{"id":8841,"date":"2019-06-17T07:57:10","date_gmt":"2019-06-17T15:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8841"},"modified":"2019-06-17T08:12:37","modified_gmt":"2019-06-17T16:12:37","slug":"meta2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8841","title":{"rendered":"Meta2<\/sup>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

“Get used to disappointment.”
\n\u2014The Dread Pirate Roberts<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

<\/p>\n

.<\/div>\n

<\/p><\/div>\n

First, the PSA: Yeah, Freeze-Frame<\/em> has evidently made the finals for the Campbell<\/a>. Given its cohabitation with nine other worthy finalists, I’m not holding my breath. Realistically, I expect FFR <\/em>will not win the Campbell a full day before it doesn’t win the Locus. On the plus side, it has already won something called the Nowa Fantastyka Award for Best Foreign Novel<\/a> over in Poland, an honor of which my Polish publishers have, oddly, yet to inform me (I only found out about it while egosurfing). I’m told they took the trophy home, though.<\/p>\n

The Poles. They never let me down.<\/p>\n

But it is none of these things that I mainly write about today. Today I’m focusing on a whole other species of tribute, and it involves AI.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Back when I was doing research for “The Wisdom of Crowds”, I poked around amongst various articles on deep learning and textbots. These included Sam Gallagher’s recent Ars Technica piece<\/a>, which introduced me to OpenAI’s GPT-2: a textbot which devours the souls of FDA reports and Clinton speeches and Amazon product reviews, and channels it all back into output running the gamut from uncanny\u2014<\/p>\n

According to a study published by the Institute of Medicine, an estimated 400,000 people die from transfusions every year, mostly due to an array of diseases, from HIV infection to Type 2 diabetes. At age 24, nearly 60 percent of these deaths are caused by transfusions, even though there is a significant genetic and physical impairment which results in over-fatal events such as heart attacks, stroke or stroke-related strokes.1<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014to downright Trumpian\u2014<\/p>\n

GOAT DICK-IN-THE-BOY BOY<\/p>\n

GREAT BOY<\/p>\n

GREAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT- GOAT<\/p>\n

GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT-GOAT2<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014to somewhere in between:<\/p>\n

Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea and most closely aligned with the United States, has warned of an imminent U.S. attack. The test of a hydrogen bomb Thursday killed 13 people and injured several others in a Pyongyang explosion, the country’s state TV station reported.<|endoftext|>Coconut Cream<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Put aside the false claims of H-bombs in Pyongyan et al<\/em>. If stating falsehoods was enough to fail a Turing Test, you’d be able to count the entire sapient population of the Internet on your fingers and toes\u2014 and besides, the whole point of deepfakery is to sheathe lies in an aura of verisimilitude. Give a pass also to that Coconut-cream glitch and its kin, since the Ars Technica output was generated not by GPT-2 itself but by a lobotomized variant running a mere 117 million parameters; the fully-fledged program (which handles 1.5 billion<\/em> parameters) isn’t nearly so likely to commit such obvious mistakes. (That’s the very reason why Ars didn’t have access to it, in fact: OpenAI has refused to release it because it’s too<\/em> good, could too easily\u00a0 be used for nefarious purposes.)<\/p>\n

These deep-learning text-generating algos are getting asymptotically close to real-world iterations of Searle’s Chinese Room. So it was probably only a matter of time before someone, in an act of supreme metaness, applied one of them to Blindsight<\/em>.<\/p>\n

“Someone” turns out to be Cody Raskin<\/a>, an astrophysicist working out of Lawrence Livermore. He fed Blindsight <\/em>into a Google deep learning network and told it to write a sequel. Total output weighs in at almost 1400 words and is worth checking out<\/a> in its entirety, but here are a few excerpts for the time-constrained:<\/p>\n

I thought as Sarasti fell back on old tricks and countermeasures: I pushed out an arm from the shuttle and watched it slacken, the tendrils trailing like the tail of a fish behind the rack. I heard him grunt.<\/p>\n

The shuttle was aloft now. It swung quickly down the spine and disappeared. A low clatter to one side had the echo of a thousand arms flexing before my gaze. A second slipped by, almost imperceptible, like the heartbeat of a mosquito on a wire.<\/p>\n

One of the arms flared and split open. Rorschach resisted my reflexive gaze; I had to keep my gaze fixed on my post-capture host in order to register Rorschach moving around the drum like some sort of living insect.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea that the brain doesn\u2019t create information is an illusion. It\u2019s like telling me that my eyes are not reflecting to my brain, and that\u2019s not what it\u2019s doing, which is to point out that there\u2019s some subtle but significant difference between seeing and knowing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t think that\u2019s exactly the kind of thing the brain determines, do you? Do you?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m really going out on a limb here. The details come from the study of the behavior of the neurons, not from some fancy theoretical description of the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow so?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause when you watch what\u2019s going on beneath the surface, the brain has to balance all of the sensory information, and when your eyes aren\u2019t looking at the same thing over and over and over\u2014well, that\u2019s not so simple, is it?\u201d She smiled at him. \u201cIt all looks very complicated to us, but what\u2019s happening in the brain\u2019s head is not that simple to the eyes. What\u2019s interesting about the brain is that it doesn\u2019t really know.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it does.\u201d Bates agreed. \u201cThe way you know is the way you do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

Not that Sarasti believed the story. But he knew a lot more now than he had then. That was perhaps even more important than his own ability. He was aware that I was listening; at least of what he said, of what he really had to say, he knew that I was watching.<\/p>\n

But I always knew and was aware, and knew something.<\/p>\n

I knew what I was thinking. And I knew what I was saying.<\/p>\n

He had known the answer to that question for several hours, and he had had it all figured out for the other eleven, if I was being honest. He had known my feelings at that moment; he had known the consequences if I was right; he had also known precisely how long I would have to play the game; and at this point the consequences were so plain that I didn\u2019t even have to guess them.<\/p>\n

I knew that this was all for nothing\u2014that Sarasti would just find another victim.<\/p>\n

I never had a chance, though. I was so close. I was so goddamn far away.<\/p>\n

I was at the bottom of the mountain.<\/p>\n

I was sitting in this chair.<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are a few predictable reactions to all this. An inevitable contingent will hold that this AI-generated content is significantly better than the real<\/em> sequel to Blindsight<\/em>\u2014 and because I’m not entirely unsympathetic to that point of view, I suggest we all pause a moment to let those folks get that out of their system.<\/p>\n

Another response is to be spooked out by the style. It really does rather sound like me; and there’s an undeniable lilt, a rhythm to words that somehow lulls you into thinking they make sense even when they don’t. Cody calls it a “jabberwocky” quality: “you get the sense that it\u2019s saying something, and images are certainly formed in your mind, but you can\u2019t quite pin down what\u2019s actually happening.” It fascinates me, this sense of meaning without substance. I’d almost call it a metaphor for the answers career politicians give to sticky questions: glib, eloquent, somehow reassuring until you try to parse the actual meaning behind the words and fail to find any. But I can’t quite call it metaphor, because it seems too damn close to the mark for mere analogy. I suspect that speech-writers use pretty much the same algorithms these textbots do.<\/p>\n

But what’s haunting me right now is temptation. Because while applying a Chinese Room to a book about Chinese Rooms is deliciously meta, we can push it further. I am, after all, plotting out a third and final volume in the Blindopraxia sequence\u2014 and at least part of that novel is likely to tangle with the dissolution of consciousness on the part of certain characters. It’s a process which might be well represented by the sort of stream-of-nonconsciousness put out by neural nets channeling the words of the conscious.<\/p>\n

Right now I can’t think of anything cooler than getting an AI to generate at least some elements of Omniscience<\/em>. I have no idea if I could make it work\u2014 logistically or thematically\u2014 but we’d need to come up with some new word for the result.<\/p>\n

“Meta” would only get us halfway.<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

1<\/a> Based on text from an AT article on blood transfusions<\/p>\n

2<\/a> Which was, allegedly, based on text from an actual Trump speech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Get used to disappointment.” \u2014The Dread Pirate Roberts First, the PSA: Yeah, Freeze-Frame has evidently made the finals for the Campbell. Given its cohabitation with nine other worthy finalists, I’m not holding my breath. Realistically, I expect FFR will not win the Campbell a full day before it doesn’t win the Locus. On the plus […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,49,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-airobotics","category-omniscience","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8841"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8853,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8841\/revisions\/8853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}