I think the first goal of writing is to talk to yourself. Without an external, unchanging scratchpad, most people cannot keep their thoughts truly straight. It can feel otherwise, but trying to write something about any tricky topic even a few pages in length can take a long time to be self-consistent. Clarifying it takes even longer, especially when you intend to share it. Writing as thinking is definitely a thing. I believe it’s the trickiest part of understanding how such interesting things pop out of a language model trained to predict the next token and rewarded with pleasing sequences. Since it is not thinking, it proves that certain sentences (most?) can be generated thoughtlessly.

I'd like to live in a world where people only make art to serve a higher purpose. But we don't live in that world and never did. Before we had slop we had pulp — formulaic, low effort writing full of cliches of romance, lust, crime and adventure broke college students could churn out en masse to make a living.

I'd also recommend having a look at the books published by this article's author. I will admit that I have never read nor heard of any of them. But come on, just look at the books published covers and the way the author introduced them and tell me that they are not industrial products engineered for mass commercial appeal.

No.

I think narrative stories are a "brain hack", in the same way heavily processed food, drugs, clickbait, soap operas and TikTok are brain hacks, combined with some exclusivity status signaling games. They're just old enough to have gained a cultural cachet that more modern forms of entertainment don't yet have. Same for art, music, comedy and culture generally.

There is nothing wrong with those "brain hacks", if they make us happy and don't have negative consequences, why not use them, but we should recognize that it's what they are.

I think that an alien intelligence could communicate with us about Ohm's law and Rieman's last theorem, maybe even debate resource and power allocation strategies (democracy, monarchy, capitalism, socialism) with us, they could probably understand the pull of sports, even if they couldn't participate in it themselves, but art and humor would be completely lost on them and considered a weird human excentricity.

Many of us understood that, and tried to tell it over and over. My keyboard is worn, my mind is numb, my soul is weary from typing/telling that the output is not the aim, but the content it carries, the substance it holds.

Yet a very vocal group advocates integrating LLMs into every aspect of their lives, and the other group watch in dismay.

On the other hand, I used a sentence form used by LLMs in a comment during a morning-brain moment, and an angry mob tried to crucify me with torches and pitchforks.

Many people love to generate text with LLMs, but most of same crowd apparently hates to read LLM output. An interesting phenomenon.

And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

Humans don't seem to have much problem sharing the world with other species, whether they are dogs or LLMs. This is unrelated.

> I don't mean the nature of consciousness or internal experience (which is unfalsifiable)

The way I've been thinking about it is not that internal experience is unfalsifiable, along with the modern science connotation that everything that is unfalsifiable is automatically irrelevant (which would be quite absurd, as everything that is dear and meaningful to humans are all simply cognitive phenomena in the end!). It's that it is externally, naively and a-priori unfalsifiable. That is, you can't externally measure or prove it, without having an a-priori theory of what it is and how it happens in the first place. But it is internally falsifiable, in the sense that if we have it, then we know we have it. Note that it's not that "If I have it, then I say I have it", or that "I one has it, he says he has it"; those are all communication to the external world, and for example machines can clearly say they have it without having it, or you can have it before even learning the words that represent it. But if you have it, you can know you do. This actually creates some potential for expanding this knowledge, maybe, in the future, to allow for external verification. We can internally investigate properties associated with consciousness, and from those properties (along with scientific knowledge), maybe one day we will know more about the objective basis which affords consciousness/sentience manifesting or emerging. So I see it like an experimental field where the component of self-assessment or self-experimentation or self-measurement is essential (again along with more conventional scientific notions).

I have been thinking the same way about all properties of life/consciousness, in particular if we think of ethics as a property of (even if you consider the ethics or ideals only pertaining to how it would be ideal to lead your own life) the mind, or of sentience in general. I think of ethics as an inherent property of existence: it stems from the fact that internal experiences/internal life/sentience/etc. are the only thing that could have value, that in fact sentience is experimentally (again taking the point of view of experimental sentience) the only thing that truly matters or has value. If we are minds, we know that only the content of minds can matter; it cannot matter, for example, that a lone rock in some place no one can know about has this or that fate, because there is no mind to interact or perceive and be affected in any way by it. So all of ethics can probably be founded or based upon this kind of observation, and the act of experimental self-observation of consciousness. And I think it's quite important that we collectively recognize those values and what matters to make our lives better (better yet, as good as it can be!) :)

“ All these processes can be reduced to mathematics and computation” may or may not be a true statement.

We don’t know yet, and maybe it’s unknowable.

Believing everything can be explained that way is itself just another ideology followed blindly

LLMs don't have the connection to reality that humans have. LLMs only have text. That's the difference.

This assumes one-shot generation. I don't use it that way, and I don't think many people who find it useful do.

I use it as a colleague I'm drafting with. I'll ask how a sentence lands, tell it to make a paragraph more friendly or more dramatic, have it argue against a point I'm making. The piece comes together over many turns, and the information arriving in each turn is mine — it's not expanding one prompt, it's helping me converge on something.

The information-content framing also proves too much: a copy editor adds no information either. Neither does a translator, or a ghostwriter. What they add is form, and form is most of what makes writing good or bad.

I agree that the output is more likely to be valuable when it’s shorter than the input. And when they use tools to do research and try things, it can be a lot of input that comes from all sorts of places.

I really hate the whole thing about companies promoting using LLMs to change one-liner emails into this long multi-paragraph thing that ends up saying almost nothing ... just wasting everyone's time in reading them (with an extra sprinkling of hallucinations).

>Right. LLMs are text production machines.

I use them as text consumption machines. They read and watch a lot of the books and movies i have no time to. And from the TLDR I decide whether the full thing is worth watching.

Yep. I love it when someone doesn't read the whole article, posts a takedown and it gets voted to the top of the discussion.

LLMs don't do anything well by human standards. Not even the one thing (programming) they are supposed to be good at. It's disheartening how many people are prepared to accept the slop an LLM puts out just because it's fast.

I don't buy it, although I agree with GP's larger point about other strengths.

Printing presses are about exact duplication of writing. The internet is a higher layer printing press. LLMs substitute for (some of) the human effort of producing the text that a printing press or the internet can then replicate.

> Huh that is an interesting metaphor. A next higher layer printing press?

A printing press that does the thinking for you.

Figuring out what problems to solve or what features to include in the OS.

Go ask an LLM to "do something with 1M tokens".

I think that the point he’s getting at is the human experience.

Non sequitur. Neither most mathematicians nor Terry A. Davis are particularly well known for their literature abilities.

> and writes entire operating systems from scratch

ehhhh, we're not really there. Not saying it's impossible to reach in the future but large tasks like this are still out of scope for LLM's beyond demoing toy applications. Impressive nonetheless, but I can't tell an LLM to reproduce microsoft word and have it give me a useful enough tool that doesn't contain an immense amount of bugs and require a human in the loop to replace it.

> writes entire operating systems from scratch

Yeah, yeah. Remind me how many people are using those operating systems? The ability of LLMs to produce dogshit software that nobody will ever use is truly unparalleled, but not especially world-changing.