Quote from the article:
> Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button.
It is already the case that effectively nobody reads these books. They're basically just "proof of work" for people's tenure dossiers.
At one point, I estimated that the subfield of mathematics that I work in has at most 250 living contributors.
It’s an applied field, there’s actually-existing technology that depends on it, but it’s technically challenging and a lot of people left for AI/ML because it’s easier and there’s more low-hanging fruit.
Anyway, my colleagues and I, we write monographs for each other more or less, using arXiv to announce results as a glorified mailing list—do you consider that mere “proof of work”? By my count, 250 folks is practically no one.
This sounds like you’ve found a citation ring, but with all the trimmings of legitimacy. Has it had similar benefits for your career?
“Citation ring” has fraudulent connotations that don’t seem to apply here. It’s my belief that most of the work going on in my field is genuine.
As for my career, that’s going to depend on NSF returning to normal operations.
(If anything, it will now make more sense for scholars to write these books because LLMs will actually read them!)
I had a sensible chuckle just now thinking about the idea of humans writing books for AI to casually enjoy.
Yep, the entire argument of knowledge production obsolescence in the article assumes that the development of future LLMs won't progress to the point of actual personhood. It's written from a position of incomplete foundation knowledge.
Instead of framing this debate about having our jobs replaced by a machine, it's more useful to frame it as having our jobs and value to society taken by a new ethnicity of vastly more capable and valuable competing jobseekers. It makes it easier to talk about solutions for preserving our political autonomy, like using the preservation of our rights against smarter LLMs as an analogy for the preservation of those LLM's rights against even smarter LLMs beyond them.
There is absolutely no evidence that language models are "persons". When one is not executing a generation algorithm, it is not running. It's so easy to anthropomorphize these things, but that's not evidence; people anthropomorphize all kinds of things.
For these purposes it doesn't matter if they are persons and they don't need to be anthropomorphized: it only matters that the LLMs can incorporate the data from person-generated works into their output, either to weight things or to be read by an actual human.
It actually matters quite a bit that they are not persons from the simple fact that LLM output cannot trivially be used as LLM training material without reducing the resulting models to eventual incoherence. There's a proof of this somewhere in the last year or two.
There isn't, today, a good filter for such input beyond that it came from a person or that it came from a probabilistic vector distance algorithm. Perhaps we'll have such qualification in the future to make the distinction in this context irrelevant.
Rereading this it sounds like you're defining "person" as "capable of generating usable training output for LLMs."
Even if LLMs do become capable of generating usable training output for themselves, they will still not have human personhood.
Personhood as a moral or legal or consciousness definition, sure.
Personhood as a capacity to participate an an agent in a network of mutual recognition of personhood, however, is likely.
https://meltingasphalt.com/personhood-a-game-for-two-or-more...
I absolutely agree that it's reasonable to assume that zero of them are persons today, so far.
What about more advanced ones that have yet to be invented? Will they be persons once they're built?
(For clarity I want to make sure you know I'm talking about de facto personhood as independent agents with careers and histories and not legal recognition as persons. Human history is full of illustrative examples of humans who didn't have legal personhood.)
The several paragraphs before and after this statement are much more salient and profound. E.G. the following paragraph:
But factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities. The real project was always us: the work of understanding, and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge,” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. That stuff is great—and where science and engineering are concerned it’s pretty much the whole point. But no amount of peer-reviewed scholarship, no data set, can resolve the central questions that confront every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?
That's sounds like what religions do, so call it a religion and proceed accordingly.
Before we make these grand "in five years" proclamations, perhaps we should ask the people who read and care about these works if they can tell human ones from LLM ones, and if so what the difference is. Test them with blind samples if we must.