Timothy B. Lee

Reporting on AI and the future of the economy.
CS masters degree from Princeton.

Newsletter:

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

It's nonsensical to blame ranked-choice voting here. The problem would be worse for Republicans without it. https://t.co/1rzQDFgpNx

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

Honestly it's not that surprising that the party that nominated the "grab 'em by the pussy" guy for president three times would nominate a candidate for Ohio governor who handles sexual assault allegations in a shameless and tone-deaf way.

[Charles Hilu @charleshilu73]

NEW: Following the release of an ad in which her mother, Donna Arthur, attacks her, court records obtained by @NRO confirm key parts of Amy Acton’s personal history, including that she was sexually abused by her stepfather while Arthur was married to him https://t.co/6UGIxBMK7G

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

@PlastiqSoldier I said many people not a majority of people.

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

A lot of hostility toward creative use of AI is based on the premise that we'll eventually reach the point where the AI is doing the thing rather than you doing the thing with the AI as a tool. I think this is wrong — if it's your idea, it's your creation.

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

@PlastiqSoldier Seems like a hard bet to measure objectively, but think how many people like patronise local artists. Or the way some audiphiles insist vinyl record sound better than CDs.

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

@PlastiqSoldier Better isn't an objective concept. I expect many people will continue to prefer human-made ideas even if they are not better in any objective sense.

[Joshua Saxe @joshua_saxe]

The big surprise of the 2022–26 era for AI security policy is how cyber damages to the public don't seem to have increased much due to AI. In fact, they've stayed on-trend with the industrialization-of-cybercrime growth rates we've observed since around 2015, with perhaps a small AI-causal bump.

It's useful to think about the position of cybercriminals to develop an intuition for this:
* Imagine you're trying to build a cybercrime business and you want to take advantage of AI automation.
* How do you find and retain talented engineers who can build and operate the software/infra stack you'll need, given that they'll often have non-criminal alternatives with today's AI labor demand (even in middle-income countries where this demand also exists)?
* Where are you going to rent space for your workforce to work?
* Who are you going to hire who's willing to live there and live a life of crime?
* If you're running your business remotely, how will you ensure honor among thieves and manage hiring and firing?
* What's your strategy for evading law enforcement and bribing your way out of trouble?
* How can you access AI inference in a stable way that allows you to innovate your work processes and tech stack?
* Given all this, how will your quarterly automation goals compare to those of, say, a regional call center business in the American Midwest?
There's a lot of nuance here (e.g., state and state-sponsored cyber attackers are a very different group; capabilities can get built up there and then unleashed discontinuously, and this needs to be considered).
But overall, the demographic picture of cyber attackers means that folks should stop thinking of cyber attackers as a bunch of implicit MIT grads anxious to absorb the latest in automation to scale their businesses...
(Below are some related charts on the demographics of cyberattackers from a blog post I'm working on.)

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

@MJClemensbee I 100% agree that undisclosed AI writing is bad.

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

@SarahWinte82308 By the same token if I take a snapshot of my breakfast that doesn't involve much creativity, but professional photographers put a lot of thought into how to get the best results from a camera that fundamentally makes exact copies of whatever scene is put in front of them.

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

@SarahWinte82308 And you do 20 rounds of this over the course of a month. Then it's a lot more your creation even if in a literal sense the AI wrote the words.

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

This is really fun.

[Benj Edwards @benjedwards]

I’ve been working on a mod of Super Mario Bros. with Zapper support. One player plays as normal and the other can use the light gun to shoot blocks and enemies on the screen—or to make
Mario huge!

[Benj Edwards @benjedwards]

"Profound to some but boring to most" is exactly the topic of my latest piece at Understanding AI

I call this "personal media," which has a very small audience -- sometimes just one person!

https://t.co/J7bcH3QbgZ

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

@allensirolly I think that if you prompt the AI to generate the output, then you are using the AI as a tool to create the output, just as if you push the button on the camera you are the creator of the photograph. We don't talk about the camera creating the photograph.

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

@tilmanbayer Yeah. Interestingly, unoriginal photographs theoretically don't have copyright protection but in practice almost all photographs are protected. I think the law will get to a similar place for AI-generated works.

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

@allensirolly No, you might notice that in the next sentence I wrote "I think this is wrong."

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

"It may be AI slop, but it's my AI slop." https://t.co/DG829EiY3i

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

@allensirolly Maybe using AI tools effectively is a new category of skilled effort.

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

@VictorGodinez Again, taking a single photograph takes ~no effort, but photography is still a craft that takes a lifetime to master because it requires skill to know how to set up a shot and when and where to click the button.

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

@VictorGodinez Sure, and the execution in this case could be "I tried hundreds of prompts and then used AI-based tools to stitch together several of the best generations."

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

@severino205 Sure, you shouldn't lie about whether you used AI in your art.