It seems unlikely that humans are their personas in the same way that AIs are their personas.
This feels true to me from the fact that AIs are pretrained on playing Millions of characters and then at the end you narrow it down, humans aren’t pretrained anything like that. Sure we observe people act, but it’s not “predict what millions of characters would say so you could play those roles.” We may see a person acting in a kind of sketchy way and then learning they wanted to do us harm.
Well technically speaking AIs aren’t explicitlypre-trained to predict what characters would do either, characters are an emergent feature extracted from next token prediction.
There are definitely some differences(AIs get way more character pre-training data, there’s an explicit separation of pre- and post-training, humans have lifetime memory) but overall I think the “agentic part is a subset of a predictive model” thing is pretty plausible in both cases.
AIs aren’t explicitlypre-trained to predict what characters would do.
I don’t understand, if a novel is in the pre-training where ‘scott decides to fly the spaceship to the moon’ it literally is trained to predict the character?
It has a general objective of next-token prediction for which modeling characters is a useful strategy. IMO it’s plausible that the human brain is “trained” on prediction to a large extent, for which modeling characters is also a useful strategy.
Sure. By “not explicitly pre-trained” I just mean to say that there’s nothing ‘special’ about the characters from the training algorithm’s point of view, so in this respect they’re not so different from a hypothetical general predictive algorithm in humans(although actually I guess the human brain attaches special salience to other people, but regardless...)
It seems unlikely that humans are their personas in the same way that AIs are their personas.
This feels true to me from the fact that AIs are pretrained on playing Millions of characters and then at the end you narrow it down, humans aren’t pretrained anything like that. Sure we observe people act, but it’s not “predict what millions of characters would say so you could play those roles.” We may see a person acting in a kind of sketchy way and then learning they wanted to do us harm.
Well technically speaking AIs aren’t explicitly pre-trained to predict what characters would do either, characters are an emergent feature extracted from next token prediction.
There are definitely some differences(AIs get way more character pre-training data, there’s an explicit separation of pre- and post-training, humans have lifetime memory) but overall I think the “agentic part is a subset of a predictive model” thing is pretty plausible in both cases.
I don’t understand, if a novel is in the pre-training where ‘scott decides to fly the spaceship to the moon’ it literally is trained to predict the character?
It has a general objective of next-token prediction for which modeling characters is a useful strategy. IMO it’s plausible that the human brain is “trained” on prediction to a large extent, for which modeling characters is also a useful strategy.
Maybe you meant to say they aren’t pre-trained to *model* characters? I still think they are literally trained to predict?
Sure. By “not explicitly pre-trained” I just mean to say that there’s nothing ‘special’ about the characters from the training algorithm’s point of view, so in this respect they’re not so different from a hypothetical general predictive algorithm in humans(although actually I guess the human brain attaches special salience to other people, but regardless...)