I sort of agree with the idea that LLMs are great (sometimes) at distilling all the quantifiable things they have churned through into something similar or, perhaps, putting together things that someone has not thought of putting together yet. And not so great at the intangible things, like good taste.
But, quoting "We've reached a dangerous moment. This moment threatens to convince too many of us that our lived experiences do not matter."
I think that "moment" was long before AI LLMs came around. I can only speak from my lived experiences, and I would say the tech industry and capitalism already put a low, low value on "lived experiences". Take game development, it seems to me, that big game studios rely on "a new fresh crop of college grads" will appear every year. We can push them as hard as we can. Hopefully, they will quit, and we can hire another batch.
I see it too, with lower wage jobs. No point in trying to keep our burger flippers happy. They are going to quit. Might as well factor that into the equation and just make a system with a revolving work force. No commitment. No retirement plan.
This Robin Williams monologue nails exactly why LLMs make us so uneasy.
They speak fluently and confidently about experiences it’s impossible for them to have. They can’t taste a strawberry or do any of the things Robin Williams names.
There are a number of people building these machines who literally believe the machines will replace us and because they will be more powerful than us so nothing meaningful will be lost.
They need to watch this clip.
Even though they probably still won’t understand it.
ChatGPT has taken to saying things like “What I would do now is…” or “if I were you I’d…”.
I know these are figures of speech, but it reminds me that this thing doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t learn anything, it can’t try anything and find out. And yet it uses speech patterns drawn from real humans who can and do all those things.
1. It's not from "Robin Williams", it's a part of a movie where Williams is playing a character. If actors actually were responsible for their actions and everything was real, I wonder how Christopher Waltz was living in US during the slave trade AND was a german nazi officer also? What a man he must be!
2. The whole movie is basically opposite Office Space. A white man finds a lot of opportunities because he is a genius and everyone bends over backwards for them. Matt Damon wrote his chatacter as a power fantasy "oh you know hes like a normal everyday guy but hes also extremely smart and MIT and NSA will do anything to hire this person just because!"
3. Will Hunting's main problem was being afraid of failure once he actually has to use his knowlege on practical things. He was afraid academic people will think of him as a fool so he puts up the bookish smart ego to prevent that hurt.
It literally does not apply to LLMs if you take even a minute to think about it apart from a surface meme level.
In movies r̶o̶b̶o̶t̶s̶ AIs have delivered speeches on the meaning of life too:
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
They literally say in the opening text crawl that replicants are genetically engineered from humans. A major theme through the movie is that they're like humans, are built to have the thoughts/emotions of humans (even if experienced in the context of implanted memories), but they can never really be humans because they're synthetic and engineered to have the traits they do and die an early death.
Robots and AI do not experience and interact with the world in a way that's comparable to humans. We don't yet have the epistemological framework to reckon with what it means to consciously experience reality in a non-biological entity, but we do know that it will be alien and unlike human cognition.
Replicants have the same biology and cognition as humans, so we can relate to them and them to us, which puts the scenario in a different context.
> This moment threatens to convince too many of us that our lived experiences do not matter.
Does anyone really take AI that seriously? I only hear that from reddit and blogs.
> I've heard it said that scientific discovery would happen regardless of who does it
In this regard, science isn't that different from art. You heard wrong. Scientific discovery is not as trivial as replication, proof, etc. Discovery is what art and science have in common. It's extremely difficult to find something new to explore and highly dependent on the scientist's experience and perspective.
But, quoting "We've reached a dangerous moment. This moment threatens to convince too many of us that our lived experiences do not matter."
I think that "moment" was long before AI LLMs came around. I can only speak from my lived experiences, and I would say the tech industry and capitalism already put a low, low value on "lived experiences". Take game development, it seems to me, that big game studios rely on "a new fresh crop of college grads" will appear every year. We can push them as hard as we can. Hopefully, they will quit, and we can hire another batch.
I see it too, with lower wage jobs. No point in trying to keep our burger flippers happy. They are going to quit. Might as well factor that into the equation and just make a system with a revolving work force. No commitment. No retirement plan.