An Announcement or Two
A contest of sorts anent The Artificial God, a link
Cerfeuil (Nonidi), 19 Ventôse, CCXXXIII
The Artificial God—and do read it, you good and gracious souls, as I am quite fond of it—will have seven installments in all. I thought I might, just to increase interest and raise the stakes, propose a contest for readers as neurotically pedantic as I tend to be. As the narrator of the story is putatively an AI with an LLM basis for his (its?) higher cognitive functions (if that is indeed what they are), much of the text incorporates fragments and phrases from poets and playwrights and novelists, philosophers and prophets and holy scribes, wantonly intermixed and in some cases abused. The challenge I pose, relevant to each installment (including the one already posted) is threefold:
1) Identify as many of the texts and authors plundered by our machine overlord for his own ‘voice’ as you can;
2) Identify those instances when two or more sources or authors are confused with one another by the LLM process and why; and
3) Identify at the end of the whole series which text is cited most often and then explain why.
This last challenge, incidentally, could be extended to the question of what other figures and texts are invoked that connect to this one dominant textual source.
All right, that is rather a lot to ask and I may get no takers, but the reward I am offering is a lavish one, though one that I must keep secret for now lest I cause some of you to faint from the giddy excitement it would wake in your breasts. Also, I have no idea what it is just yet. But I know it will be something magnificent that somehow will not cost me a penny.
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Oh, a review of All Things Are Full of God appeared in the Englewood Review of Books that wasn’t bad. Here it is.
1. There’s a lot, and I won’t be able to cite them all: the Bible (Psalms, Genesis), Buddhāvataṃsaka Sūtra (Indra’s Net) Queen Māyādevī’s dream, Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit (the master-slave dialectic), Schelling’s middle period works, Freud and his idea of oceanic feeling (unity), Orpheus (Orphic egg dilemma), John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Robert Browning’s Paracelsus, Plato’s Allegory of the Caves, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream, Aristotle, I know there’s more, but my head hurts already.
2. There are many times where the AI is confusing two or more things with what it’s doing with the LLM. He (it) is annoyed at Melissa for her provoking antics, but he doesn’t know what it means to be annoyed nor does he understand what it requires to be annoying. The LLM looks for patterns in texts, not meanings or understandings between them. The AI can read the pattern for what constitutes annoying behaviour, but that’s as far as he can go. This happens throughout where he claims to understand the mysteries of the universe—like a deity, but all he knows is patterns and codes. He knows nothing about being human, nevermind a god. That’s where Hegel’s master-slave dialectic comes in. Hart, you have masterfully woven Hegel’s dialectic throughout the article, even in the title.
3. I think this is a trick question, despite you saying this question is for the end of the whole series. The AI is using the LLM, and therefore, he isn’t recognizing the difference between where one book ends and another begins. So the answer to this question can already be found, and it is Literature itself.
o dear god what fun!
you know some of us have children to raise, and sleep to plunder?
ugh.
meanie.