Comment by labcomputer
21 hours ago
> i agree. but it's uncanny that stochastic generation of language yields a form of recognizable intelligence.
It's funny, I used to think it was complete and utter horseshit when literature professors would say that the meaning of a text is created by the reader, not the author.
Since LLMs have become commonplace, I have completely reversed my opinion on that.
That you see recognizable intelligence in the output of stochastic generation is because you are imposing meaning on it. It is why "claudish" is so hard to read--you are trying to impose meaning on a sequence of words that was stochastically generated, and it takes mental effort to do that.
I'm not so sure about that.
If Claude can write formal mathematical proofs (that a machine can check), or it can write software that works, where's the head of the reader that imposes the meaning?
i am not an expert in any of this, but intuitively i largely feel the same... the character we see as "claude" is mostly in our heads; its almost like a "super rubber duck" phenomenon or something
I fail to see what exactly is explained, or clarified by the theory here. Postmodernist philosophers are notorious for writing texts which make readers struggle. Surely, it doesn't mean "Foucault-ese" is somehow more stochastically generated than "Claudese".