[HN Gopher] Borges and AI
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Borges and AI
Author : alexmolas
Score : 79 points
Date : 2023-12-19 08:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| platz wrote:
| The paper appears to be missing both a thesis statement and a
| conclusion. It makes no claims, offers no insight, develops no
| theory.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| You know that peer reviewed papers don't need either right?
|
| That's what Survey papers are for, and we are lucky to have
| them.
| platz wrote:
| nothing you said contradicts anything I said
| blamestross wrote:
| No it doesn't contradict what you explicitly said. It is
| intended to contradict whatever motivation you had to post
| a comment that wasn't actually productive. Data is valuable
| without needing attached argument.
| albedoa wrote:
| Interesting choice of the word "missing" then!
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Those are stored elsewhere in the Library.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| Ok so the paper presents a central metaphor for reasoning about
| LLMs.
|
| The metaphor: a book with all possible conversations/ human
| writings ever, and a [good] llm is finding the spot in the book
| that exactly matches the context and reads from the book as a
| response.
|
| Certainly if you've experimented with a model that hasn't been
| fine-tuned (eg via rlhf) this metaphor will be resonant.
|
| Is it useful?
|
| (How does it help me understand LLMs with different capabilities?
| How does it help me understand models with different fine
| tunings?)
| songeater wrote:
| At the risk of self-promotion, this is my take on Borges and
| AI... which is a song/video made by AI (jukebox and various
| previous-generation image generators), and based on Borges'
| fantastic essay "A New refutation of time."
|
| song: https://songxytr.substack.com/p/borges-walks-into-a-
| discothe... original source:
| https://gwern.net/doc/borges/1947-borges-anewrefutationoftim...
|
| The authors' own intention is to "understand.. LLMs and their
| connection to AI through the imagery of Jorge Luis Borges, a
| master of 20th century literature, forerunner of magical realism,
| and precursor to postmodern literature." In that spirit, I throw
| my hat into the ring too!
| 2devnull wrote:
| My first thought,
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
|
| The op paper needs a conclusion.
| agentultra wrote:
| That was my first thought as well. An LLM seems more like a
| search engine for the library only instead of indexing through
| topics it tries to find understandable non-sense in the sea of
| non-sense.
|
| The difficulty with them is that they can only find things
| similar to what they've been trained on.
|
| Lacking a curated index it's not going to find the information
| you need or want; it's going to find things that seem most like
| what others have seen or wanted.
| aschwtzr wrote:
| I thought of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science and its
| relation to language, which is discussed by Baudrillard's
| Simulacra and Simulation. Large Language Models are the efforts
| of mapmakers to encapsulate reality in a way that is ultimately
| futile.
| staunton wrote:
| > Large Language Models are the efforts of mapmakers to
| encapsulate reality in a way that is ultimately futile.
|
| What's futile?
|
| Nobody is trying to "encapsulate all of reality". Trying to
| do that would be futile but succeeding would also be useless.
| richie_adler wrote:
| Interesting how this work received an homage in _The Name of
| the Rose_ , up to the name of the librarian, Jorge de Burgos.
| (I hated the way they pronounced the name in the movie,
| /'iorge/ instead of the correct Spanish way /'xorxe/)
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| This is interesting but such a shame to miss/skip "Funes, the
| memorious." It will prove, I think, to be quite resonant in the
| future. But it is a damning parable and probably people just
| don't want hear that right now...
|
| I just don't understand how people can attribute consciousness of
| some sort to the LLM but then with that belief not feel
| absolutely terrible for it and for what we do to it! I just think
| of poor poor Funes...
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Borges is one of my favourite writers. Having some stranger try
| to think like him to conceptualize something for public
| consumption rubs me the wrong way. If Borges was around, I'd love
| to hear what he had to say, but invoking his name and works like
| this feels off
|
| The obvious parallel between Borges and AI is his Quixote story:
| a character endeavors to write Don Quixote, but spontaneously,
| word for word, without copying; to become cervantes in a sense,
| and to train their style so that they can produce it almost by
| accident. This sort of makes the work their own, and is a typical
| argument used by ai enthusiasts when AI regurgitates copywrited
| work--it isn't storing the work, it's becoming a thing that can
| spontaneously produce it. But this imho cheapens the story and
| the parallel isn't as strong as it could be
|
| Thanks for all the downvotes
| zomglings wrote:
| Pierre Menard, author of the Don Quixote. A masterpiece, like
| almost everything Borges wrote.
| neuralRiot wrote:
| One of the most fascinating things about Borges writing is
| how he leads you into the fantastic realm without you even
| noticing.
| pkdpic wrote:
| One of the first things I did when someone showed me a pre-Chat
| version of GPT-3 was try to get it to speak in the voice of
| Borges. I had the same feeling of interesting but
| inappropriate.
|
| I was really happy to see this pop up and I'm glad someone went
| through this as a thought experiment but you make a good point
| that didn't initially occur to me.
|
| I feel like Borges' secular scifi-adjacent mysticism looses a
| lot of what makes it most meaningful when it's imitated or
| dissected academically.
|
| That said it does feel like Borges would probably be into the
| idea of being imitated.
| jacques_chester wrote:
| I also tried this as soon as I got access to GPT-4 at
| Shopify's expense. "You are the celebrated magical realist
| writer Jorge Luis Borges. Write an essay about Shopify".
|
| What it produced was more of an essay written by a talented
| undergraduate _about_ Borges, rather than Borges.
|
| I'm sure Borges would've found LLMs fascinating and one can
| only dream what stories and essays would've been written.
| willsoon wrote:
| Pierre Menard is a magician. He is trying to create the
| ultimate form of reader: a reader who can read The Capital as a
| novel.
| seanf wrote:
| _Collected Fictions_ [0] is a wonderful group of Borges stories
| that includes the ones mentioned in this article.
|
| There are some amazing short story collections out there if you
| are the kind of reader that has a hard time staying with an
| entire novel. Ted Chiang has a couple[1][2] collections of
| stories that feel very Borges-like.
|
| [0] https://www.librarything.com/work/25106 [1]
| https://www.librarything.com/work/28008 [2]
| https://www.librarything.com/work/23195758
| doesnotexist wrote:
| Thanks, I will probably read that collection. Nice to see it
| includes the stories The Zahir and The Book of Sand which feel
| just as relevant as the ones mentioned in the paper.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| "open the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI)"
|
| If ever there was a proof that "AI" doesn't mean anything it's
| this.
|
| We've been living in the era of artificial intelligence since the
| 50s
|
| People are waiting for the terminator to come in their house and
| dominate them before they actually agree that AI is a real thing
|
| Basically, the colloquial definition of AI is "it can kill you
| based on its own desires and there's nothing you can do about it"
| visarga wrote:
| > "it can kill you based on its own desires and there's nothing
| you can do about it"
|
| haha, that's an original take, but makes sense after Terminator
| and Hal
|
| wondering if these movies have caused untold external
| consequences to humanity in its adoption of AI just to sell a
| few tickets
|
| to make a parallel, anti-vaxxers did their damage and caused
| many lives to be lost, similarly these stories, which are no
| better, can make people have a bad start with AI and sabotage
| their futures, or stall the benefits of AI from everyone else
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Genuinely I think that's the case.
|
| I have been in "AI" since 1998 when I was writing A* route
| planning for npcs in this new cool engine called Unreal.
|
| The only thing that has been consistent in all these years is
| that nobody thinks it's AI unless it's literally like Arnold
| Schwarzenegger in the terminator. I mean I'm not even
| exaggerating, it's so ridiculously predictable that the
| goalposts for AI move the second whatever that particular
| technology becomes ubiquitous
|
| So for example, hog sift, surf etc. along with localization
| algorithms like slam type systems we're so thoroughly in
| research when I started that they were considered a pillar of
| the field of AI. Now literally, no one would consider those
| AI because they do not use deep convolutional networks.
|
| So just like Marvin Minsky said AI is a suitcase term that
| doesn't fucking mean anything. As somebody who's been doing
| it for so long I'm used to it but it's still annoying.
|
| So I'm just building the terminator and the counter
| terminator so we can move on.
| granularity wrote:
| > Tesler's Theorem (ca. 1970). My formulation of what
| others have since called the "AI Effect". As commonly
| quoted: "Artificial Intelligence is whatever hasn't been
| done yet". What I actually said was: "Intelligence is
| whatever machines haven't done yet". Many people define
| humanity partly by our allegedly unique intelligence.
| Whatever a machine--or an animal--can do must (those people
| say) be something other than intelligence.
|
| https://www.nomodes.com/larry-tesler-consulting/adages-
| and-c...
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Yeah I always forget the name but it's totally real
| fluoridation wrote:
| >wondering if these movies have caused untold external
| consequences to humanity in its adoption of AI just to sell a
| few tickets
|
| What are you saying? This isn't like when The Simpsons made
| fun of nuclear power and depicted it as doing impossible
| things. AGI is a hypothetical technology and we don't yet
| know what it could be capable of or even if it's feasible.
|
| >to make a parallel, anti-vaxxers did their damage and caused
| many lives to be lost, similarly these stories, which are no
| better, can make people have a bad start with AI and sabotage
| their futures, or stall the benefits of AI from everyone else
|
| Any idea can change a person's mind in one direction or
| another. Yours is an argument against the exchange of ideas
| in general. "Since hearing an idea could cause a person to
| $DO_BAD_THING, exchanging ideas (for example, by talking to
| people with $WRONG_OPINION, or by consuming fiction) is bad."
| furyofantares wrote:
| Eh, when words lose functionality they either fall out of use
| or change meaning.
|
| AI basically means things brains and computers both do, but
| this is only a useful term when brains do those things better
| than computers. Usually once computers definitively surpass
| brains we've moved on to just calling that computing.
|
| Maybe that won't be the case and the term "AI" will either
| solidify as a broad category, or fall out of use, but it also
| might continue to refer to that-which-is-left-to-do, the things
| we're still better at than computers.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| There is a reason Borges's Library of Babel contained all
| _combinatorially_ possible texts, with almost all of them being
| pure gibberish. Borges was wise enough to understand that the
| following is meaningless, even for a story about a magic library:
|
| "Imagine a collection that does not only contain all the texts
| produced by humans, but, well beyond what has already been
| physically written, also encompasses all the texts that a human
| could read and at least superficially comprehend."
|
| To be clear this is a horrifically dishonest metaphor about LLMs.
| IMO the most glaring flaw in the technology is that they can't
| handle _new_ ideas which don 't appear in the training set. It is
| true that ChatGPT doesn't deal with this use case very often
| because it mostly handles trivialities. But it does mean that
| this entire argument is navel-gazing speculation.
|
| The bigger problem is that the entire idea of "all texts a human
| could superficially comprehend" is meaningless, and the paper
| proceeds to reason based off this utter fallacy. The beauty of
| Borges's Library of Babel was that he realized that humans are
| capable of "superficially comprehending" _any_ text, even if it
| was created by a uniform random ASCII generator. This is the
| basis of numerology, and why Borges 's story included
| superstitious cult behavior of people destroying and/or
| sanctifying "meaningful" gibberish. If we have a good enough
| reason to find meaning in text, we'll find it. Humans don't
| actually rely on symbolic reasoning, we just use that for
| communication and organization: give us the symbols and we will
| reason about them, using cognition which is far too squishy to
| fit in a book. It's especially dangerous when the symbols obey
| human grammar and imitate social tones of authoritativeness,
| mysticism, etc.
|
| And then there's...this:
|
| "The invention of a machine that can not only write stories but
| also all their variations is thus a significant milestone in
| human history."
|
| I am not a writer. But speaking as a homo sapien, it is genuinely
| insulting to call ChatGPT a machine that can write "all
| variations" of a story. This paper needed to be reviewed by a
| serious writer or philosopher before being put on the arXiv.
| kevlened wrote:
| What are some examples of "new ideas"? I'm having a hard time
| imagining an idea that can't be expressed as a combination of
| existing concepts.
|
| Better concepts can arise when we make discoveries about
| reality (which takes experimentation), but there's a lot more
| juice to squeeze from the concepts we currently have.
| svnt wrote:
| They cannot be expected to produce useful new ideas because
| the ideas exist in lacunae in their probabilities: despite
| the extant possible novel combination of ideas (which isn't
| the only option for new ideas: neologisms exist), the LLM has
| never seen it and so will (probabilistically) never produce
| it because it is equivalent to nonsense.
|
| The exception to this is if the new ideas are somehow present
| in the structure of language and are internalized and/or
| presented in an emergent form.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| "an idea that can't be expressed as a combination of existing
| concepts."
|
| The problem is that if an LLM hasn't been pretrained on the
| specific idea, it won't have a grasp of the what the correct
| concepts are to make the combination. It will be liable to
| substitute more "statistically likely" concepts, but since
| that statistic is based on a training set where the concept
| didn't exist, its estimation of "likely" is flawed.
|
| One good example is patents:
| https://nitter.net/mihirmahajan/status/1731844283207229796
| LLMs can imitate appropriate prose, but really struggle to
| maintain semantic consistency when handling _new_ patents for
| inventions that, by definition, wouldn 't have appeared in
| the training set. But this extends to almost any writing: if
| you are making especially sophisticated or nuanced arguments,
| LLMs will struggle to rephrase them accurately.
|
| (Note that GPT-4 is still extremely bad at document
| summarization, even for uninteresting documents: your Q3 PnL
| number is not something that appeared in the training set,
| and GPT-4 is liable to screw it up by substituting a
| "statistically likely" number.)
|
| In my experience GPT-3.5 is extremely bad at F#: although it
| can do simple tasks like "define a datatype that works for
| such-and-such," it is much less proficient at basic
| functional programming in F# than it is Haskell - far more
| likely to make mistakes, or even identifiably plagiarize from
| specific GitHub repos (even my own). That's because there's a
| ton of Functional Programming 101 tutorials in Haskell, but
| very few in F#. I am not sure about GPT-4. It does seem
| better but I haven't tested it as extensively.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _The problem is that if an LLM hasn 't been pretrained on
| the specific idea, it won't have a grasp of the what the
| correct concepts are to make the combination_
|
| And this isn't true of humans?
| comonoid wrote:
| The title seems to refer to Borges' story "Borges and I".
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Biggest whiff the Nobel Committee ever made was failing to award
| Borges the Literature Prize.
| sproingie wrote:
| I dunno, there was also awarding the Peace Prize to
| Kissinger...
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Yeah, I phrased that poorly, didn't I. Make that the biggest
| whiff the _Literature_ Prize committee ever made.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Sorry to veer slightly off-topic, but can anyone familiar with
| academia explain why such a literary exercise gets published on
| Arxiv as a research paper? What is scientific or research-driven
| about it? How is this different from a long-form opinion or
| literary essay except for the fact that it's written with a
| paper-like style and voice? I'm baffled. Is this just because
| humanities professors need to show they're published as well and
| they need to get a score for tenure, or something like that?
| gwern wrote:
| Leon Bottou isn't a humanities professor, but a ML researcher.
| In fact, not just any ML researcher but arguably one of the ML
| researchers who _most_ anticipated the current DL scaling era.
|
| Bottou was arguing for the virtues of SGD on the grounds of
| "CPUs [GPUs] go brrr" literally 2 decades ago in 2003:
| https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2003/file/9fb7b048c96d44a0337f0...
| or here he is in 2007/2012 explaining why larger models/data
| can scale and keep getting better:
| https://gwern.net/doc/ai/scaling/2012-bottou.pdf
| https://gwern.net/doc/ai/scaling/2013-bottou.pdf
|
| Which is not to say that he necessarily has anything worthwhile
| to say about 'Borges and AI' but I'm going to at least give it
| a read to see if there's something I might want to know 20
| years from now. :)
| camillomiller wrote:
| Well the point stands, though, considering that the two
| papers you linked clearly read like papers. My question was
| mostly candidly naive and quite honest: what makes a paper a
| paper, when the content is something merely akin to a
| literary essay? I guess the answer is "the author". :D
| Tao3300 wrote:
| This paper is in the Library, along with all the endorsements and
| refutations, as well as the discussion of it here.
|
| So are:
|
| - all the false discussions that deviated into a political topic
| that turned into a flame war
|
| - the index of all the times dang has and will remind users to
| read the guidelines
|
| The trick is finding them, and being sure you have.
| willsoon wrote:
| I don't see the connection. I was a heavy B. reader in my day.
| But I remember him mentioning a Chesterton story where the
| machine eats its master. B. introduces me to Chesterton, to the
| Sartor Resartor, to the Bible, to Cthullu --- and then I can't
| even read enough English. Now, long after I've made B.'s break
| --- that it's all right, it's necessary --- I see how great his
| influence is in almost everything, bc culture is not a package of
| flooring you can buy one a day. It's a big warehouse of
| everything you can't buy, but in one lot.
| willsoon wrote:
| Kafka wrote a little story like that: I won't quote it. They
| let them choose between being kings or being messengers for the
| kings. Because they were children, they all chose to be
| messengers for the kings, and now they were running all over
| the world carrying messages that nobody understood. Well, that
| was the Internet, wasn't it?
| cagatayk wrote:
| > Neither truth nor intention plays a role in the operation of a
| perfect language model. The machine merely follows the narrative
| demands of the evolving story. As the dialogue between the human
| and the machine progresses, these demands are coloured by the
| convictions and the aspirations of the human, the only visible
| dialog participant who possesses agency.
|
| This is a really good way of thinking about these models. It
| reminds me of the recent-ish story where a reporter got really
| creeped out Bing's OpenAI powered chatbot
| (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-
| chatbot-m...). Reading that, I had thought the bot was relatively
| easily led into a narrative the reporter had been setting up. In
| a conversation between actual people who have their own will and
| agency, you don't get to see one leading the other around by the
| nose so completely.
|
| Reframing the problem as one of picking through the many threads
| of potential fictions to evolve a story makes it easier to
| explain what happened in that particular case.
| SamBam wrote:
| I would have thought the most relevant Borges story to LLMs would
| be _Funes, the memorious._
|
| Funes can remember everything perfectly, every detail that he has
| ever seen or heard in his life. However, he cannot really think
| or understand what he has seen, because understanding requires
| forgetting, it requires generalization.
|
| LLM's can only think insofar as they need to generalize over
| their inputs. If it's just a memorizing parrot, that is not a
| good LLM.
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