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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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This post explains the source of much of my skepticism of AI better than I could. But the idea of LLMs as ultimate postmodernists insofar as they are masters of language and nothing else is a key insight that I'm mad I didn't think of first.

Of course this is no accident since the very idea is just a sophisticated generalization of Markov chains which were famously great at generating pomospeak.

But it is getting to the level where it might have practical utility now.

Provided nobody finds an unfavorable equilibrium in the AI detector arms race, or at least none that also would allow human nonsense, this tool could be the final solution to the problem of credentialism.

Why indeed listen to the academic if you can replicate him with AI well enough that you could get his diploma without needing but to press a button? And then we can merrily go back to judging shamans through the only metric that matters ultimately: whether the hexes work or not.

...and that's a bingo. (Insert your preferred Christoph Waltz meme as you see fit.) ;-)