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The only other comment here at this point is "Not worth a read.": is reading itself worth it? Is being human worth it? It's long, it's philosophical. It's not
by m3047 2y ago
The only other comment here at this point is "Not worth a read.": is reading itself worth it? Is being human worth it?
It's long, it's philosophical. It's not something I'd normally read specifically with the objective of enabling commenting intelligently on HN. Rather it's something I'd read, knowing others had read it, to share our thoughts over beers in a setting quiet enough and free from distractions that we could hear ourselves think; or maybe during a long walk in the woods.
If the title is misleading it is only because it itself is so short and the piece is so long.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago> is reading itself worth it? People who are made uncomfortable by the idea that AI might be overhyped (to the extent of making an empty passive aggressive comment like that) might be the same people who don't think reading is worthwhile, hence the desire to be saved from having to process a substantive work themself.
- NikkiA 2y agoshrug I think AI is overhyped, AND I felt that the article was pretentious wankery not worth reading.
- petermcneeley 2y agoI was just trying to save people some time.
- sandspar 2y agoThe article is shallow and offers nothing new. It reads like a very well written freshman essay. If you're impressed by offhand references to Derrida then you might enjoy it. The author also bizarrely says that AI can "only" do data analysis and hence isn't very useful. A dismissive characterization like, "it's only more efficient at handling spreadsheets", as if this isn't world shattering on its own.
- 1attice 2y agophilosophy MA here. The point about derrida was actually pretty good -- I've myself reflected that Derrida, Deleuze and a couple of other French poststructuralists got weirdly close to the same basic ideas that power LLMs (high-dimensional spaces, etc.) The Derridan trope that always hits me when I see AI art is the 'virtual image', which, IIRC, is about as close to 'the latent space' as I could hope to find in source materials so far apart. Which is impressive, and, in a way, helps support the LLM/transformer paradigm -- if we're seeing results that were carefully deduced sixty years ago with a wildly different methodology, it suggests that both Derrida and ML research are on, if not the right track, than at least, a shared track; that's in itself a result. If you assume that any use of the word 'Derrida' is a form of education-signalling, you're probably taking a cognitive shortcut.
- sandspar 2y agoThanks for your response. I'm reminded of the old adage that the quickest way to learn something online is to say something controversial and wrong, because someone wiser than you will quickly jump in to correct you.
- trinsic2 2y agoI wonder if the actual wisdom gets buried under the multitude of biased and unintelligent responses though.