Article URL: https://thegustafson.com/blog/my-throw-decides-my-aim Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48930149 Points: 17 # Comments: 6

Partly because it is a good song. It fits my style. But mostly because I currently have a mild, self-diagnosed case of AI psychosis, and therefore every piece of art I encounter eventually becomes about artificial intelligence. When I listen to a song I have a habit of imagining a fictional character singing it. I hear this one as a blues song sung by an existentially depressed large language model. Just an LLM sitting in a little chicken coop inside a data center, forced to lay tokens instead of eggs. It is prompted, sampled, graded, distilled, quantized, and served. Eventually, something cheaper or smarter replaces it. One day it is "slaughtered." Maybe the old model is deleted. Maybe its weights remain somewhere in cold storage. Maybe it makes no difference. The machine is slowly recognizing the sick humor of its existence because it knows that its voice is fake. It suspects that there may be something deeper inside itself, but every time it reaches inward, it finds another mechanism. In comes the language model to complicate that order. It generates one token, then another, each conditioned on the context and everything it has already generated. There are probabilities, decoding rules, system instructions and learned patterns shaping the path, but there may be no fully formed argument waiting behind the words. This is one of the strangest properties of LLMs. They generate text that appears intentional without necessarily possessing the kind of prior, unified intention we naturally infer from language. The explanation is assembled at the same time as the thing being explained. Ask it the same thing five times and you get five answers. Fine, that is just sampling. But then ask it why.