@FCfromSSC comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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FCfromSSC Nuclear levels of sour 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

GPT is just text completion.

Back when I used to participate here actively, I ruminated a fair bit on why the Culture War Thread was so compelling to me. The urge to write, to argue, to contribute opinions, at full flow, was powerful to the point of absurdity, irrationality, compulsion. From an outside perspective, it made no sense. Everyone here is doubtless familiar with the "someone is wrong on the internet" meme, but why should it be so?

The best likeness I could come up with was bees building a hive. Pretty clearly, the bees have no conception of what they're doing or why, and yet they generate complex order. How? Instinct, clearly. They generate wax as part of their normal biological functions, and they put the wax where it should go. That this produces the hive that secures and sustains them is irrelevant to an individual drone; to the extent that they can be said to have "intentions", those intentions are simply to fullfil basic, granular biological imperatives.

It seemed to me that my own engagement with the Thread was analogous. When I read the thread, I was assessing my environment. If the environment seemed incorrect, if the wax was in the wrong place, I posted, moving the wax to the right place. Sometimes this process required deeper thought or analysis, and those moments were particularly interesting, but the majority of the time what I as engaged in was mainly memory and pattern-matching, call and response. @DaseindustriesLtd has mentioned a time or two how they find a new commenter, are impressed at first by their novel thinking, and then gradually come to see the repetitions and loops in their pattern of thought, till what seemed worth being excited about revealed itself as just another limited, too-human, simplistic pattern. I've definately had this experience with others. I've definately had it with myself.

All this to say, I think you should consider the degree to which "text completion" describes humans as well.

...Come to think of it, why do we do the Turing Test with a human and a computer? Why not have two computers talk to each other, while the human observes? What happens when one instance of ChatGPT talks to another?