All the hubub about ChatGPT made me think a lot about Trurl's poetry machine from The Cyberiad. Especially Nick Cave and others declaring it the death of creativity, compared to the protesting poets from the story.
> Trurl realized that a poet's mind is shaped by the civilization that produced him, and that civilization - by the one before it, and so on. So in order to create an artificial poet, he'd have to simulate the whole history of the Universe. Which he did, but then from the results chose only the important bits as inputs for the learning process, otherwise it would take too long...
https://lab.cccb.org/en/did-calvino-dream-of-literary-androi...
> Arguably the oldest known story of something approximating AI can be found in the eighth-century-bc Iliad, Homer’s epic poem of the Trojan War. In it, Hephaestus, disabled god of metalworking, creates golden handmaidens to help him in his forge: “In them is understanding in their hearts, and in them speech and strength, and they know cunning handiwork”.
> ..In her 2018 book Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, Adrienne Mayor describes how ancient cultures explored the idea of artificial life. Ancient Greeks were skilled in metalwork and mechanics and created a great deal of automata, including a puppet theatre that could perform an entire play.
The idea of a poetry-writing machine can also be traced back in history, hinted at in the Kabbalah, or machines of ancient China. (Source?) In the work of Leibniz, "On the Combinatorial Art" (1666), he explores:
> The main idea behind the text is that of an alphabet of human thought, which is attributed to Descartes. All concepts are nothing but combinations of a relatively small number of simple concepts, just as words are combinations of letters.
> All truths may be expressed as appropriate combinations of concepts, which can in turn be decomposed into simple ideas, rendering the analysis much easier. Therefore, this alphabet would provide a logic of invention..
(and i still don't understand how ChatGtp is able to respond to metaprompts like 'be brief', i mean if it is a model that is selecting the next most likely word, then it should not be able to control its own style of output.)
"Be brief" may just be associated with the speech patterns accociated with a shorter way to say stuff. So it's still the same autocomplete, just steered in another direction.
Now i am a bit sceptical of this whole prompting business, still some of it is doing something (otherwise people would not put their work into it)
Also not clear to me how this steering of the automcpleter in another direction is working.