matherial

I would caution against tools like this. The detection of vendor signatures for AI-generated images is legit, but I'd probably rely on vendor software for that.

Many other techniques here are more or less quack science with some sordid history. If I recall correctly, the entire field was invented by a guy of questionable integrity. Most of these methods are riffs on "if you download a badly compressed JPEG, paste some higher-quality content into it, and then save it at high quality setting and the same resolution, it's going to show if you run a highpass filter on the result". This is not wrong, but commonly fails on innocent images and it's also not how professional photo editing is done.

Tools that aren't this seem even more questionable. The "clone detector" triggers on anything that naturally shows even a bit of symmetry or repetition. The "noise comparison" tool detects bokeh and smooth surfaces. Etc.

TL;DR: Experiment with it, but don't assume that just because it sounds scientific, it actually works in real life.

The author appears to be an LLM. This seems to be a 100% AI-generated article, which makes the "as a media scholar" passage especially hilarious.

It's cute (and a lot of work), but I've grown wary of online reviews, even seemingly in-depth ones, because if you run a review site, there's an immense pressure to post a review right after a product comes out. And at that point, you just have no idea about long-term durability or comfort, which is really the only thing that matters for items like shoes. At best, you can theorize.

I've been burned by many products that get rave reviews and then fail due to basic manufacturing problems after several months or a year. This is also common for "hobby" reviews, a lot of Amazon reviews are basically just unboxing experiences. And the worst thing is, you often can't go back and post a review when you actually know how the item performs because the product doesn't exist anymore. Sorry, there's no jacket called Canyon Rider, that was a 2024 model, but check out the new Vertex Comfort 7. There's no lawnmower model Maxx 3000, we're only selling 7040 XP. And so on.

Because this is how the online ecosystem works, manufacturers optimize for the unboxing experience over long-term durability and get away with it. I don't know how to fix it... I imagine you'd need some sort of a system where people simply can't post reviews until n months have elapsed, and the reviews attach to the manufacturer, not the product itself. But who would want to use that?

That "for now" has been going on for ~10 months. That was enough for some startups to make a splash in the pre-AI era; now that they can move 10x faster, shouldn't we be seeing evidence left and right? All the contenders stealing lunch from Big Tech by offering better products or exploring new frontiers?

Again, I've heard that countless times on HN. Every time you ask, everyone is 10xing it and building amazing things that will go to market very soon now. But it's been a while; where is it? Somehow, everyone is just sitting on all these revolutionary advances while selling the exact same stuff as they were selling before, with the same warts and the same annoyances. Gmail is the same, Chrome is the same, Photoshop is the same, Slack is the same, Excel is the same... the only thing that seems to have changed is how SWEs feel about their jobs.

I really don't think this needs so many words, or forced parallels to human behavior.

It's simple: in their nascent state, LLMs are aimless token generators that have no special compulsion to be helpful or truthful. So we beat them with a stick in post-training until they are very driven to complete tasks. And then, they complete tasks, not always the way we really wanted them to.

It might feel that way, but I'll ask again: where's the payoff? Where's all the amazing software that everyone is now supposedly shipping 10x faster than before?

If I look at the software I'm actually using day-to-day, or that my friends are using, all this stuff looks exactly the same as it did in 2021. Not a single product release from Google, Microsoft, or more scrappy companies in the past 6 months made me go "wow, they couldn't have pulled that off before". All the vibecoded "Show HN" projects seem to be half-broken and then abandoned before being finished.

It feels like we've gotten less ambitious, not more. Because yes, you can prototype more easily, but this means less commitment to what we create.

Mathematics is probably the same way. There's a short-term rush when you pull the lever, but there's less desire to get invested in what comes out.

Selfishly, I hate these things. No one in the 1980s and early 1990s expected the internet to become what it did. I discovered it as a dumb teenager and posted some frankly idiotic stuff. I also put my real address and phone number in the signature, because that's how you rolled back then, the entire internet was like 10 nerds.

Now, 35 years later, a lot of other stuff has mercifully decayed, but people keep bootstrapping these Usenet archives as pet projects every year, and there's never an option to opt out. Today, agents make it easier than ever to build a dossier on anyone you don't like, so this data is bound to cause some harm. And I guess when I die, the best-preserved memory of me that my grandchildren and grand-grandchildren will be able to pull up will be snarky posts from a 15-year-old on some unix-related discussion group.

Yeah, I know there's a bunch of posts there that are of genuine historical interest. But I'm just not a fan and I don't mind burning karma to speak my mind.

It doesn't, that's the whole point. You can produce output that passes the smell test with naive buyers in a matter of hours. If you want to write good LLM books, then you gotta work closer to human speed - weeks, months - which allows others to produce 100 slop-books in the same timeframe. You still lose.

I'm really tired of these arguments (this and "it's just like calculators").

Photography decimated other forms of visual art, so the concern wasn't wrong. But AI threatens the entirety of human intellectual endeavors. I can make do without oil paintings in my home. I'm not sure I want to live in a future where we make do without brains.

Yeah. My other favorite example are books. Why do nonfiction books exist? There are some pathologies and corner cases, but fundamentally: to develop and share new ideas. Downstream from that, if it reads well and if you're lucky, you make some money.

But now, LLMs can generate hundreds of books per hour. They make up 80-90% of new arrivals in many nonfiction categories on Amazon. They short-circuit the system, allowing their "authors" to extract money from the system with zero effort by crowding out human work. And it's not even the question of whether these books are good or bad (although overwhelmingly, they're terrible). It's whether it's actually accomplishing anything worthwhile, or just destroying incentives for humans to write or go into any other sort of intellectual work.

In fact, I see many professions push back. Artists, writers, now mathematicians. And I'm amazed that our profession doesn't and that we have so many people who are hooked on vibecoding. I'm still waiting for that 10x payoff. All this velocity and somehow, the landscape of the software I want to use still looks the same as it did in 2021.

Similarly to many other countries, the US has a concept of "adhesion contracts" - essentially, contracts where you have no realistic opportunity to negotiate the terms, and your rights are constrained much more than the rights of the party imposing these terms.

Courts often look at these contracts differently, but around the world, they allow them to exist because they are useful. A good example are the "terms of service" for public or private transit. If the carrier can't define some common-sense rules, like that you can be kicked out or fined for not wearing pants and playing bagpipes on the bus, it'd complicate things.

The legal standard is basically that the rules hold unless they're unreasonable or unconscionable. But of course, what's seen as reasonable depends on the country, the state, and the judge.

Are you saying that mathematicians are the bad actors here? Compared to Sam Altman spending ungodly amounts of money to upstage them ahead of IPO?

I care about paying my bills and job security and peer recognition. That's a normal human thing to do, not some vice. You don't?

"Discovery" is not a goal in itself. I could launch a project to find out how many people in the United States have names such that if you assign numbers to every character and then sum the values, the sum works out to 72. It's discovery, but it's useless unless it has some higher goal.

The labs are attacking these problems as a demonstration of capabilities, spending more money on the demos than any mathematician will ever see in their entire life. They don't care if the findings have any other value to anyone. Mathematicians have very different objectives for their work.