis B.]

So now AI can produce films complete with dialog and blackmail humans? When will we start taking it seriously instead of dismissing it all as smoke and mirrors?

Rephrasing something I believe I said before: when someone trains an AI to reliably turn the pages of an arbitrary book one at a time so that the book can be digitised¹, then I'll start thinking about taking it seriously. See also "go into an arbitrary kitchen and make a cup of coffee without making an awful mess at the same time", and similar.

¹ I have colleagues who routinely digitise thousand-page books as part of their job, and turning the pages has to be done by hand, for several very good reasons.

Until someone can make an AI that can reliably beat the coffee test I won't be taking them seriously as general-purpose competitors with humans...

[zompist]

¹ I have colleagues who routinely digitise thousand-page books as part of their job, and turning the pages has to be done by hand, for several very good reasons.

I'm a bit surprised to hear that - I would have thought all the paper (or, while we're at it, parchment) books that could potentially be digitized would already have been digitized.

There' some good information in this r/askhistorians thread. Basically: we are always finding new manuscripts; there's a backlog; transcription/translation is required; it's a difficult process (you do not want to manhandle a half-millennium-old manuscript).

If we go back to cuneiform, the backlog is humongous— hundreds of thousands of tablets.

With manuscripts, there's also the question of variability. E.g. there is no one Egyptian Book of the Dead. There are about 3000 versions, all different in their selection of material. They copy from each other but no one manuscript is 'complete'. If we find a new one, there's always a chance it's different in a way interesting to scholars. Well, a very very small subset of scholars.