Humanist Discussion Group

Humanist Archives: Dec. 20, 2022, 8:01 a.m. Humanist 36.311 - death of the author 2.0 continued

				
              Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 36, No. 311.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2022-12-20 02:00:42+00:00
        From: Henry Schaffer <hes@ncsu.edu>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 36.309: death of the author 2.0 continued

I'm going to reply to one small item in BB's post:
--henry
On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 3:33 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:

>
>               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 36, No. 309.
>         Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>                       Hosted by DH-Cologne
>                        www.dhhumanist.org
>                 Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>     ...
>
>     [2]    From: William Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com>
>            Subject: Re: [Humanist] 36.307: death of the author 2.0
> continued (95)
>
>
> --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
>   ...
>
> --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
>         Date: 2022-12-18 08:55:46+00:00
>         From: William Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com>
>         Subject: Re: [Humanist] 36.307: death of the author 2.0 continued
> >
> >
> --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >        ...
> Later in your note you say:
>
> > So, just asserting that looking at the source code of ChatGPT “won't mean
> anything to you," may describe your reaction to looking, but it doesn't
> describe
> everybody's reaction.
> ...
>
> That is not correct. There is of course code of the kind you are talking
> about
> and, at least I assume, the source code also has comments that make it
> easier
> for us to understand what’s happening. When that code is compiled and the
> resulting object code is executed, it is executed agains a huge database of
> text, a significant fraction of the internet. ...


> BB
>

  Machine Learning in AI isn't the same as writing source code with
comments and then compiling and executing the code. There's a major
intermediate that hides what's going on. This is the Neural Network (NN or
ANN Artificial Neural Network) which is exposed to what's being studied,
e.g. images or text, and gets "trained" by having weights assigned to
different aspects as large amounts of data get passed through. It could be
millions of images or many millions of words.

  There are no comments from the NN to explain what it does! And a lot of
work has gone into efforts to interrogate the NN to find out what it is
actually doing. So looking at the code, even though commented, that pushes
data through the NN isn't going to get far into understanding the output of
the NN.

--henry


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