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by CamperBob2 974 days ago
What do I learn from that?

That you are nothing special. The computer is just doing what you do, putting one word after the last one. Picking each word more or less carefully, based on its own training and the audience's expectations.

It's doing it badly, for the moment. But would we mock a talking dog who stutters?

How is my life enriched?

Being able to see what's coming is helpful, more often than not.
2 comments
bglazer 974 days ago
You’re describing human communication as “nothing special”, just a string of patterns that have no significance beyond their low entropy.

Frankly that’s solipsistic, bordering on pure nihilism. When I read another person’s writing or talk to them, it enriches my life because it gives me a slice of their experience. When I read LLM output, it just definitionally can’t do that, no matter how plausible and semantically meaningful the words are. What is the purpose of literature for you? Just consuming a pleasing string of words?

That’s not to say they have no value, just that I can’t learn anything about another person’s experience of life through an LLM, because they aren’t people

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otabdeveloper4 973 days ago
The LLM isn't creating new information, only packaging existing information.
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CamperBob2 973 days ago
When it creates a poem, song, essay, painting, or program that has never existed before, it is doing what we do. Whether or not we define that as "creating new information" is not an especially interesting question at the end of the day.
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otabdeveloper4 973 days ago
No, because what matters here is if information complexity (aka entropy) is being increased.

Humans increase it, LLMs decrease it.

This matters because eventually in the future information complexity will be humankind's only valuable resource.

(So humans create value, LLMs destroy it.)

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CamperBob2 973 days ago
(Shrug) If you want to increase entropy, just call rand().

You might take a bit of time to learn what you're talking about before posting, or at least before forming permanent opinions on the subject. It's fascinating stuff, trust me... and I'm not that much farther along than you are, trust me on that as well.

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