@avram @adamgreenfield @tomw Of course, the Library...

@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.)

Like 5 Feb 2023 at 9:44 | Wall-to-wall | Open on wandering.shop

3 comments

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