4 ms·

> Maybe we don't really appreciate something unless we appreciate it is hard in a visceral way. Count me out of that "we" -- I appreciate the artist who put in

> Maybe we don't really appreciate something unless we appreciate it is hard in a visceral way. Count me out of that "we" -- I appreciate the artist who put in the work because they put in the work to make the thing I like, but I don't appreciate the thing because of the effort. I can marvel at the effort required to produce art in a certain way, but I'm (largely) indifferent to the effort in my actual appreciation of the thing (or lack of it). I look forward to the time when I can have as much high-quality (to me) fiction to read as I like, because it's all generated by LLM. Some time after that, I'd love to see the main Star Wars sequence done properly. I won't care that it isn't created by a vast team of humans.

kranner 2y ago
To represent the other side, I enjoy reading Urdu and Persian poetry but I will never be interested in reading anything generated by an LLM. No matter how 'high quality' it is represented to be, I'm aware that it was produced by a process that shares nothing with my own experience of the world. It has felt no hope, disappointment, fear, pain, mortality, loss of loved ones, lack of control over itself, a world model that has changed over the years, and doesn't know that it all doesn't amount to much in the end and yet this is all there is for itself. It may turn out to be sentient in some way, but it's almost certainly not sentient in the way that I am sentient. I know it's just mimicking being human as instructed; to take it seriously devalues everything about my own humanity. I'm not ready for that kind of enlightened insight, I think.
- gcanyon 2y ago
  Sure, that's your choice/preference, so good for you (sincerely).
  - kranner 2y ago
    Thanks, I respect your choice as well.
- visarga 2y ago
  > I know it's just mimicking being human as instructed; to take it seriously devalues everything about my own humanity. Since it is mirroring human culture, why do you see it in such a negative light? Instead see it like what it is, an interactive reconstruction, or maybe like a microscope to zoom into any idea.
  - kranner 2y ago
    I’m happy to use LLMs in all other contexts, quite enthusiastically actually. I’ve got DeepSeek 32B running locally on a beefy PC already. It’s just in the context of poetry, and literary writing in general, that I feel differently about them. There’s also the fact that I haven’t read all that human writers and poets have already written (and will never be able to in this short life) so there’s no need to turn to synthetic output. No supply problem exists. Poetry in particular is something to ponder over and over. You can’t really run out.
- boredhedgehog 2y ago
  > It has felt no hope, disappointment, fear, pain, mortality, loss of loved ones, lack of control over itself, a world model that has changed over the years, and doesn't know that it all doesn't amount to much in the end and yet this is all there is for itself. You can't know what any poet felt or didn't feel while writing a poem. Perhaps it was a commission piece, or an experiment or an emulation of something the poet had heard elsewhere. And more generally, whether the specific emotion another man feels is similar or even comparable to your own is also unknowable. He might use the same word to describe it, but the subjective experience associated with it might be completely different, and completely impossible to share.
  - kranner 2y ago
    Yes but at least it was possible for that poet to have felt what I feel they might have felt while writing that poem. And the closer they are to me culturally the more likely it is that I am not misidentifying their emotions entirely. Also poems are not really puzzles to be solved. If it produces an effect and is solid craft-wise, that is enough. There’s a lot to the craft side btw in the Urdu and Persian ghazal form which is what I had in mind while writing my original comment. LLMs can easily master the latter but have nothing to do with the former. Their output is pure form without substance. Edit: I want to add that ambiguity (ابہام) is even a desirable property in Urdu ghazal, specifically. The more interpretations a couplet can have, the greater is the accomplishment in terms of craft.
majormajor 2y ago
> I look forward to the time when I can have as much high-quality (to me) fiction to read as I like, because it's all generated by LLM Are your tastes so hyper-specific that we aren't already in this world? Fiction is (even pre-LLM) easier to find in whatever genre you want than ever.
- gcanyon 2y ago
  I think it's possible to slice preferences endlessly, and I do think I'm a bit unusual. I gave ChatGPT a list of my favorite SF novels, and a brief description of why, and asked for similar works. It recommended 10 novels, three of which I've read and weren't in the sweet spot. Also, everything it recommended was 30+ years old -- to be fair, the same is true of the list I gave it, but I think it goes against your point that there's an unlimited supply. So I told it about the three and asked it to adjust and to give more recent works, and it obliged. One of the new recommendations was in the Culture series, which I've read one of and it wasn't my jam. Another was Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, which I've read and enjoyed the Martian, but I'm betting that's the only Andy Weir I'll like. The others I'll have to check out. It's an interesting exercise.
kannanvijayan 2y ago
> I look forward to the time when I can have as much high-quality (to me) fiction to read as I like, because it's all generated by LLM. Some time after that, I'd love to see the main Star Wars sequence done properly. I won't care that it isn't created by a vast team of humans. I think the problem here is analogous to the "500 channels and nothing to watch" issue in the heydey of cable. Ok let's say you have an LLM in your hand that can generate any story you want. High quality. So you say: "tell me a story" and it tells you as story. But what story? Who is in it? What characters? Why are they there? The only novelty that's going into this the prompt. Everything else is regurgitated weights and probability associations. The question is: does the full infinite closure of recombination over some finite learning set (no matter how large) encompass enough of the essence of creativity to produce something "new"? This is a hard question to answer because it forces us to try to define creativity, or lacking that - at least try to identify where it comes from. I don't have a clear answer to this but I'll suggest a line of thinking that seems plausible. When a person writes a story, it's not derived as an amalgam of everything they have read. It's not some probabilistic weighted average of all those associations. The story they write is also derived from their lived experience. Their personal interactions, their observations, their musings, their passions, their fears.. and how all of those things interact with their circumstance, influencing their reactions, those reactions influencing their environment, and that feeding back into the above process. There are two components that seem important here: the first is the existence of a rich, dynamic, and active _dialogue_ between the mind and its environment. It's not static, and it involves a feedback loop between the mind and the environment it models. The second is a motive force. For humans the origin is biological. Fear, hunger, satiation, arousal, etc. - those core primitive emotional drives that originally developed to help us survive, but then were layered over with an intellect that elaborated on them. What originated as a motive force to drive the mating instinct evolves into a sonnet about an unattainable maiden. The fear of the dark that keeps us away from the places where we would be eaten.. evolves into a stories about unfathomable creatures and impossible colours that drive men insane. And I think there's a third one that's unelaborated and implied but should be made explicit: introspection & reflection. The ability to consider your choices and consequences with respect to your motivations, and adjust any number of things - from the motivations themselves, to expectations/understanding. This creature would have a lived experience, some underlying motivations, and a feedback loop established between the two using introspection. I have no idea how you'd build any of that.. but it feels like that's what you'd need before you got yourself a good storyteller. But by that point, you'd also be compelled to question whether or not it's even ethical to force it to tell you a story anymore. I don't think it's impossible that some broader AI system eventually is capable of genuinely creating creative output. LLMs are not that, though. They seem more like a substrate.

kranner 2y ago

To represent the other side, I enjoy reading Urdu and Persian poetry but I will never be interested in reading anything generated by an LLM. No matter how 'high quality' it is represented to be, I'm aware that it was produced by a process that shares nothing with my own experience of the world. It has felt no hope, disappointment, fear, pain, mortality, loss of loved ones, lack of control over itself, a world model that has changed over the years, and doesn't know that it all doesn't amount to much in the end and yet this is all there is for itself. It may turn out to be sentient in some way, but it's almost certainly not sentient in the way that I am sentient. I know it's just mimicking being human as instructed; to take it seriously devalues everything about my own humanity. I'm not ready for that kind of enlightened insight, I think.

gcanyon 2y ago
Sure, that's your choice/preference, so good for you (sincerely).
- kranner 2y ago
  Thanks, I respect your choice as well.
visarga 2y ago
> I know it's just mimicking being human as instructed; to take it seriously devalues everything about my own humanity. Since it is mirroring human culture, why do you see it in such a negative light? Instead see it like what it is, an interactive reconstruction, or maybe like a microscope to zoom into any idea.
- kranner 2y ago
  I’m happy to use LLMs in all other contexts, quite enthusiastically actually. I’ve got DeepSeek 32B running locally on a beefy PC already. It’s just in the context of poetry, and literary writing in general, that I feel differently about them. There’s also the fact that I haven’t read all that human writers and poets have already written (and will never be able to in this short life) so there’s no need to turn to synthetic output. No supply problem exists. Poetry in particular is something to ponder over and over. You can’t really run out.
boredhedgehog 2y ago
> It has felt no hope, disappointment, fear, pain, mortality, loss of loved ones, lack of control over itself, a world model that has changed over the years, and doesn't know that it all doesn't amount to much in the end and yet this is all there is for itself. You can't know what any poet felt or didn't feel while writing a poem. Perhaps it was a commission piece, or an experiment or an emulation of something the poet had heard elsewhere. And more generally, whether the specific emotion another man feels is similar or even comparable to your own is also unknowable. He might use the same word to describe it, but the subjective experience associated with it might be completely different, and completely impossible to share.
- kranner 2y ago
  Yes but at least it was possible for that poet to have felt what I feel they might have felt while writing that poem. And the closer they are to me culturally the more likely it is that I am not misidentifying their emotions entirely. Also poems are not really puzzles to be solved. If it produces an effect and is solid craft-wise, that is enough. There’s a lot to the craft side btw in the Urdu and Persian ghazal form which is what I had in mind while writing my original comment. LLMs can easily master the latter but have nothing to do with the former. Their output is pure form without substance. Edit: I want to add that ambiguity (ابہام) is even a desirable property in Urdu ghazal, specifically. The more interpretations a couplet can have, the greater is the accomplishment in terms of craft.

majormajor 2y ago

> I look forward to the time when I can have as much high-quality (to me) fiction to read as I like, because it's all generated by LLM Are your tastes so hyper-specific that we aren't already in this world? Fiction is (even pre-LLM) easier to find in whatever genre you want than ever.

gcanyon 2y ago
I think it's possible to slice preferences endlessly, and I do think I'm a bit unusual. I gave ChatGPT a list of my favorite SF novels, and a brief description of why, and asked for similar works. It recommended 10 novels, three of which I've read and weren't in the sweet spot. Also, everything it recommended was 30+ years old -- to be fair, the same is true of the list I gave it, but I think it goes against your point that there's an unlimited supply. So I told it about the three and asked it to adjust and to give more recent works, and it obliged. One of the new recommendations was in the Culture series, which I've read one of and it wasn't my jam. Another was Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, which I've read and enjoyed the Martian, but I'm betting that's the only Andy Weir I'll like. The others I'll have to check out. It's an interesting exercise.

kannanvijayan 2y ago

> I look forward to the time when I can have as much high-quality (to me) fiction to read as I like, because it's all generated by LLM. Some time after that, I'd love to see the main Star Wars sequence done properly. I won't care that it isn't created by a vast team of humans. I think the problem here is analogous to the "500 channels and nothing to watch" issue in the heydey of cable. Ok let's say you have an LLM in your hand that can generate any story you want. High quality. So you say: "tell me a story" and it tells you as story. But what story? Who is in it? What characters? Why are they there? The only novelty that's going into this the prompt. Everything else is regurgitated weights and probability associations. The question is: does the full infinite closure of recombination over some finite learning set (no matter how large) encompass enough of the essence of creativity to produce something "new"? This is a hard question to answer because it forces us to try to define creativity, or lacking that - at least try to identify where it comes from. I don't have a clear answer to this but I'll suggest a line of thinking that seems plausible. When a person writes a story, it's not derived as an amalgam of everything they have read. It's not some probabilistic weighted average of all those associations. The story they write is also derived from their lived experience. Their personal interactions, their observations, their musings, their passions, their fears.. and how all of those things interact with their circumstance, influencing their reactions, those reactions influencing their environment, and that feeding back into the above process. There are two components that seem important here: the first is the existence of a rich, dynamic, and active _dialogue_ between the mind and its environment. It's not static, and it involves a feedback loop between the mind and the environment it models. The second is a motive force. For humans the origin is biological. Fear, hunger, satiation, arousal, etc. - those core primitive emotional drives that originally developed to help us survive, but then were layered over with an intellect that elaborated on them. What originated as a motive force to drive the mating instinct evolves into a sonnet about an unattainable maiden. The fear of the dark that keeps us away from the places where we would be eaten.. evolves into a stories about unfathomable creatures and impossible colours that drive men insane. And I think there's a third one that's unelaborated and implied but should be made explicit: introspection & reflection. The ability to consider your choices and consequences with respect to your motivations, and adjust any number of things - from the motivations themselves, to expectations/understanding. This creature would have a lived experience, some underlying motivations, and a feedback loop established between the two using introspection. I have no idea how you'd build any of that.. but it feels like that's what you'd need before you got yourself a good storyteller. But by that point, you'd also be compelled to question whether or not it's even ethical to force it to tell you a story anymore. I don't think it's impossible that some broader AI system eventually is capable of genuinely creating creative output. LLMs are not that, though. They seem more like a substrate.