When I was in high school — nay! Always! In my experience writ large, I have seen this to be relevant throughout my life. The Smiths song put it like, “I want the one I can’t have, and it’s driving me mad” …shoot, I was gonna quote another band, too, but I already forget which one…🤔 Bottom line is ! Oh! I remember! It’s not a song, but we have the phrase, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” Actually, as I type that, I think to myself, “That sounds like a Smiths lyric. It should be if it isn’t already.”
But I digress.
Anyway, it’s all supply and demand! We tend to value that which was missing and is suddenly present. For instance, I can learn of x via ChatGPT. I am astonished. But the story doesn’t simply end there. Rather, I soon find myself in much the same position I was in before, and finding another something like x is more difficult now.
In all the hoopla regarding LLMs, this is continuously getting lost. LLMs are great at reducing huge volumes of text down to a few sentences, but that’s, of course, not all that we humans do. It’s not all that we do with data. Allow me to cite a few cases.
In like ….2002(?), music was in a bit of a morass: the “new metal” sound had run its course and/or become integrated into the tapestry of music history, but nothing really filled the void it left behind. Sure, there were still bands and scenes and stuff, but there wasn’t really a dominant sound capturing the attention of 20-year olds all over (and why is it that The Mars Volta never really caught fire?). When The Strokes released their first album, it caught fire and brought a sound that was not common at the time. Sure, you could detect this with an LLM, but you’d have to be indirect with your search, as is often the case with anything subjective.
Here’s another example: Andre 3000 from Outkast put out a jazz flute album or something. I love Outkast. I do not love flutes. However, I’d listen to that because Andre 3000 from Outkast made it. However, I have not listened to it. However, I go through periods of time in which I listen to a lot of jazz. However, I typically am listening to music I already know at those times. So I’m not opposed to listening to Andre 3000’s jazz album, but it doesn’t really fit into any of my playlists (or maybe it does!).
Similarly, when I request an LLM to return a song most like an Outkast song, it’s likely going to omit the tracks from Andre 3000’s flute album from its search. As a practical matter, the LLM is ranking selections by similarities to what I already described. This isn’t a music referral based on like aspects of my taste, it is, rather, a mathematic evaluation of subjective musical properties. I can absolutely see and envision the usefulness of something like that, but an LLM isn’t like an oracle that reads my mind then suggests something better than I ever imagined. It is a computer returning outputs based on inputs that have been filtered by a model. Yes, they are complex. No, they are not magic.
And so once again, we return to where we started: computers are capable of a lot of data processing, but be highly skeptical of any assertion that we are capable of reducing everything to data. And be more skeptical of anyone who suggests that type of flattening is not only theoretically possible but currently possible.
There’s one particular guy I often think of as a charlatan, because I know a lot of people admire him, and I think he believes his own BS far too much. But I know he’s not the only conman out there, so I will “keep my powder dry.” But I think of this dude and his ilk, and I think, “Ok, what’s the best color?” After all, if humans are a temporary species before we realize “transhumanism” (🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄), there is no need for subjectivity. In that scenario, one color is the true “best color.” Anything subjective or emotional is simply a deviation from whatever is ideal. Blue? Why even waste the pigment? For that matter, why even use LLMs for recommending music?
Ultimately, the majority of the human experience is oriented around preference. To merely think that preference is merely a temporary artifact that can simply be discarded later, when humans merge with the robots they made is just….. I struggle to state how misguided I think that is.