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I am a simple man. I see Terry Pratchett on HN and I share Venkat Rao’s lovely essay at https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/discworld-rules https://contrap
by Arubis 5mo ago
I am a simple man. I see Terry
Pratchett on HN and I share Venkat Rao’s lovely essay at https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/discworld-rules https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/discworld-rules.
- spicyusername 5mo agoMan, people in the Bay will find a way to over intellectualize anything.
- Arubis 5mo agoTrue, though if you're gonna get bent out of shape about overintellectualizing something, "reading books" is probably gonna be a tough sell.
- vintagedave 5mo agoStill reading but this looks an excellent article. Why not submit it here? I'd upvote! (I would submit it myself but I feel that'd be stealing karma :D)
- Arubis 5mo agoBy all means go for it! I’m averaging 250 karma per annum; if I were going to put effort into that it would’ve already happened by now
- lelanthran 5mo agoIt just struck me that a likely end-result of AIs are the Discworld elves: > Elves have no proper imagination or real emotions, and therefore such things fascinate them. Because they cannot create they steal musicians and artists [... snipped ...] Even if an elf is, for reasons of its own, trying to be nice, its lack of understanding of humans mean there's always something "off" about it.
- simonw 5mo agoWow. Hard to believe most of this was written 3 decades ago.
- FeepingCreature 5mo agoI am very uncomfortable with the idea of "this person or system cannot create, they can only steal". It seems very dehumanizing, and though LLMs aren't humans I could see the argument very easily turned on people. There is nothing specific to LLMs in it.
- Planktonne 5mo agoThe people filling the wires with AI content they didn't write aren't fundamentally incapable of creation; they have chosen not to do it, and so are incapable only until they make a better choice. It's not dehumanising to see the output of someone who isn't creating as uncreative.
- lelanthran 5mo ago> I am very uncomfortable with the idea of "this person or system cannot create, they can only steal". "This person cannot create, they can only steal" is not what was said. "This system cannot create, it can only steal" is what was said. What do you propose, then? That we aren't allowed to pass moral judgements on systems?
- FeepingCreature 5mo agoThere's this famous saying about the design of a bear-safe waste container for American national parks: "there is a considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bear and the dumbest tourist." Similarly, I suspect there is a considerable overlap between the creativity of the least creative human and the most creative LLM. Maybe it's that I've seen the same arguments raised for years about comic artists who traced off other people's work... This will not remain limited to AIs. Learning requires imitation. Our artistic system is already pretty heavily copyrighted, but it could still be a lot more so, and I don't think this would be good for our culture.