Another great piece about AI from @pluralistichttps://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle
Cory pinpoints in a few succinct paragraphs how robot assistance has been and can be great and helpful and turns us into powerful "centaurs" but that the way to profits lies in "reverse centaurs" where AI is the pilot and humans are tasked to correct bot productions at superhuman speed, degrading us to robots. In other words, AI driven Automation is only profitable if it enshittifes our work and life.
Its multiple story threads and attempts to satirise India’s government sit awkwardly with the action, but there’s much to admire in Dev Patel‘s frenzied, ultraviolet genre spectacle....Shot and choreographed with a kineticism that never veers too far into the sleekly balletic, the fight scenes here are often enthralling...
This one focuses on LLMs and the idea of the "reverse centaur", where a robot does the fun stuff while a human does the tedious, error-prone work.
I'll note from the periphery that, despite the current hype, AI is more than LLMs. There are other AI systems (e.g., Chess and Go players, VLSI design tools) that do have an internal model of the domain about which they are reasoning. Unfortunately, there's a slippery continuum:
solves the problem perfectly and deterministically
significantly outperforms any human
about as good as an expert human, but makes different, weird mistakes
#AI#GenerativeAI#LLMs#Automation#Hallucinations: "The only reason bosses want to buy robots is to fire humans and lower their costs. That's why "AI art" is such a pisser. There are plenty of harmless ways to automate art production with software – everything from a "healing brush" in Photoshop to deepfake tools that let a video-editor alter the eye-lines of all the extras in a scene to shift the focus. A graphic novelist who models a room in The Sims and then moves the camera around to get traceable geometry for different angles is a centaur – they are genuinely offloading some finicky drudgework onto a robot that is perfectly attentive and vigilant.
But the pitch from "AI art" companies is "fire your graphic artists and replace them with botshit." They're pitching a world where the robots get to do all the creative stuff (badly) and humans have to work at a robotic pace, with robotic vigilance, in order to catch the mistakes that the robots make at superhuman speed.
Le toujours formidable Cory Doctorow aka @pluralistic sur l'usage des AI (et le fait que leur business modèle ne peut reposer que sur l'exploitation des humains, à la manière des entrepôts Amazon, au lieu de leur libération)
Here's a fun AI story: a security researcher noticed that large companies' AI-authored source-code repeatedly referenced a nonexistent library (an AI "hallucination"), so he created a (defanged) malicious library with that name and uploaded it, and thousands of developers automatically downloaded and incorporated it as they compiled the code:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
If you follow me, you know by now that I love wildlife. Closup encounters, bring em on. However this closeup kinda creeped me out. These are Barbary Macaque Apes. We were able to walk right with them. They were pretty aggressive if you had something wanted. They watched you and snuck up behind you and would grab you. This was on Gibralter. Anyone been there?
One of a number of psychedelia-inspired songs they contributed to the 1970s Japanese TV show Saiyūki, better known to anglophone audiences as "Monkey".
From the Archives (11 Jan, 2008): Bill Tiller Chat '07 — “We had a Christmassy/New Years chat in #monkey-island, and we invited Bill Tiller around for the festivities! As well as being more lovely than a teddy bear, Tiller has also worked on classic LucasArts adventures like The Curse of Monkey Island, and at the time of this chat, was about to unleash A Vampyre Story on the world. Excitement!” https://mixnmojo.com/features/interviews/Bill-Tiller-Chat-07
Monkey Man review: a thrilling ultraviolent spectacle (www.bfi.org.uk)
Its multiple story threads and attempts to satirise India’s government sit awkwardly with the action, but there’s much to admire in Dev Patel‘s frenzied, ultraviolet genre spectacle....Shot and choreographed with a kineticism that never veers too far into the sleekly balletic, the fight scenes here are often enthralling...