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Yes, of course.
That’s a pretty lacking theory of knowledge. How can you know what taste is, if you’re never tasted anything? If you read a thousand books about living in New York City, is that the same thing as the experiential knowledge that comes from living there in person? I certainly don’t think so.
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That’s a pretty lacking theory of knowledge. How can you know what taste is, if you’re never tasted anything? If you read a thousand books about living in New York City, is that the same thing as the experiential knowledge that comes from living there in person? I certainly don’t think so.
keiferski didn't ask for a theory of knowledge. You're moving the goalposts.
You cannot claim that descriptive knowledge of something is equivalent to experiential knowledge of it, unless you have a theory of knowledge explaining why this is the case.
Not to be intentionally contrarian, but I have thought a lot about this: I think good fiction is actually the antithesis of AI, fundamentally. LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output. This can give you some creative results, but it is ultimately kind of limited. I cannot imagine that prompting an AI a thousand times would give you something truly original in the way many high-quality fi…
Not to be intentionally contrarian, but I have thought a lot about this: I think good fiction is actually the antithesis of AI, fundamentally. LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output. This can give you some creative results, but it is ultimately kind of limited. I cannot imagine that prompting an AI a thousand times would give you something truly original in the way many high-quality fi…
> LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output > The magic and absurdity of life is a necessary thing to create such works. These two points seem slightly conflicting. Why if a human is truly more creative than AI, must it experience "the magic and absurdity of life" if it can be creative without "combining things into output"? Is a creative human then just not splicing and recombining their…
I agree, yet I also think AI is extremely limited in terms of new creativity.
My guess is that humans operate on some deeper level. Much like the grokking model example where it easily trained on the training data, but only later did it really start to understand the deeper problem space and 'grok' the problem, I think LLMs are doing something similar with human thought. LLMs can throw more compute, but they are still lacking some introspection/drive that leads to the better creativity of humans. Grokking this from the training data might not be possible, or it might take some fundamentally different approach, or even an imperfection in humans that LLMs don't have (ego/drive?).
This isn't to say that LLMs could never do it, but the cost to do so might require magnitudes more scale in training times and size. Or it could be in the next model released. Or maybe they already can, but that gets trained out in favor of overall more general correctness accross all domains.
The history section of the book price index is incredibly america-biased. History of america, american natives, japan after ww2 and vietnam in the last century.
School textbooks are the kind of books that have the very precise purpose of giving you a foundation and roadmap to explore and understand a whole field of knowledge. And they're an industry that has been improving them on successive iterations to produce highly organized, comprehensive and accessible reading material through years.
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keiferski didn't ask for a theory of knowledge. You're moving the goalposts.
That's literally what the conversation is about: what is knowledge? You cannot claim that descriptive knowledge of something is equivalent to experiential knowledge of it, unless you have a theory of knowledge explaining why this is the case.
I am sure I Fable (or GPT-5.6-Sol) could answer this question very well. It can probably even tell us what it feels like to eat a hamburger for the first time when you spent the first 18 years of your life as a vegetarian.
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Same thing with beer and wine awards, some are good but most are just a paid promotion lottery.
Which are the good ones in your view?
The beer and wine I enjoy the best my wife finds completely unpalatable. For wine, I enjoy a dry Grenache; Mas de Gourgonnier is a good one. For beer, I enjoy a beer with body, a malty profile, and balanced hops; there are many mass-produced styles that fit this, but I like Sam Smith Organic Lager, and Leffe Brune. I’ve also brewed many beers myself and one of my all-time favorites was an all-grain formulation of a honey ale [1].
Such is the nature of beer and wine (and HN) that someone is going to “disagree” with me. That’s fine. Just go try some things and see what you like.
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> And therefore, if an AI had more data that mirrors that experience in some way would it be sufficiently creative to create something "truly original"? An important distinction seems to lie in a human having original experiences to draw from, while an AI has only "data that mirrors" experiences.
ChatGPT has had more conversations than you or I have. And it's conversed with people from a wider range of backgrounds in a wider range of situations.
The difference is huge. An LLM conversation can contain within it a batshit crazy model of the world and still produce a plausible stream of tokens. No skin in the game. If you don't test your ideas against reality, you don't have a model of reality; you have a model of written human thought. It's critical to understand the difference.
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That's literally what the conversation is about: what is knowledge? You cannot claim that descriptive knowledge of something is equivalent to experiential knowledge of it, unless you have a theory of knowledge explaining why this is the case.
You asked for a description: "Can you tell me what it feels like to eat a hamburger" I am sure I Fable (or GPT-5.6-Sol) could answer this question very well. It can probably even tell us what it feels like to eat a hamburger for the first time when you spent the first 18 years of your life as a vegetarian.
Asking another person or Fable what it feels like to eat a hamburger will give you a description of what it feels like. It will not give you the actual feeling. You are merely repeating words that someone else has told you. The description of something is not equivalent to the experience that comes from doing it yourself, as an experiencing subject. Reading a war journal about being in battle is not equivalent to the actual experience of being in battle.
To illustrate the point again: if we gathered ten people that all spoke different languages and gave them a hamburger, they would all gain the knowledge of what it feels like to eat a hamburger, even if none of them are able to communicate this to the others in language.