I, Language Robot | Hacker News Reader

I, Language Robot

lareviewofbooks.org

27 pointsprostoalex9 comments

For a long time I have been bothered that some intellectuals get so much respect for stringing together eloquent baloney that sounds very smart but doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. The trick works because close scrutiny is an extremely rare thing. I hope that these computer programs will put the human art of baloney stringing out of business.

More likely the computer programs will do their own baloney stringing which will then be marketed as objective (our proprietary algorithm is 110% objective) to the masses.

"The greatest potential loss in our relations to machines is not runaway GDP or disinformation, but rather the existential right to enjoy the surprise and uniqueness of human effort." This is similar to the "Artist's Lament" described eloquently by Feynman (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/184384-i-have-a-friend-who-...).

Actually, it would be very interesting to read fiction created by an AI that illustrates what it means to be a machine, similar to how we are recommended to read works written by people from other cultures. Note that the AI does not do this: as the article states it's trained on "more than 40 gigabytes of online writing", so it's just holding a mirror to what humans have written with no insight into "machine-ness". This is is like picking up a Chinese writer and finding out that it's a story about the Midwest, written in the style of American storytellers. It may be even called cultural appropriation (see different writer's viewpoints on cultural appropriation: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/01/novelists-cult... and Zadie Smith's eloquent push bak against it: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/10/24/zadie-smith-in-d...). OTOH, if the AI's fiction is truly authentic we may not be able to understand it a la Wittgenstein's lion (https://wittgensteinforum.wordpress.com/2007/06/13/wittgenst...) because it will be far removed from human experience.

Why do we read fiction, though? If the answer is for it to be "an axe for the frozen sea within us" (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/237620-i-think-we-ought-to-...) then we don't care who generates it: if an AI has created a story that moves you, so be it.

Lem's Solaris is (among other things) a literary take on Wittgenstein's lion, might be an easier and more fun read. (I hear the George Clooney vehicle movie is actually good too, but different from the book.)

Regarding your Chinese Midwesterner lit, we do have the huge genre of Serge Leone and the Italian "spaghetti westerns" (and spaghetti was invented in China!)

Anyway, I don't want an AI remixing literary to make derivative literature. I want AI remixing news and culture to find subtle patterns and generating literature about that, which is what many great human writers too.

Excellent example, thanks. I read somewhere that Lem was unhappy with both (by Tarkovsky and Soderbergh) adaptations because they didn't put the if we encounter aliens they will be too alien to communicate idea front and center like he did.

I agree with your last point, that would well-suited to criticism, too, maybe even better.

Talented authors have less to fear from AI than talented programmers have to fear from coding boot camps that churn out thousands of entry level devs. It sounds like the AI might be good at taking some random bits of data and presenting it in prose which could threaten the careers of a lot of journalists. But anywhere that abstract thought, analogy, simile, and syllogism would be required to express concepts and ideas will remain the domain of human authors -- forever. Machines can automate and compose passable works based on programmed rules, but they will never be able to improvise, crack jokes, or move the soul.

Dont have to worry about AI approaches used by Google in their products. Their so-called AI has zero understanding and zero creativity.

I always thought that until I played with the transformer models recently. They are becoming truely creative.

Well, as we all know, AI will kill us all - and before that it will take our jobs. Now true for copywriters and journalists as well ;)

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