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The signal of compliance - by Rob Horning - Internal exile

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“Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization,” cyberneticist Norbert Wiener writes in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950). “Indeed, it is possible to treat sets of messages as having an entropy like sets of states of the external world. Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization … That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.”

The signal of compliance Rob Horning Mar 04, 2023 30 Share “Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization,” cyberneticist Norbert Wiener writes in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950). “Indeed, it is possible to treat sets of messages as having an entropy like sets of states of the external world. Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization … That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.” Generative AI seems to have b

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