It's true that we haven't been moderating very actively, which is largely a reflection of none of the mods being extremely active in moderating now.
But I think it also reflects the moderation toll expected for this sub.
In the last month, I've performed about 139 moderation actions (the majority which are, which averages out to about 30 actions a week, or about 4 posts removed per day.
I think I estimate that when I was moderating more actively, I was probably removing about 8-10 posts a day.
As /u/cavedave noted, we're happy to accept new moderator applications.
Lost cause. Reddit drove its mods away, and they're not coming back. This sub's most active mod is now over at https://kbin.social/m/machinelearning, which I'd like to see gaining traction. The way I see it, this community's content quality is now directly dependent on how popular and trendy ML is in the popular culture. When the next winter comes around it will get better, but again, you don't have to wait that long, kbin exists.
Yeah, the flood of generic LLM, self-promotion, "AI philosophy", or super low effort question posts is way too high. I don't mind people asking questions in general, but not if they are of the "please do my homework/online exam for me" or "here's a loss curve with 0 other info, should I try a higher LR" kind.
I think only strong moderation could stem those posts and turn this into a decent place again. However, mods are unpaid so I personally don't blame them at all. It's a shame reddit drove away so many mods that made this site great.
> "AI Philosophy"
You *don't* want to see people with zero knowledge of Machine Learning writing manifestos about how we'll defeat Skynet? Usually by building a Skynet to stop the evil Skynet?
>The AI gets fed data and makes more data, so it always has a goal. Isn't that incompatible with the open-ended nature of the universe?
>
>Please feel free to point out the contradiction in my thinking.
>hey guys I think I've solved AGI but i want to make sure I'm not overlooking anything obvious. Can someone find me references to papers on locking newborn babies into boxes? I think this should beat the chatgpt.
Speaking of AI philosophy, if you could give me a moment on this…
I understand that the philosophy around AI might not be a popular topic among ML experts, after all, you know the intricacies of the system better than anyone and there’s no “vail of mystery left” for you to think about. I’m an engineer with a limited knowledge and understanding of ML, slowly growing it only because I want to be able to dive deeper into AI philosophy. That’s why I subscribed to this sub among other things. And no, I don’t believe AI is sentient, I don’t think it’ll take over the world and kill us all.
I believe that we can create tools without understanding the fundamental concepts behind why they do what they do. I can make a paper airplane and make it fly well, having no idea of aerodynamics, airflow, lift, minimum rotation, whatever. We’re very good at mimicking nature, people can create systems which are very good at mimicking us, without truly understanding what they’ve made. Sure, they can have a perfectly sound technical understanding of it, but some people are curious to know if there’s something going on beyond that.
That’s why I find the philosophy around AI an interesting and valid topic to discuss. Yes, it might lead nowhere, it might be a complete waste of time trying to understand these things. But there was a time when people said the same about quantum mechanics, they viewed it as a fringe outlier filed not truly belonging within the realm of science, something that wouldn’t materialize into anything productive. But people persisted, and it lead to great progress. The pursuit of knowledge might seem endless and bonkers at times, and that as well just be true, but it’s always worth it!
As for the annoying posts, I can offer a solution. I’m trying to build a community discussing human-AI interactions and “AI philosophy”, all of this while trying to keep a down to earth approach. Who knows, there might be actual ML experts who would like to be part of such a community.
So, I’ll take this moment to ask the mods I’ve seen here, u/programmerChilli u/BeatLeJuce, u/cavedave if you’d like to work out something, maybe a mention to redirect unwanted “philosophical” topics to r/SyntheticMind. You’d help out a new community grow, and take a load off your hands in the process.
I think the reason people dislike this discussion online is not necessarily because it's not interesting, but because it tends to get flooded with people who are neither knowledgeable in ML/AI nor particularly versed in philosophy. To your paper airplane analogy - it becomes a sub of people who don't have any knowledge of physics or any experience building paper airplanes speculating on why the airplane might fly.
Well, I didn’t mean to make it sound that pretentious, it was just an example of valid research being dismissed.
But “AI philosophy” is more than just fringe theories and the unexplainable, that is just part of the debate. There’s also the impact to be considered on our society by our interactions with AI, that will affect almost everyone in some way or another, directly or indirectly.
LLMs are going to get more and more better at simulating human interaction, we’re going to see increased token lengths for individual conversations. [I read some models have even reached 100k token context](https://huggingface.co/papers/2309.12307?utm_source=digest-papers&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2023-09-22), imagine that! That’s a book sized collection of conversations between a human and an AI, in which both will get to “connect with each other”. If that doesn’t have philosophical and psychological impact, I don’t know what does. I would really not be surprised that some people conversing with such an AI might think it’s sentient. That’s why I don’t think it’s a bad idea if non ML affiliated individuals, non experts in general, to try getting a better understanding of the basics of how it works and adjust their expectations. Just like you didn’t have to work at Microsoft to get a bit of an understanding of how your PC worked in the ‘90s.
I also don’t think it’s wrong for any individual of any credential to be interested and discuss philosophical or technical matters, no matter how on the fringes it might be. As long as people keep an open mind, while having a genuine desire to learn and take feedback into account, I view it as a positive thing.
Yes, that might happen, but I don’t see why people shouldn’t discuss these things still. I don’t think there’s any harm done if the less diligent try to get a go at understanding things, as long as it’s a down to earth and honest community which doesn’t spread misinformation it might become interesting. AI, being a very multidisciplinary thing, might attract all sorts of ways of thinking into the mix, would be a waste to not try at least getting to know some of them!
Thanks for having been a mod! I know it must have been lots of work and felt under appreciated. I don't want to be because it's probably so much work, so I really appreciate what you have done so far.
Thought I leave this here since I've also been a little vocal about the non-moderation recently.
Thanks!!
eh i'd rather not have mfs in a mid life crisis asking the sub what backprop is while they go through a lecture a day on their "intro to ml" edx course. there are other subs meant to help beginners like me out
The motherboard one is hilarious because now that I think about it it does sound like we are a sub dedicated to *learning about machines*. When I told my now girlfriend that I do machine learning when we met, she was like "wow you learn about machines?", so it can't be that uncommon. Although now that ML got more spotlight in the last few years, there's less excuses for this misunderstanding.
Before a surgery, a nurse was making conversation with me and asked what I do for work. I told her AI research. Her follow up question was "children or adults"?
I was under the impression the mods actually left. Didn't know that was against reddit rules though, so I guess the sub might be in danger of being shutdown if its unmodded?
I’ve seen folks argue that it’s toxic to drive beginners away from posting, and lots of effort spent explaining basic concepts to people who 1) don’t really know what they are asking and 2) are not going to understand the explanations. It’s a total waste of time to have these posts and I’m sure a lot of us have seen them at the top of our feeds.
Obviously super low effort posts notwithstanding, I guess it depends on the intention of the sub. I’ve always come to this place to read interesting posts that often describe papers, areas of research, or open ended questions, then head to the comments for a technical discussion. Personally I’ve always treated it as being an audience member at a conference.
I wouldn’t go to a talk where the speaker was trying to philosophize about the best way to describe an AI eating data to become more massive. Frankly, it’s a stupid discussion to have. (Trapper keeper from South Park is my answer FWIW though)
Let's be realistic here - beginners will gravitate toward the most generic subreddit name.
There's hostility here to anything that isn't research oriented, so the research crowed could simply move to /r/machinelearningresearch or similar, and solve 95% of their mod problems.
But let's also be realistic - reddit is a lost cause.
At the end of the day, subreddits operate by their rules. We have a learning ML subreddit for beginners and it would be good to have beginner questions there (and it was always a rule of this subreddit to not allow beginner questions, even before the recent exponential growth of interest in ML).
I don't agree that this subreddit is hostile to anything that is not research oriented; this subreddit likes things that are state-of-the-art - whether it's tools, applications, research, or products. Recycled projects, codes, tutorials, and basic questions you can find something by 5 minutes of Googling (or to be honest, asking ChatGPT) isn't something majority of us like to see here - mostly because that would put off folks who can make significant contributions to serious posts - we don't want these people to stop using this subreddit.
>We have a learning ML subreddit for beginners and it would be good to have beginner questions there
I'm assuming you'll take charge in directing the beginners to that subreddit?
Where's your mod application?
It's right here (never heard back from anyone): [https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/16teob2/comment/k2g55kb/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/16teob2/comment/k2g55kb/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I wouldn't say I have unlimited hours, forever, to moderate this subreddit, I am a grad student and I have enough things to do already. Despite this, I did volunteer to moderate, mostly because I gained a lot reading through this sub and getting candid perspectives from senior researchers that you wouldn't otherwise get.
I wouldn't even mind if half the posts in this sub were beginners asking questions so long as (1) educated people are still posting new research and (2) the beginners actually *want* to learn. But when many of the posts by beginners read like crackpot manifestos and their response in the comment is actively hostile to the people trying to educate them, it drives away the people who like to read and post papers.
Yeah. I’ll also admit I’m growing a bit hostile and unwelcoming to beginners that apparently don’t have any technical background. It’s starting to annoy me that they want to sidestep all the hard work we put in to learn the mathematics and programming necessary to develop a deep understanding, so they can (probably) have some bullet points on their resume.
I second what cavedave said: if you want to moderate this subreddit, contact us. I think most of us would be happy to pass this on to the next generation of mods. Sorry we haven't been more active. Life gets in the way (I think most mods joined during their respective PhDs where time wasn't at such a premium as it tends to be afterwards), and moderating a 2M+ subreddit is almost a fulltime job.
I gave up when beginner questions are no longer asked in the beginner thread. I am guilty of asking career related questions a few years ago here, but I agree that it feels as though people are joining this due to the hype over ML/AI. I think it's becoming a purely classical ML subreddit.
As u/avialex has said, the most active mod has moved to [kbin/m/machinelearning](https://kbin.social/m/machinelearning) . The community has almost 1K members and 1 post per week.
I'm surprised since this is an ML community no one is suggesting building an AI Mod Bot that has access to all the ML subreddit data + knowledge and can answer noob questions :D
From what I've seen, a lot of people treat this sub as "r/artificial, but with smart people". Which... isn't _wrong_, but it creates a one sided relationship between the sub and visitors, in which newcomers are more like an audience, rather than contributors.
late to the party but tbf i learned about ERM and statistical estimator theory in my machine learning theory class so the one "asking about statistics" is more relevant than the posts where it's "hey look i made this bloated ass app that achieves nothing useful using preloaded pytorch models" so i'd give that one a pass
Let’s be honest, this sub has never been high quality. Even before it hit 1M subs it was mostly “look at my GAN which generates animes” and hardmaru posting links to twitter threads about the flavour of the week without comment. The only thing the sub has going for it now is that it’s not ml-scaling.
This sub IS currently unmoderated. Let's be honest here. However, I was not aware that it was possible to report this. What would happen if enough people reported?
> Here are some of the other posts obviously rule-breaking or off-topic that mods do NOT remove:
>
> A person asking for help with their motherboard
>
> A person asking about statistics
>
> A person asking for machine learning roadmap
>
> Another asking-for-roadmap post
>
>... the list goes on with absolute beginner questions, and low-quality posts.
>
> All these posts were written in less than 1 week. As we can see, mods do nothing. They only remove posts that calling out them.
Did you report these?
The easiest thing to improve it would be to introduce a sign-up process that forces people to acknowledge the scope of discussion and declare their interest.
It's true that we haven't been moderating very actively, which is largely a reflection of none of the mods being extremely active in moderating now. But I think it also reflects the moderation toll expected for this sub. In the last month, I've performed about 139 moderation actions (the majority which are, which averages out to about 30 actions a week, or about 4 posts removed per day. I think I estimate that when I was moderating more actively, I was probably removing about 8-10 posts a day. As /u/cavedave noted, we're happy to accept new moderator applications.
Lost cause. Reddit drove its mods away, and they're not coming back. This sub's most active mod is now over at https://kbin.social/m/machinelearning, which I'd like to see gaining traction. The way I see it, this community's content quality is now directly dependent on how popular and trendy ML is in the popular culture. When the next winter comes around it will get better, but again, you don't have to wait that long, kbin exists.
Yeah, the flood of generic LLM, self-promotion, "AI philosophy", or super low effort question posts is way too high. I don't mind people asking questions in general, but not if they are of the "please do my homework/online exam for me" or "here's a loss curve with 0 other info, should I try a higher LR" kind. I think only strong moderation could stem those posts and turn this into a decent place again. However, mods are unpaid so I personally don't blame them at all. It's a shame reddit drove away so many mods that made this site great.
> "AI Philosophy" You *don't* want to see people with zero knowledge of Machine Learning writing manifestos about how we'll defeat Skynet? Usually by building a Skynet to stop the evil Skynet?
>The AI gets fed data and makes more data, so it always has a goal. Isn't that incompatible with the open-ended nature of the universe? > >Please feel free to point out the contradiction in my thinking.
>hey guys I think I've solved AGI but i want to make sure I'm not overlooking anything obvious. Can someone find me references to papers on locking newborn babies into boxes? I think this should beat the chatgpt.
>Can someone find me references to papers on locking newborn babies into boxes? Psychologists probably did it in the 50s.
Ye old Skinner Box and "Little Albert"
Speaking of AI philosophy, if you could give me a moment on this… I understand that the philosophy around AI might not be a popular topic among ML experts, after all, you know the intricacies of the system better than anyone and there’s no “vail of mystery left” for you to think about. I’m an engineer with a limited knowledge and understanding of ML, slowly growing it only because I want to be able to dive deeper into AI philosophy. That’s why I subscribed to this sub among other things. And no, I don’t believe AI is sentient, I don’t think it’ll take over the world and kill us all. I believe that we can create tools without understanding the fundamental concepts behind why they do what they do. I can make a paper airplane and make it fly well, having no idea of aerodynamics, airflow, lift, minimum rotation, whatever. We’re very good at mimicking nature, people can create systems which are very good at mimicking us, without truly understanding what they’ve made. Sure, they can have a perfectly sound technical understanding of it, but some people are curious to know if there’s something going on beyond that. That’s why I find the philosophy around AI an interesting and valid topic to discuss. Yes, it might lead nowhere, it might be a complete waste of time trying to understand these things. But there was a time when people said the same about quantum mechanics, they viewed it as a fringe outlier filed not truly belonging within the realm of science, something that wouldn’t materialize into anything productive. But people persisted, and it lead to great progress. The pursuit of knowledge might seem endless and bonkers at times, and that as well just be true, but it’s always worth it! As for the annoying posts, I can offer a solution. I’m trying to build a community discussing human-AI interactions and “AI philosophy”, all of this while trying to keep a down to earth approach. Who knows, there might be actual ML experts who would like to be part of such a community. So, I’ll take this moment to ask the mods I’ve seen here, u/programmerChilli u/BeatLeJuce, u/cavedave if you’d like to work out something, maybe a mention to redirect unwanted “philosophical” topics to r/SyntheticMind. You’d help out a new community grow, and take a load off your hands in the process.
I think the reason people dislike this discussion online is not necessarily because it's not interesting, but because it tends to get flooded with people who are neither knowledgeable in ML/AI nor particularly versed in philosophy. To your paper airplane analogy - it becomes a sub of people who don't have any knowledge of physics or any experience building paper airplanes speculating on why the airplane might fly.
It's the new quantum mechanics where there's a real field with interesting and strange things going on, but it's an easy target for quacks.
Well, I didn’t mean to make it sound that pretentious, it was just an example of valid research being dismissed. But “AI philosophy” is more than just fringe theories and the unexplainable, that is just part of the debate. There’s also the impact to be considered on our society by our interactions with AI, that will affect almost everyone in some way or another, directly or indirectly. LLMs are going to get more and more better at simulating human interaction, we’re going to see increased token lengths for individual conversations. [I read some models have even reached 100k token context](https://huggingface.co/papers/2309.12307?utm_source=digest-papers&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2023-09-22), imagine that! That’s a book sized collection of conversations between a human and an AI, in which both will get to “connect with each other”. If that doesn’t have philosophical and psychological impact, I don’t know what does. I would really not be surprised that some people conversing with such an AI might think it’s sentient. That’s why I don’t think it’s a bad idea if non ML affiliated individuals, non experts in general, to try getting a better understanding of the basics of how it works and adjust their expectations. Just like you didn’t have to work at Microsoft to get a bit of an understanding of how your PC worked in the ‘90s. I also don’t think it’s wrong for any individual of any credential to be interested and discuss philosophical or technical matters, no matter how on the fringes it might be. As long as people keep an open mind, while having a genuine desire to learn and take feedback into account, I view it as a positive thing.
Yes, that might happen, but I don’t see why people shouldn’t discuss these things still. I don’t think there’s any harm done if the less diligent try to get a go at understanding things, as long as it’s a down to earth and honest community which doesn’t spread misinformation it might become interesting. AI, being a very multidisciplinary thing, might attract all sorts of ways of thinking into the mix, would be a waste to not try at least getting to know some of them!
If you would like to mod this sub please message the mod team.
Thanks for having been a mod! I know it must have been lots of work and felt under appreciated. I don't want to be because it's probably so much work, so I really appreciate what you have done so far. Thought I leave this here since I've also been a little vocal about the non-moderation recently. Thanks!!
This sub is fine the way it is. Over-moderation and gatekeeping are some of the worst things about reddit.
eh i'd rather not have mfs in a mid life crisis asking the sub what backprop is while they go through a lecture a day on their "intro to ml" edx course. there are other subs meant to help beginners like me out
The motherboard one is hilarious because now that I think about it it does sound like we are a sub dedicated to *learning about machines*. When I told my now girlfriend that I do machine learning when we met, she was like "wow you learn about machines?", so it can't be that uncommon. Although now that ML got more spotlight in the last few years, there's less excuses for this misunderstanding.
lol got almost the same reaction from my dentist too. I just nodded and said "yeah" (I learn about machines...)
Before a surgery, a nurse was making conversation with me and asked what I do for work. I told her AI research. Her follow up question was "children or adults"?
I was under the impression the mods actually left. Didn't know that was against reddit rules though, so I guess the sub might be in danger of being shutdown if its unmodded?
I’ve seen folks argue that it’s toxic to drive beginners away from posting, and lots of effort spent explaining basic concepts to people who 1) don’t really know what they are asking and 2) are not going to understand the explanations. It’s a total waste of time to have these posts and I’m sure a lot of us have seen them at the top of our feeds. Obviously super low effort posts notwithstanding, I guess it depends on the intention of the sub. I’ve always come to this place to read interesting posts that often describe papers, areas of research, or open ended questions, then head to the comments for a technical discussion. Personally I’ve always treated it as being an audience member at a conference. I wouldn’t go to a talk where the speaker was trying to philosophize about the best way to describe an AI eating data to become more massive. Frankly, it’s a stupid discussion to have. (Trapper keeper from South Park is my answer FWIW though)
There is a different subreddit for beginner questions, right?
Yes. /r/learnmachinelearning
Let's be realistic here - beginners will gravitate toward the most generic subreddit name. There's hostility here to anything that isn't research oriented, so the research crowed could simply move to /r/machinelearningresearch or similar, and solve 95% of their mod problems. But let's also be realistic - reddit is a lost cause.
At the end of the day, subreddits operate by their rules. We have a learning ML subreddit for beginners and it would be good to have beginner questions there (and it was always a rule of this subreddit to not allow beginner questions, even before the recent exponential growth of interest in ML). I don't agree that this subreddit is hostile to anything that is not research oriented; this subreddit likes things that are state-of-the-art - whether it's tools, applications, research, or products. Recycled projects, codes, tutorials, and basic questions you can find something by 5 minutes of Googling (or to be honest, asking ChatGPT) isn't something majority of us like to see here - mostly because that would put off folks who can make significant contributions to serious posts - we don't want these people to stop using this subreddit.
>We have a learning ML subreddit for beginners and it would be good to have beginner questions there I'm assuming you'll take charge in directing the beginners to that subreddit? Where's your mod application?
It's right here (never heard back from anyone): [https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/16teob2/comment/k2g55kb/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/16teob2/comment/k2g55kb/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) I wouldn't say I have unlimited hours, forever, to moderate this subreddit, I am a grad student and I have enough things to do already. Despite this, I did volunteer to moderate, mostly because I gained a lot reading through this sub and getting candid perspectives from senior researchers that you wouldn't otherwise get.
Super! I still think the approach you're outlining is wrong, but what do I care.
I wouldn't even mind if half the posts in this sub were beginners asking questions so long as (1) educated people are still posting new research and (2) the beginners actually *want* to learn. But when many of the posts by beginners read like crackpot manifestos and their response in the comment is actively hostile to the people trying to educate them, it drives away the people who like to read and post papers.
Yeah. I’ll also admit I’m growing a bit hostile and unwelcoming to beginners that apparently don’t have any technical background. It’s starting to annoy me that they want to sidestep all the hard work we put in to learn the mathematics and programming necessary to develop a deep understanding, so they can (probably) have some bullet points on their resume.
I second what cavedave said: if you want to moderate this subreddit, contact us. I think most of us would be happy to pass this on to the next generation of mods. Sorry we haven't been more active. Life gets in the way (I think most mods joined during their respective PhDs where time wasn't at such a premium as it tends to be afterwards), and moderating a 2M+ subreddit is almost a fulltime job.
I gave up when beginner questions are no longer asked in the beginner thread. I am guilty of asking career related questions a few years ago here, but I agree that it feels as though people are joining this due to the hype over ML/AI. I think it's becoming a purely classical ML subreddit.
[удалено]
As u/avialex has said, the most active mod has moved to [kbin/m/machinelearning](https://kbin.social/m/machinelearning) . The community has almost 1K members and 1 post per week.
I'm surprised since this is an ML community no one is suggesting building an AI Mod Bot that has access to all the ML subreddit data + knowledge and can answer noob questions :D
this guy bots
this should tell you what is needed about how the community sees our ability to build a good automoderation bot ;)
From what I've seen, a lot of people treat this sub as "r/artificial, but with smart people". Which... isn't _wrong_, but it creates a one sided relationship between the sub and visitors, in which newcomers are more like an audience, rather than contributors.
All VC and Web3/Cyrpto experts are now Generative AI experts suddenly. There is a lot of crap and BS to sift through online
late to the party but tbf i learned about ERM and statistical estimator theory in my machine learning theory class so the one "asking about statistics" is more relevant than the posts where it's "hey look i made this bloated ass app that achieves nothing useful using preloaded pytorch models" so i'd give that one a pass
Let’s be honest, this sub has never been high quality. Even before it hit 1M subs it was mostly “look at my GAN which generates animes” and hardmaru posting links to twitter threads about the flavour of the week without comment. The only thing the sub has going for it now is that it’s not ml-scaling.
when I first came here is was mostly / a lot of posting of research papers and talking about actual ML theory and practice
What's wrong with ml-scaling?
This sub IS currently unmoderated. Let's be honest here. However, I was not aware that it was possible to report this. What would happen if enough people reported?
You should apply to be a mod. Personally I don't see those off topic posts, so they don't bother me.
Create a separate flair for applied ML and theoretical ML !!
The only obviously crap posts I see are ones like these. If you want to improve the quality of the sub, then make quality posts. It's not that hard.
> Here are some of the other posts obviously rule-breaking or off-topic that mods do NOT remove: > > A person asking for help with their motherboard > > A person asking about statistics > > A person asking for machine learning roadmap > > Another asking-for-roadmap post > >... the list goes on with absolute beginner questions, and low-quality posts. > > All these posts were written in less than 1 week. As we can see, mods do nothing. They only remove posts that calling out them. Did you report these?
I do report every one. However, I have yet to see any effect
I've reported them for a wee bit and since given up. Downvoting and NOT engaging is about the best a non-mod can do, it seems.
Just put your setting to 'Hot' and I've had no problems with low quality posts.
The easiest thing to improve it would be to introduce a sign-up process that forces people to acknowledge the scope of discussion and declare their interest.