Aboard Newsletter: But I Love Stochastic Parrots!
For a lot of people, AI is here to take their livelihood. I get that. For others, it’s here to replace the entire economy and they plan to become billionaires. Okay. But for me, it’s the most hilarious possible continuation of many decades of continual exploration of what it means to simulate thinking through language—and I never believed things could ever go this far with mere language. I used to be a pro writer for a living, and trust me, no one thought text could ever be this valuable. So to me, the situation we’re in, where LLMs can be prompted to produce interesting, somewhat random output, and then more deterministic systems can evaluate and improve that output (this is how vibe coding works), is, while frequently terrible, perpetually entertaining
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As a deeply digital person, I’ve got an archive of my own email and prose going back nearly 30 years. Sometimes I’ve searched through that archive to learn how my own thinking has changed and evolved. And nearly every time I’ve done that, I’ve learned that my thinking has not changed or evolved. I’ve asked other people about this and they report the same thing. We perceive ourselves as enlightened creatures, adapting to meet the times. But as I started going through prose I wrote in my early 20s…well, I was missing a lot of detail, but the broad ideas were there.