i respect the author of this post wayyyy too much to ever imply that i know more than them, or that i even have proprietary knowledge that they, themselves do not possess. i admire aphyr, and i aesthetically agree with many of the arguments offered forth. but this whole thing feels a bit cherry-picked— i’m not gonna go chapter-and-verse (cf. belt-and-suspenders) about it, but on some levels this comes across as a bit superficial. i think the general thrust— that ai is a sort of Narcissus’s pond— is completely a reasonable and well-considered take. but i would be shocked if someone with the intellectual powers of someone like Aphyr has never had an interaction with an ai in which they did not feel like they were interacting with the deep recesses of their mind in a way both profound and, more importantly, productive. and yeah, there’s plenty of pyrite in them thar hills. but, it does have this almost Lord of the Rings The One Ring -esque pull when you get into a certain “embedding space” (/ thought space) in a certain thread conversing with ai. it genuinely is a profound transformation of cognition, and working superlinearly productively with it is a matter of “when”, not “if”. i share all the same aeathetic concerns, and all the deeper ones. but there have been sessions that i have had with ai that made me blankly stare up at the heavens as well, and i don’t think i’m anywhere near the only one.