If I use autocomplete to help me write my email, the email is -- we ordinarily think -- still written by me. If I ask ChatGPT to generate an essay on the role of fate in Macbeth, then the essay was not -- we ordinarily think -- written by me. What's the difference?
I like the Pierre Menard/ChatGPT analogy! It also reminds me of somehow setting up a Leibnizian pre-established harmony between the output of your choices and those of ChatGPT. This suggests that if I managed to train up the appropriate Large Language Model that has the right sort of harmony with what I would say, we would count it’s outputs as mine, which seems reasonable.
There is something clumsy about the path to get there though. I rarely write anything word-by-word from the beginning. (Well, maybe emails and Substack comments, with only a few edits along the way.) So it’s a bit weird if the theory has to say that’s the way to evaluate something as mine or not. (Maybe this is an artifact of LLMs working token-by-token in order with no revision?)
But I want to go back to the idea you attribute to Dan Lloyd, which relates to thoughts I’ve had on watching the opening scene of the movie Her (where Joaquin Phoenix’s character is working at his job at ThoughtfulHandwrittenLetters.com) We tend to think there’s something problematic about getting Joaquin Phoenix to write the thoughtful letter to your boyfriend, rather than writing it yourself. But singing a Paul McCartney love song to your boyfriend probably is fine as a substitute for writing and singing your own song. (It’ll probably be a much better song!) And it might be even better to commission Paul McCartney to write a *new* love song for your boyfriend! So maybe the issue with not writing the letter (or the poem or whatever) is more about the social conventions, which could vary between media (letters rather than songs) and could change as social contexts change. It would take a lot for us to get to a point where having figured out a good prompt to get ChatGPT to write something “counts as well as” you writing it, but I don’t think it’s out of the question that we could.
I like the Pierre Menard/ChatGPT analogy! It also reminds me of somehow setting up a Leibnizian pre-established harmony between the output of your choices and those of ChatGPT. This suggests that if I managed to train up the appropriate Large Language Model that has the right sort of harmony with what I would say, we would count it’s outputs as mine, which seems reasonable.
There is something clumsy about the path to get there though. I rarely write anything word-by-word from the beginning. (Well, maybe emails and Substack comments, with only a few edits along the way.) So it’s a bit weird if the theory has to say that’s the way to evaluate something as mine or not. (Maybe this is an artifact of LLMs working token-by-token in order with no revision?)
But I want to go back to the idea you attribute to Dan Lloyd, which relates to thoughts I’ve had on watching the opening scene of the movie Her (where Joaquin Phoenix’s character is working at his job at ThoughtfulHandwrittenLetters.com) We tend to think there’s something problematic about getting Joaquin Phoenix to write the thoughtful letter to your boyfriend, rather than writing it yourself. But singing a Paul McCartney love song to your boyfriend probably is fine as a substitute for writing and singing your own song. (It’ll probably be a much better song!) And it might be even better to commission Paul McCartney to write a *new* love song for your boyfriend! So maybe the issue with not writing the letter (or the poem or whatever) is more about the social conventions, which could vary between media (letters rather than songs) and could change as social contexts change. It would take a lot for us to get to a point where having figured out a good prompt to get ChatGPT to write something “counts as well as” you writing it, but I don’t think it’s out of the question that we could.