Frank PasqualeDec 10, 2022
“AI models presume that thought is entirely a matter of pattern recognition, and these patterns, already inscribed in the corpus of the internet, can be mapped once and for all, with human ‘thinkers’ always already trapped within them. The possibility that thought could consist of pattern breaking is eliminated.”
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/what-of-the-national-throat
What of the national throat?

I’ve been reading articles about ChatGPT all week, ordering them in my mind to make the discourse about it into a kind of coherent narrative that has ebbed and flowed from excitement to panic to backlash to counter-backlash. It’s apparently never to late to say “it’s early days” with generative AI, or to rehash concerns that have been aired with each new development in the means of mechanical reproduction.

Internal exile
Show threadDavid Ribes

@FrankPasquale

Nah. That's like saying the printing press reduced all words to the individual symbols of movable type. And that thereafter there could be no new symbols, no new letters.

But #actually, that's when a @great explosion! of (symbols) $began$ 🎉

Dec 10, 2022 at 9:09amWeb
Show threadRob LucasDec 10, 2022
@davidribes it's hard to follow your analogy. Could you unpack it a bit?
Show threadDavid RibesDec 10, 2022

@roblucas Ha. Lemme try.

In the first, AI reduces thought to patterns, patterns which are already out there for AI to capture. Concluding with 'having captured all patterns, means there are no new thoughts to be had.'

In printing press, words reduced to their constituent parts, letters, and thus all possible words. But actually, new symbols still allowed for new words; instead, the printing press had to adapt to those new symbols rather than 'containing them all already'.

Sometin' like 'dat