> "We are honoring the cellulose and lignin of the trees by rearticulating them into assets for present and future generations. By allowing millions of trees to remain in place in their forests, Forust is launching a highly evolved technology for the circular technosphere.”
hmmkay hmmkay, so you're making money off wood waste, that's cool...
Anyway, just a random anecdote that that kind of language long predated GPT-3. It learned from somewhere :).
I gotta say, I find it rude. It's one short step away from calling someone a name, eh? "You sound like a inanimate algorithm imitating a human." Mean.
Consider that the unpredictability of a message is a measure of it's information content, eh?
In this case, sure, the language is flowery, but the underlying meaning is clear, and the subject is, arguably, important. (So, not to put too fine a point on it, in this case, saying it sounds like GPT-3 kinda makes you sound, um, less sophisticated than you might be going for?)
Yes, in the "information as irreducible data" sense. No in the "information as non-obvious truths about the world" sense. A message's unpredictability seems independent, or possibly anti-correlated with its truthiness (as the recipient may already have the true information, or be able to predict it from other knowledge).
The rudeness is an interesting point. It is rude, or would be a at a party. At the same time, if the goal of internet forums is to exchange information (as in truths), honest efforts to distill information from noise could be accepted as good faith effort at public service in the way that identifying shill reviews is. It will be interesting to see how internet culture evolves as the ubiquity and awareness of widespread GPT-3 noise grow (or if forums are just doomed).
In any event, the point about the unpredictability of a message comes from Shannon's Information Theory.
Although, see also Robert Anton Wilson's writing about W. Burroughs' "cut ups". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique
At least, that’s how I interpret it. I don’t think at all it has anything to do with being stupid. On the contrary, it’s usually the smarter people that can see through the smoke screen and realize “oh he’s just talking about 3D printed wood”.
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To me "just" in that sentence would be (IMO) a signal that the speaker hadn't thought things through deeply enough. The jargon word "circular" is the clue. It's not just about the 3D printing of wood, or biodegradable glue, it's about a sea change in our economy and technology to be in harmony with (for lack of a better word) Nature (and therefore durable on large (10K to 1M years) timescales.)
The "technosphere" is the thing with the lights that you see from orbit when the Sun is on the other side of the Earth.
I see way too many simple but cool concepts bogged down by an epic written collectively by the marketing dept. muddying the true concept of things.
We re-use wood-waste to 3D print objects.
What does it accomplish? "It allows millions of trees to remain in place in their forests".
How does it do that? "By rearticulating cellulose and lignin into assets for present and future generations."
It's a pretty coherent description of the technology, aimed at people who only care about the impact instead of the technology itself
But part of that is because they get told it works and/or experience themselves that trying to explain the actual technology is an exercise in pulling teeth in many cases.
I had a phone conversation with one pair of founders about a company that we actually ended up investing in where it took 3-4 tries before I got them to give me a meaningful answer because they didn't realise I actually understood the subject and wanted to understand if they did because of the amount of buzzwords in their pitch deck.
Sometimes in conversations like that you can hear the relief when they realise they can actually speak normally. In the case I mentioned the founders went from tensely trying to figure out what I actually wanted to know to excited about being able to expand on details instantly.
Other times you can sense the panic as someone realises the bullshit isn't working.