petrol_sniff_king

Ayy, how apt.

People who already have a desire for the real thing usually won't be satisfied by pc games or whatever.

Exactly correct.

And, what desire is it that 6-year-old-AI enjoyers have again? I guess the 6-years-old part is incidental?

So, you imagine a world where friends of yours say things like "God, I want to kill people so badly. Fuck, I just wish society would let me." And then what, they play Call of Duty until they climax?

If that's how it is, god damn, maybe I do agree with Jack Thompson.

Ah, but here we have to get pedantic a little bit: producing an AGI through current known methods is intractable.

I didn't quite understand this at first. I think I was going to say something about the paper leaving the method ambiguous, thus implicating all methods yet unknown, etc, whatever. But yeah, this divide between solvable and "unsolvable" shifts if we ever break NP-hard and have to define some new NP-super-hard category. This does feel like the piece I was missing. Or a piece, anyway.

e.g. humans don't fit the definition either.

I did think about this, and the only reason I reject it is that "human-like or -level" matches our complexity by definition, and we already have a behavior set for a fairly large n. This doesn't have to mean that we aren't still below some curve, of course, but I do struggle to imagine how our own complexity wouldn't still be too large to solve, AGI or not.

Anyway, the main reason I'm replying again at all is just to make sure I thanked you for getting back to me, haha. This was definitely helpful.

Hey! Just asking you because I'm not sure where else to direct this energy at the moment.

I spent a while trying to understand the argument this paper was making, and for the most part I think I've got it. But there's a kind of obvious, knee-jerk rebuttal to throw at it, seen elsewhere under this post, even:

If producing an AGI is intractable, why does the human meat-brain exist?

Evolution "may be thought of" as a process that samples a distribution of situation-behaviors, though that distribution is entirely abstract. And the decision process for whether the "AI" it produces matches this distribution of successful behaviors is yada yada darwinism. The answer we care about, because this is the inspiration I imagine AI engineers took from evolution in the first place, is whether evolution can (not inevitably, just can) produce an AGI (us) in reasonable time (it did).

The question is, where does this line of thinking fail?

Going by the proof, it should either be:

• That evolution is an intractable method. 60 million years is a long time, but it still feels quite short for this answer.
• Something about it doesn't fit within this computational paradigm. That is, I'm stretching the definition.
• The language "no better than chance" for option 2 is actually more significant than I'm thinking. Evolution is all chance. But is our existence really just extreme luck? I know that it is, but this answer is really unsatisfying.

I'm not sure how to formalize any of this, though.

The thought that we could "encode all of biological evolution into a program of at most size K" did made me laugh.

but there's no reason to think we can't achieve it

They provide a reason.

Just because you create a model and prove something in it, doesn't mean it has any relationship to the real world.

What are we science deniers now?

I also noticed that they were talking about sending arguments to a custom function? That's like a day-one lesson if you already program. But this was something they couldn't find in regular search?

Maybe I misunderstood something.

All right, I guess I'm here to collect then. We doin' paypal or what?

I was equivocating singular words and entire sentences on purpose.

If you can recombine sentences in interesting ways, into paragraphs that are your own ideas, that isn't plagiarism. Why would "people can't construct unique sentences either" be a rebuttal if that's not what plagiarsm is?

Instead it studies the prior work of humans, finds patterns and combines these in unique and novel ways.

You're anthropomorphising.

LLMs are little clink-clink machines that produce the most typical output. That's how they're trained. Ten thousand inputs say this image is of a streetlight? That's how it knows.

The fact an LLM knows what a Lord of Rings is at all means that Tolkien's words, the images, the sounds, are all encoded in its weights somewhere. You can't see them, it's a black box, but they live there.

Could you say the same of the human brain? Sure. I know what a neuron is.

But, LLMs are not people.

All of that is besides the point, though. I was just floored by how cynical you could be about your own supposed craft.

A photograph of, say, a pretty flower is fantastic. As an enjoyer of art myself, I love it when people communicate things. People can share in the beauty that you saw. They can talk about it. Talk about how the colors and the framing make them feel. But if you're view is that you're not actually adding anything, you're just doing more of what already exists, I really don't know why you bother.

Nobody has seen every photo in the world.

Okay, assume someone has. Is your art meaningless, then? All of photography is just spectacle, and all the spectacles have been seen?

it doesn't mean you can't combine them in a unique ways

Okay, so you don't believe new things can't be unique. You just think that plagiarism is when one person uses the word 'the' and then a second person uses the word 'the'.

Why do you find it such a depressing idea?

That art is dead? Through sheer saturation alone, no one has anything left to say? That watching the new Cinderella is line-by-line the same as watching the old Cinderella, and the money machine keeps this corpse moving along only because people are too stupid to realize they're being sold books from a library? I really don't know how you couldn't.

This is like asking me why a polluted lake is sad.

the truth is a moving target somewhere in between.

Token guessing and... consciousness?

I'd argue it's virtually impossible to write a sentence that has not been written before

I mean this sincerely: why bother getting excited about anything, then?

A new Marvel movie, a new game, a new book, a new song. If none of them are unique in any way, what is the point of it all? Why have generative AI go through this song and dance? Why have people do it? Why waste everyone's time?

If the plagiarism engine is acceptable because it's not possible to be unique anyway... I just, I don't know how you go on living. It all sounds so unbelievably boring.