LaMDA, Lemoine, and the Allures of Digital Re-enchantment
L. M. Sacasastheconvivialsociety.substack.com
Saved by Keely Adler and
LaMDA, Lemoine, and the Allures of Digital Re-enchantment
And while it’s tempting to dismiss it as a shallow trick to boost engagement, I’ve come to view it slightly more charitably. Cultivating the parasocial by attaching one’s face or voice to the content itself is a powerful way to make people care more about something—effective marketing if not a source of underlying quality. As AI normalizes the idea... See more
Drew Austin • The Internet's Meaning Crisis
We keep trying to transcend ourselves and our own interests, and yet the more the world becomes inhabited by our tools and technologies, the more unlikely it is “that man will encounter anything in the world around him that…is not, in the last analysis, he himself in a different disguise.”
Meghan O'Gieblyn • God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
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
Max Read • Why the internet isn't fun anymore + A.I. and magic
Still, as Baszucki made clear, the goal is still actual social networking: surely that will always be better than interacting with an AI! Or will it? It seems to me that perhaps the most important constraint on the web — to actually interact with people as if they are, well, people — disappeared a long time ago.