I Had A Dream

Alas, the dream that I had last night was not the inspiring, MLK kind of dream, even though tomorrow happens to be the great man’s day.  No, I had the literal kind of dream, where everything seems real but then you wake up and remember only the last fragments.

In my case, those last fragments involved a gray-haired bespectacled woman, a fellow CS professor.  She and I were standing in a dimly lit university building.  And she was grabbing me by the shoulders, shaking me.

“Look, Scott,” she was saying, “we’re both computer scientists.  We were both around in the 90s.  You know as well as I do that, if someone claims to have built an AI, but it turns out they just loaded a bunch of known answers, written by humans, into a lookup table, and then they search the table when a question comes … that’s not AI.  It’s slop.  It’s garbage.”

“But…” I interjected.

“Oh of course,” she continued, “so you make the table bigger.  What do you have now?  More slop!  More garbage!  You load the entire Internet into the table.  Now you have an astronomical-sized piece of garbage!”

“I mean,” I said, “there’s an exponential blowup in the number of possible questions, which can only be handled by…”

“Of course,” she said impatiently, “I understand as well as anyone.  You train a neural net to predict a probability distribution over the next token.  In other words, you slice up and statistically recombine your giant lookup table to disguise what’s really going on.  Now what do you get?  You get the biggest piece of garbage the world has ever seen.  You get a hideous monster that’s destroying and zombifying our entire civilization … and that still understands nothing more than the original lookup table did.”

“I mean, you get a tool that hundreds of millions of people now use every day—to write code, to do literature searches…”

By this point, the professor was screaming at me, albeit with a pleading tone in her voice.  “But no one who you respect uses that garbage! Not a single one!  Go ahead and ask them: scientists, mathematicians, artists, creators…”

“I use it,” I replied quietly.  “Most of my friends use it too.”

The professor stared at me with a new, wordless horror.  And that’s when I woke up.

I think I was next going to say something about how I agreed that generative AI might be taking the world down a terrible, dangerous path, but how dismissing the scientific and philosophical immensity of what’s happened, by calling it “slop,” “garbage,” etc., is a bad way to talk about the danger. If so, I suppose I’ll never know how the professor would’ve replied to that. Though, if she was just an unintegrated part of my own consciousness—or a giant lookup table that I can query on demand!—perhaps I could summon her back.

Mostly, I remember being surprised to have had a dream that was this coherent and topical. Normally my dreams just involve wandering around lost in an airport that then transforms itself into my old high school, or something.