the-podcast guy recently linked this essay, its old, but i don't think its significantly wrong (despite gpt evangelists) also read weizenbaum, libs, for the other side of the coin

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    6 months ago

    This whole thing is incredibly frustrating. Like his guy did draw a representation of a dollar bill. It was a shitty representation, but so is a 640x400 image of a Monet. What's the argument being made, even? It's just an empty gotcha. The way that image is stored and retrieved is radically different from how most actual physical computers work, but there is observably an analogous process happening. You point a camera at an object, take a picture, store it to disk, retrieve it, you get an approximation of the object as perceived by the camera. You show someone the same object, they somehow store a representation of that object somewhere in their meat, and when you ask them to draw it they're retrieving that approximation and feeding that approximation to their hands to draw the imagine. I don't get why the guy thinks these things are obviously, axiomatically uncomparable.