Comment by BoppreH

8 days ago

AI capabilities are "spiky": they extend far in some dimensions but fall short in others, seemingly at random. See for example the recent "thus spoke compute" musical[1]. It's an absolute banger, the graphics are impressive, and so is the writing. But some of the metaphors make no sense, the text highlights are in the wrong places, and the train animation at 2:35 is running backwards!

A person capable of making the rest of the video would never make those mistakes, but an AI does. Perhaps our intelligence is also spiky, and we're just used to the general shape and variance within humans.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq8qO-NjYIg

27 comments

BoppreH

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sebzim4500  8 days ago

Part of this is that we implicitly compare AI capabilities to human capabilities, which are also 'spiky'.

You could image aliens coming to earth being shocked that we were able to discover general relativity but can't remember 100 digit numbers in our heads.

ForHackernews  8 days ago

I suppose there's no accounting for taste, but to me this is awful. Is it anthropomorphism to experience vicarious embarrassment on behalf of a machine?

slim  8 days ago 

  some of the metaphors make no sense

To be fair some famous rappers are guilty of this, too

  • ACCount39  8 days ago

    Yeah, it's a very human error type - "go for a line that sounds good on the surface but doesn't actually make sense" is not at all uncommon. Like, humans will definitely go for a metaphor that falls apart mid-sentence even in a live conversation.

    Something about the way some AIs are trained to write causes them to go for metaphors aggressively - and they don't always come up with good ones off the cuff. But they don't double back and get rid of the failures.

Terr_  8 days ago

One might say a calculator is just another example of "spiky intelligence", merely spikier.

  • famouswaffles  8 days ago

    No, one might not say that. Calculators are not regarded as even a Narrow Intelligence because there's no intelligence. And no, not because of the 'humans so special' or 'it's software!' tautology that oft gets repeated in these discussions. I mean there's no adaptability whatsoever. A Chess bot has it (in its narrow domain of Chess). A calculator does not.

    • Terr_  8 days ago

      My point (using irony) is that "spiky intelligence" is a somewhat hollow phrase, something that sounds like it could be objective but really it's just a flavor on top of "I'll know it when I see it."

      Take anything "intelligent", alter it to be spikier and spikier, and eventually *poof* somehow the intelligence vanishes. You can do the same with the phrases "flawed intelligence" or "specialized intelligence."

      > Calculators [have] no intelligence. [...] I mean there's no adaptability

      To short-circuit a long discussion, I submit that "adaptability" will (once the Scooby Doo gang catches it) turn out to be "intelligence" in a tautological mask, both equally undefinable except in relation to one-another.

      Something will be intelligent because you perceive adaptability, and it'll be adaptable because you infer intelligence. If it doesn't seem adaptable, it can't be intelligent, and if you don't want it to be intelligent, it won't have "real" adaptability.

      > A Chess bot has [adaptability] (in its narrow domain of Chess). A calculator does not.

      My calculator solves equations with unknown variables, what makes that insufficiently adaptable? What determines the cutoff-point?

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