hane.bsky.social profile picture

Hane

@hane.bsky.social

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philosopher of medicine and clinical ethicist who got a gig working in gender affirming healthcare, postdoctoral affiliate in philosophy at Lancaster University, music maker, keeper of snakes, dad, he/him

https://hanehtutmaung.weebly.com

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    Hane @hane.bsky.social

    more broadly, people have worried about human creative activities being emulated by nonhuman automata for centuries. here's Johann Joachim Quantz writing in the 18th century about the philosophical implications of musical automata (from David Yearsley's "Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint")

    canson's most ardent admirers. (With Voltaire's help Frederick had tried to lure Vaucanson and his automata to Berlin back in 1740, but even the lucrative offer of 12,000 livres a year could not convince Vaucanson; the rebuffed Prussian King promptly set about organizing his own factory for the construction of musical automata.)19 Quantz writes that With skill a musical machine could be constructed that would play certain pieces with a quickness and exactitude so remarkable that no human being could equal it either with his fingers or with his tongue. Indeed it would excite astonishment, but it would never move you; and having heard it several times, and understood its construction, you would even cease to be astonished. Accordingly, those who wish to maintain their superiority over the machine, and wish to touch people, must play each piece with its proper fire.20 While admitting that a complex automaton such as that constructed by Vaucanson could surpass the accuracy and speed of human perfor- mance, such a machine could never be endowed with the subjectivity necessary for meaningful musical expression. In short, cogs and pulleys and levers could not simulate the discernment of good taste and the intensity and refinement of convincing performance. A machine could mimic human motions but it could not reproduce or elicit human emo- tions. Yet the admonitory tone of Quantz's closing suggests that the threat posed by machine performance was a real one. Quantz's counter- attack against the ferociously accurate machine and the inferences that might be drawn from it abjures the mechanical for the metaphysical: if performance was a form of communication between the soul of the player and that of the listener, then a soulless machine could never achieve human profundity. But with the increasing realism of the coun- terfeit, human musicians would now be harder pressed to convince, to win over their audience, to differentiate themselves from the machine. For Quantz, as for …
    noamchompers.bsky.social profile picture

    noam chompers aka alex rails @noamchompers.bsky.social

    one other thing about the LLM discourse: a common thing for people excited about AI to say is that until a few years ago, everyone assumed the spontaneous generation of grammatical text was, in principle, uniquely human. that's just not true. here's what turing wrote in 1950, not far off, really!

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