I wonder if this could one day be how we settle disagreements with no solid answer, like was William Shakespeare really the author of all those plays.
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
“Anything that would be regarded as true by a language model trained on the Common Crawl dataset”.
Be an interesting philosophical position to test out in, say, a judicial setting. We could replace the legal concept of a ‘reasonable person’ with ‘a language model with its temperature set to a reasonable level’.
And perhaps instead of a jury of your peers, the fairest way to reach a verdict would be to present the facts of a case to a large language model, and ask it ’guilty or not guilty?’ twelve times..
The renaissance and enlightenment happened because we stopped doing this. The church was that era’s big model, and doctrine was similarly impenetrably complex and indecipherable. You’d just take the church’s word for something.
We’re going backwards.
> We’re going backwards.
...it was an off the cuff hypothetical.
And I realize what I was replying to was a hypothetical/not a serious proposition right now, but people seem very eager to push towards a future in which we defer to more advanced versions of these things without much additional thought. I think that’d be a major mistake.
Language models might indeed help us find potential sources of validation for various hypotheses, but deciding whether a hypothesis is true is another matter entirely.
These are very large, very complex fuzzy language maps, and are best used like a crystal ball for autocompletion suggestions, not definitive answers.
I’m unsurprised but also very disappointed by people’s desire to give these fuzzy answers final word. The desire to cede final authority on truth to these machines just because they’re giant and impressive is incredibly misguided and a major step backwards.
These machines are literal embodiments of group think.
They can only add value if people understand their limitations. If people get carried away with them and start assuming they’re authoritative we’re in for serious trouble.
There are legitimate discussions about some of the plays which were likely collaborations between multiple authors (e.g. Edward III, Henry IV 1), and machine learning has been used to try identify the different authors and authorship of different passages. This is an area of open research.
[0] You sound confident about the consensus. Can you share the material that led you to that? I'm currently under the impression they were all written by multiple authors. HOWEVER, I recognize I'm very low-info on this (or low-quality info at least) and my belief would be easily changed by something reputable and/or with good methodology.
It says the majority of the plays are likely written by the same person, since Shakespeare have a distinct "voice" which is clearly different form other contemporary playwrights. But there is a number of pitfalls in the statistical approach because an author might try to mimic the writing style of another author, especially since these collaborations was somewhat like master-apprentice relationships. The Oxford Complete Shakespeare credits Marlowe as co-author of Henry VI part 1, but this is highly controversial since some believe Shakespeare was just strongly inspired by Marlowe in his early plays.
Here is a podcast with a bit a bout the controversy: https://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/christopher-mar...
As for the general authorship question, you can just read anything which isn't written by a crackpot. But Oxford has "William Shakespeare - A Very Short Introduction" which is a pocket-size introduction and biography. If you want something meatier, Marjorie Garbers "Shakespeare After All" is a great book.