Weeknote 36, 2024

§1 Writing prompts

“It's just that I remember you telling me that you would be glad to take care of this kind of thing. I'm sorry I keep forgetting that you never meant what you said.”

“She wants to feel good about herself. Don't we all? But sometimes the price of having something to feel good about is to spend a while not feeling good about yourself at all.”

“I can assure you it was nothing, my dear. Had it been something, I would never have done it.”

§2 Why artificial intelligence doesn't use language

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

-- Ted Chiang

§3 Living in the material world

There is a world of things and it assumes you, too, are a thing: To be sold, resold, and repackaged and sold again. You may or may not have another way of seeing the world besides this. I don’t know whether you do or not. What I do know is that the entities that think this way and act this way and assume the world is a series of assets to be shifted around the table carelessly for the sake of the game have no other way of seeing you besides this. You are a chip, just like anything else, and can be thrown away as part of a wager you were never even meant to understand.

-- Spencer Hall (link behind paywall)

§4 Quotation

“[S]ustained unhappiness frequently disfigures the individuals who endure it such that they do not as easily revert [...] on the eventual absence of the prime movers.” -- Timothy Burke