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Why Is There an AI Hype? | The Luddite (theluddite.org)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Companies are training LLMs on all the data that they can find, but this data is not the world, but discourse about the world. The rank-and-file developers at these companies, in their naivete, do not see that distinction....So, as these LLMs become increasingly but asymptotically fluent, tantalizingly close to accuracy but ultimately incomplete, developers complain that they are short on data. They have their general purpose computer program, and if they only had the entire world in data form to shove into it, then it would be complete.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (10 children)

Given the piece's roping in Simulators and Simulacra I highly recommend this piece looking at the same topic through the same lens but in the other direction to balance it out:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Errrrm... No. Don't get your philosophy from LessWrong.

Here's the part of the LessWrong page that cites Simulacra and Simulation:

Like “agent”, “simulation” is a generic term referring to a deep and inevitable idea: that what we think of as the real can be run virtually on machines, “produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times.”

This last quote does indeed come from Simulacra (you can find it in the third paragraph here), but it appears to have been quoted solely because when paired with the definition of simulation put forward by the article:

A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.

it appears that Baudrillard supports the idea that a computer can just simulate any goddamn thing we want it to.

If you are familiar with the actual arguments Baudrillard makes, or simply read the context around that quote, it is obvious that this is misappropriating the text.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I'm guessing you didn't read the rest of the piece and were just looking for the first thing to try and invalidate further reading?

If you read the whole thing, it's pretty clear the author is not saying that the recreation is a perfect copy of the original.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Baudrillard is always a joy to read.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Glad someone enjoyed him. My overall impression was some random guy getting high on a bus that was driving around the Midwest/Southwest US and he was copying stuff in a journal. With emphasis on the getting high part.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Over the last fifteen years of having read him, I find myself coming back to him to gain clarity of our current situation. At first, I couldn't tell if he was a genius or mad man. I tilt towards genius now.

Edit ... Isn't that Hunter S. Thompson?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

In my head canon they are now together. Trying to find the American Dream and the Hyperreal

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