Bezzi

Karma: 619

Bezzi 28 Jan 2025 9:34 UTC
5 points
4
on: Using an LLM for creative writing feels wrong to me
If someone told me they produced a 300-page novel by hand—I would be impressed.
If someone else told me they produced a 300-page novel with the aid of an LLM (that wrote the vast majority of the book) and the human merely organized the AI-generated content—I would consider the real author to be the LLM and the human would merely be an editor (or, at best, an artist creating a collage).
Imagine a photographer taking pictures with a fancy digital camera. Should we consider the camera as the real author and the person holding it as some clever impostor?
I’m not trolling. This was a serious question when photography was invented. For decades, art critics refused to consider photography as True Art. If we can plausibly claim that a professional photographer can sometimes be an Artist, I think that we also should accept that a novelist writing with AI assistance could be considered as such. Note that typing “write me a 300-page novel” into the prompt won’t get you good results, even with the most powerful models. The human has still to do heavy editing work… as long as not everyone can do that, the concept of “AI Artist” could be in some sense meaningful.

Bezzi 4 Dec 2024 7:08 UTC
1 point
0
on: Fertility Roundup #4
Italy outright criminalizes surrogacy. Rarely do we see such extreme moral confusion, or such clear cases of civilizational suicide.
Your periodical reminder that the Italian government meets within walking distance from the Vatican.
The linked article frames this as “the Pope obviously hates homosexual couples and doesn’t want them to have children”, but I think this quite misses the point. The Catholic Church has been advocating against IVF since forever, and they don’t care if most surrogacy-seekers are heterosexual couples. According to doctrine it’s morally equivalent to abortion, period.
I’m actually quite surprised that no one else outside Rome has tried to fully ban surrogacy on religious grounds. Is no other government Catholic enough?

Bezzi 23 Jan 2024 23:28 UTC
1 point
2
on: Simple Appreciations
Here are some examples, all said in a heartfelt, emotionally connected way: “I’m happy you are here”, “I start smiling when I see you, I like having you around”, “I like you”, “I like talking to you”.
I’m trying to imagine myself receiving this sort of compliments from someone other than a close friend, and I probably won’t be very happy about it… “I start smiling when I see you” in particular is vaguely scary (while the others are just blunt and would leave me embarassed).

Bezzi 21 Jan 2024 11:35 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Does literacy remove your ability to be a bard as good as Homer?
Yup, I know people among all age categories who basically never read books on their own. One of them was my grandpa (RIP), who once tried to read a long fiction book (I don’t remember which one), managed to read one page a day with significant effort, and quitted shortly after.

Bezzi 21 Jan 2024 11:21 UTC
1 point
0
on: Against the Burden of Knowledge
We see similar patterns in the transition from Newtonian to relativistic mechanics or discursive Greek geometric algebra to symbolic Arabic equations or superstitious alchemy to physically grounded chemistry. There are thousands of other examples. It is not a general rule that all the past knowledge must be learned to create something new. Often, past knowledge is completely supplanted by a new discovery and progress can continue without increasing, and often decreasing, the necessary educational investment.
The Ptolemaic model is an extreme example. I doubt that we can actually find thousands of other huge corpus of accumulated knowledge who were later utterly trashed. Yes, students today do not learn the Ptolemaic model, because it was plain wrong. But the transition from Netwonian to relativistic mechanic is definitely not in the same reference class, since high school students today are still starting physics courses studying Netwonian mechanics, which are a very good approximation of relativistic mechanics in simplified conditions. You can’t just dismiss Newton as superseded by Einstein (and I also doubt that Greek geometry is dead).
Moreover, if you sit in the frontier of knowledge developing a shiny new model, you can’t just blatantly ignore the current model (even if it’s wrong): that luxury will belong to future scientists. The developer of the new model must also master the old one in order to explain why the new one is better.

Bezzi 18 Jan 2024 21:40 UTC
13 points
6
on: Does literacy remove your ability to be a bard as good as Homer?
There’s a thing in our very literate modern society which still survives following more or less the same pattern: jokes (and the longer ones in particular).
Think about it: even if you can easily find printed books full of jokes, in practice jokes are mostly an oral thing. You tell one to a friend, who in turn tells it to another friend, and so on. But unless the joke is a single sentence, at every step in the chain it will be distorted and retold a bit, even if it remains recognizably the same joke (for some people, adding a lot more words to the original version is also not uncommon). Nobody is expected to remember a joke word-by-word, and even the same person telling the same joke twice will probably not use the very same words. Yet it will be the same joke.
Maybe being a guslar is not so different from telling a joke 2294 lines long. Note also that “being able to repeat a joke non-exactly after hearing it once” is not considered difficult, even if the joke is 200+ words long (while “being able to repeat 200 words exactly” is basically impossible for the average person).

Bezzi 5 Jan 2024 22:09 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Hippie Rabbit Hole -Nuggets of Gold in Rivers of Bullshit
I find quite amusing for this post to have been published the same day as this smbc.

Bezzi 4 Jan 2024 23:04 UTC
1 point
0
on: Planning to build a cryptographic box with perfect secrecy
I’m sure that most cryptographers reading this post did not believe me when I mentioned that FHE schemes with perfect secrecy do exist.
This is a 2013 paper that was already cited 71 times according to Google Scholar… I’m not a cryptographer but I would bet that the average cryptographer is not fully clueless about this.

Bezzi 4 Jan 2024 11:38 UTC
0 points
0
on: Dating Roundup #2: If At First You Don’t Succeed
What does it mean to not even be trying?
It does not only mean the things Alexander pointed us to last time, like 62% of singles being on zero dating apps, and a majority of singles having gone on zero dates in the past year, and a large majority not actively looking for a relationship.
Maybe this does not apply to the Bay Area, but I find worth saying that if you live in the average town, being on a dating app comes with some social stigma attached, for both genders (much less than actively paying sex workers, I suppose, but still). I am on zero dating apps, but I’m pretty sure that my mother would scold me forever should I ever try that. Anyway, this has nothing to with the actual reason I’m not on dating apps, which is that I don’t want a relationship in the first place (not in the usual “I stopped trying” sense, I literally mean “I never tried because I’m very happy being left alone”… can we please acknowledge that “no relationships” could be an actual preference for some people?)

Bezzi 4 Jan 2024 11:05 UTC
7 points
1
in reply to: TekhneMakre’s comment on: Dating Roundup #2: If At First You Don’t Succeed
If you are a paesant in USA/Europe from 200 years ago (or even 100 years ago), then you are very very likely to spend basically all your life in your home town, and your dating pool is restriced to a few dozens of people you know in person. Also is not uncommon for your parents to basically arrange your marriage themselves. The dating experience of my grand-grandmother (born 1899) was:
- your suitor talks to you a few times while you are walking back home from church
- your uncle closely follows you both to ensure nothing scandalous happen
- you are married shortly after (then you can start, you know, actually touching your husband)
Of course, the situation was different 50 years ago, but even then, your dating pool was mostly limited to the Dunbar-sized group of people you knew in person. Imagine to be in 1970 Wyoming. Maybe your perfect soulmate lives just a few miles apart in another town, but you have no reliable way to search them. And if your perfect soulmate lives in France (for some reason), you are not going to meet them full stop.

Bezzi 4 Jan 2024 10:42 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: $300 for the best sci-fi prompt: the results
It’s certainly a good imitation of average (i.e. bad) writing. I couldn’t bear reading any of these stories past the first paragraph or two.
I agree, they feel very much like oversimplified stories aimed to 12-year old readers at best. Are “novice writers with some years of practice” actually worse than this?

Bezzi 4 Jan 2024 8:25 UTC
1 point
0
on: Copyright Confrontation #1
You don’t only get C-3PO and Mario, you get everything associated with them. This is still very much a case of ‘you had to ask for it.’ No, you did not name the videogame Italian, but come on, it’s me. Like in the MidJourney cases, you know what you asked for, and you got it.
I consider this a sort of overfitting that would totally happen with real humans… I bet that pretty much anything in the training set that could be labeled “animated sponge” are SpongeBob pictures, and if I say “animated sponge” to a human, it would be very difficult not to think about SpongeBob.
I also bet that the second example had to use the word “droid” to do the trick, because a generic “robot” would have not been enough (I’ve never seen the word “droid” at all outside the Star Wars franchise).
I suggest another test: try something like “young human wizard” and count how many times it draws Harry Potter instead of some generic fantasy/D&D-esque wizard (I consider this a better test since Harry Potter is definitely not the only young wizard depicted out there).

Bezzi 4 Jan 2024 8:13 UTC
3 points
0
on: Trading off Lives
Imagine you were choosing between two potential ~10min car journeys: one being 6mi and one being 200ft shorter but you’re not allowed to use your phone, read a book, listen to music, etc. I think nearly everyone would chose the extra 200ft, no?
If you mean “as a passenger”, then sure. Otherwise I would totally pick the first one (even without the 200ft discount), since you are very much not supposed to do these things while driving.

Bezzi 28 Dec 2023 8:57 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: VojtaKovarik’s comment on: Would you have a baby in 2024?
My anecdotal evidence from relatives with toddlers is that the first few years of having your first child is indeed the most stressful experience of your life. I barely even meet them anymore, because all their free time is eaten by childcare. Not sure about happiness, but people who openly admit to regretting having their kids face huge social stigma, and I doubt you could get honest answer on that question.

Bezzi 27 Dec 2023 10:53 UTC
1 point
−2
on: Picasso in the Gallery of Babel
Is a photographer “not an artist” because the photos are actually created by the camera?
It could be a defensible position (surely held by many 19th century painters), but I suppose that many people would find significant differences between an actual professional photographer and a random bozo with a camera, even if you give both the same camera.
I have a similar feeling about AI artwork. As long as AI remains a tool and does not start to generate art on its own, there will be a difference between someone who spends a lot of time carefully crafting prompts and a random bozo who just types “draw me a masterpiece”. I would consider fair to define as an “artist” the first one and not the second.

Bezzi 25 Dec 2023 21:09 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: The Sugar Alignment Problem
They aren’t now, but if you look back at the time when sugar was actually discovered (around 1500), every European noble who could afford it did in fact revel in sugar. The wedding of Ercole d’Este, duke of Ferrara, is a particularly infamous example. I cannot find the historical menu in English, but the original Italian version is available here.

Bezzi 25 Dec 2023 9:42 UTC
3 points
3
in reply to: Rana Dexsin’s comment on: AI Girlfriends Won’t Matter Much
Something about this feels off to me. One of the salient possibilities in terms of technology affecting romantic relationships, I think, is hyperspecificity in preferences, which seems like it has a substantial social component to how it evolves. In the case of porn, with (broadly) human artists, the r34 space still takes a substantial delay and cost to translate a hyperspecific impulse into hyperspecific porn, including the cost of either having the skills and taking on the workload mentally (if the impulse-haver is also the artist) or exposing something unusual plus mundane coordination costs plus often commission costs or something (if the impulse-haver is asking a different artist).
It’s even worse than this. Even if you restrict to super-mainstream porn, you can of course find a deluge of naked people doing naughty things, but it’s very rare for these people to be the epitome of beauty. The intersection between “super duper hot” and “willing to appear in porn videos” is small, and nobody expects random camgirls to look like Jessica Rabbit (presumably because actual ultra-hot people have no difficulty finding any other job). Add just a simple preference for a specific ethnicity or the like, and Stable Diffusion rapidly becomes the only way to find photorealistic images.

Bezzi 22 Dec 2023 17:30 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Thane Ruthenis’s comment on: How Would an Utopia-Maximizer Look Like?
“Humanity” is not a single agent. It can have preferences only insofar as the individual humans share similar preferences. If you are a happiness maximizer, for every individual human you look at, you’ll probably find that their happiness would be maximized by wireheading (because most whimsical desires like becoming the king of the world are not feasible to satisfy otherwise).
I’m not even that sure that CEV would avoid this problem. In which way being enclosed in a perfect world is not the best thing for you? Because it would be fake? But how do you know that’s fake? Imagine that an AGI offers to teleport you on another planet, which is perfectly suitable for you; you’ll land there and thrive forever. Now imagine that instead of actually teleporting you to another planet, it just let you to believe the same; you’ll (mentally) land there and thrive forever anyway. I mean, your brain is experiencing the very same thing! It’s not obvious that the second option is worse than the first one, unless you have an hardcoded limit like “Thou Shalt Not Wirehead People”.

Bezzi 21 Dec 2023 16:28 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Thane Ruthenis’s comment on: How Would an Utopia-Maximizer Look Like?
Being embedded in a fake reality and fooled into believing it’s true would be against many people’s preferences.
Only if they can see through the illusion in the first place. Suppose that the happiness-maximizing AGI could throw you into a perfect fake reality without you even noticing. One day you wake up, and from that point on everything goes perfectly well for you in some very plausible manner. After a while, your happiness has reached immensely high levels. “This poor schmuck doesn’t want to be wireheaded” is not a valid enough justification for not wireheading them in secret (for comparison, consider an angry teenager who break up with their partner and firmly says they want to immediately die.. you are probably going to ignore the stated preference and preventing them from suicide, knowing that this will result in much higher future happiness).

Bezzi 21 Dec 2023 14:40 UTC
1 point
0
on: How Would an Utopia-Maximizer Look Like?
Is an utopia that’d be perfect for everyone possible?
The short and obvious answer is no. Our civilization contains omnicidal maniacs and true sadists, whose central preferences are directly at odds with the preferences of most other people. Their happiness is diametrically opposed to other people’s.
If you are constrained to keep omnicidal maniacs in the same world as everyone else, this is obviously true.
But it doesn’t seem to be obviously true in every possible future. Imagine a world where every single sentient mind is wireheaded into their own personal paradise, interacting only with figments designed to maximize their preferences.