[massung]

> Any app that ever claimed to tell you what "Hemingway would say about this blog post" would evidently be lying — it'd be giving you what that specific AI model generates in response to such a prompt.

First, 100% agreed.

That said, I found myself pondering Star Trek: TNG episodes with the holodeck, and recreations of individuals (e.g. Einstein, Freud). In those episodes - as a viewer - it really never occurred to me (at 15 years old) that this was just a computer's random guess as to how those personages from history would act and what they would say.

But then there was the episode where Geordi had to the computer recreate someone real from their personal logs to help solve a problem (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708682/). In a later episode you find out just how very wrong the computer/AI's representation of that person really was, because it was playing off Geordi, just like an LLM's "you're absolutely right!" etc. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708720/).

This is a long-winded way of saying...

1. It's crazy to me how prescient those episodes were.

2. At the same time, the representation of the historical figures never bothered me in those contexts. And I wonder if it should bother me in this (LLM) context either? Maybe it's because I knew - and I believed the characters knew - it was 100% fake? Maybe some other reason?

Anyway, your comment made me think of this. ;-)

[socalgal2]

I wonder if there's a difference between "asking for critique" and "acting the part". I generally have no problem and or get fooled, watching a movie about a famous person, even though it's not actually that person. Rami Malek is not Freddie Mercury, Timothée Chalamet is not Bob Dylan. But we (or at least I) watch them and am to some degree, fooled / by into their depiction that I'm actually seeing the real person. I have to remind myself the actor's version is not the actual person.

It feels easier to portray famous characters how we'd think they'd act but seems harder how we'd expect them to critique something. I don't know of those are just points on a spectrum from easy to hard, or if one requires a level deeper than the other.

[Doxin]

I think the core difference there is that the holodeck character feels like a character that is playing a person (because it is of course) whereas the LLM feels more like someone lying to you about who they are.

When watching a play the actor pretends to be a specific character, and crucially the audience pretends to believe them. If a LLM plays a character it's very tempting for the audience to actually believe them. That turns it from a play into a lie.

[einpoklum]

In that context, the computer was solving for a faithful representation. In our case, the computer is solving for most likely sequence of words to appear in conversations with a similar context - which not remotely the same thing.

[ben_w]

> In that context, the computer was solving for a faithful representation.

Was it, though?

They had Newton (died 1727) playing playing poker (invented at some point during the early 19th century), repeating the myth that the apple fell on his head and then reacting insulted when Data says "that story is generally considered to be apocryphal".

More generally:

In TNG, Holo-Moriarty claimed to be sentient and to have experienced time while switched off despite Barclay saying that wasn't possible, much like LLMs sometimes write of experiencing being bored and lonely between chat sessions despite that not being possible given how they work.

In DS9, there was a holo-village made out of grief, and when it got switched off to reveal the one real person who had made it, while the main cast treated all the holograms as people, that creator himself didn't. Vic Fontaine was ambiguous, being a hologram who knew he was a hologram but still preferring to keep his (fake) world to its own rules and eventually kicking Nog out of the fake world when it was becoming clear Nog was getting too swept up in the fantasy.

In Voyager, the Doctor was again ambiguously person and/or program, both fighting for his moral rights as an author in a lower-stakes echo of TNG's Measure of a Man, and also Janeway being unsure if he was stuck in a loop or making progress with grief about the death of Ensign Never-Before-Mentioned-In-This-Show.