You know what Generative AI is in terms of how it presents to you as software: clever chatbots that do or say things in response to what you say: your prompt. Some of those responses are useful, and they give you an impression of sophisticated comprehension. The models that generate text are fluent and often quite engaging.
This fluency is misleading. What Bender and Gebru meant when they coined the term stochastic parrot wasn’t to imply that these are, indeed, the new bird brains of Silicon Valley, but that they are unthinking text synthesis engines that just repeat phrases. They are the proverbial parrot who echoes without thinking, not the actual parrot who is capable of complex reasoning and problem-solving.
A zombie parrot, if you will, that screams for brains because it has none.
The fluency of the zombie parrot—the unerring confidence and a style of writing that some find endearing—creates a strong illusion of intelligence.
Every other time we read text, we are engaging with the product of another mind. We are so used to the idea of text as a representation of another person’s thoughts that we have come to mistake their writing for their thoughts. But they aren’t. Text and media are tools that authors and artists create to let people change their own state of mind—hopefully in specific ways to form the image or effect the author was after. […]
These language models are interactive but static snapshots of the probability distributions of a written language. […]
That’s what distinguishes biological minds from these algorithmic hindsight factories …
language
There are 2 posts tagged language (this is page 1 of 1).
democratic obligations
Two quotes against the reign of pragmatic politics.
I find that people are moved by good language. I think that one of the things that is an affliction, and has been increasingly an affliction, is that we condescend to one another. . . . When Abraham Lincoln, a virtually totally uneducated man, wanted to speak to people, he did it with a degree of refinement that is extraordinary by an standard, because he had that kind of respect for the kind of people he was speaking to. [People in politics today], I’m afraid, they speak in this kind of minimized language that you would use to sell a defective product. . . . To whom are we condescending? How have we allowed ourselves to have such negative assumptions about people in general. Democracy cannot survive if we continue to condescend at that level, where we don’t give good information, we don’t articulate things with the sensitivity that they require to be articulated if they are to be meaning at all. […]
[You cannot free and enlarge the people around you] if you have contempt for people in general, you have no articulated aspiration for their well-being, no great interest in protecting dignity that you really don’t assign them in the first place.
Now if something like this is true, then it matters to be able to say it. For then one has something to say, in all reason, to the people who invest their lives in these deviant forms [of individualism]. And this may make a difference to their lives. Some of these things may be heard. Articulacy here has a moral point, not just in correcting what may be wrong views but also in making the force of an ideal that people are already living by more palpable, more vivid for them; and by making it more vivid, empowering them to live up to it in a fuller and more integral fashion.