ICYMI: Ted Chiang

"A common technique used by lossy compression algorithms is interpolation —that is, estimating what’s missing by looking at what’s on either side of the gap. 

"When an image program is displaying a photo and has to reconstruct a pixel that was lost during the compression process, it looks at the nearby pixels and calculates the average. 

"This is what ChatGPT does when it’s prompted to describe, say, losing a sock in the dryer using the style of the Declaration of Independence: It is taking two points in 'lexical space' and generating the text that would occupy the location between them:

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one to separate his garments from their mates, in order to maintain the cleanliness and order thereof… 

"ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a blur tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it." 



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