Responses like this tickle me because they make clear there’s a batch of human beings who have just a profoundly different experience with LLMs than I do.
I see these things and think, this is incredible, machines seem to be approximating or emulating conscious thought. There must be so much we can learn about ourselves, and so much they can do.
You see the same thing and say meh, useless pattern matching, what’s the point, spend the money elsewhere.
I wonder why we have this different perspective? I’ve seen these two reactions again and again—I suspect they evince two different worldviews, but I don’t know what the correlates are. I don’t think it’s techno optimism/pessimism, because I’m profoundly worried about what happens to us. It’s not purely an age thing—I’m not young. I see it on here all the time so I don’t think it’s field of work. So what is it, I wonder?
My hypothesis; it's people who believe in a just world. That think value and wisdom need to come from effort and/or pain.
Potential litmus test; They like videoclips from Coldplay where every frame is drawn with real crayons.
Then it's hard to value a machine that can not feel pain or effort and just generates. It's not fair it didn't have to suffer, and then flip the arrow to say, therefore it's not valuable.
Happy to becorrected. I'm also very curious what mental models are behind such big differences in perspectives.
Nope. There’s a lot— a lot— written on artistic process and intention. What art is and what it means is a deep philosophical topic that has been pulled apart for millennia. The sheer arrogance of nearly the entire tech world reducing the value of the artistic process to a few simple logical business friendly ideas using a few a priori thought experiments while disregarding the existing philosophy on the matter is the sort of thing making the tech industry so deeply unpopular right now.
This is interesting! So to some, perhaps, the creator, intent and process matter as much as—if not more than—the output. The “becoming” over the “being.”
Right, right, nothing surprising about computers suddenly creating original works of art, poetry, legal arguments, bedtime stories and screenplays. AGI? Pshaw. Wake me up when they’ve proved the Riemann Hypothesis using nothing but a collection of vintage cookbooks.
Will we be searching the internet for content that an AI can write?
For example: If I can ask an AI to make me a cake recipe, find an error in my code or tell me about the Hindenburg disaster, and the response is faster, more accurate and easier to read than what I’d typically find on Google, then maybe I simply won’t use Google for that anymore (especially since with the AI, I can ask follow-up questions...)
So maybe bad actors using AI to generate their content will just be yelling into the void. (Until their content gets picked up and incorporated by my AI in its next training session.)
Maybe the APIs for generating that AI content will include paragraphs to advertise their content free-form in the prose and not neatly separated to where you can block the ad.
I really like this take. Maybe the mid-term future direction for search engines is finding and surfacing novel thought past the reach of the AI models.
Probably implemented by asking a model if the content is novel to the model ...
By the mid-1990s, tens—if not hundreds—of million of people had mobile phone subscriptions, and those who didn’t clearly understood the tech offered humanity a profoundly new ability: communicate anywhere, all the time.
I see these things and think, this is incredible, machines seem to be approximating or emulating conscious thought. There must be so much we can learn about ourselves, and so much they can do.
You see the same thing and say meh, useless pattern matching, what’s the point, spend the money elsewhere.
I wonder why we have this different perspective? I’ve seen these two reactions again and again—I suspect they evince two different worldviews, but I don’t know what the correlates are. I don’t think it’s techno optimism/pessimism, because I’m profoundly worried about what happens to us. It’s not purely an age thing—I’m not young. I see it on here all the time so I don’t think it’s field of work. So what is it, I wonder?