So AI Will Suffer From The GOSPLAN Problem, Will It?

Now there's a surprise

This is a little bit more than GIGO - Garbage In and Garbage Out. But not much more. It’s also a grand warning about politics and the economy. From a recent paper:

Stable diffusion revolutionized image creation from descriptive text. GPT-2 (ref. 1), GPT-3(.5) (ref. 2) and GPT-4 (ref. 3) demonstrated high performance across a variety of language tasks. ChatGPT introduced such language models to the public. It is now clear that generative artificial intelligence (AI) such as large language models (LLMs) is here to stay and will substantially change the ecosystem of online text and images. Here we consider what may happen to GPT-{n} once LLMs contribute much of the text found online. We find that indiscriminate use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models, in which tails of the original content distribution disappear. We refer to this effect as ‘model collapse’ and show that it can occur in LLMs as well as in variational autoencoders (VAEs) and Gaussian mixture models (GMMs). We build theoretical intuition behind the phenomenon and portray its ubiquity among all learned generative models. We demonstrate that it must be taken seriously if we are to sustain the benefits of training from large-scale data scraped from the web. Indeed, the value of data collected about genuine human interactions with systems will be increasingly valuable in the presence of LLM-generated content in data crawled from the Internet.

The human created data out there on the internet can be right, can be wrong, but it is human created and so is subject to corrections by other humans. Which sometimes works.

AI reads that data and then tries to produce more. OK. But there’s none of that error correction in it. It simply writes summat which then appears on the internet. The problem being that the summat - not error checked - then becomes the data which is scraped by the other AIs to write their next generation of summat. And so on, ad infinitum, until AIs are producing the sort of garbage that socialists do.

For exactly the same reason too - there’s no looking out the window at reality going on to error check the inputs to the next set of output generation. Which is exactly what happened at GOSPLAN of course. The Five Year Plan said that tractor production would rise 50%. As the Five Year Plan was over-fulfilled - as they always were - then that meant that there were more than 50% more tractors. Therefore Kazakhstan could all be planted with wheat despite everyone in Kazakhstan awaiting a horse let alone a tractor. The Plan then insists that as all Kazakhstan is now planted with wheat there is enough bread for all and so the system collapses - for no one did count the tractors nor even ask the wife about the queue at the bread shop.

Now of course GOSPLAN was extreme and we’re not - aha, aha, aha - doing anything so damn stupid. Except, of course, we are.

We’ve the relevant Minister - Teddie Mili - miming his way across the stage with the backing track insisting that renewables are the cheapest form of energy generation. Which, of course, they’re not. Not even as point additions to the system let alone as purveyors of dispatchable power. But the entire system is being built upon that claim and it will, if someone doesn’t look at reality soon, crash the system.

Or we’re being told that we’ve wild levels of child poverty - which we don’t. We’ve a slight uptick in inequality in the country for the measure of poverty being used is less than 60% of median household income. Not actual poverty which, in the absence of significant mental illness or addiction, doesn’t actually exist in Britain any more.

You can expand your list as you like. There’s not enough checking against reality going on. Which will, as with AI and GOSPLAN, mean the collapse of the society at some point. Simply because the plans for the future are being built upon the lies of the past. Instead of upon actual reality.

And, you know, top tip here. Reality is always a good place to start plans from.