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Comment by ___rubidium___ | Hacker News Reader

I think you're right, but I would qualify that the AI is bullshitting in the same way that a child's drawing of a stick figure, house, and smiling sun is bullshit designed to get approval. The AI is giving symbols--very visually stunning ones, to be sure, but symbols nonetheless--of what it is prompted to create, just like a child learns that "circle with lines coming out of it" is a symbol that can be read as "sun" and praised by adults.

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I don't think the child's drawing of a stick figure, house and smiling sun is just "bullshit designed to get approval" though. I think they care deeply about the concept of mummy, and how mummy relates to various things especially them and have strong emotional impulses towards mummy. Learning that a stick figure is an symbolic representation of mummy that might meet with approval is a trivially small part of that intrinsic interest in mummy, not the extent of their engagement with the concept of mummy. And if you tell them you don't approve of their drawing, they'll burst into tears and possibly have a completely different attitude towards drawing and/or you, not just iterate on the bullshit. Similarly, the kid's concept of mummy being happy or sad is a bit more nuanced than which way up the crescent under the two dots should be....

The reason for my final question at the end is this: can AI emerge out of AB? The child eventually grows up and (hopefully) stops bullshitting everything. But, do they actually stop bullshitting, or is the human ability to reason itself somehow built out of bullshit?

That's a very good question. The child eventually learns to stop using symbols and instead begins to copy the shapes, negative spaces, curves, etc. in front of them and makes an assemblage of otherwise-meaningless shapes, lines, curves which is interpreted by viewers as a representation of the real thing. Does AI have the potential to do that? I don't know.

Nobody grows out of your definition of bullshit - doing things that they think others want to see.

But that definition is ... well bullshit. Bullshitting is a deliberate deceptive act. Children aren't being deliberately deceptive when they come up with nonsense answers to questions they don't understand.

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