Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 408.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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    [1]    From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
           Subject: pursuit of strangeness (26)

    [2]    From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
           Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.406: the strangeness of artificial intelligence: examples from ChatGPT (4)


--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2025-03-17 06:08:39+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: pursuit of strangeness

Thanks to Michael Falk in Humanist 38.407 for recommendation of the
arxiv paper and his comments on "the strangeness of artificial
intelligence". Very helpful indeed. My central question remains,
however: who is pursuing the strangeness, the 'un-wisdom' of AI, its
non-human behaviours, rather than trying to make it as much as possible
like us? The arxiv paper by Johnson et al, "Imagining and building wise 
machines: The centrality of AI metacognition"*, barely touches on 
this question (§2.2.1), mentioning no examples, such as Falk does. 
I find the deviant, largely or wholly inexplicable behaviours, fascinating 
and wonder what could be done with them to help us.

Comments? More examples? In crucial respects, Italo Calvino's 
"Cybernetics and ghosts" has stayed ahead of 'cutting-edge' 
papers such as Johnson et al for more than half a century. 

-----
* <https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.02478>


Yours,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2025-03-16 13:29:47+00:00
        From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.406: the strangeness of artificial intelligence: examples from ChatGPT

Thank you, Terrence, for this morning's amusement. My teenage daughter might say
ChatGPT sounds like a "pick me" girl on mushrooms.

Jim R


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