alt Hacker News“meaning” emerges from a mental process. That mental process can consume things which were built to convey meaning (e.g. a novel) or were not (a waterfall).
Just because an AI bot says things that are meaningful, that doesn’t mean you need to assume it is intentional, sentient, or intelligent. It could vomit out a random Rorschach test and if you found meaning for yourself, you can still understand it was random.
I talk to a bot to sharpen my thinking, not to adopt its thinking.
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>I talk to a bot to sharpen my thinking, not to adopt its thinking.
Right. I was under the impression it doesn't have any thinking. But that never mattered to me much. And I would expect someone working with OpenAI to have a firm handle on that.
I appreciate the effort to explain, but I kind of took all that for granted. I still don't understand where the psychosis comes from. If the model spits out a number, the number is not false simply because it had no agency to understand the number. If the model brilliantly patterns something, I do not need assume intent.
If by psychosis is implied the obvious, such as attributing consciousness to an LLM, I might understand, though I would argue it's pretty elitist and self-righteous, and that "naivety" would be a less damning and more appropriate term, which could be used just as effectively. I am beginning to suspect it's a term that appeals to a younger generation, where cruelty is a bit more normal than it was in my generation. Not sure though.
Exactly. From my arts background, I'm not scared of LLMs as a replacement for human art because anything good that LLMs produce exist somewhere between "found art" and mechanically-produced art, like photography. In either case, there is a huge amount of work done by the clankers, but it has absolutely no human meaning until humans assign it meaning.
This applies to math discoveries as well. The Jacobian conjecture was always invalid, only our human understanding of it has changed thanks to human inquiry and validation, despite LLMs doing the hard work.
I feel like we are in that narrow window of time when humans grapple with a new technology by personifying it before we realize it is just another tool humans have created to amplify human capabilities.