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Facts will not save you – AI, history and Soviet sci-fi

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Re: Facts will not save you – AI, history and Soviet sci-fi

#71

Post by fn-mote »

stereolambda wrote: post #49

Many historians work on manuscripts and/or large archives of documents that might not be digitized, let alone be accessible in the internet. The proportion of human knowledge that is available in the internet, especially if we further constrain to English-language and non-Darkweb or pirated, is greatly exaggerated. So there are infrastructure problems that LLMs by themselves don't solve. On the other hand, people ten…

> I don't like the subjectivist take on historical truth [...]

The work of historians is to make inferences based on incomplete and contradictory sources.

Historians aren't simple fact-checkers. They make judgements in an attempt to understand the sweep of history.

You can see what kind of work they have to do every time you stare at some bullshit narrative put out by a company about how really it was good for the local economy for them to run their fracking operation, and the waste water really was filtered three times so it couldn't be causing the overabundance of three-legged frogs, and last year they funded two scientific studies that prove it. (I just made this up, hope you get the idea.)

Re: Facts will not save you – AI, history and Soviet sci-fi

#72

Post by nicbou »

dale_glass wrote: post #29

> The deeper risk is not that AI will replace historians or translators, but that it will convince us we never needed them in the first place. I think the bigger danger would be that they'd lose the unimportant grunt work that helped the field exist. Fields need a large amount of consistent routine work to keep existing. Like when analog photography got replaced by digital. A photo lab can't just pay the bills with t…

We aee currently wrecking the economics of running an informational website with ChatGPT and AI summaries. Who will bother reviewing products when Google places the conclusion right on top of the search results, before the source itself?

Likewise, who will bother chronicling things and putting information online without an audience? What will be the point of blogging and publishing photos or data that future historians will use?

There is so much grunt work that is no longer viable even at earlier steps in the chain. We will lose a lot to AI.

Re: Facts will not save you – AI, history and Soviet sci-fi

#73

Post by dguest »

tombert wrote: post #55

I'm sorry, as someone who genuinely likes AI, I still have to say that I have to call bullshit on Microsoft's study on this. I use ChatGPT all the time, but it's not going to "replace web developers" because that's almost a statement that doesn't even make sense. You see all these examples like "I got ChatGPT to make a JS space invaders game!" and that's cool and all, but that's sort of missing a pretty crucial part:…

I agree with you, but one correction: the bullshit is on the twitter post that this article links to (in the first sentence) and by extension on the article.

The paper itself [1] doesn't say "replace" anywhere: the purpose was to measure where AI has an "impact". They even say (in the discussion)

    It is tempting to conclude that occupations that have high overlap with activities AI performs will be automated and thus experience job or wage loss... This would be a mistake ... Take the example of ATMs, which ... led to an increase in the number of bank teller jobs as banks opened more branches at lower costs and tellers focused on more valuable relationship-building...
Ok, good. Something definitely seems amiss when a bunch of CS researchers are reporting that "mathematicians" are one of the most "replaceable" (good luck designing a new LLM without any knowledge of math).

Overall this post says something about the sad state of twitter and search: I had to dig though quite a few articles which repeated this job replacement crap before I could even find the title of the article (which was then easy to find on arXiv). And go figure, the authors didn't mean to make the statement everyone says they made.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07935v1

Re: Facts will not save you – AI, history and Soviet sci-fi

#74

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

stereolambda wrote: post #49

Many historians work on manuscripts and/or large archives of documents that might not be digitized, let alone be accessible in the internet. The proportion of human knowledge that is available in the internet, especially if we further constrain to English-language and non-Darkweb or pirated, is greatly exaggerated. So there are infrastructure problems that LLMs by themselves don't solve. On the other hand, people ten…

My Dad, who is a professor of history, always used to say that being a historian is like being a detective, piecing together many different sources of incomplete or false information from unreliable sources, assessing motivations for actions, and so on.

You may indeed be able to establish some facts with high confidence. Many others will be suppositions or just possibilities. Establishing "facts" though is not really the point (despite how history is taught in school).

You try to weave all these different things into a bigger narrative or picture. It is most definitely an act of interpretation, which itself is embedded in our current conceptions (some of which are invisible to us and which future historians may then riff on).

Saying that you don't like the subjectivist take on history means you think there is an objective history out there to be had which we could all agree on, but that does not exist.

Re: Facts will not save you – AI, history and Soviet sci-fi

#75

Post by nullpoint420 »

jadbox wrote: post #65
delusional wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "[...] dynamically changing the zone is something they simply cannot do." But... why TF not? Because the computer is fundamentally knowable. Somebody defined what a "close game" ahead of time. Somebody defined what a "reasonable stretch" is ahead of time. The minute it's solidified in an algorithm, the second there's an objective rule for it, it's no longer dynamic. The beauty of the "human element" is that the per…

Could we maybe say that an LLM which can update its own model weights using its own internal self-narrating log may be 'closer' to being dynamic? We can use Wolfram's computational irreducibility principle which says that even simple rule-based functions will often cause unpredictable patterns of its return values. You could say that computer randomness is deterministic, but could we maybe say that ontologically a Qu…

Not saying it isn’t possible, but this is scope creep to the greatest extent. The customer wants to play baseball.

Now we’re trying to build a self-learning and improving AI to replace a human who is also capable of self-learning and improving.

Re: Facts will not save you – AI, history and Soviet sci-fi

#76

Post by mapontosevenths »

richk449 wrote: post #41
mapontosevenths wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this whole-heartedly. Certainly some facts can imply a certain understanding of the world, but they don't require that understanding in order to remain true. The map may require the territory, but the territory does not require the map. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” ― Philip K. Dick

In this analogy though, maps are the only things we have access to. There may be Truth, but we only approximate it with our maps.

It's very true that we only approximate truth with our maps. All abstractions are leaky, but that fact does not imply "catastrophic relativism" (as the grandfather post phrased it). It just implies that we need better, more accurate, maps.

Or, to return the topic of the post, it just means that our translations need to try a little harder, not that human quality translation is impossible to do via machine.

I think it's very important to remember that objective truth exists, because some large percentage of society has a political interest in denying that, and we're slipping ever closer into Sagan's "Demon Haunted World."

Re: Facts will not save you – AI, history and Soviet sci-fi

#77

Post by glenstein »

delusional wrote: post #60
glenstein wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>History is therefore a constant act of reinterpretation and triangulation, which is something that LLMs, as linguistic averaging machines, simply cannot do. I know you weren't necessarily endorsing the passage you quoted, but I want to jump off and react to just this part for a moment. I find it completely baffling that people say things in the form of "computers can do [simple operation], but [adjusting for context…

> "[...] dynamically changing the zone is something they simply cannot do." But... why TF not? Because the computer is fundamentally knowable. Somebody defined what a "close game" ahead of time. Somebody defined what a "reasonable stretch" is ahead of time. The minute it's solidified in an algorithm, the second there's an objective rule for it, it's no longer dynamic. The beauty of the "human element" is that the per…

Baseball is supposed to be unscripted. When an umpire thinks it's their job to make judgments about what serves drama, we've descended from great clashes of human talent into storytelling, reversing the results of actual performance and negating the actual human element that the game was designed around.

If waxing rhapsodic for a little bit about human ineffibility is enough to get you to throw away the integrity of the game, because you think doing so is some grand romantic gesture celebrating human nature, at that point you could be talked into anything, because you lost sight of everything. Which I suppose proves the thesis of the article to be true after all: facts really won't save us, at least not if we leave it to the humans.

Re: Facts will not save you – AI, history and Soviet sci-fi

#78

Post by qingcharles »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #2

> The initial draft was terrible in conveying tone, irony, or any kind of cultural allusion. My mother reads books mostly in Russian, including books by English-speaking authors translated into Russian. Some of the translations are laughably bad; one recent example had to translate "hot MILF", and just translated "hot" verbatim - as in the adjective indicating temperature - and just transliterated the word "MILF", as…

A lot of commercial translations of foreign books are out of date. The ones sold in stores use translations that are > 100 years old because then they are public domain and they don't have to pay any royalties to anyone.

I can highly recommend anyone who is looking to read a foreign book research the translation before they buy it. Some awesome modern translations don't bubble up in the searches because their sales are much lower than the cheaper versions.

Re: Facts will not save you – AI, history and Soviet sci-fi

#79

Post by [deleted] »

randysalami wrote: post #47
munificent wrote: post #27

> There can be no objective story since the very act of assembling facts requires implicit beliefs about what should be emphasized and what should be left out. History is therefore a constant act of reinterpretation and triangulation, which is something that LLMs, as linguistic averaging machines, simply cannot do. This exactly why tech companies want to replace those jobs with LLMs. The companies control the models,…

"tech companies", "companies [who] control the models", "whoever" To be more discrete, patchwork alliances of elites stretching decades and centuries back to concentrate power. Tech companies are under the thumb of the US government and the US government is under the thumb of the elites. It's not direct but it doesn't need to be. Many soft power mechanisms exist and can be deployed when needed e.g. Visa/Mastercard ce…

[deleted]

Re: Facts will not save you – AI, history and Soviet sci-fi

#80

Post by tombert »

dguest wrote: post #73
tombert wrote: post #55

I'm sorry, as someone who genuinely likes AI, I still have to say that I have to call bullshit on Microsoft's study on this. I use ChatGPT all the time, but it's not going to "replace web developers" because that's almost a statement that doesn't even make sense. You see all these examples like "I got ChatGPT to make a JS space invaders game!" and that's cool and all, but that's sort of missing a pretty crucial part:…

I agree with you, but one correction: the bullshit is on the twitter post that this article links to (in the first sentence) and by extension on the article. The paper itself [1] doesn't say "replace" anywhere: the purpose was to measure where AI has an "impact". They even say (in the discussion) It is tempting to conclude that occupations that have high overlap with activities AI performs will be automated and thus…

Oh! Fair enough, I guess I am part of the problem in this particular case, because I uncritically assumed that someone on Twitter was telling the truth.

Looking through the actual paper now, yeah I think actually more or less agree with the writers.

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