Hofstadter should probably refrain from writing such banalities.<p>"Oh, someone sent me a ChatGPT parody of me and it sucked, blah blah, ... it's all just a mash-up from the training data, yadda yadda ..."<p>Whether I agree with it or not, this angle is not original, and new instances of it don't provide new insights.<p>I don't need it from Hofstadter, of all people.<p>Though, to be fair, this is from 2023. I'm of course writing from the context of the fatigue of two more years of everyone opining on AI along predictable patterns,
> GPT-4’s text entitled “Why Did I Write GEB?,” if taken in an unskeptical manner, gives the impression that its author (theoretically, me) is adept at fluently stringing together high-flown phrases in an effort to sound profound and yet sweetly self-effacing at the same time. That nonsensical image is wildly off base. The text is a travesty from top to bottom. In sum, I find the machine-generated string of words deeply lamentable for giving this highly misleading impression of who I am (or who I was when I wrote my
first book), as well as for totally misrepresenting the story of how that book came to be. I am genuinely sorry to come down so hard on the interesting experiment that you conducted in good faith, but I hope that from my visceral reaction to it, you will see why I am so opposed to the development and widespread use of large language models, and why I find them so antithetical to my way of seeing the world.
> it makes no sense whatsoever to let the artificial voice of a chatbot, chatting randomly away at dazzling speed, replace the far slower but authentic and reflective voice of a thinking, living human being.<p>well, of course this is the basic problem with these systems - how to resolve?