The artificial intelligence MEGATHREAD

[Whiskey]

Well aren't you all smart and fancy like

Good one. You can't train a bot to Mayan or Whiskey.

[Equality]

Apologies if this has been shared in the thread before (I didn't read all 80 pages of it or whatever).

Thoughtful piece from last month titled The Platonic Case Against AI Slop. An excerpt:

But what if that initial revulsion, the response before the rationalization, represents genuine wisdom? Twenty-four centuries ago, Plato warned that consuming imitations of truth corrupts our capacity to recognize actual truth; repeated exposure to copies of copies trains us to prefer shadows over reality. His theory of “mimesis” rests on a hierarchy of distance from reality, with each removal representing not just aesthetic degradation but a kind of spiritual pollution, a corruption of what he called the soul’s capacity for understanding.

The warning seems abstract. But recent research in computer science suggests that Plato may have been diagnosing something that is now measurable. AI models trained recursively on their own outputs undergo irreversible degradation, losing rare patterns while converging toward statistical averages. The mathematics confirms what the ancient hierarchy predicted: copies of copies collapse toward mediocrity; the collapse is built into the imitation process itself. The world is being degraded from its own copies, and we are growing comfortable with the flight from reality.

And I also recommend for your dining and dancing pleasure a piece that references the above titled Our Overfitted Century

An excerpt:

Of course, when it comes to recursion, there’s a longstanding critique that we were already imbibing copies of copies of copies for a lot of the 21st century. Maybe this worry goes all the way back to Plato (as Agathon might point out), but certainly it seems that the late 20th century into the 21st century involved a historically unique removal from the real world, wherein culture originated from culture which originated from culture (e.g., people’s life experience in terms of hours-spent was swamped by fictional TV shows, fannish re-writes of earlier media began to dominate, and so on).

...

The 21st century has made our world incredibly efficient, replacing the slow measured (but robust and generalizable) decisions of human consciousness with algorithms; implicitly this always had to involve swapping in some process that was carrying out learning and decision making in our place, but doing so artificially. Even if it wasn't precisely an artificial neural network, it had to, at some definable macroscale, have much the same properties and abilities. Weaving this inhuman efficiency throughout our world, particularly in the discriminatory capacity of how things are measured and quantified, and the tight feedback loops that make that possible, led to overfitting, and overfitting led to mode collapse, and mode collapse is leading to at least partial model collapse (which all leads to more overfitting, by the way, in a vicious cycle). And so culture seems to be ever more restricted to in-distribution generation in the 21st century.

I particularly like this explanation because, since our age is one of technological, machine-like forces, its cultural stagnation deserves a machine-like explanation, one that began before AI but that AI is now accelerating.

I’ll point out that this not just about crappy cultural products. If some (better, more nuanced, ahem, book-like) version of this argument is correct, then our cultural stagnation might be a sign of a greater sickness. An inability to create novelty is a sign of an inability to generalize to new situations. That seems potentially very dangerous to me.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I blame the lack of novelty on the Fibonacci sequence.

[Whiskey]

Apologies if this has been shared in the thread before (I didn't read all 80 pages of it or whatever).

Thoughtful piece from last month titled The Platonic Case Against AI Slop. An excerpt:

But what if that initial revulsion, the response before the rationalization, represents genuine wisdom? Twenty-four centuries ago, Plato warned that consuming imitations of truth corrupts our capacity to recognize actual truth; repeated exposure to copies of copies trains us to prefer shadows over reality. His theory of “mimesis” rests on a hierarchy of distance from reality, with each removal representing not just aesthetic degradation but a kind of spiritual pollution, a corruption of what he called the soul’s capacity for understanding.

The warning seems abstract. But recent research in computer science suggests that Plato may have been diagnosing something that is now measurable. AI models trained recursively on their own outputs undergo irreversible degradation, losing rare patterns while converging toward statistical averages. The mathematics confirms what the ancient hierarchy predicted: copies of copies collapse toward mediocrity; the collapse is built into the imitation process itself. The world is being degraded from its own copies, and we are growing comfortable with the flight from reality.

And I also recommend for your dining and dancing pleasure a piece that references the above titled Our Overfitted Century

An excerpt:

Of course, when it comes to recursion, there’s a longstanding critique that we were already imbibing copies of copies of copies for a lot of the 21st century. Maybe this worry goes all the way back to Plato (as Agathon might point out), but certainly it seems that the late 20th century into the 21st century involved a historically unique removal from the real world, wherein culture originated from culture which originated from culture (e.g., people’s life experience in terms of hours-spent was swamped by fictional TV shows, fannish re-writes of earlier media began to dominate, and so on).

...

The 21st century has made our world incredibly efficient, replacing the slow measured (but robust and generalizable) decisions of human consciousness with algorithms; implicitly this always had to involve swapping in some process that was carrying out learning and decision making in our place, but doing so artificially. Even if it wasn't precisely an artificial neural network, it had to, at some definable macroscale, have much the same properties and abilities. Weaving this inhuman efficiency throughout our world, particularly in the discriminatory capacity of how things are measured and quantified, and the tight feedback loops that make that possible, led to overfitting, and overfitting led to mode collapse, and mode collapse is leading to at least partial model collapse (which all leads to more overfitting, by the way, in a vicious cycle). And so culture seems to be ever more restricted to in-distribution generation in the 21st century.

I particularly like this explanation because, since our age is one of technological, machine-like forces, its cultural stagnation deserves a machine-like explanation, one that began before AI but that AI is now accelerating.

I’ll point out that this not just about crappy cultural products. If some (better, more nuanced, ahem, book-like) version of this argument is correct, then our cultural stagnation might be a sign of a greater sickness. An inability to create novelty is a sign of an inability to generalize to new situations. That seems potentially very dangerous to me.

So when was the Rubicon crossed? After M*A*S*H and All in the Family?

Stagnation is real. I believe that. I think having dummies in the clownhouse, clownsenate and clownSCOTUS for 6 or 30 terms is stgnant.

Also. There has never been a sequel better than an original and every show is FUBAR after season 4.

[Dr. Sunstoned]

When in doubt, I turn to AI:

The Book of Mormon is studied in academia, but primarily as a religious text, a work of American literature, or a cultural phenomenon, rather than a historical or scientific guide, with mainstream archaeology and genetics finding little to no evidence supporting its narrative of ancient American civilizations

[Philo Sofee]

When in doubt, I turn to AI:

The Book of Mormon is studied in academia, but primarily as a religious text, a work of American literature, or a cultural phenomenon, rather than a historical or scientific guide, with mainstream archaeology and genetics finding little to no evidence supporting its narrative of ancient American civilizations

Exactly. The idea is that the academia is just the Mormon scholars. It's almost clickbait because it leaves the impression that it is the world's non-Mormon scholars who are taking it seriously. They are not. It is the paid Mormon scholars at BYU who are academically studying it at BYU, the church owned university. Not that that is a bad thing at all, but it most certainly is not scholars from Oxford, Harvard, Michigan, or University of Chicago, Vanderbilt who are taking it seriously.

[I Have Questions]

When in doubt, I turn to AI:

The Book of Mormon is studied in academia, but primarily as a religious text, a work of American literature, or a cultural phenomenon, rather than a historical or scientific guide, with mainstream archaeology and genetics finding little to no evidence supporting its narrative of ancient American civilizations

It is not accepted as an ancient record for a number of good reasons, some of which are:
[AI]The Book of Mormon quotes parts of the Bible that scholars agree were written after the Book of Mormon peoples supposedly left Jerusalem, including:
Sections of Isaiah (often called “Deutero-Isaiah”)
New Testament–style Christian theology (e.g., detailed teachings about Jesus centuries before his birth)
This suggests reliance on later biblical sources rather than ancient ones.

Some passages in the Book of Mormon:
Match the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible word-for-word
Include translation errors unique to the KJV
If the Book of Mormon were translated from ancient plates, scholars ask why it would reproduce 17th-century English translation mistakes.[/AI]

It is therefore impossible for it to be what it claims to be - a literal record of real ancient people.

[MG 2.0]

When in doubt, I turn to AI:

Exactly. The idea is that the academia is just the Mormon scholars. It's almost clickbait because it leaves the impression that it is the world's non-Mormon scholars who are taking it seriously. They are not. It is the paid Mormon scholars at BYU who are academically studying it at BYU, the church owned university. Not that that is a bad thing at all, but it most certainly is not scholars from Oxford, Harvard, Michigan, or University of Chicago, Vanderbilt who are taking it seriously.

And never the twain shall meet.

Regards,
MG

[Philo Sofee]

Exactly. The idea is that the academia is just the Mormon scholars. It's almost clickbait because it leaves the impression that it is the world's non-Mormon scholars who are taking it seriously. They are not. It is the paid Mormon scholars at BYU who are academically studying it at BYU, the church owned university. Not that that is a bad thing at all, but it most certainly is not scholars from Oxford, Harvard, Michigan, or University of Chicago, Vanderbilt who are taking it seriously.

And never the twain shall meet.

Regards,
MG

Exactly. That's what makes it so disingenuous for Mormons to say the world scholars are finally taking the Book of Mormon seriously. They aren't.

[Physics Guy]

The Book of Mormon is absolutely worthy of serious academic attention, and so are the other Mormon Scriptures. They’re significant American texts from the 1830s.