> There are two ways this could go. One is that we pretend the bot is a real thing, a real entity like a person, then in order to keep that fantasy going we’re careful to forget whatever source texts were used to have the bot function.
Finally someone who, at least nearly, gets it.
> The other way is you do keep track of where the sources came from. And in that case a very different world could unfold where if a bot relied on your reporting, you get payment for it, and there is a shared sense of responsibility and liability where everything works better. The term for that is data dignity.
Of course, that's an obvious step in the other direction: isn't the original point to breathe life into the data? If we have to track who originated what, that scaffolding is going to really get in the way.
Then again, this is a good moment to recognize the futility of text inference models (LLMs). If we can't understand what path goes from input to output, how useful can the thing be? If we can't choose the path, we can't choose the output. Who can choose: the thing itself? If the whole thing is a black box making its own choices, then how do we interact with it except to personify that black box? Remember, that was option 1.
The main reason anyone is excited about LLMs is that those models have been personified. That problem began the moment we started calling them AI.
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> We have to say consciousness is a real thing and there is a mystical interiority to people that’s different from other stuff because if we don’t say people are special, how can we make a society or make technologies that serve people?
Mystical.
It's an important observation. We really don't know how we think. And that is all the evidence we need: AI does not exist. There is no artificial person.
We are free to stop personifying technology. Doing so would make all of these conversations a lot less convoluted, and a lot more direct. We are wasting a lot of effort talking past the very understanding about these machines that is necessary to improve them. Instead we are trying to understand "AI personified" a fictional character that we have never met; and trying to improve it.
Finally someone who, at least nearly, gets it.
> The other way is you do keep track of where the sources came from. And in that case a very different world could unfold where if a bot relied on your reporting, you get payment for it, and there is a shared sense of responsibility and liability where everything works better. The term for that is data dignity.
Of course, that's an obvious step in the other direction: isn't the original point to breathe life into the data? If we have to track who originated what, that scaffolding is going to really get in the way.
Then again, this is a good moment to recognize the futility of text inference models (LLMs). If we can't understand what path goes from input to output, how useful can the thing be? If we can't choose the path, we can't choose the output. Who can choose: the thing itself? If the whole thing is a black box making its own choices, then how do we interact with it except to personify that black box? Remember, that was option 1.
The main reason anyone is excited about LLMs is that those models have been personified. That problem began the moment we started calling them AI.
---
> We have to say consciousness is a real thing and there is a mystical interiority to people that’s different from other stuff because if we don’t say people are special, how can we make a society or make technologies that serve people?
Mystical.
It's an important observation. We really don't know how we think. And that is all the evidence we need: AI does not exist. There is no artificial person.
We are free to stop personifying technology. Doing so would make all of these conversations a lot less convoluted, and a lot more direct. We are wasting a lot of effort talking past the very understanding about these machines that is necessary to improve them. Instead we are trying to understand "AI personified" a fictional character that we have never met; and trying to improve it.