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I agree. It's one thing to delegate labor to a machine, but I find myself very uncomfortable when the machine takes the role of creative expression. Art is a fo

I agree. It's one thing to delegate labor to a machine, but I find myself very uncomfortable when the machine takes the role of creative expression. Art is a form of communication which transmits feeling, experience and emotion, but there's nothing a machine puts into this, there's nothing being transmitted, it's just a rendering, it's just pushing your buttons that make you go 'neato.' I fear people will start taking the beautiful and profound for granted, it'll just be content.

rektide 4y ago
I dont particularly mind there being some places where tech is in the lead, where it can claim the initiative. But it just feels like humanity secedes more and more ground & understanding to humanity each month, and there's so few visible notable frontiers where humanity is staking down real wins. Rather than have advances in general purpose computing, we keep getting more and more apps, more and more far-off cloud systems.
- rektide 4y ago
  *to tech
IanCal 4y ago
On the other side, I'm astounded that I can ask a machine to convey something it wants to convey and get something out that makes me feel something. > but there's nothing a machine puts into this What makes you so sure?
- grugagag 4y ago
  > ask a machine to convey something it wants to convey What makes you think a machine has any wants and desires?
  - IanCal 4y ago
    I'm a squishy machine and I have them, for as far as those terms have any meaning. What measure or process do you have of determining if I have them?
visarga 4y ago
> but there's nothing a machine puts into this, there's nothing being transmitted That depends on your prompt. You can make it longer if you have more to say. It's a conditional language model, you can select the place it starts from and how to go. But you can't blame it for bad prompts. Instead of seeing LLM as "nothing there, just token probabilities", I'd rather see it as a distillation of human culture. It's like a mirror house with infinite reflexions and complexities. A place to contemplate, a microscope where you can study something in detail, a simulator where you can deploy experiments.

rektide 4y ago

I dont particularly mind there being some places where tech is in the lead, where it can claim the initiative. But it just feels like humanity secedes more and more ground & understanding to humanity each month, and there's so few visible notable frontiers where humanity is staking down real wins. Rather than have advances in general purpose computing, we keep getting more and more apps, more and more far-off cloud systems.

rektide 4y ago
*to tech

IanCal 4y ago

On the other side, I'm astounded that I can ask a machine to convey something it wants to convey and get something out that makes me feel something. > but there's nothing a machine puts into this What makes you so sure?

grugagag 4y ago
> ask a machine to convey something it wants to convey What makes you think a machine has any wants and desires?
- IanCal 4y ago
  I'm a squishy machine and I have them, for as far as those terms have any meaning. What measure or process do you have of determining if I have them?

visarga 4y ago

> but there's nothing a machine puts into this, there's nothing being transmitted That depends on your prompt. You can make it longer if you have more to say. It's a conditional language model, you can select the place it starts from and how to go. But you can't blame it for bad prompts. Instead of seeing LLM as "nothing there, just token probabilities", I'd rather see it as a distillation of human culture. It's like a mirror house with infinite reflexions and complexities. A place to contemplate, a microscope where you can study something in detail, a simulator where you can deploy experiments.