10 ms·

Lem has a book about almost any subject related to science/philosophy you can imagine. Here he writes about ChatGPT :) https://mwichary.medium.com/one-hundred

by ajuc 3y ago

Lem has a book about almost any subject related to science/philosophy you can imagine. Here he writes about ChatGPT :) https://mwichary.medium.com/one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-seconds-2a0a3dfbc59e https://mwichary.medium.com/one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-sec... Here as well: https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Trurls-Electronic-Bard.pdf https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Tr... And here about Ebooks and Audiobooks: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1024 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1024

mcv 3y ago
All the hubub about ChatGPT made me think a lot about Trurl's poetry machine from The Cyberiad. Especially Nick Cave and others declaring it the death of creativity, compared to the protesting poets from the story.
- johngossman 3y ago
  Me too. And I recently learned that Calvino wrote an essay that included the idea of a poetry writing machine. Now I'm super curious whether Lem got the idea from Calvino, vice versa, or whether it was independently invented by each. I know they read each other. https://lab.cccb.org/en/did-calvino-dream-of-literary-androids/ https://lab.cccb.org/en/did-calvino-dream-of-literary-androi...
  - mcv 3y ago
    My theory is that he started with some silly poems and wrote the rest of the story around them.
  - lioeters 3y ago
    The idea of an artificial person goes back to pre-science ("magic"), ancient history and mythology. > Arguably the oldest known story of something approximating AI can be found in the eighth-century-bc Iliad, Homer’s epic poem of the Trojan War. In it, Hephaestus, disabled god of metalworking, creates golden handmaidens to help him in his forge: “In them is understanding in their hearts, and in them speech and strength, and they know cunning handiwork”. > ..In her 2018 book Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor describes how ancient cultures explored the idea of artificial life. Ancient Greeks were skilled in metalwork and mechanics and created a great deal of automata, including a puppet theatre that could perform an entire play. The idea of a poetry-writing machine can also be traced back in history, hinted at in the Kabbalah, or machines of ancient China. (Source?) In the work of Leibniz, "On the Combinatorial Art" (1666), he explores: > The main idea behind the text is that of an alphabet of human thought, which is attributed to Descartes. All concepts are nothing but combinations of a relatively small number of simple concepts, just as words are combinations of letters. > All truths may be expressed as appropriate combinations of concepts, which can in turn be decomposed into simple ideas, rendering the analysis much easier. Therefore, this alphabet would provide a logic of invention..
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- gattr 3y ago
  When I got older, I realized the sneakiness here (shortening and quoting from memory): > Trurl realized that a poet's mind is shaped by the civilization that produced him, and that civilization - by the one before it, and so on. So in order to create an artificial poet, he'd have to simulate the whole history of the Universe. Which he did, but then from the results chose only the important bits as inputs for the learning process, otherwise it would take too long...
  - ajuc 3y ago
    He almost described prunning :)
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      Seems to me more like selection of entries in the training corpus than pruning.
      - coldtea 3y ago
        Yeah, more like curated training.
    - ChainOfFools 3y ago
      or as William Goldman summarized it, poetry is compression
- MichaelMoser123 3y ago
  yes, however both Trurl and Klapaucius were also robots. In the story it is machines creating machines to describe meaning. I think Lem really liked recursion. (and i still don't understand how ChatGtp is able to respond to metaprompts like 'be brief', i mean if it is a model that is selecting the next most likely word, then it should not be able to control its own style of output.)
  - KETHERCORTEX 3y ago
    > (and i still don't understand how ChatGtp is able to respond to metaprompts like 'be brief', i mean if it is a model that is selecting the next most likely word, then it should not be able to control its own style of output.) "Be brief" may just be associated with the speech patterns accociated with a shorter way to say stuff. So it's still the same autocomplete, just steered in another direction.
    - MichaelMoser123 3y ago
      looking at the prompts in https://github.com/f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts https://github.com/f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts Now i am a bit sceptical of this whole prompting business, still some of it is doing something (otherwise people would not put their work into it) Also not clear to me how this steering of the automcpleter in another direction is working.
NooneAtAll3 3y ago
regarding 137 seconds I remember reading book about stock exchange Ai predicting terrorist attack casualties and then predicted 100k dead in London has anyone else read smth like that and remembers the name?
- crywas 3y ago
  The Fear Index by Robert Harris, 2011
cubefox 3y ago
He was actually more explicit elsewhere. Lem's book Imaginary Magnitude consists of a collection of prefaces to nonexistent books. One of them is for "Juan Rambellais et al., A History of Bitic Literature, Volume I". The "bitic" literature consists of novels written by, well, language models. You would feed in the combined work of Tolstoy, and out comes a new "Tolstoy" novel. When I first read this "preface" twenty years ago, the idea seemed implausible to me: How could a system write novels only by being fed other novels, and without simultaneously being a general intelligence? Surely novel writing is AGI-complete!
- jon_richards 3y ago
  That's basically the entire history of artificial intelligence. We used to think a robot capable of vacuuming your house would be "AI" and now roombas just bounce around the floor semi-randomly. The task didn't change, our respect for it did. At this point the definition of AI is practically "Something computers can't do yet", though I'm partial to its corollary "Any sufficiently misunderstood algorithm is AI."
  - hahajk 3y ago
    I heard Vint Cerf describe the original AI algorithms as basically "heuristic algorithms". "AI" was used to described a class of algorithms that only worked some of the time as opposed to the mathematically proven algorithms.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >We used to think a robot capable of vacuuming your house would be "AI" Only because we thought such a robot would be like a AGI servant, not just a single-purpose device like a roomba that can just bounce around the floor. So, it's not like we've changed our definition of AI (and even less so, AGI). What we did change is what a robot house-cleaner product is (less "C3PO with a broom", and more "single-purpose vacuum cleaner with heuristics to bounce around"). Even for chess playing, when people in the past thought a chess playing machine that would be able to defeat the human champion would have AGI, they did so not because they thought playing chess is enough to signify AGI, but because they thought AGI was necessary to do so. If someone had explained to them back then that such a future machine would be able to play expert-level chess by mere number crunching of a huge list of moves, and that it wouldn't imply any other thinking facultu, they wouldn't consider that to be AGI. >At this point the definition of AI is practically "Something computers can't do yet", though I'm partial to its corollary "Any sufficiently misunderstood algorithm is AI. The practical definition of AI (as used colloqualy, in the market etc) for products is basically "any smart-looking algorithm, with heuristics to do something slightly complex". It's just that the term is overloaded, and we sometimes say AI when we mean AGI.
TomaszZielinski 3y ago
And (IIRC) in Summa Technologiae he wrote about a moon-sized device, where recordings of all possible answers to all to possible questions were stored, and how a conversation with such device would be indistinguishable from a conversation with a human.
- 2f0ja 3y ago
  Cixin Liu has a great short story 'Cloud of Poems' in which an alien intelligence seeks to write every possible permutation of traditional Chinese poetry, to show up a human poet. I didn't bother to check the math on this, but in the story there is not enough matter in the universe to in some way encode every possible traditional Chinese poem!
  - ajuc 3y ago
    > but in the story there is not enough matter in the universe to in some way encode every possible traditional Chinese poem! In fact if you formally describe how you generate the permutations that's one of such encodings of these permutations (and the optimal one - see Kolmogorov Complexity :) ). So there is definitely enough matter to do it. Similarly we can encode PI despite it having infinite number of digits.
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      This seems like a reference-object error (a denotation error, or sense-reference error in philosophical terms), except the functional definition and the partial numerical expansion are both references to PI rather than being PI itself. Ce-ci n'est-pas une remarque, and all that.
      - ajuc 3y ago
        We're talking encodings not platonic ideals. Forget PI. Let's take 1337. Or is it MCCCXXXVII? Is it 2 or 1.(9)? Or 10 (binary)? Different encodings, same number. Some encodings are just less optimal than others. Same with text. Is the poem in utf-8 and utf-16 a different poem? What if you zip the file? These are just encodings, and there's no point ignoring the good ones (which for non-random strings are usually programs).
indigoabstract 3y ago
Yes, when ChatGPT came out, I instantly thought its makers must have read Lem, since it's essentially the same thing as Trurl's Electronic Bard from The Cyberiad.
twic 3y ago
Meanwhile, Philip K Dick thought Lem was himself artificial: https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is-a-communist-committee https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is...
- uptownJimmy 3y ago
  Dick thought everything was artificial, eventually.
ctoth 3y ago
> There were many poet protests staged, demonstrations, demands that the machine be served an injunction to cease and desist. But no one else appeared to care. In fact, magazine editors generally approved I forgot how much I enjoyed this...
stared 3y ago
Here are prompted "AI-generated" poems by him http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lem/WonderfulPoems.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lem/WonderfulPoems.html "This is a poem about a haircut! But lofty, nobel, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter "s"! Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide."

by ajuc 3y ago

mcv 3y ago

All the hubub about ChatGPT made me think a lot about Trurl's poetry machine from The Cyberiad. Especially Nick Cave and others declaring it the death of creativity, compared to the protesting poets from the story.

johngossman 3y ago
Me too. And I recently learned that Calvino wrote an essay that included the idea of a poetry writing machine. Now I'm super curious whether Lem got the idea from Calvino, vice versa, or whether it was independently invented by each. I know they read each other. https://lab.cccb.org/en/did-calvino-dream-of-literary-androids/ https://lab.cccb.org/en/did-calvino-dream-of-literary-androi...
- mcv 3y ago
  My theory is that he started with some silly poems and wrote the rest of the story around them.
- lioeters 3y ago
  The idea of an artificial person goes back to pre-science ("magic"), ancient history and mythology. > Arguably the oldest known story of something approximating AI can be found in the eighth-century-bc Iliad, Homer’s epic poem of the Trojan War. In it, Hephaestus, disabled god of metalworking, creates golden handmaidens to help him in his forge: “In them is understanding in their hearts, and in them speech and strength, and they know cunning handiwork”. > ..In her 2018 book Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor describes how ancient cultures explored the idea of artificial life. Ancient Greeks were skilled in metalwork and mechanics and created a great deal of automata, including a puppet theatre that could perform an entire play. The idea of a poetry-writing machine can also be traced back in history, hinted at in the Kabbalah, or machines of ancient China. (Source?) In the work of Leibniz, "On the Combinatorial Art" (1666), he explores: > The main idea behind the text is that of an alphabet of human thought, which is attributed to Descartes. All concepts are nothing but combinations of a relatively small number of simple concepts, just as words are combinations of letters. > All truths may be expressed as appropriate combinations of concepts, which can in turn be decomposed into simple ideas, rendering the analysis much easier. Therefore, this alphabet would provide a logic of invention..
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
gattr 3y ago
When I got older, I realized the sneakiness here (shortening and quoting from memory): > Trurl realized that a poet's mind is shaped by the civilization that produced him, and that civilization - by the one before it, and so on. So in order to create an artificial poet, he'd have to simulate the whole history of the Universe. Which he did, but then from the results chose only the important bits as inputs for the learning process, otherwise it would take too long...
- ajuc 3y ago
  He almost described prunning :)
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    Seems to me more like selection of entries in the training corpus than pruning.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      Yeah, more like curated training.
  - ChainOfFools 3y ago
    or as William Goldman summarized it, poetry is compression
MichaelMoser123 3y ago
yes, however both Trurl and Klapaucius were also robots. In the story it is machines creating machines to describe meaning. I think Lem really liked recursion. (and i still don't understand how ChatGtp is able to respond to metaprompts like 'be brief', i mean if it is a model that is selecting the next most likely word, then it should not be able to control its own style of output.)
- KETHERCORTEX 3y ago
  > (and i still don't understand how ChatGtp is able to respond to metaprompts like 'be brief', i mean if it is a model that is selecting the next most likely word, then it should not be able to control its own style of output.) "Be brief" may just be associated with the speech patterns accociated with a shorter way to say stuff. So it's still the same autocomplete, just steered in another direction.
  - MichaelMoser123 3y ago
    looking at the prompts in https://github.com/f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts https://github.com/f/awesome-chatgpt-prompts Now i am a bit sceptical of this whole prompting business, still some of it is doing something (otherwise people would not put their work into it) Also not clear to me how this steering of the automcpleter in another direction is working.

NooneAtAll3 3y ago

regarding 137 seconds I remember reading book about stock exchange Ai predicting terrorist attack casualties and then predicted 100k dead in London has anyone else read smth like that and remembers the name?

crywas 3y ago
The Fear Index by Robert Harris, 2011

cubefox 3y ago

He was actually more explicit elsewhere. Lem's book Imaginary Magnitude consists of a collection of prefaces to nonexistent books. One of them is for "Juan Rambellais et al., A History of Bitic Literature, Volume I". The "bitic" literature consists of novels written by, well, language models. You would feed in the combined work of Tolstoy, and out comes a new "Tolstoy" novel. When I first read this "preface" twenty years ago, the idea seemed implausible to me: How could a system write novels only by being fed other novels, and without simultaneously being a general intelligence? Surely novel writing is AGI-complete!

jon_richards 3y ago
That's basically the entire history of artificial intelligence. We used to think a robot capable of vacuuming your house would be "AI" and now roombas just bounce around the floor semi-randomly. The task didn't change, our respect for it did. At this point the definition of AI is practically "Something computers can't do yet", though I'm partial to its corollary "Any sufficiently misunderstood algorithm is AI."
- hahajk 3y ago
  I heard Vint Cerf describe the original AI algorithms as basically "heuristic algorithms". "AI" was used to described a class of algorithms that only worked some of the time as opposed to the mathematically proven algorithms.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- coldtea 3y ago
  >We used to think a robot capable of vacuuming your house would be "AI" Only because we thought such a robot would be like a AGI servant, not just a single-purpose device like a roomba that can just bounce around the floor. So, it's not like we've changed our definition of AI (and even less so, AGI). What we did change is what a robot house-cleaner product is (less "C3PO with a broom", and more "single-purpose vacuum cleaner with heuristics to bounce around"). Even for chess playing, when people in the past thought a chess playing machine that would be able to defeat the human champion would have AGI, they did so not because they thought playing chess is enough to signify AGI, but because they thought AGI was necessary to do so. If someone had explained to them back then that such a future machine would be able to play expert-level chess by mere number crunching of a huge list of moves, and that it wouldn't imply any other thinking facultu, they wouldn't consider that to be AGI. >At this point the definition of AI is practically "Something computers can't do yet", though I'm partial to its corollary "Any sufficiently misunderstood algorithm is AI. The practical definition of AI (as used colloqualy, in the market etc) for products is basically "any smart-looking algorithm, with heuristics to do something slightly complex". It's just that the term is overloaded, and we sometimes say AI when we mean AGI.

TomaszZielinski 3y ago

And (IIRC) in Summa Technologiae he wrote about a moon-sized device, where recordings of all possible answers to all to possible questions were stored, and how a conversation with such device would be indistinguishable from a conversation with a human.

2f0ja 3y ago
Cixin Liu has a great short story 'Cloud of Poems' in which an alien intelligence seeks to write every possible permutation of traditional Chinese poetry, to show up a human poet. I didn't bother to check the math on this, but in the story there is not enough matter in the universe to in some way encode every possible traditional Chinese poem!
- ajuc 3y ago
  > but in the story there is not enough matter in the universe to in some way encode every possible traditional Chinese poem! In fact if you formally describe how you generate the permutations that's one of such encodings of these permutations (and the optimal one - see Kolmogorov Complexity :) ). So there is definitely enough matter to do it. Similarly we can encode PI despite it having infinite number of digits.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    This seems like a reference-object error (a denotation error, or sense-reference error in philosophical terms), except the functional definition and the partial numerical expansion are both references to PI rather than being PI itself. Ce-ci n'est-pas une remarque, and all that.
    - ajuc 3y ago
      We're talking encodings not platonic ideals. Forget PI. Let's take 1337. Or is it MCCCXXXVII? Is it 2 or 1.(9)? Or 10 (binary)? Different encodings, same number. Some encodings are just less optimal than others. Same with text. Is the poem in utf-8 and utf-16 a different poem? What if you zip the file? These are just encodings, and there's no point ignoring the good ones (which for non-random strings are usually programs).

indigoabstract 3y ago

Yes, when ChatGPT came out, I instantly thought its makers must have read Lem, since it's essentially the same thing as Trurl's Electronic Bard from The Cyberiad.

twic 3y ago

Meanwhile, Philip K Dick thought Lem was himself artificial: https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is-a-communist-committee https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is...

uptownJimmy 3y ago
Dick thought everything was artificial, eventually.

ctoth 3y ago

> There were many poet protests staged, demonstrations, demands that the machine be served an injunction to cease and desist. But no one else appeared to care. In fact, magazine editors generally approved I forgot how much I enjoyed this...

stared 3y ago

Here are prompted "AI-generated" poems by him http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lem/WonderfulPoems.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lem/WonderfulPoems.html "This is a poem about a haircut! But lofty, nobel, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter "s"! Seduced, shaggy Samson snored. She scissored short. Sorely shorn, Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed, Silently scheming, Sightlessly seeking Some savage, spectacular suicide."