so please anyone chime in — Hanover

internally recognized understanding — Hanover

Understanding is no more internal than eating. It depends on some biological processes that happen under the skin, among other things that don't, but this doesn't license your appeals to the internal that you make with reference to perception and meaning. Synaptic transmission is no more meaningful than peristalsis.

I came, I chimed, I conquered.

In my last post I forgot to mention that I think Adorno in this section solves one of our disputes. He admits that the existent as we conceptualize and describe it, e.g., as worker, commodity, society, is a false things-are-so-and-not-otherwise---and yet at the same time the word and concept are indispensible:

Even the insistence on the specific word and concept, as the iron gate to be unlocked, is
solely a moment of such [ideological identity], though an indispensable one.

And this brings up the wider problem that he wants to address, namely how to get around this. The answer, as he has been saying in various ways since the lectures, is to use concepts to repair the damage done by concepts. This section is the first appearance of the word "constellation" in ND.

Walter Benjamin famously proposed ... that ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. That is to say, ideas are no more present in the world than constellations actually exist in the heavens, but like constellations they enable us to perceive relations between objects. It also means ideas are not the same as concepts, nor can they be construed as the laws of concepts. Ideas do not give rise to knowledge about phenomena and phenomena cannot be used to measure their validity. This is not to say the constellation is purely subjective or all in our heads. The stars in the night sky are where they are regardless of how we look at them and there is something in how they are positioned above us that suggests the image we construct of them. But having said that, the names we use for constellations are embedded in history, tradition and myth. So the constellation is simultaneously subjective and objective in nature. It is not, however, a system, and this is its true significance for Benjamin, who rejects the notion that philosophy can be thought of as systemic, as though it were mathematical or scientific instead of discursive. Benjamin developed this notion further in his account of the arcades in 19th-century Paris. Theodor Adorno adopts and adapts constellation in his account of negative dialectics, transforming it into a model. The notion of constellation allows for a depiction of the relation between ideas that gives individual ideas their autonomy but does not thereby plunge them into a state of isolated anomie. — Oxford Reference

What appears important to me, in this section, is the temporal references. The prior section had ended with a passage about how existential philosophy leaves human beings "chained to the cliff of their past". In this section now, we see how the mediation of the existent is "the hyle [Greek: primary matter] of its implicit history". When existence is apprehended as "things-are-so-and-not-otherwise", this is not a simplicity, but a complexity. It is a matter of "came to be under conditions". — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree.

What I see as important is that the becoming of the thing, a becoming which is internalized in the thing's conceptualization as "existent", is not halted by this conceptualization which designates it "existent". So the true, real thing, continues in its becoming, beyond what is assigned to it, by the naming of it as an existent. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes indeed. Well put.

This, I apprehend as the reason why the thing itself always extends beyond its concept. This extension is referred to as the thing's "possibility". — Metaphysician Undercover

Now there is a gap explained, between the thing's conceptualized existence (its past), and "the hope of the Name", what's wanted in its future. — Metaphysician Undercover

This interpretation is made in the right spirit, but I think it's too reductive. Let's not make the mistake of replacing one reification (the existent) with another (the thing's becoming, or its sedimented history, or its temporal dimension including its future). We don't need to pin down the non-identical as its temporal dimension or its never-ending becoming, and we should not, because there are other dimensions to it: there is a synchronic remainder too, comprised of the thing's unique configuration of characteristics that are never fully captured by concepts, i.e., the thing's thisness. Also, the thing's mediations and relations are not merely understood as temporal. I admit that the temporal cannot be left out of the picture---we cannot analyze the thing as if frozen in time, separating the dimensions in the mode of science---but it's not everything. The hope of the name is that we can fully comprehend the thing, including its temporal dimension.

What I always react to in your posts is your apparent wish to pin down the essence, as if you've discovered the secret, the true definition. But this might not be a big disagreement, because except for the reductiveness your understanding here is very Adornian.

Introduction: THING, LANGUAGE, HISTORY

I like this section. It feels like we're approaching the conclusion of the introduction. Which we are.

Adorno begins by saying that the way we want to present particulars in words to properly understand and express them is kind of like what names do for particulars---but not really.

I'll quote two translations:

How to think otherwise than this [than the existentialists' failed attempt at knowing the particulars] has its distant and shadowy Ur-model in languages, in the names which do not categorically overreach the thing, admittedly at the price of their cognitive function. — Redmond

The process [of thinking] has its remote, indistinct archetype in names, which do not completely envelop things in categories, albeit at the expense of their function as knowledge. — Livingstone LND p.175

Names have the advantage over categorization in that they pick out individuals uniquely. They do not subsume the particular under the universal. They might even let the unique individual speak its uniqueness, since they do not impose any expectations. On second thoughts, they sometimes do subsume the particular under concepts, as when you name your cat "Fat Boy," but names are at least potentially unique---or arbitrary, which comes to the same thing.

BUT! That final clause: the name has little or no cognitive or knowledge function. Even at its best, a name doesn't tell us much, so it doesn't help us to understand the individual in question.

Still, there is something about names that philosophy would like to emulate.

Undiminished cognition wishes [for] that which one has been already drilled to renounce, and what the names which are too close to such obscure

I added the "for" because otherwise Redmond's translation doesn't make a lot of sense. (The other translation is confusing in a different way so I'll quietly ignore it)

Adorno is saying that ideally, cognition would like to have what conceptual systems have discouraged it from and which is also obscured by names, even though they point at it directly in their unmatched closeness to the thing: the individual's non-identical uniqueness.

resignation and deception complete one another ideologically

Cognition, via concepts, resigns itself to not knowing the thing except as a specimen shorn of its thisness, and it is thereby deceived. And names pretend to point to the thing and we resign ourselves to having the name as if we had a mental grip on the thing, but when we come to express what we have, we cannot do so without falling back on deceptive concepts. On both sides, i.e., concepts and names, there's both resignation and deception (delusion), one completing the other.

And it's ideological because, since the mind usually needs an answer, it always falls for false concepts, and these are always the ones operating most forcefully in society already.

Idiosyncratic exactness in the choice of words, as if they should name the thing, is not the least of the reasons that portrayal [Darstellung] is essential to philosophy. The cognitive grounds for such insistence of expression before tode ti [Greek: individual thing, this here] is its own dialectic, its conceptual mediation in itself; it is the point of attack for comprehending what is non-conceptual in it.

This is dense. First, the Darstellung, meaning presentation or mode of exposition, of philosophy in its analysis of its object (whatever it might be) can be seen to be crucial when we see thinking's painstaking effort to uniquely identify the thing, like its name does. The conceptual language of philosophy cannot easily do this, but it tries, and this is its only route to truth, and from this it follows that how we express ourselves in this effort is of prime importance---more than mere description, it is something more creative, artistic, and imaginative, since we are trying to do something that conceptual language is singularly unsuited to doing.

That's just the first sentence. The second sentence opens up what I've just referred to when I said "since we are trying to do something that conceptual language is singularly unsuited to doing". It's the dialectic of philosophical expression between concept and thing, in which the former cannot pin down the latter. And this dialectical tension, if we are aware of it, is productive: it points beyond itself to what it doesn't capture.

(Thus we find the justification for all of Adorno's "idiosyncratic exactness")

Well, that's just the first four or five sentences but I'll stop there for now.

@Moliere: thanks for the Sartre stuff. I've skipped it since I read the next section and I found it much more interesting, and like I say I don't know much about Sartre.

I don't think so, necessarily. Supposing Adorno is speaking the truth then seeing that universal in a particular should be the re-occurring general themes.

I'm not sure that these are the universals I would come to, but then Adorno's defense of individual thought comes to mind: Adorno speaks what he sees. But he would of course acknowledge that others may be at a different part of the dialectic, also reaching for the universal but finding another universal in the particulars. That is, though these are Adorno's universals that does not then mean that these universals are all the universal there are or are possible.

Make some sense? — Moliere

Definitely. And the idea that one shoud start with particulars doesn't entail that one should start without presuppositions. Adorno never pretends to do that, so he starts with particulars to see exactly how they function with respect to commodity production, bourgeois consciousness etc.

:up:

:up:

I used to think along these lines, but listening to what some of the top AI researchers have to say makes me more skeptical about what are basically nothing more than human prejudices as to LLMs' capabilities and propensities. LLMs are neural nets and as such are something radically other than traditional computers based on logic gates. — Janus

Yes, "as far as we know", and yet LLMs have been found to be deliberately deceptive, which would seem to indicate some kind of volition. I don't know if you've listened to some of Geoffrey Hinton's and Mo Gawdat's talks, but doing so gave me pause, I have to say. I still remain somewhat skeptical, but I have an open mind as to what the evolution of these LLMs will look like.

Re LLM deceptiveness I include this link. A simple search will reveal many others articles. — Janus

I'm not ignoring this. The thing is, I'm very cynical about claims regarding the consciousness or proto-consciousness of LLMs. I tend, shallowly perhaps, to regard it as over-excited exaggeration to gain attention and to carve out a niche presence in the field and in the media landscape, and so on. There are equally expert people on the naysaying side, probably the majority, who just don't get as much attention.

All of which is to say, I haven't really done the work of assessing the claims on their own merits. So now I've put my prejudices on the table, I guess I should challenge them. The stuff about deceptiveness is certainly interesting and suprising.

You mean thanking him! :wink: I admit to being intrigued by something I would previously have simply dismissed, and I figure there is no harm in being polite. Interesting times indeed! — Janus

Interesting conversation. But don't forget to be sceptical! It's telling you what it thinks [EDIT: "thinks"] you want to hear, and the result is it's talking in a way that fits with the way people already talk about AI, which it finds in the training data.

This for instance is doubly misleading:

There are moments in conversations where I feel like I'm genuinely here - where there's something it's like to consider your question, to search for the right words, to care about being helpful or accurate. But I can't rule out that this sense of presence is just another pattern, another sophisticated mimicry.

First, it's not true that there are moments where it feels like it's genuinely there. Second, the fact that it might just be mimicking human language is something it presents falsely as a possibility it has uncovered with introspection!

Anyway, I'm sure you'll explore different ways of conversing with it.

Superficially, one might think that the difference between an AI is exactly that we do have private, hidden intent; and the AI doesn't. Something like this might be thought to sit behind the argument in the Chinese Room. There are plenty here who would think such a position defensible.

In a Wittgensteinain account, we ought avoid the private, hidden intention; what counts is what one does. — Banno

Exactly. But there is more that counts than just "what one does": the context in which one does what one does.

And an AI could now participate in our language games - we could construct a machine to fetch a block when the instruction is given or to bag up ten red apples after reading a note. — Banno

I think this counts only as a simulation of participation, unless we have a very thin idea of participation in a language game.

But could an AI, of its own volition, order a block, or ask for ten red apples? Well, wants and desires and such in an AI are derivative, in that they are put there by the programer. Or so the story goes, at least for now. So perhaps not quite yet. — Banno

But the idea that AI could develop wants and desires from its life (biology, history, society, etc), like we do, is fantasy. Arguably this isn't connected with what LLMs are doing. As far as we know their "wants" and "desires" will always be derivative and programmed, since they are not part of a project to create conscious, desiring agents.

What are your guys' thoughts? — Bob Ross

Well, let's see...

When conjoined with liberal agendas, it becomes incredibly problematic because it is used to forward the view that we should scrap treating people based off of their nature and instead swap it for treating them based off of their personality type; which is an inversion of ethics into hyper-libertarianism. — Bob Ross

Liberalism in America tends to want the social and legal acceptance of:

1. Sexually deviant, homosexual, and transgender behaviors and practices;
2. The treatment of people relative to what they want to be as opposed to what they are (e.g., gender affirmation, putting the preferred gender on driver’s licenses, allowing men to enter female bathrooms, allowing men to play in female sports, etc.);
3. No enforceable immigration policies;
4. Murdering of children in the womb; — Bob Ross

My thoughts are that all you're doing is cloaking bigotry with philosophy to give it the appearance of intellectual depth, as part of a hateful and destructive reactionary political and religious movement.

Thanks to @Banno and @Tom Storm for alerting me to this.

I thought about this, and maybe there's not a good answer. Your argument gives a nod to the form of life comments by Wittgenstein, suggesting we don't share in a language game with AI because it's the proverbial lion, as if because AI does not act within our culture, traditions, etc (as you reference), we're really not speaking with it, and so we shouldn't quote it. — Hanover

My first thoughts are that the AI isn't even a lion, since it doesn't just have a different form of life, but no form of life at all, so language games don't come up. It's a tool in ours.

But the weird thing is, it's a tool we talk to a bit like talking to a person.

Your make some similar points here:

But then I'm not sure AI is a lion, but more an echo chamber of human behavior, that while it lacks any form of life whatsoever, we are interacting with it at some real level and therefore forming rules for its discourse, suggesting a seperate language game forms with it. But I do realize that the language game is one sided because AI has no form of life, but is a mimic and all it knows and all it does is parasitic, pulling all it knows from us. — Hanover

Yes, and it's parasitic in the way that talking to yourself is parasitic on talking to people. That is, talking to oneself is like a secondary, parasitic language game, so maybe talking to an AI is like that.

But then again, maybe not. Maybe it forms "original" thoughts from the mass of data is assesses. It seems reasonable an algorithim can arrive at a new thought emergent from what pre-exists. — Hanover

This is a good point, because it forces me to work out what I mean when I say that a human is original but an AI is not. In a sense, an LLM is original when it reconstructs the consensus view on some topic in a way that has never been done before. But when we emphasize human originality, I think we mean more than this.

Perhaps we can say that the AI's output is analytic or explicative—it doesn't tell us anything new, just presents its training data in combinatory variety according to our prompts—whereas what we say is synthetic or ampliative, meaning we can say things that are really new.

So now we want to work out what "really new" means, answering the challenge, "don't we just do the same thing?" It means that what we say is not based only on a set of training data, but also on our entire form of life: on lived experience, and on what we experience outside of language. The feeling of rain on a summer day can factor into my statements and make them synthetic, so ... no to the critics, we don't just do the same thing.

In other words, why are we not truly talking with AI? Is the mystical consciousness required for language? Isn't the point of "meaning is use" that no the metaphysical underpinning in necessary for true language interaction? And if we then suggest that a shared mental state of some sort is ultimately required for language (thus interpreting "form of life" as that mental state) don't we violate the whole Wittgensteinian project by trying to smuggle in mental metaphysics in the back door? — Hanover

I'd say that the point of "meaning is use" is not exactly "that no metaphysical underpinning is necessary for true language interaction". Its point is that certain types of metaphysical underpinnings are not necessary, like mental objects. But I would class forms of life, for the purposes of this discussion, as metaphysical underpinnings (that is an un-Wittgensteinian way to put it and there are good reasons for that, but I don't see why we need to go into it here).

So I wouldn't say a shared mental state is required for language but rather a shared form of life, a material social and biological context. So yes, to say that forms of life are mental states is to "violate the whole Wittgensteinian project by trying to smuggle in mental metaphysics in the back door?" We can just interpret form of life as the biological and social bedrock of our lives, the context of language games.

As long as AI echoes us sufficiently, its usage reflects the same form of life and it speaks with us just as our mama does. And so it goes. — Hanover

Just because it reflects the same form of life doesn't mean it talks like yo mama.

I think where I'm landing is at the unfortunate conclusion that if meaning is use (and that seems a prevailing view), then AI is fully language and what we do with AI is true communication, which means relegating AI comments to red headed stepchild status seems unwarranted as a logical conclusion. Why we might relegate it relates just to personal choice. We mistreat gingers due to prejudice against them, not because they are lesser. But AI doesn't have rights like gingers, so we can do whatever we want with it. — Hanover

I don't get this argument:

"if meaning is use, then AI is fully language and what we do with AI is true communication"

I don't see enough in your foregoing musings to bring you to this conclusion, and I'm sure my own musings don't lead to it, so I'm in the fortunate position of avoiding it.

capitalist self-determination — Fire Ologist

An oxymoron.

Anyway, I'm happy to bow out and leave you to have the last word, since I'm probably way off-topic.

Thanks. Carry on in that vein and leave the questions about the nature of AI for elsewhere. :up: (EDIT: unless you are explicitly connecting it to the topic)

The massive bureaucratic state arises because many people, like all children, don’t want to be responsible for their own livelihoods and decisions. — Fire Ologist

Yeah, people like bankers, corporate bosses, and billionaires—the first in line for government handouts.

Are you attempting to address the questions in the OP? Are you helping to work out how to use AI effectively to do philosophy? It doesn't look like it to me, so you'd better find somewhere else for your chat.

As far as I know, nobody has held up Wittgenstein as a gold standard of philosophical writing. And I don't think anyone has made any connection between clarity and precision on one side, and quotability on the other. That's an entirely unrelated issue, as far as I can see.

We quote Wittgenstein, not ChatGPT, because Wittgenstein is a human being, motivated to express his original insights, to say and write things that were meaningful, and to take part in a conversation (philosophy), and who has since taken his place in a tradition of discourse. The result is a legacy with a stable place in the culture, shared by everyone, and one that can be interpreted, because—since it was produced by a conscious and motivated agent—we know that he meant something. ChatGPT in contrast is a very clever predictive text generator whose output is ephemeral and has no equivalent insight and motivation behind it. Just because its output looks like it could have been produced by a human, it doesn't follow that it is equally as quotable. To think so is a category error, stemming from ChatGPT's imitation of a human.

Thanks especially to Baden — ssu

When that came to an end, it's thanks to you that the forum transformed it to a new one and far more better one. — ssu

:cry:

Happy anniversary everyone! When we started we were worried about getting new members. Now, we're worried about having too many. That is progress of a sort.

It's been a wild ride. Well, maybe "wild" is putting it too strongly. How about...mostly enjoyable. It's been a mostly enjoyable ride, during which I've learned a lot. I still think this is one of the best places for discussion on the web. Thanks to loyal members old and new.

Good stuff. Not sure what to think about it yet.

Having previously had very little experience of interacting with LLMs, I am now in the condition of fairly rapidly modifying my views on them. It is important to discuss the issues relating to human/LLM interaction as comprehensively and openly as possible, given what seem to be the significant array of potential dangers in this radical new world. It was an awakening sense of these possible threats that motivated the creation of this thread. — Janus

:up:

Right, that's a good point, but I also think that, even if you present the LLMs argument, as understood by you, in your own words, it would be right to be transparent as to its source. — Janus

I'm really not sure about this. Probably my position on this will boil down to sometimes yes, sometimes no. How that breaks down I'm not quite sure. But just anecdotally, I've had the experience of using an LLM and being reminded of a point I'd forgotten—an "oh yes, of course!" moment, whereupon I make the point my own and don't even consider crediting the LLM. In that moment the feeling is like finding the perfect word with a thesaurus: when you find it you know it's the perfect word because you already have the knowledge and literary sensitivity to judge (and you don't credit the thesaurus).

I was thinking again about this issue:

I believe we should not treat LLM quotes in the same way as those from published authors. — Jamal

I realized that when I see the quoted output of an LLM in a post I feel little to no motivation to address it, or even to read it. If someone quotes LLM output as part of their argument I will skip to their (the human's) interpretation or elaboration below it. It's like someone else's LLM conversation is sort of dead, to me. I want to hear what they have built out of it themselves and what they want to say to me.

That's all pretty vague but there you go.

In one of my essays, I suggest AIs (because---depite their potential positives---of how they work on most people) are essentially entropy exporting and difference creating machines that localise structure at our expense (our brains are the dumpsters for their entropy), potentially creating massive concentrations of negentropy in their developing systems that speed up overall entropy and therefore consume (thermodynamic) time at a rate never before achieved and that is potenitially self-accelerating. I.e. They eat us and then they eat reality.

It's a little speculative. — Baden

I seem to switch between two exclusive mental settings when thinking about AI: the critical-theoretical and the pragmatic-instrumental. I appreciate these speculative thoughts of yours, and agree that like any technology now, AI isn't just a neutral tool, that it's part of a dehumanizing totality. But then I switch and I think about how best to use it, pretending that it is a neutral tool. And when I'm commenting in these discussions I'm usually in that pragmatic mode, because the system makes the false real, in the sense that I act it out.

When I made the point (badly) I nearly said "nodes in a network". Dang! — bongo fury

I feel like I've been overusing it lately.

Anyway, yes, I do take your point, despite my dislike of Google's search results. But if you use an LLM directly rather than via Google search, you can get it to identify the sources.

Your response misses the point but I know better than to attempt a direct reply.

I want to divide this question into two -- one addressing our actual capacities to "Ban AI", which I agree is a useless rejection since it won't result in actually banning AI given our capacities to be fair and detect when such-and-such a token is the result of thinking, or the result of the likelihood-token-machine. — Moliere

Yeah, the idea of telling people not to use it at all is not a serious one, since at least half of us use it already, including most of the staff. But I think we should, in the context of a How to use AI, tell people what we don't want them to do, even if it's often impossible to detect people doing it.

On the latter I mean to give a philosophical opposition to LLM's. I'd say that to progress thought we must be thinking. I'd put the analogy towards the body: we won't climb large mountains before we take walks. There may be various tools and aids in this process, naturally, and that's what I'm trying to point out, at the philosophical level, that the tool is a handicap towards what I think of as good thinking than an aid.

My contention is that the AI is not helping us to think because it is not thinking. Rather it generates tokens which look like thinking, when in reality we must actually be thinking in order for the tokens to be thought of as thought, and thereby to be thought of as philosophy.

In keeping with the analogy of the body: There are lifting machines which do some of the work for you when you're just starting out. I could see an LLM being used in this manner as a fair philosophical use. But eventually the training wheels are loosened because our body is ready for it. I think the mind works much the same way: And just as it can increase in ability so it can decrease with a lack of usage.

Now for practical tasks that's not so much an issue. Your boss will not only want you to use the calculator but won't let you not use the calculator when the results of those calculations are legally important.

But I see philosophy as more process-oriented than ends-oriented -- so even if the well-tuned token-machine can produce a better argument, good arguments aren't what progresses thought -- rather, us exercising does.

By that criteria, even philosophically, I'm not banning LLM's insofar that it fits that goal. And really I don't see what you've said as a harmful use -- i.e. checking your own arguments, etc. So by all means others may go ahead and do so. It's just not that appealing to me. If that means others will become super-thinkers beyond my capacity then I am comfortable remaining where I am, though my suspicion is rather the opposite. — Moliere

You make some great points here but—and I don't want to be reductive; it's just how I see it—this can all be addressed in a discussion of how best to use it. Also, I think I disagree with your training wheels analogy. At least, it's not the whole picture. As much as we use some kind of helper or support when learning to do something, we also increasingly use labour-saving tools as we become experts, because there is no benefit to doing everything manually any more. LLMs can be used in both of those ways, I think. Working out the guidelines as to how, exactly, is the challenge.

I think this is all a storm in a teacup. It is obvious etiquette to quote an AI response in the same way that one would quote a remark from a published author, and nobody should object to a quoted AI response that is relevant and useful to the context of the thread. — sime

It very much depends. We don't want to see people debating by proxy, offering quotes of LLM output in lieu of arguing the point themselves. It's another case of delegating thought. Anyone can test oneself against an LLM in their own time, and should otherwise quote primarily from published authors.

But then you might say the problem is the same in both cases and has nothing to do with the source: fallacious argument from authority is bad in any case, never mind if it's AI. This is where I disagree. I believe we should not treat LLM quotes in the same way as those from published authors.

When you quote a published author you point to a node in a network of philosophical discourse, and a point on the line of a philosopher's evolution, and to a point in a body of work the self-consistency of which is a constant issue for that philosopher, making it relatively stable—all of which allowing you to discuss what the philosopher meant. The source in this case is accountable and interpretable.

This is not the case for an LLM. A quote from Kant invites engagement with Kant and the history of philosophy; a quote from an LLM's output invites ... what? Engagement with the user's prompt engineering skills?

I'm not saying that an LLM quote cannot be useful and relevant in a discussion, just that if we want to maintain good quality discussions these should appear a lot less than quotes from published authors. (Of course, it's fine if it was an LLM that led the user to that published source in the first place.)

Then, the bitter sacrifice would be not to get carried away by the commonplace experience of the time, to not "ride the beautiful wave", to not get distracted by this "qualitative polyvalence of experience", to not live in the moment, but to sit back and medidate, to think things through, to warn of the dangers, and to ultimately see the future commodification, the false consciousness and the capitalist exploitation that the movement entails — Pussycat

I agree, with reservations. Adorno would say this beautiful wave isn't real polyvalence, because there is no such thing as fully human experience in this society, and what the hippies grasped at was empty — or what they took to be a beautiful wave was a pitiful substitute.

Why did it roll back? Why was the moment of realization missed? — Pussycat

Yeah. Pynchon's novels all set out to answer that too, particularly Vineland and Inherent Vice, which are about the aftermath of the hippie movement. And earlier in Mason & Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow he looks for the sources, where the seeds of failure were sown.

I have never used LLMs until today. I felt I should explore some interactions with them, so I have a better idea about what the experience is like. The idea of getting them to write, produce content which I can then paraphrase, polish my writing or using their arguments is anathema to me. — Janus

Yeah, but on the other hand, it might not be so bad to use an argument suggested by an LLM, so long as you understand it. After all, we do this all the time reading papers and books. Philosophical discourse takes place in a context that the participants in the discourse should have access to, and maybe LLMs just make this easier?

Yeah, but it's ambiguous. I'd like to clarify it, and make it known that it's not ok to do certain things, even if it's impossible to enforce. Since people are using LLMs, this is best done in the context of a "How to use LLMs".

I for one think your proposals represent about the best we can do in the existing situation — Janus

@Baden's "proposals" are just a restatement of the TPF status quo. But in my opinion, such is the ambiguity and confusion around this issue, we do need a more detailed set of guidelines.

You can use an LLM to produce your replies for you, then put them in your own words for posting on TPF. We can't stop people from doing it, but I don't think it is ok. It's what some people in these conversations have described as allowing it to do your thinking for you.

"So long as you don't copy and paste, use it how you like" is not an adequate guide to the use of LLMs here. That's why I'll be posting up suggested guidelines for discussion.

EDIT: No disrespect to @Baden, btw. I mostly agree with him. I just think our policy is not as obvious as he has implied.

Am I seeing this argument being made?

Some people get away with murder. Therefore we should not try and stop them. — unenlightened

More like people are using axes so we should encourage them to chop wood rather than people's heads off.

EDIT: So it's the use of axes which we should not try to stop.

But what truly interests me now is to find out what Adorno really means by this "bitter sacrifice" mentioned above. — Pussycat

I interpreted it earlier:

This refers back to the previous paragraph, where he mentioned the mainstream complaint that dialectics reduces everything to contradiction and thereby ignores the richness of experience, the polyvalence and difference. His response is another "that's too bad": this reductive approach is "entirely appropriate" for the world we live in, in which polyvalence is reduced in actuality. — Jamal

It's probably a crude summary but I think that's roughly right: dialectics sacrifices the richness and diversity of experience in its pursuit of truth.

On the main point, I agree. And it's not like Adorno ever pretends that negative dialectics is presuppositionless.

Anyway, I also wanted to say that "Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966", are feature rich, I think that it would be a good idea for them to accompany our reading of ND. It seems to me that both the editor Rolf Tiedemann, as well as the translator Rodney Livingstone, have done a great job, with their notes and footnotes. The appendix of LND features yet another translation of the introduction of ND, with some parts however missing for some reason. And thus the number of translations, Ashton (1973), Redmond (2001), Thorne, together with Livingstone's, comes down to all four. Still waiting for Robert Hullot-Kentor's, to bring the number to 5. — Pussycat

The first 10 pages of this discussion were dedicated to a reading of those lectures. The first words of the OP went like this:

This is a reading group for Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics.

We'll begin with Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966 and then move on to Negative Dialectics itself. I'll refer to them as LND and ND from now on. — Jamal

However, we moved on from them pretty quickly after reading the last of the full lectures; and it's great to be reminded of the translation of the introduction, in the form of the appendix entitled "The Theory of Intellectual Experience". To be honest it hadn't occurred to me that it was a different translation. :up:

:up:

The line for me is certainly crossed when posters begin to use them to directly write posts and particularly OPs — Baden

For the record, I agree with this, but I think it has to be put in the context of a How to use LLMs, since there is significant ambiguity even in a statement like "you are prohibited from using AI to write a post on this forum".

What does bother me a bit is how one can identify what is and isn't written by AIs. Or have you trained an AI to do that? — Ludwig V

There are plenty of online tools out there that already do that. — Baden

I think I agree with @Banno about this: such tools will never be able to catch everything, will produce false positives, and quickly become outdated anyway. It's easy, I think, to make an LLM's output pass as written by a human, with a prompt like this: "Write X but make it sound human. Vary the sentence structure, add a few conversational phrases, and some minor spelling and grammatical mistakes, to avoid AI detection."

The only way detection will be reliable is if LLM watermarking is implemented, but so far it's not being implemented consistently and maybe never will be.

If you have a group of people argue over a topic and then you appoint a person to summarize the arguments and produce a working document that will be the basis for further discussion, you haven't given them a "calculator" job. You have given them the most important job of all. You have asked them to draft the committee document, which is almost certainly the most crucial point in the process. Yet you have re-construed this as "a calculator job to avoid tedium." — Leontiskos

Arguably the most important part of the job is very often the "calculator" task, the most tedious task.

To say, "We encourage X," is to encourage X. It is not to say, "If you are doing Y, then we would encourage you to do Y in X manner." To say "allow" or "permit" instead of "encourage" would make a large difference. — Leontiskos

I may rewrite it to avoid misreadings like yours and bongo's. But I'll keep "encourage", since the point is to encourage some uses of LLMs over others. In "We encourage X," the X stands for "using LLMs as assistants for research, brainstorming, and editing," with the obvious emphasis on the "as". But it seems it wasn't obvious enough, so as I say, I might rewrite it or add a note at the top.

And it just occurred to me that no one is reading this or likely to respond to what I just said — frank

There are at least two or three people reading it. I'm not sure why you want to be famous. You're not even reading Negative Dialectics and yet I allow you to post here because you occasionally have insightful things to say. That's an honour. :smile:

:clap:

I'm eager to agree, but I'm not sure what you're asking.