[foxglacier]

> for communication to hold any meaning there must be persons at either end of it working towards a common understanding of truth.

I'm really struggling to understand that. Are you defining the meaning of the word "communication"? Does "either" mean "both" or "at least one"? Does reading a blog post count as communication? It it just a fancy way of saying "words are only useful when they convey meaning"? How does any of that relate to AI? AI can also learn from communication. Do you exclude AI because you hold the controversial belief that it's not to be capable of understanding or perhaps not to be capable of working towards any goal? And how about humans who intentionally write nonsense?

I also don't see how the story of that library is relevant. This text is not seemingly random, so it's more like walking through an actual library.

[newer_vienna]

I mean "either" as "both". Yes, reading a blog is communication. And you don't need to convince me that plenty of people go about life steeped in nonsense and that listening to what they have to say is a waste of time. But on the topic of existentialism, humans can grasp at truth through lived experience and this produces both a reason for and a means towards purposeful interaction with others.

LLMs at their root are next-word predictors. If there's any communicative value in what they produce, it is due only to the data they were trained on and the intentions of the prompt-director and publisher. I have no problem in saying that I would rather interact with the words from the source than with the machine-generated resultant text.

[foxglacier]

Thanks for clarifying. I think we just differ on what we value. I don't mind communicating with someone even when there's no hope of them gaining any understanding from our interaction. I'm happy to read a technical manual that may have been written by 100's of different individuals of many decades, many of whom aren't even alive anymore. That's the same one-way communication I get from a blog or news article. Who or what the author is is irrelevant to me.

Do you mean you'd rather read the prompt than the output? That's tantalizing but it's only possible because they used AI. I think regular journalists and bloggers effectively have a secret prompt in their head and generate an article to respond to it. Don't you feel the same way about that? It's not AI vs human, but seeing behind the scenes vs seeing the product of the work. Also, you probably don't want to see how the sausage is made. It might look like "here's a bunch of dense technical PDFs about resource use permits and lab reports. Write an article that makes Tesla look like they did something wrong". That might be the exact same secret prompt a human journalist uses, so why do you value the human's output more than the AI's? The human certainly isn't trying to gain any understanding - they're trying to rile up their readers.

[newer_vienna]

Sure, I see your point. I too read and value technical manuals, but I think them worth reading because the underlying scientific truth or technology matters and the builders/maintainers were doing important work when they crafted the manuals.

Yes, I'd rather read the prompt than the output. The problem you bring up with journalists and bloggers is exactly why provocative content is not worth reading. Kierkegaard brings up this point exactly! One of his most famous quotes is precisely this, "The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word 'journalist.'". The problem is exactly their motives and the distortion of truth.

[foxglacier]

I fully agree about provocative content. Well except that some people enjoy feeling angry by believing something that isn't true. That's a kind of pleasure that's worth something, but it seems emotionally harmful in the long run. God in these olden-days moral judgements usually means emotional health of the individual or vaguely defined long-term success of their society.

My point is that it's not AI-vs-human that matters. AI makes provocative content easier to write but it also makes helpful technical documentation easier to write.