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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38238 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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A few followups to last week's post on the shifting political alignment of artists:

HN: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

The AI Unbundling

Vox: What AI Art means for human artists

FurAffinity was, predictably, not the only site to ban AI content. Digital artists online are in crisis mode, and you can hardly blame them -- their primary income source is about to disappear. A few names for anyone here still paying for commissions: PornPen, Waifu Diffusion, Unstable Diffusion.

But what I really want to focus on is the Vox video. I watched it (and it's accompanying layman explanation of diffusion models) with the expectation it'd be some polemic against the dangers of amoral tech nerds bringing grevious harm to marginalised communities. Instead, what I got was this:

There's hundreds of millions of years of evolution that go into making the human body move through three-dimensional space gracefully and respond to rapidly changing situations. Language -- not hundreds of millions of years of evolution behind that, actually. It's pretty recent. And the same thing is true for creating images. So our idea that like, creative symbolic work will be really hard to automate and that physical labor will be really easy to automate, is based on social distinctions that we draw between different kinds of people. Not based on a really good understanding of actually what's hard.

So, although artists are organising a reactionary/protectionist front against AI art, the media seems to be siding with the techbros for the moment. And I kind of hate this. I'm mostly an AI maximalist, and I'm fully expecting whoever sides with Team AI to gain power in the coming years. To that end, I was hoping the media would make a mistake...

There's hundreds of millions of years of evolution that go into making the human body move through three-dimensional space gracefully and respond to rapidly changing situations. Language -- not hundreds of millions of years of evolution behind that, actually. It's pretty recent. And the same thing is true for creating images. So our idea that like, creative symbolic work will be really hard to automate and that physical labor will be really easy to automate, is based on social distinctions that we draw between different kinds of people. Not based on a really good understanding of actually what's hard.

This is definitely not as bad as it could have been but I find the reasoning here really strange. Since when is time evolution spent creating something a good measure of difficulty. Evolution has been "perfecting" tons of chemical reactions since before there were multi-cell organisms and it's trivial for us to cause chemical reactions.

I can't speak for Ted Underwood and it's possible that he hasn't given it much thought.

But it's reasonable in this specific context, because evolution consists of a semi-random exploration of the fitness landscape, and neural net training is an attempt to discover the global minimum in the loss landscape; length of training is trivially expected to contribute to the «polish» and optimization of the feature – some old things like ribosomes can well be approaching the thermodynamical limits of efficiency, and then there's... how we do arithmetic (I've made this point to darwin somewhere in this thread). Animals have been navigating 3D space for a long time, as a result they're pretty good at it.

Further, short-term evolution is necessarily dominated by simple changes – often just a few substitutions here and there affecting quantitative parameters like the rate of expression of a protein which upregulates the secretion of some hormone, that leads to general size change and allometric growth, in other words, unequal scaling of body parts with changed size. Or even more commonly and to a greater extent, selection on «standing» variation, changing distributions of already polygenic traits:

Quantitative selection is a lot easier than people think. If I kidnapped a year’s worth of National Merit Scholars and dropped them on a deserted but fertile island, a new race with an average IQ around 130 would develop ( unless those little brainiacs escaped. You have to watch them all the time). If I dropped a lot of NBA and WNBA players, you’d see the tallest race, if we could just get them to reproduce.

But… there are some subtle points here. Great Danes exist and persist, but they have a bundle of health problems, and they don’t live too long (8-10 years). Wolves last around 15-16 years in captivity, with a record of 20. If you wanted to create a new race with an average adult height of 7 feet, I’m sure you could, but I’d bet money they’d have bad knees.

On the other hand, if they stayed 7 feet tall for a couple of million years, they would not be particularly prone to bad knees. There would be gradual selection for tougher knees: changes in development, changes in bones and tendons and cartilage, eventually perhaps fundamental changes in the architecture of the knee. There would be lots of little changes that made development among those giants more robust, changes that reduced the incidence of many problems that centers fall heir too.

Brain size in ancient and archaic humans was plenty big, but we don’t really see signs of rapid innovation, art, and decent fast food until fairly recently, 50,000 years or so. [...]

So I think Kevin Mitchell ( not the other two) has a point. It’s possible, even likely, that the populations that have relatively high IQs today haven’t had them for very long, and that they’re not terrible well adapted to their new mental horsepower. Susceptible to various mental problems and illusions that would probably be a lot rarer if natural selection had had time to iron out the bugs.

Short bursts of evolution like those are simple to approximate with technology: once we achieve the very basic performance (at least using a somewhat analogous architecture, like with connectionist models), we can keep going, scaling, even if the exponent is more punishing than it was in the organic substrate.

Our higher-order cognition including symbolic thought (probably necessary for art) and speech is physically implemented on the array of almost homogenous cortical columns (with some priority for Wernicke and Broca areas in the case of speech), which has been scaled up by a factor of like, two in the last 2 million years, or something to this effect, depending on where you start assuming hominids had any semblance of speech; and Cochran argues even that was only part of the prerequisite, with real hot stuff – including cave art – starting to happen tens of thousands of years ago. So the expectation is that the change was something even simpler.

Having (presumably) discovered the general trick to learning, particularly in the domain of image recognition, and shown it with decent machine vision and other achievements, we can reasonably expect to cover the rest of the ground very quickly with scaling and scientifically trivial tweaks – which is all there is to those generative models.

We haven't yet shown equivalent mastery in tasks involving locomotion of real robots, though that's probably more an issue of iteration time.

Quantitative selection is a lot easier than people think. If I kidnapped a year’s worth of National Merit Scholars and dropped them on a deserted but fertile island, a new race with an average IQ around 130 would develop ( unless those little brainiacs escaped. You have to watch them all the time). If I dropped a lot of NBA and WNBA players, you’d see the tallest race, if we could just get them to reproduce.

Without evolutionary pressure both populations would regress to the mean. If you're stuck on a desert island, what good does a 130IQ brain do? It just wants more carbohydrates and mopes. Someone who's born with IQ125 will thrive a little bit more.

Leaving probable nutritional deficiencies etc. aside: the next generation will have an IQ of like 120, and the third one, I'd bet, of 119.6. Regression to the mean has nothing to do with evolutionary pressures, it's just the issue of resetting beneficial non-hereditary effects (which we assume explain 30-50% of the deviation from median phenotype in these particular specimens). It's not some abstract global mean but just the mean of the island population's genetic value for the trait. Cochran himself explained this well to Edge, in a kinder era:

The kids get the good additive genes, but have average "environmental" luck—so their average IQ is 110. The luck (10 pts worth) goes away.

The 120-IQ parents drawn from the IQ-85 population have 35 extra IQ points, half from good additive genes and half from good environmental luck. But in the next generation, the luck goes away… so they drop 17.5 points.

The next point is that the luck only goes away once. If you took those kids from the first group, with average IQs of 110, and dropped them on a friendly uninhabited island, they would eventually get around to mating—and the next generation would also have an IQ of 110. With tougher selection, say by kidnapping a year’s worth of National Merit Finalists, you could create a new ethny with far higher average intelligence than any existing. Eugenics is not only possible, it’s trivial.

(...Does he actually hope to do this?)

In the long run, the trait may well be watered down, of course – unless they discover some fitness peak that normie island populations couldn't get to because of all the valleys; I think Scott had a short story on brilliant island eugenicists?

But this happens because of purifying selection.

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