Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 4.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2025-05-08 06:51:41+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: repetition vs intelligence

This is about the current state and probable trajectory of artificial
intelligence, I'd hope without promotional futurism. (Prominence of the
future tense in writings about AI I find very interesting indeed, but
here it is, at least for me, only a distraction.)

My question is this: to what extent, in what ways, do the strategies of
the so-called Large Language Models produce results that only echo back
to us current linguistic behaviour (parole), in effect saying nothing
new, however useful, however news to the questioner? The current term
for the misbehaviour of LLMs when they make things up seems to be
'hallucination'; far more accurate would be 'fabrication'.
Hallucinations are much more interesting, but used of LLMs lets them off
the hook.

We could say, as a friend of mine did, that saying something new in my
sense, i.e. being truly creative, is exceedingly rare. But isn't that
exactly what we want of intelligence? What would the artificial kind
have to do to qualify? Or do we have examples, are they being noticed
and investigated?

Enough for now, I trust. Comments eagerly welcomed!

Best,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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