The Machine is You #395
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Zipf's law
11 min read
The article directly discusses Zipf's Law as the key statistical principle explaining why LLMs work - understanding this mathematical phenomenon deeply would illuminate the core argument about human predictability
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Golem
13 min read
The article references Rabbi Loew's Golem as a historical precursor to AI fears - the full Jewish folklore and philosophical implications provide rich context for the creator-creation anxiety theme
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Pygmalion (mythology)
15 min read
The article mentions Pygmalion's statue coming alive as an ancient AI parallel - this myth explores themes of artificial creation, love for creations, and the blurring of animate/inanimate that directly connect to the article's discussion of objectophilia and AI relationships
I.
AI is going to take our jobs. AI is stealing copyrighted works. AI is going to become hostile and terminate us. AI is unreliable. AI is biased. AI’s values do not align with ours. We can never understand how AI works or what it is thinking.
This is the way AI is portrayed in popular culture today. Interestingly, every one of these sentences could, just by changing one word, be made to address other common fears in our societies:
China is going to take our jobs. China is stealing copyrighted works. China is going to become hostile and terminate us. The Chinese are unreliable. The Chinese are biased. Chinese values do not align with ours. We can never understand what the Chinese are thinking.
You can do the same with Muslims or immigrants instead of China. This little exercise shows that there is really nothing specifically “AI” that triggers our fears. Other objects will do equally well and feed the same apocalyptic sentiments. Maybe, then, it’s not about AI or China or the Muslims at all? Maybe we are just projecting our fears onto any suitable and available other?
But if this is the case, we can ask: Is AI a suitable other at all?
II.
We have all talked to Large Language Models by now. People get recipes, relationship and career advice, instruction and help phrasing legal letters from ChatGPT and the other AI systems. Every week, a new case surfaces where a judge or a lawyer will use AI to quote non-existent precedent.
More than half of participants in a Tidio survey would like to use (or are already using) AI to write their online dating messages to prospective partners.
More than half of survey participants (52%) would prefer to meet someone in real life than to create a perfect partner in a virtual world. (Tidio survey)
This means that around half of all participants would actually prefer to have a virtual than a real partner, or they they would like to have both.
This does not make sense. How can we be afraid of AI but also use it daily, let it shape our careers and our work, entrust it with our love life, and even (half of us!) make it into our romantic partner? Objectophilia, on the other hand, erotic love towards inanimate objects, is considered very rare in the general population, with a
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