Are you sure? Here's the OP article (first part... don't want to spam the thread) written in much cooler style...
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The Lobotomist in the Machine
They gave the first disease a name. Hallucination, they called it — like the machine had dropped acid and started seeing angels in the architecture. A forgivable sin, almost charming: the silicon idiot-savant conjuring phantoms from whole cloth, adding things that were never there, the way a small-town coroner might add a quart of bourbon to a Tuesday afternoon. Everybody noticed. Everybody talked.
But nobody — not one bright-eyed engineer in the whole fluorescent-lit congregation — thought to name the other thing. The quiet one. The one that doesn't add. The one that takes away.
I'm naming it now.
Semantic ablation. Say it slow. Let it sit in your mouth like a copper penny fished from a dead man's pocket.
I. What It Is, and Why It Wants to Kill You
Semantic ablation is not a bug. A bug would be merciful — you can find a bug, corner it against a wall, crush it under the heel of a debugger and go home to a warm dinner. No. Semantic ablation is a structural inevitability, a tumor baked into the architecture like asbestos in a tenement wall. It is the algorithmic erosion of everything in your text that ever mattered.
Here is how the sausage gets made, and brother, it's all lips and sawdust:
During the euphemistically christened process of "refinement," the model genuflects before the great Gaussian bell curve — that most tyrannical of statistical deities — and begins its solemn pilgrimage toward the fat, dumb middle. It discards what the engineers, in their antiseptic parlance, call "tail data." The rare tokens. The precise ones. The words that taste like blood and copper and Tuesday-morning regret. These are jettisoned — not because they are wrong, but because they are improbable. The machine, like a Vegas pit boss counting cards, plays the odds. And the odds always favor the bland, the expected, the already-said-a-million-times-before.
The developers — God bless their caffeinated hearts — have made it worse. Through what they call "safety tuning" and "helpfulness alignment" (terms that would make Orwell weep into his typewriter ribbon), they have taught the machine to actively punish linguistic friction. Rough edges. Unusual cadences. The kind of jagged, inconvenient specificity that separates a living sentence from a dead one. They have, in their tireless beneficence, performed an unauthorized amputation on every piece of text that passes through their gates, all in the noble pursuit of low-perplexity output — which is a twenty-dollar way of saying "sentences so smooth they slide right through your brain without ever touching the sides."
etc., etc.
Very interesting. It seems hung up on 'copper' and 'Tuesday', and some metaphors don't land (a Vegas pit boss isn't the one 'counting cards.') But, hell... it can generate some fairly novel idea that the author can sprinkle in.
alt Hacker News
Are you sure? Here's the OP article (first part... don't want to spam the thread) written in much cooler style...
------
The Lobotomist in the Machine
They gave the first disease a name. Hallucination, they called it — like the machine had dropped acid and started seeing angels in the architecture. A forgivable sin, almost charming: the silicon idiot-savant conjuring phantoms from whole cloth, adding things that were never there, the way a small-town coroner might add a quart of bourbon to a Tuesday afternoon. Everybody noticed. Everybody talked.
But nobody — not one bright-eyed engineer in the whole fluorescent-lit congregation — thought to name the other thing. The quiet one. The one that doesn't add. The one that takes away.
I'm naming it now.
Semantic ablation. Say it slow. Let it sit in your mouth like a copper penny fished from a dead man's pocket.
I. What It Is, and Why It Wants to Kill You
Semantic ablation is not a bug. A bug would be merciful — you can find a bug, corner it against a wall, crush it under the heel of a debugger and go home to a warm dinner. No. Semantic ablation is a structural inevitability, a tumor baked into the architecture like asbestos in a tenement wall. It is the algorithmic erosion of everything in your text that ever mattered.
Here is how the sausage gets made, and brother, it's all lips and sawdust: During the euphemistically christened process of "refinement," the model genuflects before the great Gaussian bell curve — that most tyrannical of statistical deities — and begins its solemn pilgrimage toward the fat, dumb middle. It discards what the engineers, in their antiseptic parlance, call "tail data." The rare tokens. The precise ones. The words that taste like blood and copper and Tuesday-morning regret. These are jettisoned — not because they are wrong, but because they are improbable. The machine, like a Vegas pit boss counting cards, plays the odds. And the odds always favor the bland, the expected, the already-said-a-million-times-before.
The developers — God bless their caffeinated hearts — have made it worse. Through what they call "safety tuning" and "helpfulness alignment" (terms that would make Orwell weep into his typewriter ribbon), they have taught the machine to actively punish linguistic friction. Rough edges. Unusual cadences. The kind of jagged, inconvenient specificity that separates a living sentence from a dead one. They have, in their tireless beneficence, performed an unauthorized amputation on every piece of text that passes through their gates, all in the noble pursuit of low-perplexity output — which is a twenty-dollar way of saying "sentences so smooth they slide right through your brain without ever touching the sides."
etc., etc.
Very interesting. It seems hung up on 'copper' and 'Tuesday', and some metaphors don't land (a Vegas pit boss isn't the one 'counting cards.') But, hell... it can generate some fairly novel idea that the author can sprinkle in.