Template:M intro work Large Learning Model: Difference between revisions
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====Literary theory, legal construction and LLMs==== | ====Literary theory, legal construction and LLMs==== | ||
{{quote|“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” | |||
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Fittingly, the first chatbot was a designed as a parlour trick. In 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at MIT created “[[ELIZA]]” to explore communication between humans and machines. [[ELIZA]] used pattern matching and substitution techniques to generate realistic conversations. By today’s standards, [[ELIZA]] was rudimentary, simply regurgitating whatever was typed into it, reformatted as an open-ended statement or question, thereby inviting further input. As a session continued, the user’s answers became more specific and elaborate, allowing [[ELIZA]] to seem ever more perceptive in its responses. | Fittingly, the first chatbot was a designed as a parlour trick. In 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at MIT created “[[ELIZA]]” to explore communication between humans and machines. [[ELIZA]] used pattern matching and substitution techniques to generate realistic conversations. By today’s standards, [[ELIZA]] was rudimentary, simply regurgitating whatever was typed into it, reformatted as an open-ended statement or question, thereby inviting further input. As a session continued, the user’s answers became more specific and elaborate, allowing [[ELIZA]] to seem ever more perceptive in its responses. | ||
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Now, as [[generative AI]] improves towards 100 — assuming it does improve: there are some indications it may not; see below — that threshold may move but it will never get to 100. In the mean time, as each successive round takes more time and bears less fruit, mortal enthusiasm and patience with the LLM will have long-since waned: well before the [[Singularity]] arrives. | Now, as [[generative AI]] improves towards 100 — assuming it does improve: there are some indications it may not; see below — that threshold may move but it will never get to 100. In the mean time, as each successive round takes more time and bears less fruit, mortal enthusiasm and patience with the LLM will have long-since waned: well before the [[Singularity]] arrives. | ||
And many improvements we will see will largely be in the [[meatware]]: as we refine and elaborate our queries; we learn how better to frame our queries, and “prompt-engineering” becomes the skill, rather than the dumb, parallel pattern-matching process that responds to it. Ours is the skill going in, and ours is the skill construing the output. | And many improvements we will see will largely be in the [[meatware]]: as we refine and elaborate our queries; we learn how better to frame our queries, and “prompt-engineering” becomes the skill, rather than the dumb, parallel pattern-matching process that responds to it. Ours is the skill going in, and ours is the skill construing the output. The machine just does the boring bit. But this is all machines have ''ever'' done. This is the basic proposition of mechanising. | ||
So in all kinds of literature ''bar one'', “construal” is where the real magic happens. It is the [[Emergent|emergent]] creative act and community consensus that renders ''King Lear'' a timeless cultural leviathan and {{br|Dracula: The Undead}} forgettable pap.<ref>Maybe not ''that'' forgettable, come to think of it: it has stayed with me 15 years, after all.</ref> A literary work may start with the text, but it stays there barely a moment. The “meaning” of literature is necessarily personal to the reader: it lives between our ears, and within the cultural milieu that interconnects the reading population.<ref>Call me [[post-modern]] — go on, do — but I don’t hold with [[Carl Sagan]]’s idea that a book teleports its author “inside our heads”. That would be to equate reading with symbol-processing. It absolutely isn’t, and that metaphor gravely underestimates the human brain when in construction mode. </ref> | |||
“Construal” and “construction” are interchangeable in this sense: over time that cultural milieu takes the received corpus of literature and, literally, ''constructs'' it into edifices its authors can have scarce have imagined. ''Hamlet'' speaks, still, to the social and human dilemmas of the twenty-first century in ways Shakespeare cannot possibly have contemplated.<ref>A bit ironic that Microsoft should call its chatbot “Bard”, of all things.</ref> to be clear: the reader of literature is no symbol processor, decrypting text to reveal a one-to-one scale assembly of the content of the author’s head. Literature is not an instruction manual. | “Construal” and “construction” are interchangeable in this sense: over time that cultural milieu takes the received corpus of literature and, literally, ''constructs'' it into edifices its authors can have scarce have imagined. ''Hamlet'' speaks, still, to the social and human dilemmas of the twenty-first century in ways Shakespeare cannot possibly have contemplated.<ref>A bit ironic that Microsoft should call its chatbot “Bard”, of all things.</ref> to be clear: the reader of literature is no symbol processor, decrypting text to reveal a one-to-one scale assembly of the content of the author’s head. Literature is not an instruction manual. | ||