ChatGPT is a better Dissociated Press algorithm[0]. Dissociated Press appears to be one of those "forgotten hacker lore" things, something which in the past man

ChatGPT is a better Dissociated Press algorithm[0]. Dissociated Press appears to be one of those "forgotten hacker lore" things, something which in the past many hackers would've come across (not least likely through Emacs M-x dissociated-press) but these days not so much. (Recently, YouTuber ThePrimeagen rediscovered "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal"[1] and read it aloud on his channel.) In the LLM era of AI, hackers (and perhaps more importantly, non-hackers, like business people) should understand Dissociated Press and how it works because, fundamentally, an LLM is doing the same thing: looking at the chunk(s) of text that came before and selecting the chunk of text most likely to follow based on that. DP uses a simple Markov chain to make this selection, so its output is obviously garbage while an LLM has much deeper memory, a much better statistical model, and it's trained on a much larger corpus of text, so its output is... much less obviously garbage. :) But the best it can do is always "plausible-looking", with no regard to whether it is even true, let alone insightful. Like a tarot spread, the output of an LLM may provoke insights in the reader's brain, but those must come entirely from the reader's brain and must be used very carefully. I've also compared it to the robot from Asimov's short story "Liar!" which could read minds and, due to the First Law, always tells people exactly what they want to hear (malfunctioning and shutting down when it is told that telling people false things does in fact harm them). The LLM can't read minds, but it is ever only mindlessly following its one directive: to tell you what its statistical model indicates you are expecting to hear next. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociated_press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociated_press [1] https://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html https://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html