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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32545 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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Just commoditizing mediocre, platitudinal, «it's something at least» conversation – as well as stylistic flourish, as well as all things shallow and trite – is a valid contribution of pretrained language models to the enterprise of humanity. For millenia we've been treading water, accumulating the same redundant wisdom over and over, and losing it every time. Now, we have common sense too cheap to meter – and to the extent that it ever was useful, this is a great boon. Like discovering you have 50 nagging aunts. Or therapists.

And on the other hand, this brings to the fore those things LLMs are not great at: incorporating recent salient context, having relevant personal experience that cannot be googled, actually reasoning with rigor and interest in seeing things through. It points to what we as humans should prize in ourselves.

For now, at least.

Too cheap to meter...

gpt-3.5 costs, what, $0.002/1K tokens on the api?

These words you are reading are not some great rigorously intellectual post. I totally agree with you.

Rather it just occurred to me that the saying "My two cents"

seems very fitting here.

[exit stage left]

Btw, was it you that I got the link to a Russian sci-fi novel about chatbot AIs powered by discount Lithuanian MBTI used as best friends, therapists and lovers by the whole population from? I thought the idea was ridiculous, but turns out you don't even need to tinker with sociotype theory to get people to form a relationship with a bit.

Thought for a moment you just mean Replika. No, no idea what that is, though i sometimes forget things. If you find it let me know.

http://samlib.ru/m/marxjashin_s_n/roboty_bozhy.shtml

Now I want to find out where I got it from.

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