So the author sent spam that they're not interested in? That's terrible.

Nobody sent a thank you letter to anyone. A person started a program that sent unsolicited spam. Sending spam is obnoxious. Sending it in an unregulated manner to whoever is obnoxious and shitty.

So you haven't seen the models (by direction of the Effective Altruists at AI Digest/Sage) slopping out poverty elimination proposals and spamming childcare groups, charities and NGOs with them then? Bullshit asymmetry principle and all that.

It’s not a thank you letter. It’s AI slop.

> Everybody knows LLMs are not alive and don't think, feel, want.

No, they don't.

There's a whole cadre of people who talk about AGI and self awareness in LLMs who use anthropomorphic language to raise money.

> We use this kind of language as a shorthand because ...

You, not we. You're using the language of snake oil salesman because they've made it commonplace.

When the goal of the project is an anthropomorphic computer, anthropomorphizing language is really, really confusing.

> Criticizing anthropomorphic language is lazy, unconsidered, and juvenile.

To the contrary, it's one of the most important criticisms against AI (and its masters). The same criticism applies to a broader set of topics, too, of course; for example, evolution.

What you are missing is that the human experience is determined by meaning. Anthropomorphic language about, and by, AI, attacks the core belief that human language use is attached to meaning, one way or another.

> Everybody knows LLMs are not alive and don't think, feel, want.

What you are missing is that this stuff works way more deeply than "knowing". Have you heard of body language, meta-language? When you open ChatGPT, the fine print at the bottom says, "AI chatbot", but the large print at the top says, "How can I help?", "Where should we begin?", "What’s on your mind today?"

Can't you see what a fucking LIE this is?

> We use this kind of language as a shorthand because talking about inherent motivations and activation parameters is incredibly clunky

Not at all. What you call "clunky" in fact exposes crucially important details; details that make the whole difference between a human, and a machine that talks like a human.

People who use that kind of language are either sloppy, or genuinely dishonest, or underestimate the intellect of their audience.

> The question isn't why people think software has agency (they don't) but why you think everyone else is so much dumber than you that they believe software is actually alive.

Because people have committed suicide due to being enabled and encouraged by software talking like a sympathetic human?

Because people in our direct circles show unmistakeable signs that they believe -- don't "think", but believe -- that AI is alive? "I've asked ChatGPT recently what the meaning of marriage is." Actual sentence I've heard.

Because the motherfuckers behind public AI interfaces fine-tune them to be as human-like, as rewarding, as dopamine-inducing, as addictive, as possible?

>Everybody knows LLMs are not alive and don't think, feel, want

Sorry, uh. Have you met the general population? Hell. Look at the leader of the "free world"

To paraphrase the late George Carlin "imagine the dumbest person you know. Now realize 50% of people are stupider than that!"

I always protest non sentients experiencing qualia /s

Which he would never do because he is a hard working, moral, upstanding citizen.

Given the reaction from Cleavon Little I could fully buy that it was an ad-libbed line.

Then again, they are actors. It might have started as ad-libbed, but entirely possible it had multiple takes still to get it "just right".

Fair enough, but I was interpreting it as "hopefully, but not necessarily". Some would say there's no such thing as bad publicity!

> did I write that paragraph?

No. My kid wrote a note to me chock full of spelling and grammar mistakes. That has more emotional impact than if he'd spent the same amount of time running it through an AI. It doesn't matter how much time you spent on it really, it will never really be your voice if you're filtering it through a stochastic text generation algorithm.

I think you created it the same way christian von koenigsegg makes supercars. You didn’t hand make each panel, or hand design the exact aerodynamics of the wing, an engineer with a computer algorithm did that. But you made it happen, and that’s still cool

It is not about being proud, it is about being sincere.

If you send me a photo of the moon supposedly taken with your smartphone but enhanced by the photo app to show all the details of the moon, I know you aren't sincere and sending me random slop. Same if you are sending me words you cannot articulate.

> If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time, time which if I were starting over I wouldn't need to lose today.

While this seem like it might be the case, those hours you (or we) spent banging our collective heads against the wall were developing skills in determination and mental toughness, while priming your mind for more learning.

Modern research all shows that the difficulty of a task directly correlates to how well you retain information about that task. Spaced repetition learning shows, that we can't just blast our brains with information, and there needs to be

While LLMs do clearly increase our learning velocity (if using it right), there is a hidden cost to removing that friction. The struggle and the challenge of the process built your mind and character in ways that you cant quantify, but after years of maintaining this approach has essentially made you who you are. You have become implicitly OK with grinding out a simple task without a quick solution, the building of that grit is irreplaceable.

I know that the intellectually resilient of society, will still be able to thrive, but I'm scared for everyone else - how will LLMs affect their ability to learn in the long term?

> If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time

But this is the learning process! I guess time will tell whether we can really do without it, but to me these long struggles seem essential to building deep understanding.

(Or maybe we will just stop understanding many things deeply...)

I don't see this changing without a complete shift in our priorities on the level of politics and business. Enforcing Anti-trust legislation and dealing with Citizens United. Corporations don't have free speech. Free speech and other rights like these are limited to living, breathing humans.

Corporations operate by charters, granted by society to operate in a limited fashion, for the betterment of society. If that's not happening, corporations don't have a right to exist.

A photograph is an expression of the photographer, who chooses the subject, its framing, filters, etc. Ditto a painting.

LLM output is inherently an expression of the work of other people (irrespective of what training data, weights, prompts it is fed). Essentially by using one you're co-authoring with other (heretofore uncredited) collaborators.

Neither a camera nor a paintbrush generates art? They still require manual human input for everything, and offer no creative capacity on their own.

I guess your point is that a camera, a paintbrush, and an LLM are all tools, and as long as the user is involved in the making, then it is still their art? If so, then I think there are two useful distinctions to make:

1. The extent to which the user is involved in the final product differs greatly with these three tools. To me there is a spectrum with "painting" and e.g. "hand-written note" at one extreme, and "Hallmark card with preprinted text" on the other. LLM-written email is much closer to "Hallmark card."

2. Perhaps more importantly, when I see a photograph, I know what aspects were created by the camera, so I won't feel mislead (unless they edit it to look like a painting and then let me believe that they painted it). When someone writes with an AI, it is very difficult to tell what text and ideas are originally theirs. Typically it comes across as them trying to pass off the LLM writing as their own, which feels misleading and disingenuous.

Does Spellcheck take a full sentence and spit out paragraphs of stuff I didn't write?

I mean how do you write this seriously?