This started as a summary of a random essay Robert Epstein (fuck, that’s an unfortunate surname) cooked up back in 2016, and evolved into a diatribe about how the AI bubble affects how we think of human cognition.

This is probably a bit outside awful’s wheelhouse, but hey, this is MoreWrite.

The TL;DR

The general article concerns two major metaphors for human intelligence:

  • The information processing (IP) metaphor, which views the brain as some form of computer (implicitly a classical one, though you could probably cram a quantum computer into that metaphor too)
  • The anti-representational metaphor, which views the brain as a living organism, which constantly changes in response to experiences and stimuli, and which contains jack shit in the way of any computer-like components (memory, processors, algorithms, etcetera)

Epstein’s general view is, if the title didn’t tip you off, firmly on the anti-rep metaphor’s side, dismissing IP as “not even slightly valid” and openly arguing for dumping it straight into the dustbin of history.

His main major piece of evidence for this is a basic experiment, where he has a student draw two images of dollar bills - one from memory, and one with a real dollar bill as reference - and compare the two.

Unsurprisingly, the image made with a reference blows the image from memory out of the water every time, which Epstein uses to argue against any notion of the image of a dollar bill (or anything else, for that matter) being stored in one’s brain like data in a hard drive.

Instead, he argues that the student making the image had re-experienced seeing the bill when drawing it from memory, with their ability to do so having come because their brain had changed at the sight of many a dollar bill up to this point to enable them to do it.

Another piece of evidence he brings up is a 1995 paper from Science by Michael McBeath regarding baseballers catching fly balls. Where the IP metaphor reportedly suggests the player roughly calculates the ball’s flight path with estimates of several variables (“the force of the impact, the angle of the trajectory, that kind of thing”), the anti-rep metaphor (given by McBeath) simply suggests the player catches them by moving in a manner which keeps the ball, home plate and the surroundings in a constant visual relationship with each other.

The final piece I could glean from this is a report in Scientific American about the Human Brain Project (HBP), a $1.3 billion project launched by the EU in 2013, made with the goal of simulating the entire human brain on a supercomputer. Said project went on to become a “brain wreck” less than two years in (and eight years before its 2023 deadline) - a “brain wreck” Epstein implicitly blames on the whole thing being guided by the IP metaphor.

Said “brain wreck” is a good place to cap this section off - the essay is something I recommend reading for yourself (even if I do feel its arguments aren’t particularly strong), and its not really the main focus of this little ramblefest. Anyways, onto my personal thoughts.

Some Personal Thoughts

Personally, I suspect the AI bubble’s made the public a lot less receptive to the IP metaphor these days, for a few reasons:

  1. Articial Idiocy

The entire bubble was sold as a path to computers with human-like, if not godlike intelligence - artificial thinkers smarter than the best human geniuses, art generators better than the best human virtuosos, et cetera. Hell, the AIs at the centre of this bubble are running on neural networks, whose functioning is based on our current understanding of how the brain works. [Missed this incomplete sensence first time around :P]

What we instead got was Google telling us to eat rocks and put glue in pizza, chatbots hallucinating everything under the fucking sun, and art generators drowning the entire fucking internet in pure unfiltered slop, identifiable in the uniquely AI-like errors it makes. And all whilst burning through truly unholy amounts of power and receiving frankly embarrassing levels of hype in the process.

(Quick sidenote: Even a local model running on some rando’s GPU is a power-hog compared to what its trying to imitate - digging around online indicates your brain uses only 20 watts of power to do what it does.)

With the parade of artificial stupidity the bubble’s given us, I wouldn’t fault anyone for coming to believe the brain isn’t like a computer at all.

  1. Inhuman Learning

Additionally, AI bros have repeatedly and incessantly claimed that AIs are creative and that they learn like humans, usually in response to complaints about the Biblical amounts of art stolen for AI datasets.

Said claims are, of course, flat-out bullshit - last I checked, human artists only need a few references to actually produce something good and original, whilst your average LLM will produce nothing but slop no matter how many terabytes upon terabytes of data you throw at its dataset.

This all arguably falls under the “Artificial Idiocy” heading, but it felt necessary to point out - these things lack the creativity or learning capabilities of humans, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for taking that to mean that brains are uniquely unlike computers.

  1. Eau de Tech Asshole

Given how much public resentment the AI bubble has built towards the tech industry (which I covered in my previous post), my gut instinct’s telling me that the IP metaphor is also starting to be viewed in a harsher, more “tech asshole-ish” light - not just merely a reductive/incorrect view on human cognition, but as a sign you put tech over human lives, or don’t see other people as human.

Of course, AI providing a general parade of the absolute worst scumbaggery we know (with Mira Murati being an anti-artist scumbag and Sam Altman being a general creep as the biggest examples) is probably helping that fact, alongside all the active attempts by AI bros to mimic real artists (exhibit A, exhibit B).

  • David GerardA
    link
    64 months ago

    What do you mean here by “creativity”?

      • @zogwarg
        link
        9
        edit-2
        4 months ago
        Of course! Who needs a proper definition for a measured quantity before designing an experiment?
        Of course! The limited scope of grading papers by English teachers, is the best possible proxy metric.
        Of course! Intent and agency aren't really important, after all they aren't fully scrutable from the words on a page, form is obviously the only thing that counts.
        
      • @Amoeba_Girl
        link
        7
        edit-2
        4 months ago

        as long as you could design a reasonable experiment to measure it in a double blind study

        no

        Creativity is an inner mental process, not a content creation machine. The output is irrelevant.

          • @swlabr
            link
            9
            edit-2
            4 months ago

            Yeah an inner mental process that has been replicated - well to a (very) limited degree.

            Given that you refuse to provide a definition of creativity, this is not something that you (specifically you, not the generic) are allowed to believe.

            My argument is that this is exactly what is so offensive to people.

            Your argument is wrong. People who are “offended” by AI don’t believe that AI is doing anything that humans are doing beyond formulaic bullshit and plagiarism.

            The painful realization or disillusionment that one of the things we held most special about being human, turns out is not so special after all.

            If you or a loved one has experienced said painful disillusionment, my advice would be to go outside, touch grass, i.e. experience what it means to be human, because your conception of such is lacking.

            I never would have predicted that before GPT-3. I look at movies or stories with a character that is an artistic archetype differently now.

            You never saw a robot in fiction, specifically the many robots that are characterised to be all but human? The ones designed to be mirrors to humanity so that we can gain perspective on exactly what makes us human? Roy Batty? Data? Bender Bending Rodriguez?

            Meat good! Silicon bad!

            They label those packets specifically “do not eat”, I guess you had to learn the hard way.

          • @selfMA
            link
            84 months ago

            so your posts are all utterly wrong but they’re also not interesting enough to make fun of, so I’m just gonna make them and you disappear

            • @swlabr
              link
              84 months ago

              also not interesting enough to make fun of

              Oof, I’m out here catching strays from @self

              • @selfMA
                link
                74 months ago

                my bad! you squeezed some very good sneers out of a post I swear I dozed off in the middle of reading. I should’ve known somebody was cooking up a post — I’ll wait a bit longer next time.

                • @swlabr
                  link
                  84 months ago

                  no no, please, do not modify your stellar moderation policy. It’s fine. There’s no need to platform idiocy for the sake of sneers (says the guy that quoted the deleted comment in full)

            • David GerardA
              link
              54 months ago

              the rest of their posts are a trip (and not a great one)

              • @selfMA
                link
                74 months ago

                ah, this isn’t their first ride on the Bad Takes Express