Tor G.

“but at its core, an LLM is just fetching one word after another in sequence.”
― John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

“All fiction offers up the possibility of escape from everyday life, but great fiction allows us to explore what we otherwise look away from.”
― Agnes Callard, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life

“Large language models do not “write.” They generate syntax. They do not think, feel, or experience anything. They are fundamentally incapable of judging truth, accuracy, or veracity. Any actions that look like the exercise of judgment are illusory. While the term hallucination has come to mean outputs from LLMs that are incorrect or untrue, it is arguably more accurate to say that from the point of view of the LLM, everything is a hallucination, as it has no reference points from which to judge its own production. ChatGPT is fundamentally a “bullshitter” as defined by Harry Frankfurt in his classic treatise on the term (On Bullshit), something “unconnected to concern for the truth.” It’s not that ChatGPT makes stuff up. It has no capacity for discerning something true from something not true. Truth is irrelevant to its operations.”
― John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

“Sometimes, when we are very determined not to ask a question, we make a claim of having very decisively answered it.”
― Agnes Callard, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life