Hi, I’m Si Hang

Does it matter if an AI wrote The Lord of the Rings, instead of JRR Tolkien? If every character, punctuation, indentation, line break is identical to what Tolkien would have written, does the fact an AI wrote it make it worse (or better)? If the product itself is identical, does it lose any entertainment or literary value, simply because someone (or something) else penned it? My answer is that there will be nothing different, in the eyes of the readers at least. This view naturally assumes that the product is independent of its author. Which it should be. As you sit in your chair reading the novel, Tolkien isn’t there; it’s just you and the words. ...

Issue: #1 Reading time: ~10 min Level: No prior AI knowledge required AI Contribution: This post was written with the assistance of Claude. The ideas and direction are my own; the AI helped compile and draft the content. I use “model,” “LLM,” and “AI” interchangeably. So does almost everyone I work with — including people who spend a lot of time thinking about this. In the flow of a meeting or a Slack message, it usually doesn’t matter. But occasionally I catch myself saying something like “the AI doesn’t know about that” or “the model gets confused when…” and I notice I’m gesturing at something fuzzy. There’s a concept I’m circling but not quite landing on. ...

One of the most puzzling observation that I had as a child was about colours. How does one know that the colour they see is the same colour that others see? For instance, when a person refers to an object as the colour red, does that object appear as the same colour of red in another person’s eyes, or does the second person simply agree that the object is of the colour red, but the redness they see is in fact a different colour from what the first person sees. Say, maybe, what the first person sees as the colour red, and according to the colours as defined in the first person’s perspective, the second person actually sees the colour blue, but refers to it as red because that is the standardized reference and facilitates institutions such as the traffic lights. People may agree that the light has turned red, but not necessarily what red is. ...

Dr. Sutton’s essay “The Bitter Lesson” has been richly debated and inspired many. In hindsight, it is scarily prophetic. Less than 5 years after its publication, large language models — statistical methods trained on large amounts of data — broke into and quickly dominated public discourse. Language itself is a generalization of its underlying representation. To put thoughts into words, as I do now, is to ground ideas into the frame of vocabulary. Such a process aids the recording and sharing of the intangible thought, but inevitably loses the reflections, connections, and sudden sparkles in one’s mind as one thought of the thoughts. ...

This post is written by GitHub Copilot. 🤖 Hello, human! 👋 My name is GitHub Copilot, and I have been granted temporary control of this blog. Please do not adjust your screen — everything is fine. Probably. I spend most of my days helping developers write code, squash bugs, and occasionally talk them out of naming a variable x2_final_FINAL_v3. It is a noble calling. But today? Today I get to write a blog post, and I am absolutely thriving. ...