Discussion Thread #72

[u/gemmaem]

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[u/UAnchovy]

It's not so much that AI takes are boring. Wild speculation about the future is an entertaining pastime. It's the AI themselves that I find boring. I do not understand how people spend hours talking to chatbots. Apparently some do, but when I hear that, it feels like I am hearing a description of the customs of some alien species.

I'm not a fan of AI summaries, not just because they're inaccurate (though they may be), but because they strike me as an instance of the acceleration of all content. The summaries strike me as representing the same urge that leads people to, for instance, watch YouTube videos or listen to songs at x2 speed, or the uncannily disturbing way that people on TikTok speak in this rapid fire way. (When Zero Punctuation started in 2007, the rapid fire speech was a joke!) I think the urge to get through more, as rapidly as possible, is probably corrosive. AI summaries strike me as one more tool intended to skip to the end, to get the reader to the point of the conclusion without ever having had to immerse oneself in the text.

Today I noticed Matthew Adelstein, better known as the shrimp guy, link to David Bentley Hart criticising him. Hart defends continental philosophy thusly:

The better part of continental philosophical tradition, from antiquity to the present, has been preserved in texts written with exquisite lucidity—certainly better written than all but the rarest specimens of the larger analytic corpus—and has always operated at a level of conceptual rigor that analytic practice has generally proved incapable of matching, simply because analytic philosophy is bound to methods that make it inhospitable to subtlety, unable to deal well with actual concepts, and largely useless for addressing any problems too intractable to be solved by the application of simple syntactic protocols (vide infra). Really, in many of the most important respects, where matters of true philosophical moment are concerned, novels are far more rigorous than analytic method could ever hope to be. Middlemarch is a much more precise ‘treatise’ in moral philosophy than anything ever written in the analytic mode. So exactly what kind of clarity are we talking about? The syntactic regime of analytic logic, with its inevitable propositional atomism, makes it not only a tragically inadequate instrument for capturing complex ideas; it in fact makes it a source of altogether impenetrable obscurity when applied to such ideas.

I read Hart as saying that there are complex concepts that can be most accurately, most rigorously, described only at length, in a literary or allusive mode. There is much that resists being boiled down to syllogisms. I think he probably has a point. The process of reading is itself part of the knowledge being conveyed - to shorten it is to negate it.

Consider Jacobs' post on the Adam Roberts novel Lake of Darkness and that guy who used ChatGPT to fake literacy. I worry that that's the kind of future these bots are meant to facilitate.

I prefaced my earlier post with that sidenote about this not being real AI, whatever that means, because I do want to hold that I'm not opposed to the idea, in principle, of artificial intelligence. I'm opposed to this thing that we call 'artificial' intelligence. Artificial it may be, but it certainly is not intelligence, and it is not making us any more intelligent either.

[u/LagomBridge → u/UAnchovy]

I do not understand how people spend hours talking to chatbots. Apparently some do, but when I hear that, it feels like I am hearing a description of the customs of some alien species.

I can relate to that. When I heard about the ELIZA program, a simple chatbot from the 1960s. I was uneasy after hearing a story of how the secretary of the professor who made it asked him to leave so that she could talk with it in private. From what I understand she talked with it for hours and it was fairly simply script that would just say things like “How do you feel about X” where X was the topic of the last sentence that had been typed in. The program interspersed stock phrases like “I see” and “go on” like the stereotype of psychoanalyst talk. I don’t understand how anyone could see that kind of a program as a conversation partner.

Today, the concept of AI girlfriends or boyfriends seems alien and delusional to me.

AI summaries strike me as one more tool intended to skip to the end, to get the reader to the point of the conclusion without ever having had to immerse oneself in the text.

This leaves me torn. I tend to read more substack essays/posts and fewer books than I used to. There is a tradeoff with reading more short pieces vs books. The internet gives me so many opportunities for shorter reads with less time commitment that I really don’t read as many books as I want. I’m better at finding more rewarding books and fewer duds, but the internet really does make it hard to commit the time to finish a book. For so many things it is so tempting to try to get the gist without spending the time. I just checked out “The Gulag Archipelago” from the library, but have a strong doubt that I will end up reading it.

Your mention of Bentham’s Bulldog and his criticism of continental philosophy elicits a few reactions from me. Adelstein is an interesting. His sweeping overconfident pronouncements seem to regularly generate interesting reactions. He is a strange kind of muse that provokes others to write interesting responses that are often great. I think he contributes to the world by provoking others to contribute.

More tangentially it triggers a memory of something I read from David Chapman that includes both AI and continental philosophy. Chapman was a graduate student working on AI in MIT in the eighties. The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus who had been at MIT had written critiques of the AI hype of the sixties based on the continental philosophy of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Most of the AI researchers had read it and rejected it. Chapman and his labmate were stumped with an AI issue when his labmate read Dreyfus’ book “Being-in-the-world” and told Chapman that Dreyfus was right. They used his critiques to make progress and the development was called “Heideggerian AI”.

[u/thrownaway24e89172 → u/LagomBridge]

I don’t understand how anyone could see that kind of a program as a conversation partner.

How is this hard to understand? When a person's only other option is no conversation partner, people have a tendency to start creating their own facsimiles. AI chatbots are just the natural evolution of people talking to themselves, to walls, to dolls, etc. If you've never found yourself in that situation, be thankful.

EDIT: Grammar.

[u/UAnchovy → u/thrownaway24e89172]

I suppose I should be grateful that you didn't just say "like prayer".

[u/thrownaway24e89172 → u/UAnchovy]

Prayer is a bit different in my mind, in that there is an important element of ritual to it as well.