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I could be misreading this, but I hope the author doesn't think GANs are used in LLMs. They are cool, though.
But he’s made the error of trying to come at it from a technical perspective, when he clearly knows nothing about that side of things, which discredits the rest.
Huh? That quote appears to be the entirety of the "technical perspective" of the post and is an aside from his larger points that you have blessed as "fine". Literally nothing in the rest of the post relies on that incorrect statement.
Let me quibble with what is discredited here, given the entirety of your point is built upon an error.
> They're word-association mechanisms with no embodiment and no way to associate the text vectors they manipulate with real-world phenomena.
This is wrong too. RLVR grounds foundational models in reality.
It's almost always ignorant nonsense, but somehow it works on some subset of users.
The fact that you got another dead account outright calling for murder is perfectly on brand. Own it. That's who you are.
AI is so good that if you see an hallucination as obviously wrong like this one it’s a sign it’s written by a human.
Doesn't most of this also apply to a guy living in The Matrix?
I wouldn't be too upset about that. They write better anyway.
> I will concede that using LLMs in software development is a different category from fiction, insofar as the languages and APIs are much smaller and more tightly constrained and in software you actively don't want long-range dependencies between elements (something you often do want in fiction, i.e. put a gun on the mantlepiece in part 1 of the book, pull the trigger in part 3).
Agents can plan out a narrative draft, write it out section by section, maybe out of order, then tweak it, plant clues if it wants to, then trigger it in another chapter file etc. Then read the whole thing, reconsider, etc. It can iterate. I'm not saying it will be great literature, but the problem isn't the inability to create long range references.
My bigger point would be this: arguing from such mistaken technical ideas, when not having any idea about the tools is a sign that people's real problem is none of those technical limitations, but Western culture has lost the vocabulary to express their true sentiment. They are grasping for words but can't reach for "soul" and other religious terms because that would sound ridiculous in a secular modern world. But they clearly want to express that and we'd be ahead if we could discuss in such actual terms. Would you want the machine to write literature if, hypothetically it could write indistinguishably from any great writer? I guess not. Because there is something mysterious and important about the human spirit. (the same vocabulary-inaccessibility is plaguing other culture war issues too). People will rather talk about fake water consumption problems than touch the topic of the human soul or spirit.
I sure would. If you want a religious tone to it… It would be a signal suggesting that the human spirit(tm) had finally transcended.
If humans can someday build a machine that can truly carry a (trans)human mind, and let some future souls live unconstrained by all the quirks and limitations of our preexisting biology, exercising more control of their own lives - that’d be wonderful.
I obviously have no idea wherever language models can lead to such dream, of would be a dead end.
Just be upfront. 1) It threatens your livelihood that people can get the thing done faster and cheaper than what they used to pay you, 2) our relationship to an AI shaped entity is spiritually risky and a esthetically off putting, and we have to talk about golems and the tower of babel and stuff. If you think I'm being incoherent, you're in for a ride. Society will have to come to terms with major major issues, not just job replacement and bad slop art.
But this post seems to mostly channel Harlan Ellison. And while he was amazing in his prime, with some absolutely legendary rants, he didn't age well in the end.
I do like his challenge to make LLMs useful to himself and to other authors though. Someone needs to make that happen and nearly exactly how he described it.
Interestingly enough, I do this with various books I'm reading. E.g, I'm currently rereading Accelerando and had Claude generate a wiki-like timeline of key events, characters, and salient plot points. That makes it easier to jump around when I want to re-read a section and grok a plot thread that is scattered across chapters. Ironically, it also exposes inconsistencies (or "hallucinations" as some might call them) in the text because the author didn't have an AI proofread the text.
That's not irony, or even cute. He's literally describing a tool he'd like to use to plan edits to his writing.
If you want to build your own, you can feed this DESIGN.md to your favorite clankie: https://pastebin.com/huRkGnba
I don't understand the celebration of ignorance myself. There are lots of things I don't know how to do or how to use, but I'd never dream of complaining because somebody else does.
Otherwise, I see people just use a regular dash a lot. I love the em dash myself, but of course stopped using it so I won't get accused of AI (which is sad). It's easy to type, at least on a Mac.
I mean, make the case em-dashes are overused and used lazily, I'm right there with you. I just don't see the pretense.
It's one of my favorite books and the main reason I'm e/acc and many other pro-AI people love it because we view it as utopian sci-fi rather than the dystopian world Stross invented. This might be the best case of the Torment Nexus meme [2] in action.
1. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus
At least the author seems to think[1] it is one, if in not so many words:
> And don't ever let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI; by the end of the book our entire species is extinct, surviving only as simulations/memories recalled by something arguably not alive.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163630
2) Turns out it was the sci-fi author who was wrong all along! Fascinating to see someone confidently citing a meme, while actively evidencing the fallacy it exposes.
I think my favorite moment in the book is when one of the characters (at the time, a digitized consciousness traveling at near light speed in a space ship the size of a coke can to explore an anomalous signal sent by alien life) argues that the singularity is a ridiculous concept and will never happen. I always thought that was a really clever observation on the part of Stross that our perspectives are so narrow and provincial, we often can’t see what’s happening in front of our own faces. Your comment does kind of recontextualize that for me and I sort of wonder if that was the author speaking directly to the audience?
You’ve lost the plot. There is no singularity, your machine-god is not coming to save you.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality...
Both, I think, are extremely interesting ideas where very few theories, e.g. pro, anti, or anywhere in between, can be written off as ridiculous -- probably due to a lot of ambiguity and difficulty in defining proof.
For me, I find the Singularity very implausible due to the fact that we talk about "general intelligence" quite a bit, and the more we do, I'm finding that I don't think it exists. There are a set of low-level basic skills that I think -- if you don't have, you're not intelligent. And then there are higher level skills that vary wildly.
So, will we make AIs that can say and do very clever and amazing things; yes, this is happening. Will they be, like ascendant, or something? I would say -- yes, but perhaps not in the way we think? Like, humans made "The Bible." And that's obviously a big huge, impactful, maybe superhuman thing. But feels different from this idea of a "Singularity."
You can find a lot of neo-religious behavior within the AI accelerationist community. Cults coming out of rationalism and fear of the wrath of an angry AI God, making the world right for AI's coming (and even killing the nonbelievers.) Evangelism. Promises of infinite plenty in a post-scarcity heaven. Even a persecution complex - "Luddites" are increasingly demonized, hated, accused of moral depravity for their doubt, and for not abandoning the world, taking up their prompt and following the AI.
How many people post about how AI seems to be draining them of meaning and purpose, that it doesn't live up to the hype, that keeping up with the rituals is exhausting, but feeling that the problem must be with them and not AI? That's a religious person having doubts about the nature of their faith, unable to accept that the God they believe in might not be real, and framing their issues as their own moral failing.
And all of this before the "Singularity" even shows up, and people upload their minds - I mean, meet God in the air.
It's religion, very specifically neo-Christian ideologically. Regardless of any arguments one might make about the practical benefits of using AI in any particular field, it is obviously also religion.
Regardless of believing in the “singularity” or not, please explain how this sounds utopian in the slightest without borderline (if not literal) sociopathic anti-human worldviews.
I think there are a lot of paths where we just rock ourselves back to a regressed agency societal state, and just never have the capacity to have any affect on the wider universe. Which is maybe good for the universe, as we are certainly not a role-model for certain forms of balance. But maybe the balanced view doesn't seek to dominate and influence and become ubiquitous, after all
There was a guy on here the other day trying to argue that Brave New World wasn't a dystopian novel. There are some absolutely wiiild world views out there.
Like, "cautionary" but not full on "dystopian."