With LLMs taking over and everything artificially generated, we seem to enter a new world where i see there isn't anything as truth. nothing has come from human experience, suffering, it just simply is created by AI. I can't wrap my head around this. how to make sense of it.
It's worrying to read such anxiety, but take heart that
your premises are wrong.
LLMs are not "taking over". We're in another technology hype cycle.
Unlike block-chains this one is more understandable by the masses, and
more worrying to media types who always breathlessly trumpet
everything. They now feel their jobs threatened (even more) by the
race to the bottom of low quality crap that global corporatism
ultimately produces.
If you go outside, take your head out of your phone, and walk around,
in a few hours you will see no evidence whatsoever that "everything is
artificially generated".
There is no "new world" afoot, no more than there was new world when
the printing press, steam engine or microprocessor arrived. It will
be the same old world with some people trying to make benevolent use
of technology, some cynically exploiting it for nothing but money, and
the vast majority bumbling cluelessly along without care for the
consequences one way or another.
> where i see there isn't anything as truth. nothing has come from
human experience, suffering, it just simply is created by AI. I
can't wrap my head around this. how to make sense of it.
Truth was always hard to find. There will be less "easy and
convenient truth". And all that generative AI does is regurgitate
reconfigurations of all the human experience it has been fed with.
I think what you, and many others are feeling and fearing is not
existential or epistemological crisis, but a massive rejection of all
the derelict values that brought us to this shallow, empty juncture.
It's probably good that dies. We simply do not value truth any more
anyway. It's good that you're questioning that.
How I like to think about the post truth thing: The time period in which we had reliable evidence that was impossible (or at least very difficult) to tamper with was quite short. Can't have been more than 200 years. Societies managed before, so I think we'll manage again.
Consider, have you ever known truth? how do you know?
Everything you experience is generated by your mind, you do not have a firsthand experience of what's out there. You are a brain in a skull, yet you see light and feel spacious and you feel like a body. It is all generated similar to a dream which is also generated.
Fun fact, I practice lucid dreaming and to become lucid I check to see if I'm dreaming by looking at my hand. If my hand looks AI generated, then I'm dreaming. Interpret as you wish.
Another fun fact, before you even know you have made a decision, your brain has made that decision for you. This is documented. So thinking you made a decision is an illusion.
Finally, what is a tree? a label, if I ask you to define a tree you will tell me it branches, trunk, leaves, root. What is leaf? a green thin layer used to generate food. What is green? ... you practice this and you realize even though you can function in a network of words, you don't actually know what any of these words really mean. So, again, you have never know the Truth. And never will.
So, I suggest, learn to relax; whatever happens trust that you can navigate it like everyone else. Plus how do you know it won't lead us to utopia?
This sort of postmodern deconstruction of everything leads to an endless pit of nothing. Why even write that comment? What are words even? Let alone letters? Why is a capital A three lines? What are lines? Why are vectors? Why is anything?
It does not lead to nothing, it leads to emptiness, which is everything, like space.
Why write this? because deconstructing everything also leads me to read your comment see that I am getting irritated and angry. I can see I am angry because my knowledge or intellect feels insulted, I can then see how foolish that is, I can then read your comment again and see that you are triggered by what I said, but I don't know why. So I decide that your reaction to my opinion, is your problem.
This helps me calm down and harbor no, or far less ill will towards you than not.
That's why I write and suggest this. Also investigation may also be used if deconstruction doesn't work.
I do ask you, consider it if you can get over the anger and be open to it.
Once I read somewhere that people overestimate the impact of new technologies in the short term and underestimate it in the long term.
My interpretation is that right now we're on the top of AI euphoria wave. It was the same thing some time ago with crypto. We would hear a lot of theories about how a system based in objective microcontracts would make the subjective and inefficient governments of today obsolete.
We still don't know the true impact that the new LLM models will have over the economy, but what we know is that a lot of people is making a lot of money by being excessively optimistic with the prospects. Honestly I think that the practical impacts of LLMs won't be nowhere near to what the enthusiasts are preaching. In more 3-4 years the novelty will fade and then we will be ready to go to the next hype.
* If truth does not exist, anything and everything is false
* If everything is false, so is the statement "truth does not exist"
* Therefore truth must exist
We're also talking about two questions: does objective reality exist? and can it be accurately communicated (at least up to a certain standard) with human language? I think the first question is not that interesting in most cases, since it devolves into untestable speculation. The second question has gained prominence thanks to postmodernism and can be discussed at length, although ultimately because it aims to deconstruct meaning, it suffers from the same type of contradiction mentioned above... if nothing has meaning, neither does the theory that points that out.
That said, neither of these should be relevant in the advent of generative AI and AGI. The fact some tools will produce content that is indistinguishable from reality has no impact on objective reality and whether or not we can capture true statements with language. Not only that, but I think AGI will probably need to grapple with the same problem. I can imagine a super intelligent machine making some advancements in this area, and I suspect it will also hit a wall and realize the limits of its own perceptions.
The question: What is Truth? has been bothering people for a long time. Probably as soon as humans started to be able to talk about not so simple things. Many philosophers have spent thoughts about that. Religions popped up to give a simple answer to this question.
Somehow the experience of AI seems to trigger this question.
My take: There's no such thing as Truth. Everything is empty, and so is Truth.
Once someone wrote, God is all-powerful, so God could make it that all religions on Earth are true simultaneously. If God were not all-powerful then God could not make it so. Where is then Truth?
Descartes once thought, what if he sees and thinks is an illusion? What if he is alone on the world and all the people he interacted with are only a figment of his deeper, instinctive imagination?
Even Buddha had an answer. The desire to find Truth is one of the wants. Let it go and you'll find pease.
There are many thoughts about Truth. These thoughts are not really related to AI, but the experience of AI triggers these thoughts in many people.
> My take: There's no such thing as Truth. Everything is empty, and so is Truth.
By definition that is not true. Without any truths, everything is false, and communication is not possible. There are two questions at hand, is there an objective reality, if so.. is it accessible to our senses and can it be articulated with language? I feel neither of these is at stake with the advent of AGI. Having a machine that can think like a human means nothing to the question of objective reality or whether or not language is able to capture it.
> God is all-powerful, so God could make it that all religions on Earth are true simultaneously. If God were not all-powerful then God could not make it so. Where is then Truth?
I see this kind of objection to God a lot, and while this isn't necessarily a religious discussion, the problem here is that because God is an agent, asking God to do something contradictory doesn't prove or disprove anything. If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, he doesn't have to prove anything to anyone, and therefore there is no proof or disproof in the hypothetical. In other words, if God is all-powerful, not only could he make all religions true, he can also choose not to.
I think AGI is going to question our humanity, and it is understandable people are also questioning truth, however it is a separate question, and one that I bet even AGI will be grappling with.
You assume you can find the truth from beliefs, words, sentences etc. Those all are human constructs which changes over time, location, personal age, mood etc.
The truth cannot be explained or written down.
You have to find it yourself.
If you are serious about truth, going for a Vipassana retreat might be a good start.
There are collections of millions of books available online.
Some legal as they are out of copyright. Like archive.org and project Gutenberg. Although they are under threat and can’t be counted on to remain around indefinitely.
There are other such libraries even more complete if you seek you shall find most books.
I think the move is to keep an archive of everything printed before 2000.
Humans do this every now and then. We seem to suffer through it somehow. Most of history consists of a large-scale epistemological battle.
We used to think the Roman Emperor (or equivalent) was the sole source of truth and understanding. Then we thought it was the church. The Enlightenment changed that to individual science and reason. We're currently (for the last 70 years or so) on a kick about how everything reduces to bits and bytes.
I was thinking this morning about how in the 80s AI researchers would argue whether or not a computer that played chess was "actually" playing chess, ie, was it conscious and having the experience people did when they played chess? Our answer from that period was something like "Who cares? If to me the computer looks like it is playing chess, it's playing chess. How can I tell differently?"
The rule here is that everything reduces to my generalized conception of how this transaction/game plays out. That's the Turing Test.
But this just shows how stupid people are. It doesn't say anything about intelligence. Intelligence is transformative and pre-language. You reduce it to words and images and you've destroyed the thing you're trying to create. The human that plays chess with me is the human one day that, while moving a pawn, comments on how life seems dull to them, striking a conversation about existentialism which, in turn, changes me slightly. Or they move slower than normal, making me worry about their health, which prompts me to think about my parents. That's chess, it's not moving pieces around.
Once you spot this, you can see it over and over again. Project Management must consist of reports, graphs, video meetings, and so forth, right? Those TPS reports need their covers. Movies must be spectacle and pre-canned drama. The piece of graphic I need for my book can easily be created by AI, right? Nobody thinks that by creating my own graphic I come to a new realization about the problem I'm exploring. That's not considered "graphic arts" If it can't be digitized, it must not be important, right?
Like everything else, this will keep going until it doesn't. And like all other examples, the change will be painful. But we always seem to muddle through. And if this turns out to be an extinction-level event? I find it tremendously and oddly-pleasing that man made it through all these trials only to be destroyed by the turbo-electric bullshitting machine we finally created. Somehow that seems to suit us.
LLMs are not "taking over". We're in another technology hype cycle. Unlike block-chains this one is more understandable by the masses, and more worrying to media types who always breathlessly trumpet everything. They now feel their jobs threatened (even more) by the race to the bottom of low quality crap that global corporatism ultimately produces.
If you go outside, take your head out of your phone, and walk around, in a few hours you will see no evidence whatsoever that "everything is artificially generated".
There is no "new world" afoot, no more than there was new world when the printing press, steam engine or microprocessor arrived. It will be the same old world with some people trying to make benevolent use of technology, some cynically exploiting it for nothing but money, and the vast majority bumbling cluelessly along without care for the consequences one way or another.
> where i see there isn't anything as truth. nothing has come from human experience, suffering, it just simply is created by AI. I can't wrap my head around this. how to make sense of it.
Truth was always hard to find. There will be less "easy and convenient truth". And all that generative AI does is regurgitate reconfigurations of all the human experience it has been fed with.
I think what you, and many others are feeling and fearing is not existential or epistemological crisis, but a massive rejection of all the derelict values that brought us to this shallow, empty juncture. It's probably good that dies. We simply do not value truth any more anyway. It's good that you're questioning that.