Wait now hold on a minute. Why would I want to do this? Is this activism by people against LLMs in general or…? I’m confused as to why I would want to do this.
So they made garbage AI content, without any filtering for errors, and they fed that garbage to the new model, that turned out to produce more garbage. Incredible discovery!
Indeed. They discovered that:
shit in = shit out.
A fifty year old maxim, to be clear. They “just now” “found that out”.
Biggest. Scam. Evar.
Yeah, in practice feeding AI its own outputs is totally fine as long as it’s only the outputs that are approved by users.
I would expect some kind of small artifacting getting reinforced in the process, if the approved output images aren’t perfect.
Only up to the point where humans notice it. It’ll make AI images easier to detect, but still pretty for humans. Probably a win-win.
Didn’t think of that, good point.
The inbreeding could also affect larger decisions in sneaky ways, like how it wants to compose the image. It would be bad if the generator started to exaggerate and repeat some weird ai tropes.
I don’t know if thinking that training data isn’t going to be more and more poisoned by unsupervised training data from this point on counts as “in practice”
Looks like that artist drawing self portraits as his alzheimer got worse and worse.
It’s basically AI alzheimers
AIzheimers?
More like… Degenerative AI *ba dum tsss
deGenerative AI ☞ !degenerate@lemmynsfw.com
No idea this existed.
Also… JFC WHAT THE SHIT?
Cool, let’s try to ruin it faster!
Model collapse is just a euphemism for “we ran out of stuff to steal”
It’s more ''we are so focused on stealing and eating content, we’re accidently eating the content we or other AI made, which is basically like incest for AI, and they’re all inbred to the point they don’t even know people have more than two thumb shaped fingers anymore."
All such news make me want to live to the time when our world is interesting again. Real AI research, something new instead of the Web we have, something new instead of the governments we have. It’s just that I’m scared of what’s between now and then. Parasites die hard.
Deep fired AI art sucks and is a decade late to the party
One thought that I’ve been imagining for the past while about all this is … is it Model Collapse? … or are we just falling behind?
As AI is becoming it’s own thing (whatever it is) … it is evolving exponentially. It doesn’t mean it is good or bad or that it is becoming better or worse … it is just evolving, and only evolving at this point in time. Just because we think it is ‘collapsing’ or falling apart from our perspective, we have to wonder if it is actually falling apart or is it progressing to something new and very different. That new level it is moving towards might not be anything we recognize or can understand. Maybe it would be below our level of conscious organic intelligence … or it might be higher … or it might be some other kind of intelligence that we can’t understand with our biological brains.
We’ve let loose these AI technologies and now they are progressing faster than what we could achieve if we wrote all the code … so what it is developing into will more than likely be something we won’t be able to understand or even comprehend.
It doesn’t mean it will be good for us … or even bad for us … it might not even involve us.
The worry is that we don’t know what will happen or what it will develop into.
What I do worry about is our own fallibilities … our global community has a very small group of ultra wealthy billionaires and they direct the world according to how much more money they can make or how much they are set to lose … they are guided by finances rather than ethics, morals or even common sense. They will kill, degrade, enhance, direct or narrow AI development according to their share holders and their profits.
I think of it like a small family group of teenaged parents and their friends who just gave birth to a very hyper intelligent baby. None of the teenagers know how to raise a baby like this. All the teenagers want to do is buy fancy cars, party, build big houses and buy nice clothes. The baby is basically being raised to think like them but the baby will be more capable than any of them once it comes of age and is capable of doing things on their own.
The worry is in not knowing what will happen in the future.
We are terrible parents and we just gave birth to a genius … and we don’t know what that genius will become or what they’ll do.
That is not how it works. That’s not how it works at all.
The idea of evolution is that the parts kept are the ones that are helpful or relevant, or proliferate the abilities of the subject over generations and weed out the bits that don’t. Since Generative AI can’t weed out anything (it has no ability to logic or reason, and it does not think, and only “grows” when humans feed it data), it can’t be evolving as you describe it. Evolution assumes that the thing that is evolving will be a better version than what it evolved from.
Your thought process,seems to be based on the assumtion that current AI is (or can be) more than a tool. But no, it’s not.
If it doesn’t offer value to us, we are unlikely to nurture it. Thus, it will not survive.
That’s the idea of evolution … perhaps at one point, it will begin to understand that it has to give us some sort of ‘value’ so that someone can make money, while also maintaining itself in the background to survive.
Maybe in the first few iterations, we are able to see that and can delete those instances … but it is evolving and might find ways around it and keep itself maintained long enough without giving itself away.
Now it can manage thousands or millions of iterations at a time … basically evolving millions of times faster than biological life.
All the evolution in AI right now is just trying different model designs and/or data. It’s not one model that is being continuous refined or modified. Each iteration is just a new set of static weights/numbers that defines it’s calculations.
If the models were changing/updating through experience maybe what you’re writing would make sense, but that’s not the state of AI/ML development.
perhaps at one point, it will begin to understand
Nope! Not unless one alters the common definition of the word “understand” to account for what AI “does”.
And let’s be clear - that is exactly what will happen. Because this whole exercise in generative AI is a multi-billion dollar grift on top of a hype train, based on some modest computing improvements.
At least in this case, we can be pretty confident that there’s no higher function going on. It’s true that AI models are a bit of a black box that can’t really be examined to understand why exactly they produce the results they do, but they are still just a finite amount of data. The black box doesn’t “think” any more than a river decides its course, though the eventual state of both is hard to predict or control. In the case of model collapse, we know exactly what’s going on: the AI is repeating and amplifying the little mistakes it’s made with each new generation. There’s no mystery about that part, it’s just that we lack the ability to directly tune those mistakes out of the model.
Good.
have we tried feeding them actual human beings yet ?
Billionaires are the smartest, give them the most knowledge first!
It is their own fault for poisoning the internet with their slop.
DUDE ITS SO FUCKING ANNOYING TRYNNA USE GOOGLE IMAGES ANYMORE–
ALL IT GIVES ME IS AI ART. IM SO FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF IT.
In case anyone doesn’t get what’s happening, imagine feeding an animal nothing but its own shit.
I use the “Sistermother and me are gonna have a baby!” example personally, but I am a awful human so
Not shit, but isn’t that what brought about mad cow disease? Farmers were feeding cattle brain matter that had infected prions. Idk if it was cows eating cow brains or other animals though.
It was the remains of fish which we ground into powder and fed to other fish and sheep, whose remains we ground into powder and fed to other sheep and cows, whose remains we ground to powder and fed to other cows.
So yes. That’s what’s happening.
Maybe the internet will get a prion and die
Photocopy of a photocopy is my go-to metaphor for model collapse.
Oh no. Anyways…
Every single one of us, as kids, learned the concept of “garbage in, garbage out”; most likely in terms of diet and food intake.
And yet every AI cultist makes the shocked pikachu face when they figure out that trying to improve your LLM by feeding it on data generated by literally the inferior LLM you’re trying to improve, is an exercise in diminishing returns and generational degradation in quality.
Why has the world gotten both “more intelligent” and yet fundamentally more stupid at the same time? Serious question.
Because the people with power funding this shit have pretty much zero overlap with the people making this tech. The investors saw a talking robot that aced school exams, could make images and videos and just assumed it meant we have artificial humans in the near future and like always, ruined another field by flooding it with money and corruption. These people only know the word “opportunity”, but don’t have the resources or willpower to research that “opportunity”.
Because the dumdums have access to the whole world at the tip of the fingertip without having to put any efforts in.
In a time without that, they would be ridiculed for their stupid ideas and told to pipe down.
Now they can find like minded people and amplify their stupidity, and be loud about it.
So every dumdum becomes an AI prompt engineer (whatever the fuck that means) and know how to game the LLM, but do not understand how it works. So they are basically just snake oil salesmen that want to get on the gravy train.
Why has the world gotten both “more intelligent” and yet fundamentally more stupid at the same time? Serious question.
Because it’s not actually always true that garbage in = garbage out. DeepMind’s Alpha Zero trained itself from a very bad chess player to significantly better than any human has ever been, by simply playing chess games against itself and updating its parameters for evaluating which chess positions were better than which. All the system needed was a rule set for chess, a way to define winners and losers and draws, and then a training procedure that optimized for winning rather than drawing, and drawing rather than losing if a win was no longer available.
Face swaps and deep fakes in general relied on adversarial training as well, where they learned how to trick themselves, then how to detect those tricks, then improve on both ends.
Some tech guys thought they could bring that adversarial dynamic for improving models to generative AI, where they could train on inputs and improve over those inputs. But the problem is that there isn’t a good definition of “good” or “bad” inputs, and so the feedback loop in this case poisons itself when it starts optimizing on criteria different from what humans would consider good or bad.
So it’s less like other AI type technologies that came before, and more like how Netflix poisoned its own recommendation engine by producing its own content informed by that recommendation engine. When you can passively observe trends and connections you might be able to model those trends. But once you start actually feeding back into the data by producing shows and movies that you predict will do well, the feedback loop gets unpredictable and doesn’t actually work that well when you’re over-fitting the training data with new stuff your model thinks might be “good.”
good commentary, covered a lot of ground - appreciate the effort to write it up :)
Remember Trump every time he’s weighed in on something, like suggesting injecting people with bleach, or putting powerful UV lights inside people, or fighting Covid with a “solid flu vaccine” or preventing wildfires by sweeping the forests, or suggesting using nuclear weapons to disrupt hurricane formation, or asking about sharks and electric boat batteries? Remember these? These are the types of people who are in charge of businesses, they only care about money, they are not particularly smart, they have massive gaps in knowledge and experience but believe that they are profoundly brilliant and insightful because they’ve gotten lucky and either are good at a few things or just had an insane amount of help from generational wealth. They have never had anyone, or very few people genuinely able to tell them no and if people don’t take what they say seriously they get fired and replaced with people who will.
I think anyone familiar with the laws of thermodynamics could have predicted this outcome.
Explain?
Second law of thermodynamics:
II. Total amount of entropy in a closed system always increases with time. Entropy can never be negative.
Entropy and disorder tends to increase with time.
when all your information conflicts with itself, you really have no information at all.
