brettworks

• An essay on AI’s conversation deep fakes.

“The term deepfake traditionally refers to photos, audio, and video, but when it comes to discussions of consciousness, we need to regard text as a deepfake medium as well. Just as it is vastly easier to generate a realistic video of an astronaut in orbit around Alpha Centauri than it is to develop an interstellar propulsion technology, it is vastly easier to generate a plausible simulacrum of a conversation between two conscious beings than it is to develop a computer program that is conscious and has a genuine desire to communicate with a human. The primary difference between deepfake photos and LLM conversations is that the people who generate the former are deliberately trying to fool others, and many of the people who elicit the latter from LLMs have inadvertently fooled themselves.”

• An essay on Notre-Dame’s (new) acoustics.

“The space is like an instrument.”

• An essay on AI and human agency.

“The AI companies seem to be missing all of this. To them, only the information—not the humanity—has value for their models. This is not right, but so many of us, lost in a swirl of ceaseless information, will be lulled into thinking that it is. In the new paradigm, we are not so much consulted as tasked with feeding data into the machinery. We perform our humanity, and the machine learns to mimic us. Its goal is to be better at whatever we’re doing than we are.”

• A podcast about AI and creativity.

“But we had a suspicion that AI might be breaking that link between words and ideas, and it might have the capability to generate this flood of varied words without actually doing anything different at the conceptual level. And that is because that comes back to this question of process, right? Because when a human brain looks for words, it’s looking for words using the same networks, the same semantic links that it uses to search for ideas. But AI is doing it differently. AI is searching for the next word token. It’s using a stochastic sampling across a learned probability distribution, which is fundamentally different from how brains work.”