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> Any app that ever claimed to tell you what "Hemingway would say about this blog post" would evidently be lying — it'd be giving you what that specific AI model generates in response to such a prompt.

First, 100% agreed.

That said, I found myself pondering Star Trek: TNG episodes with the holodeck, and recreations of individuals (e.g. Einstein, Freud). In those episodes - as a viewer - it really never occurred to me (at 15 years old) that this was just a computer's random guess as to how those personages from history would act and what they would say.

But then there was the episode where Geordi had to the computer recreate someone real from their personal logs to help solve a problem (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708682/). In a later episode you find out just how very wrong the computer/AI's representation of that person really was, because it was playing off Geordi, just like an LLM's "you're absolutely right!" etc. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708720/).

This is a long-winded way of saying...

1. It's crazy to me how prescient those episodes were.

2. At the same time, the representation of the historical figures never bothered me in those contexts. And I wonder if it should bother me in this (LLM) context either? Maybe it's because I knew - and I believed the characters knew - it was 100% fake? Maybe some other reason?

Anyway, your comment made me think of this. ;-)

In that context, the computer was solving for a faithful representation. In our case, the computer is solving for most likely sequence of words to appear in conversations with a similar context - which not remotely the same thing.

> In that context, the computer was solving for a faithful representation.

Was it, though?

They had Newton (died 1727) playing playing poker (invented at some point during the early 19th century), repeating the myth that the apple fell on his head and then reacting insulted when Data says "that story is generally considered to be apocryphal".

More generally:

In TNG, Holo-Moriarty claimed to be sentient and to have experienced time while switched off despite Barclay saying that wasn't possible, much like LLMs sometimes write of experiencing being bored and lonely between chat sessions despite that not being possible given how they work.

In DS9, there was a holo-village made out of grief, and when it got switched off to reveal the one real person who had made it, while the main cast treated all the holograms as people, that creator himself didn't. Vic Fontaine was ambiguous, being a hologram who knew he was a hologram but still preferring to keep his (fake) world to its own rules and eventually kicking Nog out of the fake world when it was becoming clear Nog was getting too swept up in the fantasy.

In Voyager, the Doctor was again ambiguously person and/or program, both fighting for his moral rights as an author in a lower-stakes echo of TNG's Measure of a Man, and also Janeway being unsure if he was stuck in a loop or making progress with grief about the death of Ensign Never-Before-Mentioned-In-This-Show.

I wonder if there's a difference between "asking for critique" and "acting the part". I generally have no problem and or get fooled, watching a movie about a famous person, even though it's not actually that person. Rami Malek is not Freddie Mercury, Timothée Chalamet is not Bob Dylan. But we (or at least I) watch them and am to some degree, fooled / by into their depiction that I'm actually seeing the real person. I have to remind myself the actor's version is not the actual person.

It feels easier to portray famous characters how we'd think they'd act but seems harder how we'd expect them to critique something. I don't know of those are just points on a spectrum from easy to hard, or if one requires a level deeper than the other.

I think the core difference there is that the holodeck character feels like a character that is playing a person (because it is of course) whereas the LLM feels more like someone lying to you about who they are.

When watching a play the actor pretends to be a specific character, and crucially the audience pretends to believe them. If a LLM plays a character it's very tempting for the audience to actually believe them. That turns it from a play into a lie.

I have a more straightforward rebuttal of the need for an AI Hemingway. Someone already implemented a decent interactive guide to writing like Hemingway at least a decade ago, before all this LLM stuff: https://hemingwayapp.com/

It uses some simple heuristics to identify grammar that could be simpler and prompts you to do better. It might actually be better than an LLM specifically because it isn't able to do the rewriting for you. Maybe that might help a user learn.

> A nano banana photo-editing app where I don’t have to write a prompt. Just give me hundreds of templates from trying out different haircuts to seeing what you and your partner’s kid would look like to making me look like The Rock. A photo editing super-app.

Quite a few of these "ideas" make me think that the human behind it wants to maximize laziness. Glazing over what Hemingway kinda sorta would have thought about something fits into this pretty well.

> the human behind it wants to maximize laziness

A good tool should do reduce the amount of work we have do manually. That's all this is.

> So in effect it becomes an exercise of "can you fool the human into thinking this is a plausible thing Hemingway would've said".

That's useful in itself, though. Assume the human knows they're "being fooled", we call this make-believe, or suspending disbelief. It's a tool we use each time we act something out, pretend to be someone else, try to put ourselves in their position; we do that when we try to learn from recorded experience of other people, real or fictional.

> The reason why you would care to hear Hemingway's thought on your writing, or Steve Jobs' thoughts on your UI design, is precisely because they are the flesh-and-bone, embodied versions of themselves. Anything else is like trying to eat a picture of a sandwich to satisfy your hunger.

Not at all! It's exactly the other way around.

No one wants to talk to the actual human. We're not discussing creepy dating apps here. The reason you'd care for a virtual Hemingway or Jobs is because you want to access specific, opinionated expertise, wrapped in fitting and expected personality, to engage fully with the process, to learn tacitly and not just through instructions.

The Hemingway and Shakespeare and Jobs people want are not real anyway. Who knows how much of "Hemingway" is actually Hemingway, and how much it was written or edited by his wife, butler, or some publisher? How much real Jobs actually is in the stories, how much were they cleaned or edited to reinforce the myth? It doesn't matter, because no one cares about the real person, they care about the celebrity that's in public consciousness. The fake person is more useful and interesting anyway.

Like 'massing, I agree TNG was prescient about it. But I actually see the examples working as intended. Einstein, Hawking, Freud were all useful simulations. Ironically, it's Barclay who actually related to them in reasonable fashion, and it's Geordie who got confused about reality.

Very interesting rebuttal. I must say I was almost as convinced by the original post! This just made me think: if we can’t agree even on relatively simple topics like this, what hope is there that we will ever agree on most important issues. Disagreement should be an expected constant in all aspects of life, not an undesirable outcome. Even with disagreement, I believe it’s possible to find common ground and do what needs to be done (now I am really far into my tangential point!)

Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool" when talking about science, but it also applies to the properties of LLM output.

I think you're correct but your bar is too high, I think this app would be useful even if it was a lossy approximation Hemingway from his writings. As a thought experiment - I would value what a PhD who dedicated her career to studying one author and their works to tell me what she thinks about a piece of writing from that author's lens. (It's not too far from it)

> Anything else is like trying to eat a picture of a sandwich to satisfy your hunger.

I think it's more akin to you trying to recreate a different sandwich after reading a couple of their cook-books.

I'm not disagreeing with your broader point but:

So in effect it becomes an exercise of "can you fool the human into thinking this is a plausible thing Hemingway would've said". ... There's something unsettling that so many people cannot seem to cut clearly through this illusion.

Modern culture, at all scales, is largely based upon such exercises. We rarely know exactly what something (whether a person, organization or entity) truly stands for, with messages often boiled down, contextualized, or re-interpreted through others or through simulations.

People go to theme parks and enjoy rides simulating the wild west and meet characters who resemble, but aren't, their favorite characters from TV (which themselves are a fabrication based upon other, real things). Many cultural (heck, also religious) experiences are an exercise in humans entering into a suspension of disbelief and thinking something is plausible when it has little relation to the original thing it symbolizes. Indeed, the comforting thing about AI may be that at least we can see that process taking place more clearly with it.

Hemingway was just an example imho. But yes, LLM is just a very clever text composer that tries to understand our inputs and statistically is right in some per cent of answers. And it is clever enough to fool people to think that they communicate with intelligence.

I agree but for they example you picked, I imagined he was referring to their style of writing.

But if he meant literally then then yea.. that's delusional

I think even that still misses that it can only offer a pastiche.

As an example, I put the first paragraph of Hemingway's "A clean, Well Lightened Place" into Le Chat and asked it for notes to make it sound like Hemingway. It gave me plenty!

For example:

Tweak: The second sentence is a bit long. Consider breaking it up for more impact:

“In the day the street was dusty. At night, the dew settled the dust.” -> “The old man liked to sit late. He was deaf, and at night it was quiet. He felt the difference.”