21–30 of 41 posts
when i see ted chiang i think of his blurry jpeg LLM take in the new yorker. i'm not a fan of that take. i think it was one of the worst LLM takes, competing with the stochastic parrot take. i heard he wrote some amazing science fiction stories though i should read them some time.
when i see ted chiang i think of his blurry jpeg LLM take in the new yorker. i'm not a fan of that take. i think it was one of the worst LLM takes, competing with the stochastic parrot take. i heard he wrote some amazing science fiction stories though i should read them some time.
What don't you like about the article? A lot of people don't understand the limitations of ChatGPT and I think it's worth talking about. I like "blurry jpeg" a lot better than "hallucination".
It's valid at some technical level but I dislike it so much. There are so many things. If I had to pick only a few, it's that it encourages to see LLMs as a worse and static rendering of an 'ideal' piece of data that we already have. This is not how the LLMs are useful. An LLM can be at its best when it's explaining or imagining for example something like 'how could x be combined with y in the context of z.' The LLM uses its imagination to answer it. Some would say 'hallucination' which isn't so good description. But in the metaphor of 'blurry jpeg' its answer could only be described as a 'jpeg artifact'. Which is bad. The most useful help that an LLM provides is analogous to the worst aspect of a blurry jpeg. Ughhh I hate it so much.
I don't want to be only negative so I'll put an example of an LLM take that I think is good, it's the simulators essay https://generative.ink/posts/simulators/
Also I can easily believe that Ted Chiang is an excellent science fiction story author I have read almost none of his stories but I heard they are great and I want to read them soon.
This is one of my favorite sci-fi short stories, period. Up there would be the one that inspired Arrival (I don't recall the name), and The Last Question. This one was great, because it's not clear until the very end whether the character is going through increasing levels of paranoia, or dealing with an adversary. The way the dénouement is stitched together (literally) was such a shock. I love it.
> it's not clear until the very end whether the character is going through increasing levels of paranoia, or dealing with an adversary
Er, which one do you think it resolved as? Your phrasing suggests you went from doubt to believing the narrator is reliable and sane. I was and am convinced in his reliability; yet, he fell for a painfully obvious ploy by the adversary, which is not terribly consistent with superintelligence. Nevertheless I understand the story to be, in-universe, reliable, but from outside, intentionally following narrative tropes consistent with mental illness. Other tropes include "there's something in the jab", "CIA is after me", "I have become the renfield of a hidden adversary".
So there's a lot of evidence for the opposite interpretation, that the protagonist is simply ill the whole time. This interpretation has the distinct advantage that falling for the attack was truly a flaw on the part of the protagonist (qua confabulator, I suppose) rather than the narrative or the author. In fact I can't really say why I don't adopt this as my preferred interpretation; perhaps a bias for my original interpretation, or skill on Chiang's part in convincing the reader of the less plausible explanation through, what, sheer sympathy?
This is one of my favorite sci-fi short stories, period. Up there would be the one that inspired Arrival (I don't recall the name), and The Last Question. This one was great, because it's not clear until the very end whether the character is going through increasing levels of paranoia, or dealing with an adversary. The way the dénouement is stitched together (literally) was such a shock. I love it.
It's called "Stories of your life". Highly recommend both the book that includes it ("Stories of your life and others") as well as Exhalation. Ted Chiang is superb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stories_of_Your_Life_and_Other...
when i see ted chiang i think of his blurry jpeg LLM take in the new yorker. i'm not a fan of that take. i think it was one of the worst LLM takes, competing with the stochastic parrot take. i heard he wrote some amazing science fiction stories though i should read them some time.
On a related note: Tchiakovsky's novel Children of Memory has some characters of dubious sentience that almost seem based on LLMs. Book is 3rd in a trilogy, but anyone who likes Chiang will like the series.
The Children novels are from another tradition - space opera. They focus on big canvases, rather than big ideas. That's not to imply the big ideas aren't there, but they're not the focal point in the same way. They're comparable to Alastair Reynolds or Iain Banks, not Ted Chiang.
This is one of my favorite sci-fi short stories, period. Up there would be the one that inspired Arrival (I don't recall the name), and The Last Question. This one was great, because it's not clear until the very end whether the character is going through increasing levels of paranoia, or dealing with an adversary. The way the dénouement is stitched together (literally) was such a shock. I love it.
This is one of my favorite sci-fi short stories, period. Up there would be the one that inspired Arrival (I don't recall the name), and The Last Question. This one was great, because it's not clear until the very end whether the character is going through increasing levels of paranoia, or dealing with an adversary. The way the dénouement is stitched together (literally) was such a shock. I love it.
Oh, that's interesting. I always took the character to be a reliable narrator. Thanks for that.