>
So in effect it becomes an exercise of "can you fool the human into thinking this is a plausible thing Hemingway would've said".That's useful in itself, though. Assume the human knows they're "being fooled", we call this make-believe, or suspending disbelief. It's a tool we use each time we act something out, pretend to be someone else, try to put ourselves in their position; we do that when we try to learn from recorded experience of other people, real or fictional.
> The reason why you would care to hear Hemingway's thought on your writing, or Steve Jobs' thoughts on your UI design, is precisely because they are the flesh-and-bone, embodied versions of themselves. Anything else is like trying to eat a picture of a sandwich to satisfy your hunger.
Not at all! It's exactly the other way around.
No one wants to talk to the actual human. We're not discussing creepy dating apps here. The reason you'd care for a virtual Hemingway or Jobs is because you want to access specific, opinionated expertise, wrapped in fitting and expected personality, to engage fully with the process, to learn tacitly and not just through instructions.
The Hemingway and Shakespeare and Jobs people want are not real anyway. Who knows how much of "Hemingway" is actually Hemingway, and how much it was written or edited by his wife, butler, or some publisher? How much real Jobs actually is in the stories, how much were they cleaned or edited to reinforce the myth? It doesn't matter, because no one cares about the real person, they care about the celebrity that's in public consciousness. The fake person is more useful and interesting anyway.
Like 'massing, I agree TNG was prescient about it. But I actually see the examples working as intended. Einstein, Hawking, Freud were all useful simulations. Ironically, it's Barclay who actually related to them in reasonable fashion, and it's Geordie who got confused about reality.