But LLM training? I don’t feel the same sense of creative commonality. Although I tend to see scientific and technological work as creative as much as rational, I don’t think ChatGPT is itself an artwork. I think it’s a technology which wears a simulation of creativity, and how that simulation is achieved governs its meaning. In this case, that seems to be via a straightforward systematic appropriation; yet another instance of a big tech outfit saying that the legislative environment (that is, the world everyone else inhabits and makes a living in) doesn’t suit them and restricts their power to make money and do good by… doing what, exactly? Generating a machine that can create horrible internet content and break search for all of us? Causing a strike in Hollywood? We’re all past the point where you can wave a wand and say “we created this amazing digital thing and it’s going to make everyone’s lives SO much better, so you have to let us burn the newspaper industry to the ground.” It ain’t that simple, tech bro. And if OpenAI and the rest really believed in the accessibility they think society requires from writers and artists, they’d be, well, open with their code. Which they are not.
LLM = Large Language Model
> It ain’t that simple, tech bro.
… And it never is. As a (former/now adjecent) member of the “tech community” I can tell you that for the most part (there are a minority of voices that disagree) the tech community tends to have a very idealistic view of what their inventions will produce downstream.
And this is a byproduct of the current age in aggregate, and a point that has been made by (neuro-researcher) Iain McGilchrist: we live in an overly left-brain specific mindset as both a society and (even more so) within the tech community.
The left-hemisphere is optimised for very specific outcomes … For apprehending things like a weapon or a piece of food, and it doesn’t concern itself with the “big picture” which is the concern of the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is only concerned with specifics. Specific answers … numerical data or purely quantitative data. If you ignore “big picture” stuff in favour of very specific, filtered outcomes, you get what you see in the tech industry irrespective of the bigger picture and the downstream consequences of {{fill in innovation name here}}.
This seems to be apropos:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14556
When one is in ..
.A situation that is so difficult that NO progress can be made.
one MUST…”Move Smartly”. …when a small opening occurs
I woke this morning and decided to open “that” letter.
(a VERY serious issue dating back to july 2012)
Forces are in motion now.
ok…lets see …can’t turn back now.
(…mostly likely will tell me to lawer up …)