As junk web pages written by AI proliferate, the models that rely on that data will suffer.
Good.
“On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” - Charles Babbage
The business people adopting AI: “who cares what it’s trained on? It’s intelligent right? It’ll just sort through the garbage and magically come up with the right answers to everything”
Of course modern UX design is very much based on getting the right answer with the wrong inputs (autocorrect, etc).
I believe Robustness was the term I learned years ago: the ability of a system to gracefully handle user error, make it easy to recover from or fix, clearly communicate what was wrong etc.
Of course, nothing is ever perfect and humans are very creative at fucking up, and a lot of companies don’t seem to take UX too seriously. Particularly when the devs get tunnel vision and forget about user error being a thing…
Garbage in; Garbage out.
Model degeneration is an already well-known phenomenon. The article already explains well what’s going on so I won’t go into details, but note how this happens because the model does not understand what it is outputting - it’s looking for patterns, not for the meaning conveyed by said patterns.
Frankly at this rate might as well go with a neuro-symbolic approach.
The issue with your assertion is that people don’t actually work a similar way. Have you ever met someone who was clearly taught "garbage’?
The issue with your assertion is that people don’t actually work a similar way.
I’m talking about LLMs, not about people.
I know you are, but the argument that an LLM doesn’t understand context is incorrect. It’s not human level understanding, but it’s been demonstrated that they do have a level of understanding.
And to be clear, I’m not talking about consciousness or sapience.
Well, you’ve got a timestamped copy of much of the Web that existed up until latent-diffusion models at archive.org. That may not give you access to newer information, but it’s a pretty whopping big chunk of data to work with.
Hopefully archive.org have measures in place to stop people from yanking all their data too quickly. As least not without a hefty donation or something. As a user it can chug a bit, and I’m hoping that’s the rate-limiting I’m talking about and not that they’re swamped.
That would go against the principal of the archive imo but regardless, if you take away all means of acquiring data freely, you are just giving companies like OpenAI and Google who already have copies of it an insane advantage.
AI isn’t going away, we need to make sure we have free access to it as to not give our whole economy to a handful of companies.
