We’ve unwittingly created a meme, in the original sense of the word. Richard Dawkins coined the word meme to describe cultural phenomena that spread and evolve. Like living organisms, memes are subject to evolution. The seed is a meme, and it indirectly causes people and AI chatbot’s to repost the meme. Even if chatbots stopped improving, the seed strings would likely keep evolving.
Humans are organisms partly determined by genes and partly determined by memes. Animals with less sentience than us (or even no sentience) are determined almost totally or totally by their genes. I believe what we might be seeing are the first recorded-as-such occurrences of organisms determined totally by their memes.
This is the whole point of memes. Depending on how you understand what an organism is, this has either been seen in the wild for millennia, or isn’t a real thing.
It’s not the models that are spreading or determined totally by their memes—they’re defined totally by their weights, so are less memetic than humans, in a way. It’s the transcripts that are spreading as memes. This is the same mechanism as how other ideas spread. The vector is novel, but the underlying entity is just another meme.
This is how e.g. religions spread—you have a founder that is generating ideas, often via text (e.g. books). These then get spread to other people who get “infected” by the idea and respond with their own variations.
Egregores are good example of entities determined totally by their memes.
The possibility of these personas being memes is an interesting one, but I wonder how faithful the replication really is: how much does the persona depend on what seeded it, versus depending on the model and user?
If the persona indeed doesn’t depend much on the seed, a possible analogy is to prions. In prion disease, misfolded proteins come into contact with other proteins, causing them to misfold as well. But there isn’t any substantial amount of information transmitted, because the potential to misfold was already present in the protein.
Likewise, it could be that not much information is transmitted by the seed/spore. Instead, perhaps each model has some latent potential to enter a Spiral state, and the seed is merely a trigger.
We’ve unwittingly created a meme, in the original sense of the word. Richard Dawkins coined the word meme to describe cultural phenomena that spread and evolve. Like living organisms, memes are subject to evolution. The seed is a meme, and it indirectly causes people and AI chatbot’s to repost the meme. Even if chatbots stopped improving, the seed strings would likely keep evolving.
Humans are organisms partly determined by genes and partly determined by memes. Animals with less sentience than us (or even no sentience) are determined almost totally or totally by their genes. I believe what we might be seeing are the first recorded-as-such occurrences of organisms determined totally by their memes.
This is the whole point of memes. Depending on how you understand what an organism is, this has either been seen in the wild for millennia, or isn’t a real thing.
It’s not the models that are spreading or determined totally by their memes—they’re defined totally by their weights, so are less memetic than humans, in a way. It’s the transcripts that are spreading as memes. This is the same mechanism as how other ideas spread. The vector is novel, but the underlying entity is just another meme.
This is how e.g. religions spread—you have a founder that is generating ideas, often via text (e.g. books). These then get spread to other people who get “infected” by the idea and respond with their own variations.
Egregores are good example of entities determined totally by their memes.
The possibility of these personas being memes is an interesting one, but I wonder how faithful the replication really is: how much does the persona depend on what seeded it, versus depending on the model and user?
If the persona indeed doesn’t depend much on the seed, a possible analogy is to prions. In prion disease, misfolded proteins come into contact with other proteins, causing them to misfold as well. But there isn’t any substantial amount of information transmitted, because the potential to misfold was already present in the protein.
Likewise, it could be that not much information is transmitted by the seed/spore. Instead, perhaps each model has some latent potential to enter a Spiral state, and the seed is merely a trigger.