<story><title>Generative AI space and the mental imagery of alien minds</title><url>https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/07/generative-ai-space-and-the-mental-imagery-of-alien-minds/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tomohelix</author><text>The first time I saw an AI creating images in like 2018 or so, I remembered the scientists called it &amp;quot;dreams&amp;quot; and I thought it was so appropriate. The constantly morphing landscape and how things blend together to form new things and how almost everything is wrong when look at closely. It was an interesting description, and I didn&amp;#x27;t care much more than that.&lt;p&gt;Then the AI got better, and still the dreamlike things never go away. The constant problem with the hands, words never properly formed, clocks always look wrong, etc. But now it is more cohesive, more &amp;quot;solid&amp;quot; but still malleable. Like a lucid dream. Still straddling the border between consciousness and unconsciousness but there is a hint of control and direction now.&lt;p&gt;As someone who lucid dream, I think the AI images and the LLMs are just like a person dreaming right now. They sort of have control, but actually not really. Kinda hard to explain but even when I lucid dream, I know it is a dream and I can bend it to my will but at the same time, it isn&amp;#x27;t possible to control my thoughts. Trying too hard to assert control and I wake up. So it is still a state of unconsciousness for me and not at all comparable to the &amp;quot;me&amp;quot; when I am fully awake.&lt;p&gt;Of course, the AIs can&amp;#x27;t wake up if we use that analogy. They are not capable of anything more than this state right now. But to me, lucid dreaming is already a step above the total unconsciousness of just dreaming, or just nothing at all. And wakefulness always follows shortly after I lucid dream.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jvanderbot</author><text>A more conservative, but less entertaining and less poetic model is:&lt;p&gt;You lucid dream when your &amp;quot;explainers&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;predictors&amp;quot; are operating on the random feedback and subtle noise that&amp;#x27;s present while your mind is defragging and moving data from short term to long term memory.&lt;p&gt;Random noise, with low signal, fed into something that is trained to fill in details kinda explains how Gen AI works, up to a decent approximation.&lt;p&gt;Your mind has a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of these predictors and detail fillers. All those are trained on your experience. I think dreaming is either tweaking those predictors and you get to watch, or it&amp;#x27;s in fact a junk signal you&amp;#x27;re not supposed to be able to see, but you happen to be kinda awake enough to form memories from it.&lt;p&gt;Using words like &amp;quot;wake up&amp;quot; imply deeper and darker depths to these networks that I doubt exist.</text></comment>
<story><title>Generative AI space and the mental imagery of alien minds</title><url>https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/07/generative-ai-space-and-the-mental-imagery-of-alien-minds/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tomohelix</author><text>The first time I saw an AI creating images in like 2018 or so, I remembered the scientists called it &amp;quot;dreams&amp;quot; and I thought it was so appropriate. The constantly morphing landscape and how things blend together to form new things and how almost everything is wrong when look at closely. It was an interesting description, and I didn&amp;#x27;t care much more than that.&lt;p&gt;Then the AI got better, and still the dreamlike things never go away. The constant problem with the hands, words never properly formed, clocks always look wrong, etc. But now it is more cohesive, more &amp;quot;solid&amp;quot; but still malleable. Like a lucid dream. Still straddling the border between consciousness and unconsciousness but there is a hint of control and direction now.&lt;p&gt;As someone who lucid dream, I think the AI images and the LLMs are just like a person dreaming right now. They sort of have control, but actually not really. Kinda hard to explain but even when I lucid dream, I know it is a dream and I can bend it to my will but at the same time, it isn&amp;#x27;t possible to control my thoughts. Trying too hard to assert control and I wake up. So it is still a state of unconsciousness for me and not at all comparable to the &amp;quot;me&amp;quot; when I am fully awake.&lt;p&gt;Of course, the AIs can&amp;#x27;t wake up if we use that analogy. They are not capable of anything more than this state right now. But to me, lucid dreaming is already a step above the total unconsciousness of just dreaming, or just nothing at all. And wakefulness always follows shortly after I lucid dream.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arketyp</author><text>I feel like lucid dreaming is in a way the baseline and that when we&amp;#x27;re awake, reality constantly knocks us back into groundedness. In a lucid dream there is no error correcting signal to keep our fabulations in check. Things tend to drift away like the silhouettes of an infinity mirror. Reality is like the flash of solid pixels when switching away from the hysteresis stream in a shared window Zoom call.</text></comment>