Hey! Just asking you because I’m not sure where else to direct this energy at the moment.

I spent a while trying to understand the argument this paper was making, and for the most part I think I’ve got it. But there’s a kind of obvious, knee-jerk rebuttal to throw at it, seen elsewhere under this post, even:

If producing an AGI is intractable, why does the human meat-brain exist?

Evolution “may be thought of” as a process that samples a distribution of situation-behaviors, though that distribution is entirely abstract. And the decision process for whether the “AI” it produces matches this distribution of successful behaviors is yada yada darwinism. The answer we care about, because this is the inspiration I imagine AI engineers took from evolution in the first place, is whether evolution can (not inevitably, just can) produce an AGI (us) in reasonable time (it did).

The question is, where does this line of thinking fail?

Going by the proof, it should either be:

• That evolution is an intractable method. 60 million years is a long time, but it still feels quite short for this answer.
• Something about it doesn’t fit within this computational paradigm. That is, I’m stretching the definition.
• The language “no better than chance” for option 2 is actually more significant than I’m thinking. Evolution is all chance. But is our existence really just extreme luck? I know that it is, but this answer is really unsatisfying.

I’m not sure how to formalize any of this, though.

The thought that we could “encode all of biological evolution into a program of at most size K” did made me laugh.

but there’s no reason to think we can’t achieve it

They provide a reason.

Just because you create a model and prove something in it, doesn’t mean it has any relationship to the real world.

What are we science deniers now?

Oh yeah, absolutely. The fact that we own nothing these days is crazy.

I’m sorry, did you not want to play Ocarina of Time in the year of our lord 2046?

I would if it had any lasting power. I mean, can’t they just push out another eula update 6 months from now when this change is no longer useful to them?

Fuck arbitration, of course, I’m just not expecting this to really mean anything.

People should be allowed to smoke and gamble, too.
I still don’t think it’s good that they do that, though.

One of the aims of Stop Killing Games, as far as I’m aware, is the preservation of history, which seems like a very odd thing to be indignant about.

This comment reminds me of when Bitcoin became the world’s dominant currency.

Do you mean the voice of Mario…?

I do not want an AI voice to puppet his corpse for the next 150 years.

I also noticed that they were talking about sending arguments to a custom function? That’s like a day-one lesson if you already program. But this was something they couldn’t find in regular search?

Maybe I misunderstood something.

All right, I guess I’m here to collect then. We doin’ paypal or what?

You didn’t answer the question.

If the DNC doesn’t listen anyway, why would a 3rd party vote “get attention from them”?

There is no other way to get the attention from the politicians.

And if those politicians are so keen on ignoring you, why would they listen to this? Oh, you voted for Cornel West because you’re “unsatisfied,” literally who cares? The status quo wins again, goodbye. Say hello to the camps.

I was equivocating singular words and entire sentences on purpose.

If you can recombine sentences in interesting ways, into paragraphs that are your own ideas, that isn’t plagiarism. Why would “people can’t construct unique sentences either” be a rebuttal if that’s not what plagiarsm is?

Instead it studies the prior work of humans, finds patterns and combines these in unique and novel ways.

You’re anthropomorphising.

LLMs are little clink-clink machines that produce the most typical output. That’s how they’re trained. Ten thousand inputs say this image is of a streetlight? That’s how it knows.

The fact an LLM knows what a Lord of Rings is at all means that Tolkien’s words, the images, the sounds, are all encoded in its weights somewhere. You can’t see them, it’s a black box, but they live there.

Could you say the same of the human brain? Sure. I know what a neuron is.

But, LLMs are not people.

All of that is besides the point, though. I was just floored by how cynical you could be about your own supposed craft.

A photograph of, say, a pretty flower is fantastic. As an enjoyer of art myself, I love it when people communicate things. People can share in the beauty that you saw. They can talk about it. Talk about how the colors and the framing make them feel. But if you’re view is that you’re not actually adding anything, you’re just doing more of what already exists, I really don’t know why you bother.

Nobody has seen every photo in the world.

Okay, assume someone has. Is your art meaningless, then? All of photography is just spectacle, and all the spectacles have been seen?

it doesn’t mean you can’t combine them in a unique ways

Okay, so you don’t believe new things can’t be unique. You just think that plagiarism is when one person uses the word ‘the’ and then a second person uses the word ‘the’.

Why do you find it such a depressing idea?

That art is dead? Through sheer saturation alone, no one has anything left to say? That watching the new Cinderella is line-by-line the same as watching the old Cinderella, and the money machine keeps this corpse moving along only because people are too stupid to realize they’re being sold books from a library? I really don’t know how you couldn’t.

This is like asking me why a polluted lake is sad.

the truth is a moving target somewhere in between.

Token guessing and… consciousness?

I’d argue it’s virtually impossible to write a sentence that has not been written before

I mean this sincerely: why bother getting excited about anything, then?

A new Marvel movie, a new game, a new book, a new song. If none of them are unique in any way, what is the point of it all? Why have generative AI go through this song and dance? Why have people do it? Why waste everyone’s time?

If the plagiarism engine is acceptable because it’s not possible to be unique anyway… I just, I don’t know how you go on living. It all sounds so unbelievably boring.

Your taxes pay for the library.

Arguing why it’s bad for society for machines to mechanise the production of works inspired by others is more to the point.

I agree, but the fact that shills for this technology are also wrong about it is at least interesting.

Rhetorically speaking, I don’t know if that’s useless.

I don’t care why they’re different, or that it technically did or didn’t violate the “free swim” policy,

I do like this point a lot.

If they can find a way to do and use the cool stuff without making things worse, they should focus on that.

I do miss when the likes of cleverbot was just a fun novelty on the Internet.

If I as a human want to learn a subject from a book, I buy it

xD
That’s good.

It’s not because what they’re against is the consolidation of power.

If the principle “information is free” can lead to systems where information is not free, then that’s not really desirable, is it.

If free information to inspire more creative works can lead to systems with less creative works, then that’s not really desirable, is it.