Claude Shannon invented LLMs in 1948. See The Mathematical Theory of Communication Sect 3: THE SERIES OF APPROXIMATIONS TO ENGLISH.
Shannon said earlier in the same paper:
Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.
I put this here to highlight a curiosity. An intellectual predecessor of ChatGPT was very explicitly developed without semantics--without meaning--involved. Yet nowadays folks want to argue that these systems are capable of representing meaning, or have understanding, or perform other semantic tasks. No one has yet explained why increasing the order of the Markov chain Shannon discusses in his article changes the system from a meaning-less word emitter into a semantically meaningful intelligent entity. Why does that transition occur? When? This is an extraordinary claim akin to saying if you had a big enough Excel spreadsheet it would become intelligent. It requires extraordinary evidence.
I wanted to reduce the amount of apps I use for email. So I’ve been looking for apps to keep everything in a single place and it feels a bit bleak?
EVERYTHING is AI now. And it feels (a lot of the times) to be just an excuse to be able to charge a subscription instead of a one time payment.
Apple Mail, or even Outlook, seem like the best options out there. Canary Mail also looks alright. Even with its “AI Copilot” it at least seems to have a lifetime purchase.
Next week I'll be starting a pretty ambitious project—50 Days of LIT Prompts. Every weekday for 10 weeks, I'll be sharing prompt patterns along with my thoughts and readings relating to Large Language Models like those behind #ChatGPT. Follow the link below, and this thread, for updates: https://sadlynothavocdinosaur.com/posts/50-days-of-lit-prompts/
Sometimes, I imagine the HAL 9000 answering emails on my behalf simply by saying, "I'm Sorry, Dave can't do that." So, today's title was a no brainier.
I'm Sorry, Dave Can't Do That: [Have AI] Use the text of an email to draft a polite reply declining any request(s)¹
Regarding that last boost, I'm starting to conceive of LLMs and image generators as a phenomenon of (American) society eating its seed corn. If you're not familiar with the phrase, "seed corn" is the corn you set aside to plant next year, as opposed to the corn you eat this year. If you eat your seed corn this year, you have no seeds to plant next year, and thus create a crisis for all future years, a crisis that could have been avoided with better management.
LLMs and image generators mass ingest human-created texts and images. Since the human creators of the ingested texts and images are not compensated and not even credited, this ingestion puts negative pressure on the sharing of such things. Creative acts functioning as seed for future creative acts becomes depressed. Creative people will have little choice but to lock down, charge for, or hide their works. Otherwise, they'll be ingested by innumerable computer programs and replicated ad infinitum without so much as a credit attached. Seed corn that had been freely given forward will become difficult to get. Eaten.
Eating your seed corn is meant to be a last ditch act you take out of desperation after exhausting all other options. It's not meant to be standard operating procedure. What a bleak society that does this, consuming itself in essence.
To put it differently, these tools and techniques are drawing out the value of works created by creative people without replenishing the originators of that value. That's a horribly dehumanizing way of looking at it, as if people were value spigots, but that's the problem isn't it? This is a dehumanzing arrangement. We don't need to be doing this.
People who work in AI and libraries/archives/museums, we need your help! 👋🏻
A few of us maintain an "awesome-ai4lam" 🕶️ list at https://github.com/AI4LAM/awesome-ai4lam and we need your help finding more things to add. Please tell us what we missed!
You can just reply to this toot, or open an issue/ticket in the GitHub repo, or email me, or whatever is easiest for you.
I made a working concept for an alt text generator browser extension using the GPT-4 API, it’s pretty cool! The low detail option in the API seems to work fine for this, so each processed image is less than $0.01 in API billing.
I’m not sure if this could be released on the Chrome Web Store because it would need an API key from the user to run. Maybe it would be better as a PWA anyway so it could be used on other platforms? #gpt#tech
next time I torrent a bunch of shit because yet another streaming service has risen to claim what they believe to be their slice of the pie, I'm just going to say I'm using their shit to build an AI dataset
Compared to #ChatGPT it provides more concise hints and knows more about some Python libraries my collaborators and yours truly maintain. Thanks to all contributors and as always: Feedback is 💚ly welcome 🤗