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Adam Greenfield

@tomw …aaaaaand *that* is how Jorge Lewes Borges came up with the plot of “The Library of Bebel”!

4 Feb 2023 at 22:54 | Wall-to-wall | Open on social.coop
9 comments
DanCast

@adamgreenfield @tomw if you enjoyed that, I would highly recommend A Short Stay in Hell

5 Feb 2023 at 2:13 | Open on wandering.shop
Avram Grumer

@adamgreenfield @tomw I was just going to bring up that Borges story, only the Library of ChatGPT is even worse. Most of the texts in the Library of Babel are obvious nonsense. The Library of ChatGPT is filled with superficially-valid texts.

5 Feb 2023 at 3:23 | Open on wandering.shop
Ergative Absolutive

@avram @adamgreenfield @tomw
Of course, the Library of Babel also contains all the ChatGPT nonsense, as well as the alphabet soup and word salad. Does that make it worse or better?

Better, because the alphabet soup and word salad remind the reader that there's a lot of nonsense in the library?

Or worse, because in the midst of all the gibberish the superficially plausible ChatGPT books look like the real thing?

(I lean towards the latter. The parallels really are chilling.)

@avram @adamgreenfield @tomw
Of course, the Library of Babel also contains all the ChatGPT nonsense, as well as the alphabet soup and word salad. Does that make it worse or better?

Better, because the alphabet soup and word salad remind the reader that there's a lot of nonsense in the library?

Or worse, because in the midst of all the gibberish the superficially plausible ChatGPT books look like the real thing?

5 Feb 2023 at 9:44 | Open on wandering.shop
Adam Greenfield

@ergative @avram @tomw As I read it, yes, that was the real horror of the Borges story, the trillions of nearly-“perfect spurious interpolations.” If you thought we already lived in a universe of epistemic relativism, and suffered the consequences thereof, well…just wait for 2024.

5 Feb 2023 at 11:27 | Open on social.coop
Joshua

@ergative @avram @adamgreenfield @tomw there's stuff even more wrong, and more convincing, and more dangerous in the library of Babel than ChatGPT could ever generate

5 Feb 2023 at 18:05 | Open on dice.camp
Avram Grumer

@zenten @ergative @adamgreenfield @tomw It occurs to me that the Library of Babel contains both all of the spells for summoning Cthulhu, Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, etc, and all of the spells for banishing them. As well as all of the spells for summoning them *mislabeled* as spells for banishing them.

5 Feb 2023 at 18:55 | Open on wandering.shop
mostly_harmless

@adamgreenfield One of my favorite authors. A genius.

5 Feb 2023 at 4:18 | Open on defcon.social
Adam Greenfield

@mostly_harmless Yes, I also enjoyed his “Tlin, Ikbar, Orbus Tretius.”

5 Feb 2023 at 11:07 | Open on social.coop
Johana :v_lesbian: :v_trans:
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