Comment by gentleman11
1 year ago
Borges is one of my favourite writers. Having some stranger try to think like him to conceptualize something for public consumption rubs me the wrong way. If Borges was around, I'd love to hear what he had to say, but invoking his name and works like this feels off
The obvious parallel between Borges and AI is his Quixote story: a character endeavors to write Don Quixote, but spontaneously, word for word, without copying; to become cervantes in a sense, and to train their style so that they can produce it almost by accident. This sort of makes the work their own, and is a typical argument used by ai enthusiasts when AI regurgitates copywrited work--it isn't storing the work, it's becoming a thing that can spontaneously produce it. But this imho cheapens the story and the parallel isn't as strong as it could be
Thanks for all the downvotes
Pierre Menard, author of the Don Quixote. A masterpiece, like almost everything Borges wrote.
One of the most fascinating things about Borges writing is how he leads you into the fantastic realm without you even noticing.
One of the first things I did when someone showed me a pre-Chat version of GPT-3 was try to get it to speak in the voice of Borges. I had the same feeling of interesting but inappropriate.
I was really happy to see this pop up and I'm glad someone went through this as a thought experiment but you make a good point that didn't initially occur to me.
I feel like Borges' secular scifi-adjacent mysticism looses a lot of what makes it most meaningful when it's imitated or dissected academically.
That said it does feel like Borges would probably be into the idea of being imitated.
I also tried this as soon as I got access to GPT-4 at Shopify's expense. "You are the celebrated magical realist writer Jorge Luis Borges. Write an essay about Shopify".
What it produced was more of an essay written by a talented undergraduate about Borges, rather than Borges.
I'm sure Borges would've found LLMs fascinating and one can only dream what stories and essays would've been written.
Pierre Menard is a magician. He is trying to create the ultimate form of reader: a reader who can read The Capital as a novel.