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Comment by bugfix-66 | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for saying it.

We're surrounded by people who don't understand what's happening. They seem to think some kind of art intelligence has been invented.

No, it's the aggregation and interpolation of vast amounts of existing art.

The same thing is happening with software, through Microsoft's Copilot:

https://bugfix-66.com/7a82559a13b39c7fa404320c14f47ce0c304fa...

I think people just don't understand what they're seeing. They have no idea what it is.

They think it's really "intelligence", dreaming and imagining and simulating and feeling and experimenting and...

It's none of these things. It's a sophisticated interpolation, not so different from linear interpolation:

  a*x + (1-a)*y

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Memes (in the sense Dawkins used) have found easier replication into this new medium. Rather than jumping from brain to brain, with the intermediate step of writing, our old memes now replicate by language model. They do meaningful work when deployed without a human in the loop.

I think both humans and AI without training are stupid. Take a human alone, raised alone, without culture. He/she will be closer to animals than humans. It's the culture that is the locus of intelligence and we're borrowing intelligence from it just like the AIs.

Lovely perspective. Esp. the first point.

> It's a sophisticated interpolation, not so different from linear interpolation: a*x + (1-a)*y

These algorithms are specifically non-linear a far cry from ‘linear interpolation’ unless you want to water down the meaning of interpolation to be so generic it loses its meaning.

Having said all that - the sophistication of the algorithm is beyond the point here as long as what they are generating is substantially transformative (which >99% of the possible outputs are legally speaking).

> water down the meaning of interpolation to be so generic it loses its meaning.

"Interpolation" was always a very generic word.

If it is interpolation what kind of interpolation is it? Linear? Bilinear? Nearest Neighbor? Lanczos? No… because it isn’t and doesn’t resemble anything close to interpolation.

They even gave a linear equation in their example… again not even close. If we can call what these algorithms do interpolation - we can call what humans do interpolation too - it makes the word that meaningless

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