2023 BorgesandAI
- (Bottou & Schölkopf, 2023) ⇒ Léon Bottou, and Bernhard Schölkopf. (2023). “Borges and AI.” doi:10.48550/arXiv.2310.01425
Subject Headings: LLM Hallucination, Confabulation.
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Abstract
Many believe that Large Language Models (LLMs) open the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some see opportunities while others see dangers. Yet both proponents and opponents grasp AI through the imagery popularised by science fiction. Will the machine become sentient and rebel against its creators? Will we experience a paperclip apocalypse? Before answering such questions, we should first ask whether this mental imagery provides a good description of the phenomenon at hand. Understanding weather patterns through the moods of the gods only goes so far. The present paper instead advocates understanding LLMs and their connection to AI through the imagery of Jorge Luis Borges, a master of 20th century literature, forerunner of magical realism, and precursor to postmodern literature. This exercise leads to a new perspective that illuminates the relation between language modelling and artificial intelligence.
1. Introduction
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The ability to recognize the demands of a narrative is a flavour of knowledge distinct from the truth. Although the machine must know what makes sense in the world of the developing story, what is true in the world of the story need not be true in our world. Is Juliet a teenage heroine or your cat-loving neighbour? Does Sherlock Holmes live on Baker Street? [8] As new words are printed on the tape, the story takes new turns, borrowing facts from the training data (not always true) and filling the gaps with plausible inventions (not always false). What the language model specialists sometimes call hallucinations are just confabulations (Millidge, 2023).
Having recognized that a perfect language model is a machine that writes fiction on a tape, we must ask ourselves how it can affect us and shape our culture. How does fiction matter? If Borges’ stories can tell us how language models confuse us, they also show how fiction, real or artificial, can help us.
2 The Librarians
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References
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[4] Erin Griffith and Cade Metz. AI funding frenzy escalates. New York Times, 3/14/2023, 2023.
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[6] Claude Elwood Shannon. A mathematical theory of communication. The Bell System Technical Journal, 27:379–423, 623–656, 1948.
[7] Zellig Harris. Mathematical Structures of Language. John Wiley & Sons, 1968.
[8] David K. Lewis. Truth in fiction. American Philosophical Quarterly, 15(1):37–46, 1978.
[9] (Millidge, 2023) => Beren Millidge. LLMs confabulate not hallucinate. https://www.beren.io/2023-03-19-LLMs-confabulate-not-hallucinate,
[10] Patrick Henry Winston. The strong story hypothesis and the directed perception hypothesis. In AAAI Fall Symposium: Advances in Cognitive Systems, 2011.
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| Author | volume | Date Value | title | type | journal | titleUrl | doi | note | year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 BorgesandAI | Bernhard Schölkopf Léon Bottou | Borges and AI | 10.48550/arXiv.2310.01425 | 2023 |