AI is kicking your butt; just accept it

If LLMs aren’t making you feel like shit, you’re not thinking hard enough:

During the Q and A after his talk, Cowen said that LLMs are already “kicking our butt” at many things, including poetry. In fact, Cowen insisted, LLMs already write poems that are as good as the median poem by Chilean Nobel Prize-winner, Pablo Neruda. “Now, ex post, you can read one, read the other, and say, oh, only the real Neruda poem is meaningful to me because he’s a flesh and blood human, or was one. Like, fine. But … we need to wake up and realize there’s going to be a generation that has just grown up with this and won’t have the same sentimental attachment to the real Pablo Neruda.”

Hearing this bummed me out for the rest of the evening. I suppose Cowen would say that my sad reaction to his words was a sign that I grasped the magnitude of what he was saying. As he posted last year: “I’ve grown not to entirely trust people who are not at least slightly demoralized by some of the more recent AI achievements.” Well, consider me demoralized.