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<\/a><\/p>\nTed Chiang, The New Yorker, 9 Feb 2023<\/strong>: ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web<\/a>, subtitled “OpenAI\u2019s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?” In the original floor plan, each of the house\u2019s three rooms was accompanied by a rectangle specifying its area: the rooms were 14.13, 21.11, and 17.42 square metres, respectively. However, in the photocopy, all three rooms were labelled as being 14.13 square metres in size. The company contacted the computer scientist David Kriesel to investigate this seemingly inconceivable result.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Digital files are compressed to save space, so sometimes images are distorted. In this case, the compression algorithm thought the small blobs of text specifying areas were all the same, and so at the other end, printed them out as identical.<\/p>\n Chiang goes on: If you tried to download the entire Internet, and used such a compression scheme, what would you get? Well, something like what the ChatGPT app is spitting out.<\/p>\n What I\u2019ve described sounds a lot like ChatGPT, or most any other large language model. Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG<\/em> of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG<\/em> retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you\u2019re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won\u2019t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it\u2019s usually acceptable. You\u2019re still looking at a blurry JPEG<\/em>, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn\u2019t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A long, thoughtful piece, that ends:<\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing magical or mystical about writing, but it involves more than placing an existing document on an unreliable photocopier and pressing the Print button. It\u2019s possible that, in the future, we will build an A.I. that is capable of writing good prose based on nothing but its own experience of the world. The day we achieve that will be momentous indeed\u2014but that day lies far beyond our prediction horizon. In the meantime, it\u2019s reasonable to ask, What use is there in having something that rephrases the Web? If we were losing our access to the Internet forever and had to store a copy on a private server with limited space, a large language model like ChatGPT might be a good solution, assuming that it could be kept from fabricating. But we aren\u2019t losing our access to the Internet. So just how much use is a blurry JPEG, when you still have the original?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \\\\\\<\/p>\n Now a few more political links, which as always, are truly about trying to understand epistemology — how and why humans think and come to conclusions about how the world works. And how, given the priorities of survival (in the evolutionary sense) those conclusions are both right (for survival) and wrong (about what’s actually real).<\/p>\n NY Times, Paul Krugman, 9 Feb 2023<\/strong>: War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Democrats Are Radicals<\/a><\/p>\n This is another response to Biden’s SOTU speech the other night.<\/p>\n Delivering the Republican response, Sarah Huckabee Sanders<\/a> claimed that the United States is divided between two parties, one of which is mainly focused on bread-and-butter issues that matter to regular people, while the other is obsessed with waging culture war. This is also true. But she got her parties mixed up \u2014 Republicans, not Democrats, are the culture warriors who\u2019ve lost touch with ordinary Americans\u2019 concerns.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He fact-checks the issue about Medicare and Social Security, shouts of “liar!”, and Rick Scott’s record. How Republican arithmetic doesn’t add up.<\/p>\n But let\u2019s talk about the Sanders response to Biden, which was even more revealing.<\/p>\n Sanders\u2019s speech was a diatribe against wokeness. This is standard G.O.P. fare these days and exactly what you\u2019d expect in, say, an address at the Conservative Political Action Conference<\/a>. But this wasn\u2019t a CPAC speech; it was meant to address the nation as a whole and rebut the president of the United States.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And,<\/p>\n So as Greg Sargent of The Washington Post points out<\/a>, it was remarkable that Sanders spoke largely in right-wing insider jargon. She boasted of eliminating C.R.T. in her state, without even explaining the abbreviation; how many Americans know that it stands for \u201ccritical race theory,\u201d let alone why that\u2019s supposed to be such a bad thing?<\/p>\n For that matter, focus groups<\/a> suggest that most people don\u2019t know what \u201cwokeness\u201d means, or why they should fear it.<\/p>\n But wait, it gets worse. Sanders seemed to say (although her syntax was a bit garbled) that woke policy was responsible for \u201chigh gas prices\u201d and \u201cempty grocery shelves.\u201d<\/p>\n So first of all, how does that work? How did critical race theory cause a global spike in crude oil prices, which raised prices at the pump all around the world? How did it snarl supply chains and cause a worldwide shortage of shipping containers?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And so on. This piece touches on what I’m gradually coming to realize: Most people don’t pay attention to anything outside their immediate circumstances. I saw a Facebook post from one of my friends commenting about a John McWhorter piece<\/a> in NYT about the changing meanings of words, and he said nobody (i.e. the vast majority of the population) will read this! Language changes, it just happens, as does everything else.<\/p>\n \\\\<\/p>\n Finally, just three headlines.<\/p>\n Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 8 Feb 2023<\/strong>: The GOP rebuttal to Biden\u2019s State of the Union address was indistinguishable from a Fox News monologue<\/a><\/p>\n Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 8 Feb 2023<\/strong>: Bless their hearts! The Christian right attempts to mount a revival<\/a>, subtitled “The Satanic panic over the Grammys is part of a larger fundamentalist bid to make themselves relevant again”<\/p>\n New York Times, Stuart A. Thompson, 9 Feb 2023<\/strong>: Steve Bannon\u2019s Podcast Is Top Misinformation Spreader, Study Says<\/a>, subtitled “A large podcast study found that Mr. Bannon\u2019s ‘War Room’ had more falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims than other political talk shows.”<\/p>\n The runners-up are, of course, other right-wing outlets: Charlie Kirk; Rush Limbaugh [someone running his legacy site, presumably]; Michael Savage; Bret Weinstein; Daniel Horowitz… Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rudy Guilani.<\/p>\n Obvious comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ted Chiang on ChatGPT; Paul Krugman on the GOP’s Orwellian take on the world; and epistemology. Ted Chiang, The New Yorker, 9 Feb 2023: ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web, subtitled “OpenAI\u2019s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers … Continue reading
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\nHere’s a longish article by none other than famed science fiction writer (and tech writer) Ted Chiang, in The New Yorker<\/i>, about how the AI app ChatGPT works, beginning with a story about how modern photocopiers work.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\n