Post by @williampietri@sfba.social

2024-01-14 15:53 UTC

As a writer, I think the real value of writing is the thinking and care that goes into it. Even for purely factual material, writing involves a careful search for truth. LLMs, though, don't have any concept of "true". They can't. What they have is the digested correspondence between words in Wikipedia and Reddit and a zillion other sources of text. Truth can be represented in text, but it lies outside of it. In philosopher Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit", he defines it as "speech intended to persuade without regard for truth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit Marketing content generated by LLMs is clearly bullshit. But I'd argue that by imitating human forms of writing, *everything* produced by an LLM is bullshit. (Which would make the enormous "AI" hype cycle bullshit about bullshit, a truly American accomplishment.) 5/

Replies (1)

@williampietri@sfba.social 2024-01-14 16:05

Let's turn to the second plausible use case: customer support. People often like to talk to other people to resolve problems. What if we can automate the *feeling* of talking to a person, but with no actual people involved? There are a bunch of things going on here. At least here, there's a real user need. But to what extent is it a real user solution? It's plausible to me here that this will be a plausible first-query solution once you've built up a good base of Q&A examples for it, doing a bit of textual generalization. At least as long as what you're doing is pretty standard. But remember that we're using a bullshit engine here, so what happens when the statistically plausible text isn't correct or useful? 6/

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