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Comment by wzdd | Hacker News Reader

Quite an astonishing amount of quotes -- I counted Heidegger, Nietzsche, Murdoch, the Bible, and Plato as key players -- to contribute very little of substance. It feels like the same kind of hand-wringing that you might have read about the invention of the typewriter, the telegraph, or recorded music. Humans are complex creatures! We can be "in the process of becoming" about a great many things along a great many axes. Using ChatGPT to draft a letter of complaint to your local government isn't going to change that.

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The basilisk consumes the minds of those who worship it.

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

other comments mention things like the "geat filter" and how (further) abandonment of the written word could become a class definition, these are not trivial speculations......many of us here will have experienced predjudice and bullying for bieng "overly" literate in school so the notion of literacy becoming a liability is reasonable, especialyconsidering that the president just finnished his first book, and it didn't go so well, so he might just save everyone from having to suffer as he has, and ban crayons.

Invoking the cliched comparison of AI to past inventions in a discussion about parroting is brilliant satire.

While I agree, making the assumption that our GP was not indeed using an LLM, that has a lot to say about the essence of the article’s argument. We were maybe already stochastic parrots and are just building tools to be more efficient at it.

> We were maybe already stochastic parrots and are just building tools to be more efficient at it.

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

Not sure about that, we are happy to assume that a stochastic process such as evolution culminated in advanced life forms but reluctant to admit that our own creations could be the outcome of a stochastic process on communication patterns.

So is writing an ultimately empty essay mostly composed of other people's quotes, thoughts, and concerns

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