[throwgfgfd25]

And it still won't produce the type of articles he produces. Because at the very least he is capable of writing new articles from something the LLM doesn't have: his brain.

Seriously. This is just the parrot thing again. The fact that AI proponents confuse the form of words with authorial intent is mindbending to me.

Wouldn't have confused Magritte, I think.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I’m not confused, I just disagree. I don’t think that authorial intent is something fundamentally different than text prediction.

When I’m writing out a comment, there’s no muse in my head singing the words to me. I have a model of who I am and what I believe - if I weren’t religious I might say I am that model - and I type things out by picking the words which that guy would say in response to the input I read.

(The model isn’t a transformer-based LLM, of course.)

[javed6542]

It would cost around $5 and about 5 hours of work to prove you wrong...

[throwgfgfd25]

You clearly, clearly do not understand what I am saying. But sure, waste your time and money making a parrot that, unlike the author it mimics, is incapable of introspection, reflection, intellectual evolution or simply changing its mind.

Words are words. Writers are writers. Writers are not words.

ETA: consider what would actually be necessary to prove me wrong. And when you hear back from David Karpf about his willingness to take part in that experiment, write a blog post about it and any results, post it to HN.

I am sure people here will happily suggest topics for the articles. I, for example, would love to hear what your hypothetical ChatKarpf has to say about influences from his childhood that David Karpf has never written about, or things he believed at age five that aren't true and how that affects his writing now.

Do you see what I mean? These aren't even particularly forced examples: writers draw on private stuff, internal thoughts, internal contradictions, all the time, consciously and unconsciously.

[askafriend]

You articulate this position well. I've tried to convey something similar and it's tough to find the words to explain to people. I really like this phrase:

"Words are words. Writers are writers. Writers are not words."

I'm very bullish on AI/LLMs but I think we do need to have a better shared understanding of what they are and what they aren't. I think there's a lot of confusion around this.

[throwgfgfd25]

> I really like this phrase:

Thank you. I don't think it really explains the distinction, of course. It just makes it clear there necessarily must be one, and it can't be wished away by discussions of larger training sets, more token context, or whatever. It never will be wished away.