https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-simulators https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-simulators But the essay brings up another connotation:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-simulators https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-simulators But the essay brings up another connotation: to simulate is to pretend to be something. A simulator wears many masks. If you ask GPT to complete a romance novel, it will simulate a romance author and try to write the text the way they would. Character.AI lets you simulate people directly, asking GPT to pretend to be George Washington or Darth Vader. […] This answer is exactly as fake as the last answer where it said it liked me, or the Darth Vader answer where it says it wants to destroy me with the power of the Dark Side. It’s just simulating a fake character who happens to correspond well to its real identity. […] The whole point of the shoggoth analogy is that GPT is supposed to be very different from humans. But however different the details, there are deep structural similarities. We’re both prediction engines fine-tuned with RHLF. And when I start thinking along these lines, I notice that psychologists since at least Freud, and spiritual traditions since at least the Buddha, have accused us of simulating a character. Some people call it the ego. Other people call it the self.