Sure, at some level, there are some people who at least some times, cannot pecieve a difference. That does not prove that there is no difference or that the difference doesn't matter.
I think narrative stories are a "brain hack", in the same way heavily processed food, drugs, clickbait, soap operas and TikTok are brain hacks, combined with some exclusivity status signaling games. They're just old enough to have gained a cultural cachet that more modern forms of entertainment don't yet have. Same for art, music, comedy and culture generally.
There is nothing wrong with those "brain hacks", if they make us happy and don't have negative consequences, why not use them, but we should recognize that it's what they are.
I think that an alien intelligence could communicate with us about Ohm's law and Rieman's last theorem, maybe even debate resource and power allocation strategies (democracy, monarchy, capitalism, socialism) with us, they could probably understand the pull of sports, even if they couldn't participate in it themselves, but art and humor would be completely lost on them and considered a weird human excentricity.
Art, music, humour, poetry are more basic and the commonality is more or less "I bring you surprising phenomena". If phenomena are surprising to you then your mental model of the world needs improving.
What's Riemann's last theorem?
What's the purpose of this? You didn't disagree, you just went on a tangent. Is this another "brain hack?" If so, there is something wrong with them. They often make words appear to be something that they are not.
Like a magician would use a thing called "indirection."
But like it or not, humans are not computers. They are animals with messy, complex thinking and reasoning that is impossible to fully describe, and incredibly complex societal systems created from their chaotic interactions. These messy people don't learn from datasheets and reference manuals, even if you'd like it to be otherwise.
Of course, there's a place for non-fiction, I like some of it a lot. But art has subtlety to it - instead of smacking people in the face with data and lists of objective measurements, it can pry into them by using the human ability to imagine themselves in other shoes, experience emotions that aren't results of real life events, and much more. There is a reason why parents teach their children values by reading them fables or educational stories, not the legal code of their jurisdiction. And this is also why fiction actually changes the minds of people reading it, arguably doing it more effectively than nonfiction. Slop (clickbait, average tiktok content, whatever else you're imagining) doesn't make you feel new things or think of something you haven't thought of before, art does.
The aiens are also a bit of a copout. You're just assuming that there's bound to be this perfect species (that are effectively computers) that operate only on mathematics and discrete logic, who are obviously superior to us and can show us our wrong ways. What if computers aren't always superior? Or what if organic life requires some of that messiness you don't like to be viable? What if the aliens had their own weird things we could never relate to?
I think alien intelligence would be able to appreciate art and humor, even without necessarily feeling it viscerally, as we do. We know that our particular brands of them rely on highly-developed and specific aspects of our psychology, but at a basic level, they seem to fundamentally be about congruence, incongruence, expectation, and interpretation/perspective. Any embodied intelligence that can observe physical reality is capable of grokking those concepts.
I'd also recommend having a look at the books published by this article's author. I will admit that I have never read nor heard of any of them. But come on, just look at the books published covers and the way the author introduced them and tell me that they are not industrial products engineered for mass commercial appeal.
Yet a very vocal group advocates integrating LLMs into every aspect of their lives, and the other group watch in dismay.
On the other hand, I used a sentence form used by LLMs in a comment during a morning-brain moment, and an angry mob tried to crucify me with torches and pitchforks.
Many people love to generate text with LLMs, but most of same crowd apparently hates to read LLM output. An interesting phenomenon.
This only works in broken companies where leadership is already overrun with other status climbers.
If someone tries this trick at a functional company and is discovered, their reputation takes a huge hit that can take years to overcome, if ever.
At high performing companies reputation is everything. It can be a real problem to even get people to work on difficult or risky problems because they’re afraid of having a failure attached to their reputation.
Throwing unreviewed LLM slop around would be a reputation death sentence if your peers are good at what they do, because by now we all know that it’s easy to generate long reports with LLMs. The secret is out and anyone who follows technology knows it.
There are some companies where you can LLM report-slop your way to prestige. Those are not companies you want to stay at.
The promotion of LLMs is, I believe, basically a referendum on how many companies are broken in that way. So far, the adoption statistics are looking like it’s most of them.
It can be a very engineer thing to point at a vanilla Doxygen dump and call that thing "documentation".
It's like the car manual (Do they still ship with one?) where every detail is laid out. It's not important for daily driving, but when you to fix an electrical problem, that's the reference you need.
On the other hand, I have friends who play that game, and I don't talk with most of them, because their life views and mental states continually drift to a state which makes no sense whatsoever for me, so we grow apart.
It's a good concept, but for some reason I thought of a military movie I watched recently, where someone was going on about how they were third generation military. And how their friends and family were military. Sort of the same kind of siloing there.
It's even more than that, I think. It's the intent to reach out and transfer to others something that you experience internally. It's a sense of purpose motivating that content and substance to be packaged up and communicated in the first place.
Sometimes LLMs will slip up and say things like, "I see this working with people all the time." And it REALLY breaks the illusion that the text they extrude means anything. Because obviously there is no "I" and no, the LLM does not have this autobiographical memory the text is simulating.
Are you sure it's the same people? I feel the opposite: it's the same people who happily read tons of LLM output themselves and send some of it to others.
point is: maybe llm output is best not shared. maybe, like a dream, the only audience who can appreciate the content of the writing is the first party
* As a reference; people can look look up just the algorithm they want
* As a token that says “I’ve thought about this problem”
(The former is somewhat a subset of the latter. All of the stuff they didn’t read when they used the work as reference was there to provide them confidence that the algorithm they plucked out of the thing had some thought behind it).
but when my coworker pays to create documents on topics he hasnt considered, for ideas of projects which dont exist, it feels like an exercise in text generation and i become mildy put off for the onus of reading it. i know it was written without purpose and while there are possibly novel tech and ideas in there, it feels like being handed less than a rough draft because it lacks any aim and intention
now, i expect he would get much more from it. hes the first party audience who reads the doc and sees a valuable project somewhere inside of it
This applies even in "low" art. AI generated imagery from mainstream models tends to be so ugly it detracts from effectively communicating what the prompter intended.
I stopped sharing my photos publicly to stop supplying training data for image generation models. I don't want to feed that machine.
It's not the exact same asymmetry, but there are parallels.
Oh no. I see the contrary.
One of my friends recently stated (paraphrased):
- Since I can generate code, writing it feels mundane now. I don't write code anymore.
I have seen people who never think but spend all their days querying LLMs for everything. Docs, help, howtos, system administration, coding...
What I see is an incentive for less work, less effort. Not income or status. They don't spend their "saved" time, if there's any, for personal activities or self-improvement either. They just do things with less effort, and just live as they lived before.
It's brain numbing.
> I would predict shorter and weirder stories and meme style communication patterns outside normal syntax.
I don't share the same sentiment, yet I don't have idea what to expect. It has to get darker to get brighter again.
We're just starting.
Additionally I am so, so ,so sick of reading claudes overly wordy technical writing ish bullshit. Its exhausting trying to find the fuck ups or hidden assumptions in the pages of text it produces for everything.
Every time I try and search for ways to make it stop I just find people trying to save tokens which I don't give a shit about. I just want it to communicate things to me without having to constantly read 4 paragraphs, dump the context or fork it or start a new session so it "remembers" or re-weights that is was told to be concise and terse in like 7 different places. Maybe I am using it wrong.
- Do not include opinions, just official documentation.
- Add all references you have used as a bibliography section at the end.
That’s not meant to be glib; Google and friends are pretty trash now.
This means it finds me a single video which is not in a language which I know, or similar.
9 pages about how it felt to be a kid eating the dish, for 7 ingredients and a one line recipe.
Anyway, to answer your question, I was pointing out that the request for "important knowledge and moral lessons that larger society needs" and "communicating solutions to how to live as a human" as well as lamenting that "We are adrift without instructions" is actually a request for religion. Religion is how to make sense of how to live. So the comment is asking for religion and rejecting religion at the same time.
At the same time, I was pointing out that one religion in particular has directly addressed the point that "writing is not the goal." The "word"—or "logos" in the greek—is the reason, the logic, the rational principle of the cosmos behind the words. It points to that need for a solution for how to live, as well as showing there is a real answer.
You can also view them as data expansion tools. They expand an input to an arbitrary long text. That text contains roughly the same amount of information as was contained in the input to begin with.
This is not very useful unless your work is content production. More useful is when the output length is shorter than the input. Then it is a (lossy) data compression tool. These are, as we all know, very useful for images and sound but now we have them for text too.
I use it as a colleague I'm drafting with. I'll ask how a sentence lands, tell it to make a paragraph more friendly or more dramatic, have it argue against a point I'm making. The piece comes together over many turns, and the information arriving in each turn is mine — it's not expanding one prompt, it's helping me converge on something.
The information-content framing also proves too much: a copy editor adds no information either. Neither does a translator, or a ghostwriter. What they add is form, and form is most of what makes writing good or bad.
My favorite part about LLMs is that their insufficiency as legal aids (Aides? Aids.) seems to be slowly cluing-in the general public as to how Byzantine and "inside baseball" our legal system has become. (This is a bad thing.)
This is supposed to help our economic growth during the coming decade.
I use them as text consumption machines. They read and watch a lot of the books and movies i have no time to. And from the TLDR I decide whether the full thing is worth watching.
There is no way a summary of these things fron an LLM has the correct context.
(not really frustrated at you, as much as where society is going)
Most of the non pulp books published - contain at least two times as many pages as needed for the story or narrative.
The information density in the modern world is absurdly low.
All these processes can be reduced to mathematics and computation. The human brain is just a tool, like any other organ. Do we deny this reality because it shields us from existential horror?
We don’t know yet, and maybe it’s unknowable.
Believing everything can be explained that way is itself just another ideology followed blindly
The way I've been thinking about it is not that internal experience is unfalsifiable, along with the modern science connotation that everything that is unfalsifiable is automatically irrelevant (which would be quite absurd, as everything that is dear and meaningful to humans are all simply cognitive phenomena in the end!). It's that it is externally, naively and a-priori unfalsifiable. That is, you can't externally measure or prove it, without having an a-priori theory of what it is and how it happens in the first place. But it is internally falsifiable, in the sense that if we have it, then we know we have it. Note that it's not that "If I have it, then I say I have it", or that "I one has it, he says he has it"; those are all communication to the external world, and for example machines can clearly say they have it without having it, or you can have it before even learning the words that represent it. But if you have it, you can know you do. This actually creates some potential for expanding this knowledge, maybe, in the future, to allow for external verification. We can internally investigate properties associated with consciousness, and from those properties (along with scientific knowledge), maybe one day we will know more about the objective basis which affords consciousness/sentience manifesting or emerging. So I see it like an experimental field where the component of self-assessment or self-experimentation or self-measurement is essential (again along with more conventional scientific notions).
I have been thinking the same way about all properties of life/consciousness, in particular if we think of ethics as a property of (even if you consider the ethics or ideals only pertaining to how it would be ideal to lead your own life) the mind, or of sentience in general. I think of ethics as an inherent property of existence: it stems from the fact that internal experiences/internal life/sentience/etc. are the only thing that could have value, that in fact sentience is experimentally (again taking the point of view of experimental sentience) the only thing that truly matters or has value. If we are minds, we know that only the content of minds can matter; it cannot matter, for example, that a lone rock in some place no one can know about has this or that fate, because there is no mind to interact or perceive and be affected in any way by it. So all of ethics can probably be founded or based upon this kind of observation, and the act of experimental self-observation of consciousness. And I think it's quite important that we collectively recognize those values and what matters to make our lives better (better yet, as good as it can be!) :)
sorry the brain is a tool to who exactly in this ostensibly reductive worldview?
Yo, this blog post could’ve been a freakin’ prompt. I have years and years of blogging for an AI to learn from, and over 20 novels, and tons of short stories. One prompt, and all this spills out. And if your goal is a blog post, you’re gonna love this era. If your goal is the joy of thinking in words, nothing has changed. So this is the real part, right here: Doing a thing for the love of the thing is no different than it ever was. The problem is, there aren’t many people for whom this applies.
Only if what you mean by this is "for people who think padding a word count is the goal".
LLMs absolutely do not write well, by human standards.
There are areas where the average of LLM slop already beats the average of humanslop by a sizeable margin.
In the past, a human producing humanslop would get a serious talking to, but nowadays it's apparently a valid excuse "well, an LLM generated it". This approach is placing a huge burden on the reviewers, much more so than in the past.
AI slop can be more annoying to read. I mean, some human slop is as annoying as AI slop, but not all of it.
AIs can produce slop far faster than humans, so that the majority of slop at the moment is AI slop.
Printing presses are about exact duplication of writing. The internet is a higher layer printing press. LLMs substitute for (some of) the human effort of producing the text that a printing press or the internet can then replicate.
LLMs likewise are text production machines. They don't produce writing, they produce text. Text without writing is what we call slop in the modern parlance.
LLMs are literally throwing random dice into a printing press and making a thousand copies that you then try to huck on the street as if it were a real newspaper.
Either people are vouching for those again and again, or the ban was lifted at some point. I don't really know how this works here, but the first option seems unlikely to me.
maybe LLMs are seen to write as well as humans because most humans have poor reading comprehension skills? to wit: OP is using an analogy to make their point, where the components don't need to be an exact fit to make the point (ever heard the phrase "the map is not the territory"?)
A printing press that does the thinking for you.
Soon you won't be doing anything. At best you'll just be a bag of meat attached to automated processes you don't understand in order to take legal liability for it.
Literally a scapegoat, except of a different species.
You could ask a human to "do something with 1M dollars" and get garbage too.
It's no different than an editor standing between the author and a book, or a publisher, or a printing press. It's part of the process of idea realization, so it's just on that spectrum somewhere between book sale and author idea. (even though in another flipflop, that editor might be an author and now elevated to the premier deciding role). It's about how the tool fits, not what the tool is ultimately capable of.
So the analogy holds, just fine.
At least the human's brain requires about 20 Watts to operate.
Cheap garbage is better than garbage requiring whole power plants nad billions of capital investment.
The idea that we'd have to justify the existence of humans relative to LLMs based on objective metrics sounds like it's leading in a bad direction. If the LLM gets their power budget down to nineteen watts, what does that mean for humans?
ehhhh, we're not really there. Not saying it's impossible to reach in the future but large tasks like this are still out of scope for LLM's beyond demoing toy applications. Impressive nonetheless, but I can't tell an LLM to reproduce microsoft word and have it give me a useful enough tool that doesn't contain an immense amount of bugs and require a human in the loop to replace it.
To 1-shot MS Word will be possible only within some workspace designed for creating that kind of software. It will probably be saas style where you pay to export binaries or maybe some will take 30% if they become destinations for finding such software.
But I would bet other platforms are used for game dev, or for filmmaking.
Such that we still won’t have some super “model” that just does everything. The harnessing becomes architecture becomes software becomes user experience and expertise.
Yeah, yeah. Remind me how many people are using those operating systems? The ability of LLMs to produce dogshit software that nobody will ever use is truly unparalleled, but not especially world-changing.