"Fake it till you make it" was practically the motto of young scientists when I was matriculating. In fairness, I don't think they really meant "fake your research" but our entire incentive/competition based society encourages positive misrepresentation - you can't do science, good or bad, if you get competed out of the system entirely.
Guy Debord wrote a book about what he called "The Society of the Spectacle," wherein he argues that capitalism, mostly by virtue of transforming objects into cash at the point of exchange, (that is, a person can take the money and run) tends to cause all things to become evacuated, reduced as much as possible to their image, rather than their substance.
I believe even GK Chesterton understood this when he said that the purpose of a shovel is to dig, not to be sold, but that capitalism tends to see everything as something to be sold primarily and then as something to be used perhaps secondarily.
There is some truth in all this, I think, though obviously the actual physical requirements of living and doing things place some restrictions on how far we can transform things into their images.
And the name is not very edgy and a pretty exact mission description - it describes exactly what it grows from. Seeing stones aka cellphone data of everyone, collected, analyzed and turned into predictions for kings.
To be honest, the good guys - turned out to be pretty embarrassing too.
The whole "everyone thinks like us" delusion bought with the surplus of a good times window distributed all around and its still willing to return to this delusional state of affairs.
The obvious plot-holes they reveal when it comes to we do not discuss nature (the bugs in the human mind are all fixable with education) and we do not discuss nurture (all cultures are equal, and equally capable - disregard the evidence before your eyes).
You don't get to juggle and drop so many balls and do not massively loose confidence!
The rule of (finger in ears) "La-La-La" is over - the problem is- the right is a reactionary mess, that has no solutions, analysis and tools to exploit these weaknesses.
> You don't get to juggle and drop so many balls and do not massively loose confidence!
You don't get to run all this circus if you don't intend to run it only as a circus. It's time to stop kidding ourselves that anybody mainstream is sincere and smart enough to move anywhere different from where they all are told to go.
My experience is that they spit out reasonably looking solutions but then they don't even parse/compile.
They are OK to create small spinets of code and completion.
Anything past that they suck.
It's actually hilarious that AI "solved" bullshiting and and artistic fields much better and faster than say reasoning fields like math or programming.
It's the supreme irony. Even 5 years ago the status quo was saying artistic fields were completely safe from the AI apocalypse.
I disagree that the current generation of AI has "solved" artistic fields any more than it's solved math or programming.
Just as an LLM may be good at spitting out code that looks plausible but fails to work, diffusion models are good at spitting out art that looks shiny but is lacking in any real creativity or artistic expression.
> "looks shiny but is lacking in any real creativity or artistic expression."
My experience with that is that artistic milieus now sometimes even explicitly admit that the difference is who created the art.
"Human that suffered and created something" => high quality art
"The exact same thing but by a machine" => soulless claptrap
It's not about the end result.
A lot could be written about this but it's completely socially unacceptable.
Whether an analogous thing will happen with beautiful mathematical proofs or physical theories remains to be seen. I for one am curious, but as far as art is concerned, in my view it's done.
Truly great art, the kind that expands the field of artistry and makes people think, requires creativity; if you make something that's just a rehashing of existing art, that's not truly creative, it's boring and derivative.
This has nothing to do with whether a human or AI created the art, and I don't think it's controversial to say that AI-generated art is derivative; the models are literally trained to mimic existing artwork.
Creativity in AI art production is a fancy term for temperature that adds no semantic value.
Your "creativity" is just "high temperature" novel art done by the right person/entity.
This was something already obvious to anyone paying attention. Innovation from the "wrong people" was just "sophomoric", derivative or another euphemism, but the same thing from the right person would be a work of genius.
Any experienced programmer will be able to tell what kind of person another programmer is just by the way they write their code.
Code written by programmers with humanities backgrounds is easily identifiable as being of bad quality.
Kind of like vibe coding meets programming by accident, before vibe coding was really a term.
It's a faux pas to even mention this IRL, but good coders know what's up.
Those "coders" usually get promoted to people managers, which is usually what they want anyway because their self-worth relies on abusing others to mitigate the correct self-perception they have of being "inferior".
The problem is, things need to be solved and vibe+accident programming can only go so far.
But fear not, they can always scapegoat whoever solves the problems, because if they were not to blame, how could they know what was up or even feel the need to correct it?
This is a high level of bias and generalization about an enormous group of people with varied backgrounds and experiences, not to mention selection bias as you don't know many good coders backgrounds who may in fact be from humanities.
Even if many of the bad coders are those who were in humanities and don't have coding experience because they just entered the field (because once you get it you are no longer a humanities background)
Only perception matters?
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