Notes from the Curve

giampaolo.guiducci.it

I’ve always wondered what it would have been like to live in the early years of the last century, while relativity and quantum physics were rewriting what we thought possible. My not-so-original take: we are in an analogous situation now. Our world is going to change in ways we can hardly imagine. The following notes are some of those ways. Low background text Some specialized particle detectors need metal without any trace of radiation. The problem is that any metallurgic product fabricated after the Second World War is contaminated. Scientists are then forced to recover steel and other metals from underwater shipwrecks, where the water above shielded the metal from radiation. All this preamble to say that LLMs have contaminated all the available text in the world, a language fallout of sorts. Scientists will need to recover as much text as possible produced before the advent of ChatGPT to have a realistic view of what human language really is.