Training the AI to write better LiveCode

[Kevin Miller]

Ethics are very important to me as you know. I'm a passionate believer in working to increase fairness as we grow and evolve as a species. We're making great progress at that at the moment. For example, the number of people living in extreme poverty globally has more than halved in the last 20 years. Over half of the world's population has a smartphone, giving them access to what would once have been a supercomputer, and an online world that just 25 years ago the majority could not access.

I think it takes time after something new emerges before we sort out the societal implications fully. Such implications are rarely well understood at the start. I don't think the questions these lawsuits raise have easy answers. It certainly does not seem clear cut to me on reading them what is even right or in the ultimate best interests of artists, creators or our species. I would need to dig into this for a lot longer to truly form an opinion.

I don't underestimate the potential for technology to continue at breath-taking rate and solve the problem of writing in assembler. I get the exponential growth of technology and the improvements of algorithms that lead to further growths - in fact I'm quite excited about it. I'm just not sure that this is a problem that really needs solved next. We already have a technology that takes human readable code and creates machine instructions, i.e. compliers. Until technology completely eliminates humans in the making of software (which may of course happen one day) I don't think we need to worry (too much!) about the exit of scripting languages. It's a useful medium for a human to understand and edit in until such time as we are truly defunct. If and when that happens I doubt there will be any sort of jobs in any industry.

We also have to be careful we don't try to cut off our nose to spite our face. Leaving a language like ours behind in the dust rather than finding ways to work with new opportunities like this one is a high price to pay, particularly as such a protest would have little or no impact on the course of the evolution of such technology. Obviously we need to stand up for our rights as we go forward, I am not advocating sticking our collective heads in the sand. This could go in a negative direction, particularly depending on who owns it and has access to it and we can re-evaluate things if necessary in the future.

As to the first industrial revolution, I think it's easy to forget what it was actually like to live a couple of hundred years ago compared to now. I'm with Geoff, overall it came out extremely well. That gives one a little cautious optimism that the second one might also do so, though as ever the future is not guaranteed.

Kind regards, 

Kevin 

Kevin Miller ~ kevin at livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/ 
LiveCode: Build Amazing Things 



On 21/01/2023, 22:40, "use-livecode on behalf of Geoff Canyon via use-livecode" <use-livecode-bounces at lists.runrev.com <mailto:use-livecode-bounces at lists.runrev.com> on behalf of use-livecode at lists.runrev.com <mailto:use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>> wrote:


Those only interested in LiveCode, click "next" now.

On Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 10:40 AM Richard Gaskin via use-livecode <
use-livecode at lists.runrev.com <mailto:use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>> wrote:

>
> After all, the Codex had been trained on billions of
> publicly available source code lines – including code
> in public repositories on GitHub. That included, among
> other things, all of the Apache Foundation's many
> projects' code.
> https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/11/githubs_copilot_opinion/ <https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/11/githubs_copilot_opinion/>
>
>
> Stability Diffusion, Midjourney, and DreamUp were
> trained on copyrighted materials without credit,
> compensation, or consent, according to a new lawsuit.
>
> https://www.pcmag.com/news/artists-sue-ai-art-generators-for-copyright-infringement <https://www.pcmag.com/news/artists-sue-ai-art-generators-for-copyright-infringement>

My not-a-lawyer understanding is that this lawsuit is almost guaranteed to
fail. Just from a conceptual perspective, human artists have access to the
same copyrighted material (albeit not the ability to ingest *all* of it)
and even the ability to mimic it for their own edification. It's the act of
publishing similar work that is problematic. And it's going to be fun for
the lawyers to sort out who's at fault if I use Stable Diffusion to create
a corporate christmas card that happens to resemble the Coca-Cola polar
bears.

> We're a very long way from attempting to write all apps in assembler
> > using this sort of AI.
>
> Are we? As late as my teens I was still reading science mags saying
> "Well, AI is going to be a big deal, but no machine will ever beat a
> human at something as complex as chess."
>
> Big Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov less than two decades
> later.
>
> So the goalpost moved, with explanations like "Well, chess is ultimately
> a memorization task, but no computer can ever beat a human at something
> as abstract and intuitive as Go".
>
> Google's DeepMind beat Go champion Lee Se-dol in 2019.
>
> I would caution against underestimating how CS advancements accelerate
> further CS advancements.
>

If anything I think those examples undersell how quickly this is going to
proceed. I'll be very surprised if GPT-X (not an actual name) isn't
human-capable for a broad range of programming tasks by 2025.

So how'd that First Industrial Revolution turn out? ;)
>

I know you're just being cheeky here, but to make it explicit and let
others disagree if they wish: the First Industrial Revolution turned out
*great*. "Some economists have said the most important effect of the
Industrial Revolution was that the standard of living for the general
population in the western world began to increase consistently for the
first time in history" (others say it began right after). "Economic
historians are in agreement that the onset of the Industrial Revolution is
the most important event in human history since the domestication of
animals and plants." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution>
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