[ben_w]

I get the point having read much the same from Tesla (and fans) regarding self driving cars that still haven't done half the things that Musk said was just around the corner pending regulators a decade ago and repeatedly since then.

And myself I keep making comparisons between AI and the progress in 90s video games where every minor improvement got called "photo realistic" and then forgotten with the next game engine: https://archive.org/details/nextgen-issue-26

So I'm not gonna say "this is it" when the software quality really matters, and I absolutely won't speak to progress (or lack of it) outside of software.

But I will say "you can look around and easily see small businesses using AI to generate posters, quite a lot of small business software and websites are in the same category: the mistakes are real but increasingly don't matter".

[qsera]

>the mistakes are real but increasingly don't matter...

I think it would start to matter once again. People will get fed up of AI posters and art. I think they already are...and once some threshold is crossed, the business won't dare to use AI generated assets/designs.

Turns out humans are much better at recognizing patterns in stuff that is generated ONLY using patterns from human generated content.

[ben_w]

> People will get fed up of AI posters and art. I think they already are

Agreed, but will this look like a meme/fashion cycle? If so, re-prompt each year with a different look. Yes, there are still issues here, a friend found an image he was amazed was AI generated, but to me it was obviously so, so I showed him a screenshot of ChatGPT making something just it and included my prompt:

  create image: hand drawing of cute springer spaniel puppy looking sideways, various geometric shapes drawn in layer behind and in front of the puppy, all done in style of 7 year old using crayons with mediocre colouring-in skills

As I said to them:

  yeah, the line thickness feels AI, to me, the bad colouring-in scribbles feel like just the art style it was propmpted with

  it's like: it gets the big picture of the composition, and it knows how to colour in badly, but it doesn't know how to draw a dog as badly as the colouring in

> Turns out humans are much better at recognizing patterns in stuff that is generated ONLY using patterns from human generated content.

We're better at recognising patterns full stop. All biological brains are, and needed to be better than the current state of the art in machine learning because if a living organism was as poor at learning patterns as the SotA in machine learning, the organism would starve to death before being able to pick up anything and eat it.

AI also has a second disadvantage, because there are so few models: the laziest of ChatGPT "thinkpiece" blog posts being everywhere is hard to miss, and 5000 fake bloggers all prompting the same model with "find biggest news story of today and write a blog post about it in a way that maximises my ad revenue" will get 5000 almost identical posts. This will remain true while each instance of the most commonly used AI fail to talk to each other in a way that at least mimics them collectively getting bored with writing the same thing 5000 times, it does not depend on e.g. quality.

[satvikpendem]

It's the exact opposite. Humans will hedonically adapt to anything. If they see enough AI posters pretty soon they will start to not care, at least the majority, while some minority will disagree. We've seen this pattern many times, from data privacy and people still using social media, to using non free software.

[qsera]

>If they see enough AI posters pretty soon they will start to not care..

Wrong analogy. A marketing item wants you to look at it. It takes advantage of an involuntary impulse. A repetitive boring AI artwork will not trigger the impulse to look it. So it is not about "caring"....

[ben_w]

Yes, but also.

Right now GenAI content a bad thing, cringe, a sign of low-value or lack of attention to detail. I don't want to play even a free game if I think it was made by someone else prompting an AI, and that's despite liking the output when I do the same for myself.

If AI output is normalised and becomes simply "boring" or "mundane", those negatives must have also gone away.

After that (assuming there is an "after that", I don't want to bet either way), people would, as per your argument, need to un-boring them.

[ragequittah]

>I don't want to play even a free game if I think it was made by someone else prompting an AI

I have bad news for you if you think the video game industry isn't widely embracing generative AI. Companies try not to say it because of the current backlash involved but I truly believe Tim Sweeney isn't wrong[1]. I think in 5 years it will be a quaint idea to be AI-vegan and it'll be similar to how people resisted smartphones (I was one of them) until they became inevitable.

[1]https://www.techspot.com/news/110410-epic-tim-sweeney-ai-lab...

[ben_w]

I am aware of its use. The point is: I *am* aware, even if the creator doesn't say so.

5 years is an eternity with the current rate of change of AI. Its development is already turning into an international geopolitical issue, even though the implications for mere task-level economics have yet to settle.

Even if it wasn't, 2031 (ish) happens to be roughly when a lot of long-term exponential growth trends all happen to reach points that suggest the assumptions behind them have to break, like more than 100% of electricity being made by PV etc.; the only thing I am confident of about AI is that even its current trend line on METR were to continue it becomes physically unmeasurable sooner than that. This also means nobody will pay Tim Sweeney so much as a single Zimbabwe Dollar in royalties for games written in the Unreal Engine.

Half the game logic I played on Kongregate back in the heyday of Flash games is now one-to-few shot prompting on Claude even if you don't pay for it, and even if you don't pay for ChatGPT you can get assets at that scale pretty quickly. I know 'cause I've tried. It's just, like every blog post whose headings contain emoji, every time there's a 6-7 word paragraph a little too bombastic about how important something is, every time I read or hear "you're absolutely right" or "delve" or "nuance", and yes hear even when the lips those words pass through happen to be human…

…the way most people prompt these models, I can tell. Most people don't bother to ask it to speak like a posh victorian, or draw poster art like it's the 60s, and they don't check and reject when the shadow on the foreground of the moon base doesn't match the Earth in the sky. And because humans are lazy and greedy, so even if the visual models gets as good as the finest artists and the language models as good as Nobel laureates, we're going to learn the style of whatever the default output of those models is when prompted by lazy and greedy humans. And we'll hate it, because it's a cliché, and we avoid those like the plague.

[satvikpendem]

I'm talking about AI menus and such. When I first saw them they were a novelty, and then I didn't really care about them. In other words, they were normalized, just as all AI will be. The amount of people who have strong opinions one way or another will diminish, just as it has for people who have opinions about, say, the Internet. It's so normalized that it's just background noise, and really only technologists like those on HN have issues with the Internet.

[TeriyakiBomb]

Will? They already have.

[w4der]

I digress with your last quote, I feel like some people who are aware of AI are starting to develop a quasi allergic reaction to slop, and while the mistakes might not matter for most of the population, for others it does and will take notice.

[qwerpy]

I’m probably illustrating your point but as a FSD fan it really got ”good enough” recently with version 14. The tipping point was suddenly, much more often than not, it can drive end to end from start (my garage) to finish (parked at destination) with no interventions. I can text and watch videos on my phone and as long as I glance up once a minute, it doesn’t complain.

Handling highway driving with lane changes was great when it got there years ago, but just in the last year or so it has gone from a nice to have to “from now on I will never buy a car that can’t do this”.

AI has hit some milestones for replacing work as well. There’s still many more to go and maybe some of them will never get hit (much like I don’t think a coast to coast drive with zero interventions during winter conditions is ever going to happen) but there are points at which it forever meaningfully changes some field of work. I think it’s there for writing code.

[ben_w]

> I’m probably illustrating your point but as a FSD fan

Half-and-half. I'm not denying that self driving cars (and LLMs) are improving, I'm comparing it against the standards set by the biggest proponents. But yes, I have heard basically the same thing you just wrote for the previous several major releases of FSD.

Where we agree is that, while you are a fan, you do explicitly give as an example of something you think it will never do, something very close to what Musk has promised:

  "Ultimately you'll be able to summon your car anywhere … your car can get to you. I think that within two years, you'll be able to summon your car from across the country. It will meet you wherever your phone is … and it will just automatically charge itself along the entire journey."

- Musk, in Jan 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

(That said, I think Tesla's FSD will never get there, not that it's impossible. The way Musk is behaving, there's going to be a financial scheme named after him in whatever passes for a textbook in 20 years, and it won't be the positive kind of example).

[qwerpy]

What matters is the benefit it affords to drivers, not what "biggest proponents" say. Elon got overly excited in 2016, but for my day to day usage, I don't need it to self-charge on a drive across the country to get me. I need it to safely drive my family on my daily errands or weekend trips, which I now consider solved.

I'm mentally prepared for the next US administration to exact retribution on his companies, and I expect FSD will be neutered after that. Hopefully other car companies are able to catch up. I'm more of a self-driving fan than a Tesla fan, so as long as the thing works as well as what I have now, I'll be fine with it.

[ben_w]

> Elon got overly excited in 2016

Yes. He was before and remains so to this day, but he did so then, too.

> I need it to safely drive my family on my daily errands or weekend trips, which I now consider solved.

This is probably unwise. As with LLMs, the statistics suggest a spikiness in the intelligence, with it being mostly good but also sometimes still making some very odd mistakes that humans would essentially never make.

As with your other comment, you know that if it gets into a crash you're responsible; while you consider this a win, I suggest waiting until the company you buy the car from (in this case Tesla) puts their money where their mouth is on quality and takes liability for crashes due to the AI upon themselves.

(The Cybercab was supposed to be sans-steering-wheel and sans-pedals, which would be a sign of that level of confidence, but the ones spotted in the wild at least sometimes seem to come with the wheel, which suggests they're still not there yet: https://www.vehiclesuggest.com/cybercab-with-steering-wheel-... https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-news/real-tesla-cybercab-sp...)

> Hopefully other car companies are able to catch up.

From the stats I've seen, they're much closer to the goal, relatively smoother/less spiky all-round driving intelligence. They may not be as impressive at their best, but when they fail the failure modes are themselves much safer.

[qwerpy]

The data shows that FSD (supervised) is safer than human alone driving. Given that I value the well-being of my family, FSD (supervised) it is as often as possible. Separately from the data, it is just so nice to hit a button and sit back and relax for the entirety of the drive.

The usual HN nits at this point are that the data is unreliable/biased and that the way I’m using it isn’t supervised enough. I’ll admit to the latter. In my experience the mistakes tend to be navigational but I’ve seen a few of the “nearly drove through the lane closed gate” videos so I definitely keep a closer watch when there is complicated highway stuff going on. I also have my foot at the ready for when I go through the gate to my community, similar failure mode and about 1% of the time it forgets to wait for the gate to close and reopen.

I look forward to the other car companies catching up, competition and more options are good. Elon is a loose cannon, so I need alternatives if Tesla ceases to be.

[ben_w]

I urge caution when examining statistics, as even with the best will in the world… well, the Datasaurus dozen was created for good reason: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datasaurus_dozen

Tesla have been claiming the stats show superiority of their AI vs. humans since at least 2016: https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/06/tesla-says-drivers-using-a...

The lesson from the Datasaurus should be to ask detailed questions, e.g.:

• exposure bias: is the AI used more or less in certain conditions, on certain kinds of roads

• sharpshooter: shouldn't need to ask this one of a public company, but given regular headlines: how many crashes happen a few seconds after it switches itself off?

• driver demographics: most severe accidents by humans are due to impairment or being a new driver, is the AI actually better than an experienced-and-not-impaired driver?

• the nature of the failure modes: as a cyclist I've been hit by a car that stopped at a junction and pulled out into me, this was not fun but no serious injury; this is very different to any of the highway speed fatalities.

> Separately from the data, it is just so nice to hit a button and sit back and relax for the entirety of the drive.

No doubt. Myself, this is why I have been happy to live in a city with a good public transport network and use that instead of driving.

> I look forward to the other car companies catching up

My point is that they are in some important senses already ahead. Less optimised for the headline, more optimised for the real dream.

[StilesCrisis]

Please don't text and watch videos when you drive.

[keeda]

I would deeply implore you to not put to much faith in this technology as there are many very dangerous edge cases, including as I personally experienced, jumping red lights after coming to a full stop: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48928102

And this is not anecdotal, there are enough reports that an investigation is ongoing: https://autos.yahoo.com/policy-and-environment/articles/tesl...

I keep saying, FSD being marketed as FSD is going to get people killed and I can't believe more is not being done to prevent this.

[sumeno]

You are going to get someone killed. You should not be allowed on the road

[grim_io]

Who is responsible for any accident happening while you use your phone during FSD?

It's not FSD until the human is no longer responsible.

This half measure bullshit is a joke.

[qwerpy]

The fact of the matter is that it drives reliably end to end. I don't care who's responsible or what it's called. I only care about the benefit it provides my family, which is immense. If it gets into a crash I know I'm responsible, but given that I consider it a better driver than I am now, this is an improvement over before.

[grim_io]

I'm not going to tell you how you should keep your family safe, or not.

It's just absolutely crazy to me that you trust this experimental feature more than the manufacturer does.