We’ve learned to make “machines that can mindlessly generate text. But we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.”
I think comparing LLM’s to bullshitters–that is, focused on the rhetoric, not the substance–is apt and insightful.
Perhaps the best way to put into words a feeling about LLM I have been coming to understand.
To be fair I feel like a lot of debates online are trapped in rhetoric. I also feel like call centers and support lines (the crap onrles anyway) are too.
Maybe the real question we need to be asking is: how do we incentivise listening, instead of parroting rhetoric?
I’m still sad we went with bullshitter instead of the much more cultured sounding to me sophist. And, you know, having existed for thousands of years. But I’m strange.
I think from what I’ve managed to read of the article (it’s kind of long) - I agree we need to be careful anthropomorphizing things. However, there also seems to be quite a lot of confidence that we really understand what our brains are doing. I do not have that confidence, so I also do not have the confidence to say it’s going to be obvious for the mid-long term (50-100 years) that we know if a AI is a person or not.
That said, I also intuitively disagree with the other person in that article who claims that language meaning can be deduced or worse just is a matter of relative positions to context. This seems very circular to me. I think we can certainly reference language to itself, and literally “play language games”, but important levels of meaning have to “break out” and apply to external reality. Otherwise I strongly question the utility of language, and it’s prima facie useful. And we all spend a lot of time talking about physical reality…
However - I also question the idea that we can’t intelligibly talk about something we don’t have personal referents for. This also seems obviously false - from writing convincing period fiction to quantum mechanics equations - at least some of us can opine and figure useful things out about levels of reality we have no personal interaction with. I don’t see why we should assume an octopus / AI couldn’t potentially do the same.
I’d bet you it’s only a small portion of English speakers who know what the word sophist means. It’s old fashioned, the sort of word that only crops up in old books and in philosophy discussions. That age and inaccessibility is probably why it sounds much more erudite than bullshitter, or other ways of saying the same thing.
I’m of the opinion that when it comes to matters that are immediately relavent to most, if not all, people, and when we’re talking about ideas that are relevant to current political decisions, it’s important that the idea be presented in a way most people can understand.
Dressing it in fancy lingo would make us all feel smarter, maybe, but the idea would just die with us and not go anywhere else. Unless someone else picked it up and re-phrased it, at which point you’d have reached the same end anyway.
Edit: I would have had to think about it to pull a definition of sophist out of its dusty spot in my memory, if you hadn’t defined it.
Edit 2: also, that type of language itself invites bullshitery, of the “I sound smart but say nothing” type. Like you might find among a crowd at a ritzy art gallery.
I suppose once we’re defining terms, like everyone had to do with “bullshitter” in this case, we could as well define existing terms rather than reinvent the wheel. I think people like bullshitter not because it is intuitive what it means (note how every place that uses it also rushes to say it’s not synonymous with liar - which is what I thought it meant pre this recent book) but because it sounds “edgy” with the “bad word” and precisely like all slang is novel. It’s the reinventing that makes it cool.
Of course you can get real depressed about how little of this is actually new if you investigate the ancient sophists and what the platonic dialogs and others thought.
