LaMDA, Lemoine, and the Allures of Digital Re-enchantment

Corresponding to the price of authenticity, the tech-vex can also exact a price on human dignity. It begs the question, to what extent does machine-mediated living gratify, ennoble? Can it replace the sense of fulfilment that people feel when they attain a skill or achieve an insight? Can a work put together by artificial intelligence match the elo... See more

Such a thing is compelling not because it offers  answers  in the form of text, but because it makes it possible to play text—all the text, almost—like an instrument.

That outcome could be revelatory! But a huge obstacle stands in the way of achieving it: people, who don’t know what the hell to make of LLMs, ChatGPT, and all the other gene

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A subset of intense, Twitter-famous accelerationists really loves to play up the mystical unknowability of LLMs--the way we still can't quite reverse engineer how, e.g., GPT-4 arrives at its “answers.” You can see this as a kind of anti-modernist desire for re-enchantment, but it’s also a kind of capital-F Futurist Modernism--a total belief in powe... See more