Something similar happened in the late 1990's when a PlayStation memory card was being sold with pre-loaded save data for a dating sim game (Tokimeki Memorial). Konami claimed it violated the integrity of the work because selling a hacked save with all stats maxed tampered with the game's natural progression. (And they won twice, the original case and the appeal.)
I once played an indie JRPG that took inspiration from Cordwainer Smith and some other authors. It's untranslated but the Santaclara drug is a usable item that acts like a Phoenix Down.
Recently I've tended to look at mid-2000s Web 2.0 as a source of nostalgia. It was back in the day when twttr felt like people were optimistic about building a new community for the future and the possibilities were still unexplored. Poring through all the dense skeumorphic design trends of the era is like unearthing a time capsule.
I think of it like: The only reason humans still drive cars is we have yet to find a good enough way of replacing ourselves with something more effective. It's merely an implementation detail of "getting from A to B" that would be disrupted if a true autonomous solution was discovered. Many would want to optimize away drunk drivers and road rage if it were possible in some faraway future. So something like a steering wheel could be seen like a compromise of sorts, until the next big thing makes them obsolete.
That, and the state of missing a technology in a period of time is irreplaceable once it's been discovered. Nobody can live in an era without social media anymore, barring a global-scale catastrophic reset. So I believe it's important to consider what technology is not yet totally pervasive, for example by realizing there is still a steering wheel for you to grip in your car.
And in my mind, the sinister feeling stems from the fact that all it takes to irreversibly shift society like that is enough smart people with honest intentions but little foresight of what will happen in a few decades as a result of proliferating all this. The problems that result stop being in anyone's control, "throwing it over the wall" so to speak, and instead become yet another fact of life that could weigh us down (mostly I think of the ubiquity of social media and how it has changed human interaction). And it all stems from just a few engineering type people getting overexcited about cool possibilities they can grasp at, not considering there are billions of people unlike them who may have other ideas.
Given Palworld is the new thing I doubt its predecessor will ever exit EA by now. I hope the devs commit the new game to a full release instead of dropping support again after the hype dies down.
It's sort of the same thing with "all regulations are written in blood", right? For example, many of the current set of laws, regulations and best practices that prevent people on planes from dying were only enacted after people in the past died from scenarios that were either unknown unknowns or had never been observed in practice before. And that I think applies to many types of regulations besides just aviation.
> But that doesn't mean that there is any remotely moral case for undoing the green revolution and allowing billions to starve.
A question is, is it possible to advance technology to fulfill the green revolution without changing the value of human creativity due to the creation/advancement of genAI? Or past a certain point, the results of discovering improved health and ecological outcomes will become inextricably linked with discovering new technologies that cause conflict? What actually drives such a process?
I think more people might become interested on why we end up here talking about new possibilities conflicting with stability again and again, similar to how the negative effects of the invention of smartphones are being talked about now.
> AI's do not make a copy of the source material. It very much just adjusts their internal weights, which from a broadminded perspective, can be seen as simple inspiration, and not copying.
I think the term "AI" is one of the most loaded and misleading to come up in recent discourse. We don't say that relational databases "pack and ship" data, or web clients "hold a conversation" with each other. But for some reason we can say that LLMs and generative models "get inspired" by the data they ingest. It's all just software.
In my own opinion I don't think the models can copy verbatim except in cases of overfitting, but people like the author of the post have a right to feel that something is very wrong with the current system. It's the same principle of compressing a JPEG of the Mona Lisa to 20% and calling that an original work. I believe the courts don't care that it's just a new set of numbers, but instead want to know where those numbers originated from. It is a color of bits[1] situation.
When software is anthropomorphized, it seems like a lot of criticisms against it are pushed aside. Maybe it is because if you listen to the complaints and stop iterating on something like AI, it's like abandoning your child before their potential is fully realized. You see glimpses of something like yourself within its output and become (parentally?) invested in the software in a way beyond just saying "it's software." I feel as if people are getting attached to this kind of software unlike they would to a database, for example.
A thought experiment I have is whenever the term "AI" appears, mentally replace it with the term "advanced technology." The seeming intent behind many headlines changes with this replacement. "Advanced developments in technology will displace jobs." The AI itself isn't the one coming for people.
And this time it's not only driven by larger media organizations, but also by random people who now have a chance to propagate their views from decreased barriers to entry.
I believe it wasn't only journalistic gatekeeping that prevented this for so long, but simply a lack of affordance for willing parties to do those things. High-speed Internet has made everything so much easier.
My feelings about the rise of streaming video are also conflicted. It has given us high-quality longform content on topics that hadn't been covered before, but all those other people's passions and hobbies take up way too much time if you as a consumer become deeply invested in them (not even counting the conspiracy genre and its implications). It's easy to do partially because YouTube facilitates that, but I think in the end people want to consume all this information in the end, for some definition of "want". And dozens of 6-hour streams of the latest game or another will keep being uploaded every day.
And there's this other thing that I keep coming back to. Someone I know was really into this engineer creating fake Apple product boxes that recorded thieves stealing them and being glitterbombed. They found it hilarious, but I was sort of confounded. It was the conversion of a few people's bad choices into entertainment and ad revenue, coated over with the intellectual sheen of detailed makerspace engineering diagrams and wit mixed with a moral high ground. Though what the thieves did was not right, there was something smug and passive aggressive about the entire thing that rubbed me the wrong way. And this was presented as just a humble guy with engineering experience creating his content and getting people interested in STEM. Anyone has the capability to do this sort of thing now, not just a media machine with questionable motives. It's just regular, driven people with questionable motives now.
Reminds me, I played Genshin Impact once and I was struck by how brief the opening cutscenes were. Given it was a fantasy epic I sort of expected a bit more introduction to the characters in the first 30 minutes. But I think that was because of my conditioning on console games.
It makes logical sense. The longer the intro cutscene took, the more people would just exit out before the action could take place, the more money they lost on IAPs. So fast-tracking the player to beating things up within 2-4 minutes is critical. The longer story cutscenes can take over later. There are probably hard metrics to back this up somewhere.
I think this is the main problem that will increasingly come into focus.
OpenAI has one of the fastest-growing software releases in history. It's kind of insane how after a year this is already starting to alter people's communication styles. Technologists will have to start asking "why do people still insist on doing this", even with all the discussion about incorrect information coming up. Well, because they wanted to, they could, and nobody has told them "no" yet.
I hope the consequences of such a large-scale software rollout are considered next time. If you have to stop and stay "we should educate people about the misuses of this," then some proportion of the population won't be educated or reject being educated outright and do what they want. In my view, the only thing preventing people from throwing around ChatGPT suggestions in inappropriate contexts is... not giving them ChatGPT. To remain naive to the possibilities lest they get excited and unwittingly unleash them on everyone, regardless of true their intentions - as had been the status quo up until a few years ago. Draconian legislation outlawing GPUs or LLMs are more divisive a solution than the general public just not being aware of the possibilities of LLMs.
I know this is unrealistic, however. "Time for people to embrace the tech and move on" has become a thought-terminating cliche. As a programmer, I'm lost as to what to say or do about this.
I've seen accusations and suspicion of HN commentators giving ChatGPT responses. Accusing someone of using ChatGPT here has become something more nuanced than an insult, but still sows discord. If it's coming to this, I think it is worth examining for what purpose we build the things we do.
At first I thought this was the 48GB card that had been rumored for a while, but it turns out it's just a sanctions-compliant RTX 6000 Ada for export to China.
The Adventures of Cookie & Cream had dynamic splitscreen based on progress through the level, and that was released in 2000.
Plus I believe there was an (uncommon?) feature where two players could share a single controller to control each character (two shoulder buttons and an analog stick).
(Even with an Action Replay I remember that game being frustrating as hell.)
It's like imagine there's this force of nature that grants people astounding insight on all knowledge of the universe but causes the suicide rate to skyrocket because nobody is meant to handle that much information at once.
But when asked what people do about their innate insight they can only respond "Oh, I can only manage my finances telepathically and none of my friends have time to speak mouth to mouth anymore, their mental energy is always focused on something now."
And when asked about alternatives, "Oh, we can't just make it go away. We were born with it from the start and everyone relies on it to stay connected. And my children are given assignments where they exercise their PSI so they're obligated to use it. Then they spend a lot of time playing mind games after school with their friends. It will probably never go away, and I accept that."
I'm starting to think that successive generations will both live and die by advancing technology. It's a runaway force that no single organization is in control of, and that we cannot study the long-term effects of until everyone relies on it daily.
And just think about how many tech dependencies we don't have yet but are itching to give ourselves. A generation from now this could repeat itself when people generally consider LLMs useful enough to integrate into every fridge and ATM. Who will make that decision? It seems like when a few people make that decision for others, an acceptance loop begins where the tech is normalized over years until we stop asking ourselves how we got here at all. It no longer makes sense to wake up and see that you don't have a smartphone sitting on your nightstand anymore.
I don't know if it's the same "noise", but for a period of months I used an extension that replaced the New Tab page. When you do this with Firefox it pops up a notification the first new tab you open each session stating "your new tab has changed, keep settings?" I mean, I installed the extension to change the new tab page, so presumably I wouldn't need to be asked a second time.
The noisy part was this notification steals focus so you can't type into the search bar immediately, you have to hit escape or click out to gain focus again. And the popup kept appearing until I realized you had to specifically press "yes, keep changes" on the notification to get it to stop (usually I canceled out of it reflexively to do actually important things). If you just hit Escape or tried to use the URL bar it would come back next session and steal focus again.
It sounds like something minor but the idea of stealing focus to re-confirm a change you already confirmed is a mild source of headaches, and not necessary in my view. Not to mention, this process would repeat itself for every Firefox installation synced with, since the extension counts as a fresh install each time. In a world where switching browsers is trivial, I think minor annoyances like those are best removed.
What seems most likely to me, at least before AGI is invented, is that the human will ask the LLM for strategies to make money under pressure, it will suggest something unethical, and the human will commit the insider trading themselves. When questioned, they will blame the AI for misleading them.
If LLMs are eventually regarded by a lot of people as an authoritative source, regardless of whether or not they are, I expect a lot of such cases of "morality laundering" to appear.
https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%A8%E3%81%8D%E3%82%81%...
http://gaming.moe/?p=2938