bwfan123 11 hours ago

Many areas of humanities devolve into a bag of words where the evaluation of it is subjective depending on ones tastes - and LLMs excel here, and academics are rightfully scared.

As an analogy and contrast, take the case of euclidean geometry. This is knowledge about geometry which relates to our "feeling" of space around us. But, it is symbolized in a precise and operational manner which becomes useful in all sorts of endaevors (physics, machines we use etc) - because of the precision. LLMs as machines cannot yet create symbolism and operational definitions of worlds which produce precise and operational inferences. However, they excel at producing persuasive bag-of-words.

As the author notes and concludes, human intuition, experience and the communication of it (which is the purview of humanities) is a pre-cursor to formally encoding it in symbolism (which renders said intuition stale but operationally useful). ie, socratic dialog was a precursor to (and inspired) euclidean geometry, and meta-physics inspires physics.

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jibbit 11 hours ago

it's intentionally ironic that this is written in the style of ai slop?

add-sub-mul-div 11 hours ago

It would be against an AI's best interests to write such a spot-on parody of AI optimism.