[wyattpeak]

If you showed somebody from 1921 a page of text produced by GPT-3, told them that it was written by a machine, and then told them that we'd made no progress towards artificial intelligence, they'd laugh in your face.

You can take from that what you will, but I suspect it will always seem as though we've made no progress, because anything we learn to emulate we necessarily understand well enough that it will no longer seem magical. I wouldn't put it past us to start thinking of humans as automata before we declare that machines can think.

[Ginden]

> If you showed somebody from 1921 a page of text produced by GPT-3, told them that it was written by a machine, and then told them that we'd made no progress towards artificial intelligence, they'd laugh in your face.

You can actually do it. 100 year old people usually don't follow news on artificial intelligence, so they will act genuine.

[jjoonathan]

Unless the people running GPT-2 bots all over the internet suddenly gave up when GPT-3 came out, it's been passing Turing tests on audiences much younger than 100 years.

[irrational]

My grandmother is 99 and definitely doesn’t follow news on artificial intelligence. Maybe I should test this on her the next time I’m at her house.

[Cyphase]

This is the AI effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

[hyperpallium2]

The humans move goalposts because intelligence is political.

[robbedpeter]

It's clear that gpt models are more competent with knowledge work than a significant percentage of humans. This is implicitly threatening, to the extent that it seems people will refuse to even consider the possibility. Dall-e is a better artist than 99% of humans.

We thought we'd have time for the mental tasks as ai encroached on the menial, but it seems to be the reverse.

By every measure Turing himself considered, the Turing test has been passed. It's only the post-gpt-2 peanut gallery that have insisted on moving the goalposts straight into mysticism and magical thinking.

Machines will be better at everything humans can do, and accomplish things we cannot.

We are living in interesting times, different from anything that's come before - we exist in relation to systems that are learning to think like us.

[katabasis]

If we continue to move the goalposts of what defines intelligence into mystical/ineffable territory, we may find that humanity no longer qualifies as “intelligent” either.

[hyperpallium2]

The Turing test employs interview, not artistic creation, to distinguish the human.

The mechanisation of knowledge work has been ongoing (at least) since human accounting with beans - before writing; before number; maybe, even before language.

The humans' real fear will rise when they meet with superior argument.

[TaylorAlexander]

> Dall-e is a better artist than 99% of humans.

Really depends on whether “art” means “making drawings of things” or “making people feel something”. It’s also a very narrow domain. Dall-e can’t sculpt clay (for example), even if you attached a robot arm, without essentially replacing a bunch of the training system logic. Out of the box Dall-e has no provision to manipulate anything to produce art.

[mensetmanusman]

Where can I try Dall-e? If it’s not available to test, how can we know?

[djsbs]

“The machine stops” [1]written in 1909 has AI composing things (I forget if it was poetry or music)

Orwell’s 1984, written in the mid forties, has pop songs written by machine.

In both cases the AI composed works are described in the same way Id describe modern AI composing things - dreadful.

The concept of AI is quite old. Even Medieval Europe you had philosophers making quite penetrating insights on mechanical creativity. But, lacking a computer, there was no point continuing their train of thought

[1] amazing, far seeing, book. Very short, maybe a two hour read.

[wyattpeak]

I'm not saying the idea would be new to them, the idea of thinking machines had been around for a lot longer than that. I'm saying that the idea that modern text-generation is "zero progress on anything even remotely resembling Artificial Intelligence" would be absurd to them.

Jules Verne wrote about a trip to the moon. It doesn't follow that he would regard the NASA missions as old-hat.

[jimmaswell]

Some AI generated music certainly passes as normal music.

[mensetmanusman]

Alternatively, they could have said, ‘oh great! Computers continued to improve and you were finally able to implement our algorithms on enough data!’

[wyattpeak]

To whatever extent that people in the 1920s can be said to have had algorithms for machine learning, they certainly didn't bear any relation to modern algorithms.

Even the idea of requiring enough data to build a good system is fairly new. As late as the 1980s, expert systems were the dominant approach to artificial intelligence, and they didn't require information corpi at all but instead involved experts programming in all of the rules they could think of for a system.

[mensetmanusman]

Do we know who published the first conceptual framework for the algorithms behind AlphaGo etc? It seems like they would get a Nobel prize at some point…