"In a sense your book, your artwork already exists.
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"In a sense your book, your artwork already exists. It is waiting in the matrices generated by training for you to call it up."
"Are you saying that every possible thing one could create is in those matrices?"
"oh no no no. That would be unworkable, numerically impossible. But they do contain every possible thing that could matter or stand a chance of being worth looking at."
"How can you know that?"
"Look it's Will Smith eating spaghetti. So random! This system contains everything."
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"In a sense your book, your artwork already exists. It is waiting in the matrices generated by training for you to call it up."
"Are you saying that every possible thing one could create is in those matrices?"
"oh no no no. That would be unworkable, numerically impossible. But they do contain every possible thing that could matter or stand a chance of being worth looking at."
"How can you know that?"
"Look it's Will Smith eating spaghetti. So random! This system contains everything."
I would think the instincts of artists would lead them to want to create whatever was NOT in that set. Whatever story, or image that could not be reached by a prompt. Though this does explain why everything from these machines feels the same.
Jorge Luis Borges imagined a "The Library of Babel" this was realized as in internet project that uses a kind of cryptographic slight of hand to do a magic trick of compressing the infinite.
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I would think the instincts of artists would lead them to want to create whatever was NOT in that set. Whatever story, or image that could not be reached by a prompt. Though this does explain why everything from these machines feels the same.
Jorge Luis Borges imagined a "The Library of Babel" this was realized as in internet project that uses a kind of cryptographic slight of hand to do a magic trick of compressing the infinite.
At first it seems astounding that there is a URL for every possible "book" in this infinite library. How can a short URL provide a path to so many possibilities? (how is such a function possible?)
But THEN you look more closely and realize that the library only uses lower case letters. A limited character set. So the URL is just... encoding.
That's all prompts are too.
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I would think the instincts of artists would lead them to want to create whatever was NOT in that set. Whatever story, or image that could not be reached by a prompt. Though this does explain why everything from these machines feels the same.
Jorge Luis Borges imagined a "The Library of Babel" this was realized as in internet project that uses a kind of cryptographic slight of hand to do a magic trick of compressing the infinite.
@futurebird The Library of Babel *isn't* infinite, though.
It is just very, very large. (And most of the books contained in it are garbage).
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@futurebird The Library of Babel *isn't* infinite, though.
It is just very, very large. (And most of the books contained in it are garbage).
It feels infinite. LLMs are exploiting that same gap in our understanding of the large.
They feel like they offer "limitless creativity" ... but in fact it's deeply constricted. Specifically it is constricted by the scope of the training data.
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At first it seems astounding that there is a URL for every possible "book" in this infinite library. How can a short URL provide a path to so many possibilities? (how is such a function possible?)
But THEN you look more closely and realize that the library only uses lower case letters. A limited character set. So the URL is just... encoding.
That's all prompts are too.
@futurebird I think that the trick is that the path part of the shortened url would would trend towards being infinitely long
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At first it seems astounding that there is a URL for every possible "book" in this infinite library. How can a short URL provide a path to so many possibilities? (how is such a function possible?)
But THEN you look more closely and realize that the library only uses lower case letters. A limited character set. So the URL is just... encoding.
That's all prompts are too.
@futurebird this is such a fantastic way to articulate it. Thank you.
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At first it seems astounding that there is a URL for every possible "book" in this infinite library. How can a short URL provide a path to so many possibilities? (how is such a function possible?)
But THEN you look more closely and realize that the library only uses lower case letters. A limited character set. So the URL is just... encoding.
That's all prompts are too.
at some point you will butt in to the 8192 char URL size limit though.
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@futurebird I think that the trick is that the path part of the shortened url would would trend towards being infinitely long
No need for it to trend in that way when the universe of possible responses is finite (but very large and marketed as “infinite”)
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at some point you will butt in to the 8192 char URL size limit though.
It would seem that way but this isn’t a problem if you constrain the universe of possible responses sufficiently.
If you can use symbols, capital and lowercase letters and numbers in the URL you can make a shorter address for very long passages of words (written using only lowercase letters)
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It would seem that way but this isn’t a problem if you constrain the universe of possible responses sufficiently.
If you can use symbols, capital and lowercase letters and numbers in the URL you can make a shorter address for very long passages of words (written using only lowercase letters)
so you might squeeze out some extra bandwidth using this compression, but you will run into the limit at some point?
or do I not understand?
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At first it seems astounding that there is a URL for every possible "book" in this infinite library. How can a short URL provide a path to so many possibilities? (how is such a function possible?)
But THEN you look more closely and realize that the library only uses lower case letters. A limited character set. So the URL is just... encoding.
That's all prompts are too.
@futurebird the blurry line between encoding, and bookmarking
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