I am a simple man. I see Terry
Pratchett on HN and I share Venkat Rao’s lovely essay at https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/discworld-rules.
It just struck me that a likely end-result of AIs are the Discworld elves:
> Elves have no proper imagination or real emotions, and therefore such things fascinate them. Because they cannot create they steal musicians and artists [... snipped ...] Even if an elf is, for reasons of its own, trying to be nice, its lack of understanding of humans mean there's always something "off" about it.
I am very uncomfortable with the idea of "this person or system cannot create, they can only steal". It seems very dehumanizing, and though LLMs aren't humans I could see the argument very easily turned on people. There is nothing specific to LLMs in it.
The people filling the wires with AI content they didn't write aren't fundamentally incapable of creation; they have chosen not to do it, and so are incapable only until they make a better choice.
It's not dehumanising to see the output of someone who isn't creating as uncreative.
Wow.
Hard to believe most of this was written 3 decades ago.
Man, people in the Bay will find a way to over intellectualize anything.
Still reading but this looks an excellent article. Why not submit it here? I'd upvote!
(I would submit it myself but I feel that'd be stealing karma :D)