[tony_cannistra]

TFA raises several points I hadn't heard before. Here's one.

The artifacts we produce define our culture. If we allow LLMs to produce our work, our culture represents that which they understand. But LLMs can't be trained on the entirety of the human experience. "How dare we abandon so many countless traditions and people and ideas and nuances, simply because they are under­represented in the training data?"

I just feel like that's not performative in the way you're insinuating. That feels like a take to me. Respectful engagement is what I expected here.

[Levitz]

But that's not anything new, and even in the same text you can see examples of that.

LLMs are a tool. The brush is a tool, the pencil is a tool. The way we write already is defined by tools. This very comment is remarkably defined by its medium, I can't control its font size! Or the font at all, for that matter, nor the color, hell I can't even control how and where this comment is read! This means I'm generally going to write it in English, a whole different language from my native one! How is that for "defining"???

None of this is new, it's all dictated by human experience in the very same way that the output of a LLM gets dictated by human experience. That's the way memes (as in, anthropology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme?) work.

LLMs don't understand, they just output based on some parameters. We've been here before.

[gumby]

The LLM is the next generation of 20th century culture. Until the early 20th century, all stories (from before homer to Shakespeare, through Dickens and so on), music etc we continual remix and interpretation. But as recording became possible and then film, cultural elements mixed with law adopted expensive production and started to become more locked down. Corporations (which are just machines themselves) made musical acts whose members were just actors playing a role (still happens today with K-pop being the most successful). Disney colonized the public domain and drowned out the origins, with their versions becoming canonical

But consumers were willing participants. Rather than make a costume of your favorite character people now preferentially seek out licensed versions of dolls, costumes, “official” soundtracks etc rather than treating it all as just more raw material for your own imagination.

I’m not saying there isn’t fanfic and remix culture as well but when was the last time you saw a kid with a home-made “character” T-shirt? They even buy sport jerseys with the ads included!

So the mechanical slop infiltrating culture is just the current apotheosis of this process atrophy of the imagination. Truly it is degenerative AI