Constructing the Other Half of the Policeman's Beard (2021)

> it is not the writer who ultimately determines meaning: it is the reader.

This fact is almost never raised in discussions of AI and LLMs but is actually the reason so many people are tricked into believing there is conscious intelligence behind them. Words are are symbolic abstractions that are pre-invested with meaning and don’t require an intelligence to communicate that meaning.

What are the hermeneutics of LLM-generated content?

https://archive.org/details/policemansbeardi0000unse

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This is one of those weird books, like the "Codex Seraphinianus" that you read about as a kid in some magazine back in the 1980s, then when the internet (or WWW, really) finally came around, and you remember and search for them, and then you find out that they're some absurd price. (Used paperback "The Policeman's beard is half-constructed" listed for $157 on Amazon now.)