The Word Made Lifeless. Are we becoming stochastic parrots?
hedgehogreview.com
hedgehogreview.com
It was one of the most jarringly alien things I’ve ever heard, like being told that everyone has moved on from toilet paper to just using their hands, but I missed the memo.
AI is not a faithful representation of human intelligence—or the human essence at all, for that matter—and prolonged dependence on its technologies will subdue human expression and the means in which we come to know about ourselves and life around us.
He is exercising his point through his prose. A cursory glance at his Wikipedia bio and this passage gives insight into the objective of this article:
> As Socrates sees things, the proper use of logos is to work toward, and to be transformed by, an increasingly clear grasp of the good. He regards this as an erotic undertaking. The more clearly we see the good, the more we long to bring ourselves into closer proximity to it. And the most promising path to the apprehension and internalization of the good is prolonged union and thoughtful conversation with a worthy lover.
The problem is that he’s attempting to display the art of literary lovemaking in the age of hook-up culture.
Hint: It may serve this crop of readers to start immediately from the section titled “Another Creation Story”.
Aside: I’d like to see a study that scores contemporary literacy rates using articles from the Hedgehog Review instead of Jane Austen.
Think of all the things we consider fun or worthwhile that are purely unnecessary struggles. Ever play sports? Build a side project just for the fun of it? Video games? Music? Art?
But also the machine stops[1] and idiocracy both address this.
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/72890/pg72890-images.ht...
How do you imagine a robot solving those?
How does one create art without understanding struggle? How can someone find love without knowing how to keep it alive?
People need to make mistakes and then reflect deeply on them. We need to integrate our experiences with our beliefs and values in order to find meaningful expression.
I think the only exception to all of this might be abstract puzzles.
The same thing will happen to us that happens to surplus livestock
I think we can and should firmly reject this notion
If humans were mere stochastic parrots we would not have the ability to build the Internet we're talking on right now
It's mostly in the tech industry though that you find people who have such a tenuous grasp on the natural order that they honestly believe serving the basilisk is what's best
With more seriousness, I find people who drill deep into the bedrock of knowledge and expertise will find that tact and conviction in informed opinion is a healthy counterweight to this possible habit.
Although from a chemical perspective and learning perspective humans may seem like stochastic machines, I think that the capability for inner thought and emotion does differentiate us from genAI. After all, we would not ascribe sentience to such a "stochastic parrot", but in a similar way we see the text output that AI generates and wrongly assume (in a previously reasonable assumption) that there must have been "thoughts" behind said text.
It's a functional subunit of the brain responsible for language interpretation and production.
It would be so sad to disappoint
It seems trivially obvious to me that you cannot stochastic parrot yourself from apes with sticks and rocks to space flight and internet
Why do hard thing when everyone says hard thing is too hard. What if there was no everyone? Is thing that hard?
I dont think original thinking is going to go away but i do think it will be owned by those who control the all thing which absorbs it from the mass of information.
You are a chemical soup. Your body is a closed system of proteins and amino acids reacting with each other, driving behavior in order to sustain the reactions.
You are an electric grid. A system of interconnected wires where electric impulses respond to one another in a synchronized manner, from which your life force is derived.
As Terry Pratchett might have said - what about quantum?
Humans are analog, state machines are not. And the analogue I will use here is that a model of anything is not the thing itself by definition.
> We are perhaps different stochastic parrots than the models we create, but likely stochastic parrots none the less.
To parrot is to "to repeat by rote"[0]. Algorithms, such as LLM's, do so as that is all they can do.
I choose to not limit myself to being a parrot. Which is why I am not one.
As Descartes proffers:
The only thing we have power over in the universe is our
own thoughts.[1]
You’re not a state machine. A state machine does one serial task, which is why the input+state can create a consistent and deterministic output+state. There are no secondary input streams or exogenous factors to consider for calculating a state machine transition.
Humans create output from many streams of input, arriving at across many different time horizons. Because of this, you cannot create a deterministic model of a human’s state transition for a given input - a requirement of state machines.
This isn’t philosophical or semantics. Mathematically, you’re not a state machine.