Mastodon Feed
Boosted by pixxl:
lina@neuromatch.social ("Lina") wrote:
@jonny
oh i'd never think you were capable of endorsing that sort of thing. it's just where my mind goes when i see that argument 😋 if i sound spicy, it's because i am - but it's 100% directed at the people making the argument.it's just a nonsense statement, is what I'm getting at. a category error that doesn't deserve to be treated as a valid argument.
writing isn't "the production of text". it's an embodied, social, reflexive activity — an assemblage of writer, audience, instruments, languages, locations, histories, cultural knowledge and artifacts and prior works, etc etc etc...
LLMs are fundamentally incapable of writing. they're glorified markov chains that statistically produce numbers that we map character strings onto - period. if somebody wants to believe that they like slop more than writing, that's on them (and sad) ... but I'm not gonna engage with the idea that what either they or the LLMs they use are doing is in the same category as writing and can be compared as such. the "median" framing implicitly uses this category error as a premise and adds a positivist garnish, so i guess in the previous post I was trying to take the "median" bit literally and go at it from that angle.