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Luc Lalande's avatar

As someone who used to deliver innovation and entrepreneurship programs in higher education institutions, I became increasingly disillusioned with the apparant lack of imagination and creativity in the startup ideas being proposed by students. In a way, this possibly reflects the outcomes of our sclerotic education system (aka, Sir Ken Robinson's "Do Schools Kill Creativity?"). I totally "get" the potential of LLM's as a tool for associative thinking by cobbling together and connecting apparently disassociated concepts. AI can serve to create the conditions for the flourishing of imagination if used wisely. Exciting times for innovation ... maybe.

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Adrian Chan's avatar

I'd love to try to tease apart how LLMs make these connections. Where are they in the latent layers? What, if any, reasoning is used at all?

On the use of Kant, for example, Bing doesn't seem to use his essay on Perpetual Peace. I actually read that in Berlin as a student of International Relations. Kant would have approached MAD using his ideas on nation states, not ethics.

Bing can seem to make a cogent argument here, but doesn't have or use context with which to measure which of a thinker's ideas applies best, because it lacks categories. (Bing is not a Kantian!)

It's using a kind of free-association based on word-relationships more so than conceptual categories. In fact I believe its facility with concepts likely comes out of linguistic tropes more than logical distinctions.

I don't know what your prompting was, but I'm assuming it finds Kant from ethics, and within ethics, linguistic relationships close to (proximate to) terms, phrases, statements found in texts on MAD? (We could ask Bing about MAD and Kant's views on the nation state-I think we'd likely get a very different argument.)

What's interesting here is the manner in which logical and conceptual reasoning appear as effects of language. Bing's reasoning is still hallucinatory, imaginitive, inventive. But I don't think conceptual. It will appear to be intelligent when it's not. It'll appear to be educated when it's not. It'll test our intelligence, insofar as it forces us to measure and judge whether its reasoning is simply fanciful or indeed insightful.

I'd be curious to know what students of philosophy/humanities are learning about it. Have you seen anything? I haven't run into anything similar to what you're doing here.

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