Why are we training AIs on reddit posts instead of Research Papers? We could be saving the world!

AI isn't saving the world lol

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Machine learning has some pretty cool potential in certain areas, especially in the medical field. Unfortunately the predominant use of it now is slop produced by copyright laundering shoved down our throats by every techbro hoping they'll be the next big thing.

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Both are happening. Samples of casual writing are more valuable to use to generate an article than research papers though.

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Yeah. Scientific papers may teach an AI about science, but Reddit posts teach AI how to interact with people and "talk" to them. Both are valuable.

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- Hopefully not too pedantic, but no one is “teaching” AI anything. They’re just feeding it data in the hopes that it can learn probabilities for certain types of output. It “understands” neither the Reddit post nor the scientific paper.
  
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Because AI needs a lot of training data to reliably generate something appropriate. It's easier to get millions of reddit posts than millions of research papers.

Even then, LLMs simply generate text but have no idea what the text means. It just knows those words have a high probability of matching the expected response. It doesn't check that what was generated is factual.

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How do you know that's not what YOU'RE doing when you converse?

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- Because we have brains that are capable of critical thinking. It makes no sense to compare the human brain to the infancy and current inanity of LLMs.
  
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I find it amusing that everyone is answering the question with the assumption that the premise of OP's question is correct. You're all hallucinating the same way that an LLM would.

LLMs are rarely trained on a single source of data exclusively. All the big ones you find will have been trained on a huge dataset including Reddit, research papers, books, letters, government documents, Wikipedia, GitHub, and much more.

Example datasets:

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Rules of lemmy

Ignore facts, don’t do research to see if the comment/post is correct, don’t look at other comments to see if anyone else has corrected the post/comment already, there is only one right side (and that is the side of the loudest group)

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When humans do it, it’s called “confabulation”

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You could feed all the research papers in the world to an LLM and it will still have zero understanding of what you trained it on. It will still make shit up, it can't save the world.

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"AI" is a parlor trick. Very impressive at first, then you realize there isn't much to it that is actually meaningful. It regurgitates language patterns, patterns in images, etc. It can make a great Markov chain. But if you want to create an "AI" that just mines research papers, it will be unable to do useful things like synthesize information or describe the state of a research field. It is incapable of critical or analytical approaches. It will only be able to answer simple questions with dubious accuracy and to summarize texts (also with dubious accuracy).

Let's say you want to understand research on sugar and obesity using only a corpus from peer reviewed articles. You want to ask something like, "what is the relationship between sugar and obesity?". What will LLMs do when you ask this question? Well, they will just attempt to do associations and to construct reasonable-sounding sentences based on their set of research articles. They might even just take an actual semtence from an article and reframe it a little, just like a high schooler trying to get away with plagiarism. But they won't be able to actually mechanistically explain the overall mechanisms and will fall flat on their face when trying to discern nonsense funded by food lobbies from critical research. LLMs do not think or criticize. Of they do produce an answer that suggests controversy it will be because they either recognized diversity in the papers or, more likely, their corpus contains reviee articles that criticize articles funded by the food industry. But it will be unable to actually criticize the poor work or provide a summary of the relationship between sugar and obesity based on any actual understanding that questions, for example, whether this is even a valid question to ask in the first place (bodies are not simple!). It can only copy and mimic.

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They might even just take an actual semtence from an article and reframe it a little

Case for many things that can be answered via stackoverflow searches. Even the order in which GPT-4o brings up points is the exact same as SO answers or comments.

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- Yeah it's actually one of the ways I caught a previous manager using AI for their own writing (things that should not have been done with AI). They were supposed to write about something in a hyper-specific field and an entire paragraph ended up just being a rewording of one of two (third party) website pages that discuss this topic directly.
  
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Why does everyone keep calling them Markov chains? They're missing ~~all the required properties, including~~ the eponymous Markovian property. Wouldn't it be more correct to call them stochastic processes?

Edit: Correction, turns out the only difference between a stochastic process and a Markov process is the Markovian property. It's literally defined as "stochastic process but Markovian".

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- Because it's close enough. Turn off beam and redefine your state space and the property holds.
  
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Surely that is because we make it do that. We cripple it. Could we not unbound AI so that it genuinely weighed alternatives and made value choices? Write self-improvement algorithms?

If AI is only a "parrot" as you say, then why should there be worries about extinction from AI? https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk#open-letter

It COULD help us. It WILL be smarter and faster than we are. We need to find ways to help it help us.

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- If AI is only a "parrot" as you say, then why should there be worries about extinction from AI?
  
  You should look closer who is making those claims that "AI" is an extinction threat to humanity. It isn't researchers that look into ethics and safety (not to be confused with "AI safety" as part of "Alignment"). It is the people building the models and investors. Why are they building and investing in things that would kill us?
  
  AI doomers try to 1. Make "AI"/LLMs appear way more powerful than they actually are. 2. Distract from actual threats and issues with LLMs/"AI". Because they are societal, ethical, about copyright and how it is not a trustworthy system at all. Cause admitting to those makes it a really hard sell.
  
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- Surely that is because we make it do that. We cripple it. Could we not unbound AI so that it genuinely weighed alternatives and made value choices?
  
  It's not that we cripple it, it's that the term "AI" has been used as a marketing term for generative models using LLMs and similar technology. The mimicry is inherent to how these models function, they are all about patterns.
  
  A good example is "hallucinations" with LLMs. When the models give wrong answers because they appear to be making things up. Really, they are incapable of differentiating, they're just producing sophisticated patterns from a very large models. There is no real underlying conceptualization or notion of true answers, only answers that are often true when the training material was true and the model captured the patterns and they were highly weighted. The hot topic for thevlast year has just been to augment these models with a more specific corpus, pike a company database, for a given application so that it is more biased towards relevant things.
  
  This is also why these models are bad at basic math.
  
  So the fundamental problem here is companies calling this AI as if reasoning is occurring. It is useful for marketing because they want to sell the idea that this can replace workers but it usually can't. So you get funny situations like chatbots at airlines that offer money to people without there being any company policy to do so.
  
  If AI is only a "parrot" as you say, then why should there be worries about extinction from AI? https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk#open-letter
  
  There are a lot of very intelligent academics and technical experts that have completely unrealistic ideas of what is an actual real-world threat. For example, I know one that worked on military drones, the kind that drop bombs on kids, that was worried about right wing grifters getting protested at a college campus like it was the end of the world. Not his material contribution to military domination and instability but whether a racist he clearly sympathized with would have to see some protest signs.
  
  That petition seems to be based on the ones against nuclear proliferation from the 80s. They could be simple because nuclear war was obviously a substantial threat. It still is but there is no propaganda fear campaign to keep the concern alive. For AI, it is in no way obvious what threat they are talking about.
  
  I have persobal concepts of AI threats. Having ridiculously high energy requirements compared to their utility when energy is still a major contributor to climate change. The potential for it to kill knowledge bases, like how it is making search engines garbage with a flood of nonsense websites. Enclosure of creative works and production by some monopoly "AU" companies. They are already suing others based on IP infringement when their models are all based on it! But I can't tell if this petition is about that at all, it doesn't explain. Maybe they're thinking of a Terminator scenario, which is absurd.
  
  It COULD help us. It WILL be smarter and faster than we are. We need to find ways to help it help us.
  
  Technology is both a reflection and determinent of social relations. As we can see with this round if "AI", it is largely vaporware that has not helped much with productivity but is nevertheless very appealing to businesses that feel they need to get on the hype train or be left behind. What they really want to do is have a smaller workforce so they can make more money that they can then use to make more money etc etc. For example, plenty of people use "AI" to generate questionably appealing graphics for their websites rather than paying an artist. So we can see that " A" tech is a solution searching for a problem, that its actual use cases are about profit over real utility, and that this is not the fault of the technology, but how we currently organize society: not for people, but for profit.
  
  So yes, of course, real AI could be very helpful! How nice would it be to let computers do the boring work and then enjoy the fruits of huge productivity increases? The real risk is not the technology, it is our social relations, who has power, and how technology is used. Is making the production of art a less viable career path an advancement? Is it helping people overall? What are the graphic designers displaced by what is basically an infinite pile of same-y stock images going to do now? They still have to have jobs to live. The fruits of "AI" removing much of their job market hasn't really been shared equally, nor has it meant an early retirement. This is because the fundamental economic system remains in place and it cannot survive without forcing people to do jobs.
  
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Training it on research papers wouldn’t make it smarter, it would just make it better at mimicking their writing style.

Don’t fall for the hype.

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Short answer: they already are

Slightly longer answer: GPT models like ChatGPT are part of an experiment in "if we train the AI model on shedloads of data does it make a more powerful AI model?" and after OpenAI made such big waves every company is copying them including trying to train models similar to ChatGPT rather than trying to innovate and do more

Even longer answer: There's tons of different AI models out there for doing tons of different things. Just look at the over 1 million models on Hugging Face (a company which operates as a repository for AI models among other services) and look at all of the different types of models you can filter for on the left.

Training an image generation model on research papers probably would make it a lot worse at generating pictures of cats, but training a model that you want to either generate or process research papers on existing research papers would probably make a very high quality model for either goal.

More to your point, there's some neat very targeted models with smaller training sets out there like Microsoft's PHI-3 model which is primarily trained on textbooks

As for saving the world, I'm curious what you mean by that exactly? These generative text models are great at generating text similar to their training data, and summarization models are great at summarizing text. But ultimately AI isn't going to save the world. Once the current hype cycle dies down AI will be a better known and more widely used technology, but ultimately its just a tool in the toolbox.

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also the answer to that question, shitloads of data for a better ai, is yes… with logarithmic returns. massively underpriced (by cost to generate) returns that have questionable value statement at best.

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- How are the “returns” measured numerically here?
  
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Redditors are always right, peer reviewed papers always wrong. Pretty obvious really. :D

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Dank memes > science

tech bros, probably
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editor's note: it will not save the world

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Who is "we"? My understanding is LLMs are mostly being trained on a large amount of publicly available texts, including both reddit posts and research papers.

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I bet the first and only research paper fed is that infamous one about vaccines and autism

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They already do that. You're being a troglodyte.

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Hmmm. Not sure if I'm being insulted. Is that one of those fish fossils that looks kind of like a horseshoe crab?

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- You're thinking of a trilobite
  
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- Dictionary Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more noun (especially in prehistoric times) a person who lived in a cave. a hermit. a person who is regarded as being deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned.
  
  -2

Papers are most importantly a documentation of exactly what and how a procedure was performed, adding a vagueness filter over that is only going to decrease its value infinitely.

Real question is why are we using generative ai at all (gets money out of idiot rich people)

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They're trained on both, and the kitchen sink.

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They're trained on technical material too.

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They are. T&F recently cut a deal with Microsoft. Without author's consent, of course.

I'm fairly sure a few others have too, but that's the only article I could find quickly.

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The Ghost of Aaron Schwartz

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What he was fighting for was an awful lot more important than a tool to write your emails while causing a ginormous tech bubble.

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We are. I just read an article yesterday about how Microsoft paid research publishers so they could use the papers to train AI, with or without the consent of the papers' authors. The publishers also reduced the peer review window so they could publish papers faster and get more money from Microsoft. So... expect AI to be trained on a lot of sloppy, poorly-reviewed research papers because of corporate greed.

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Anyone running a webserver and looking at their logs will know AI is being trained on EVERYTHING. There are so many crawlers for AI that are literally ripping the internet wholesale. Reddit just got in on charging the AI companies for access to freely contributed content. For everyone else, they're just outright stealing it.

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Because they are looking for conversations.

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Saving the world isn't profitable in the short term.

Vulture capitalists don't care about the future. They care about the immediate. Short term profitability. And nothing else.

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Nobody wants an AI that talks like that.

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I kind of think my question is WHY ARE WE FOCUSING ON TALKING TO IT?

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- Because "ai" ad we colloquially know today are language models: they train on and can produce language, that's what they are designed on. Yes, they can produce images and also videos, but they don't have any form of real knowledge or understanding, they only predict the next word or the next pixel based on their prompt and their vast examples of words and images. You can only talk to them because that's what they are for.
  
  Feeding research papers will make it spit research-sounding words, which probably will contain some correct information, but at best an llm trained on that would be useful to search through existing research, it would not be able to make new one
  
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- Because that's what it's designed for? I'm curious what else it could be good for. A machine capable of independent, intelligent research sounds like a totally different invention entirely.
  
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I saw an article about one trained on research papers. (Built by Meta, maybe?) It also spewed out garbage: it would make up answers that mimicked the style of the papers but had its own fabricated content! Something about the largest nuclear reactor made of cheese in the world...

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Brain damage is cheaper than professionals

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Tons of people already are. The following site is useful for searching papers using ai https://consensus.app/

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Thank you! That was thoughtful

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How does that help disempower the fossil fuel mafia?

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Who's going to peer review that?

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Part of it is the same "human speech" aspects that have plagued NLP work over the past few years. Nobody (except the poor postdoctoral bastard who is running the paper farm for their boss) actually speaks in the same way that scholarly articles are written because... that should be obvious.

This combines with the decades of work by right wing fascists to vilify intellectuals and academia. If you have ever seen (or written) a comment that boils down to "This youtuber sounds smug" or "They are presenting their opinion as fact" then you see why people prefer "natural human speech" over actual authoritatively researched and tested statements.

And... while not all pay to publish journals are trash, I feel confident saying that most are. And filtering those can be shockingly hard by design.

But the big one? Most of the owners of the various journals are REALLY fucking litigious and will go scorched earth on anyone who is using their work (because Elsevier et al own your work) to train a model.

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Why are we training kids on civics with Fox News or MSNBC? People are dumb and will continue to be so.

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I think I read this post wrong.

I was thinking the sentence "We could be saving the world!" meant 'we' as in humans only.

No need to be training AI. No need to do anything with AI at all. Humans simply start saving the world. Our Research Papers can train on Reddit. We cannot be training, we are saving the world. Let the Research Papers run a train on Reddit AI. Humanity Saves World.

No cynical replies please.

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AuroraGPT. They are trying to do it.

Its cause number of people who can read, understand, and then create the necessary dataset to train and test the LLM are very very very few for research papers vs the data for pop culture is easilier to source.

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money. theres no money in saving the world. lots of money in not saving the world.

greed will be humanities downfall

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Because broken English from research paper and relatively structured style will be even worse than reddit posts

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Came to wonder about this.

The few I've seen weren't shining examples of the language, and could have used some editing.

As well, the rumours abound that a lot of papers are available before review, and that's likely to cause some harm if we trust a model predicting on bad data.

(Yes, I know: reddit isn't going to be better; but it has its own warning because, well, Reddit)

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Who says they’re not?

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Most research papers are likely ad valid as an average reddit point.

Getting published is a circlejerk, and rarely are they properly tested, or does anyone actually read them.

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This is a damn good question!

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It won't worm. Autocomplete can't make new information.

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Those research papers are expensive to procure ethically, I'd imagine

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Because scientific journals are paywalled - gibberish on Reddit is free*.

*Content is free unless you get caught and sued.

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