This is interesting! So to some, perhaps, the creator, intent and process matter as much as—if not more than—the output. The “becoming” over the “being.”
Responses like this tickle me because they make clear there’s a batch of human beings who have just a profoundly different experience with LLMs than I do.
I see these things and think, this is incredible, machines seem to be approximating or emulating conscious thought. There must be so much we can learn about ourselves, and so much they can do.
You see the same thing and say meh, useless pattern matching, what’s the point, spend the money elsewhere.
I wonder why we have this different perspective? I’ve seen these two reactions again and again—I suspect they evince two different worldviews, but I don’t know what the correlates are. I don’t think it’s techno optimism/pessimism, because I’m profoundly worried about what happens to us. It’s not purely an age thing—I’m not young. I see it on here all the time so I don’t think it’s field of work. So what is it, I wonder?
Right, right, nothing surprising about computers suddenly creating original works of art, poetry, legal arguments, bedtime stories and screenplays. AGI? Pshaw. Wake me up when they’ve proved the Riemann Hypothesis using nothing but a collection of vintage cookbooks.
Will we be searching the internet for content that an AI can write?
For example: If I can ask an AI to make me a cake recipe, find an error in my code or tell me about the Hindenburg disaster, and the response is faster, more accurate and easier to read than what I’d typically find on Google, then maybe I simply won’t use Google for that anymore (especially since with the AI, I can ask follow-up questions...)
So maybe bad actors using AI to generate their content will just be yelling into the void. (Until their content gets picked up and incorporated by my AI in its next training session.)
By the mid-1990s, tens—if not hundreds—of million of people had mobile phone subscriptions, and those who didn’t clearly understood the tech offered humanity a profoundly new ability: communicate anywhere, all the time.