Template:M intro technology rumours of our demise: Difference between revisions
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit |
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) |
||
Line 248: | Line 248: | ||
(The “directed intelligence of human consensus” is not [[utopia|magically benign]], of course, as [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] might be able to tell us, having been on both ends of it).<ref>See also Lindy Chamberlain, Peter Ellis and the sub-postmasters wrongly convicted in the horizon debâcle.</ref> | (The “directed intelligence of human consensus” is not [[utopia|magically benign]], of course, as [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] might be able to tell us, having been on both ends of it).<ref>See also Lindy Chamberlain, Peter Ellis and the sub-postmasters wrongly convicted in the horizon debâcle.</ref> | ||
===Bayesian priors and the canon of Chat-GPT=== | |||
Last point on literary theory, is that the “[[Bayesian priors]]” argument which fails for Shakespeare fails all the more so for a [[large language model]]. | |||
Just as a great deal of the intellectual energy involved in rendering a text into the three-dimensional metaphorical universe we think of as ''King Lear'' comes from beyond the author of that text, so it does with the output of an LLM. Its model, after all, is entirely drawn from the human canon. | |||
And there is one other contributor to a cultural artefact we haven’t yet considered. The main one: the ''reader''. It is the reader, and her “[[cultural baggage]]”, who must make head and tail of a work of literature, however rich the cultural milieu that supports it. Construing natural language is no matter of mere [[Symbol processing|symbol-processing]]. Humans are ''not'' [[Turing machine|Turing machines]]. | |||
We know this because the overture from ''Tristan und Isolde'' reduce one person to tears and can leave the next one cold. I can see in the Camden Cat a true inheritor of the blues pioneers, you might see an unremarkable busker. A text becomes art in the reader’s head. | |||
This is as true of magic — the conjurer’s trick is to misdirect her audience into ''imagining'' something that isn’t there: the magic is supplied by the audience — and it is of ''digital'' magic. We imbue what an LLM generates with meaning. ''The meatware is doing the heavy lifting''. | |||
If you feed an LLM with its own output it rapidly degrades into meaningless mush. LLMs are not intentional. They are not directed, they depend on the ongoing environment to shape their fitness. That environment is necessarily human. | |||
===A real challenger bank=== | ===A real challenger bank=== |