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delis-thumbs-7e 3 hours ago

That’s not how language works https://www.telelib.com/authors/J/JoyceJames/prose/finnegans...

andrewla 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I dunno, man, I looked at that text and I see one word after another.

Obviously language and the connection to human thought is more subtle than this; I think we all have a rich inner life. Just from an external perspective we can't observe it; all we can see is the token/phoneme stream. I'm just saying that it's a mistake to try to criticize LLMs on this basis because it's hard to see how the same criticism would not apply to any system (like humans) that generate language.

delis-thumbs-7e 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If you want to see words form a shape I could point you towards concrete poetry, but I guess there is no point. Joyce wrote Finnegan’s Wake for 17 years and although superficially it seems complete gibberish, trodding through it you find meaning to words that are in no dictionary, sentence structures alien to English, etc. but still you are able to understand it, and perhaps some way the mind that produced it. So I disagree with you, we can observe each other’s inner life. It is always unexpected, strange, exciting, but always rooted to our shared experience or what it like being a very big and confused ape.

LLM’s are usually unexpected only when they malfunction and sprout same letter again and again etc - hardly a literary masterpiece. They make very easily recognisable patterns that we can use as helpful tools, but in the end they are devoid of any meaning apart from what we give them. Of course one could say same about art and all language, but I think there still is the fact that we apes somehow recognise each other. And besides, we do know the internal functions that drive the parroting. It is admittedly bit tricky, but in no way as magical as people purport it to be.