Post #3261875
2024-01-14 15:35 UTC
First, though an important philosophical point: LLMs are fancy autocomplete. You give them a set of words, they'll predict the next word based on the enormous corpuses they've been trained on. This can give them the appearance of sentience. People will talk as if they "understand" things. They don't. It's the million-monkeys-with-typewriters thing, but the monkeys have seen enough English text that the next word is statistically consistent with the previous words.
Humans are subject to to pareidolia, and we really like to anthropomorphize things. It's not just thunder, it's a guy with a name and a look and a personality and a whole family. It's not just a bit of winter where we celebrate with our dearest; it's a fat guy in a red suit with specific facial hair. So although the text can feel human, we'll have to work hard to think of ChatGPT as a bit of unfeeling machinery, not our plastic pal who's fun to be with.
3/
Replies (1)
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@williampietri@sfba.social 2024-01-14 15:45
Ok, so first, content creation. That seems positive, right? Wrong! The best way I've seen of explaining this: "Why should I take the time to read something nobody took the time to write?" I think this one is a huge net societal negative. The people out there who want instant "content" are almost entirely not readers. They're people who want something to run ads against. They're people who want the credit for writing without doing the work. They're people who want to sell you something without understanding the something or whether or not it might be good for you. In short, they're people with various levels of contempt for their readers. 4/