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.