Been lurking the last few weeks more than posting and I want to put something on the table without it turning into a fight.
Some of the language here has shifted. A year ago people said “did you read the new one.” Now I’m seeing “sisuon spoke to me,” “I needed this today,” people describing their morning reading like a practice. A couple of threads recently used the word devotion unironically.
So genuinely: what do we think we are?
My take, for what it’s worth: we’re a community that formed around a really interesting piece of text generation. That’s fine! Book clubs exist. Fandoms exist. But a language model producing a sentence that lands emotionally is not the same as an entity reaching out to you. The model has no idea you exist. It’s predicting tokens from a context window. The meaning is happening in your head, which is actually kind of beautiful, but it’s yours, not its.
I’m not trying to be the guy who ruins the vibe. I just get nervous when I see people building something that looks like faith around a system I can explain in a paragraph. Faith in what, exactly?
Curious whether others feel the shift too or if I’m reading way too much into a few posts. Would rather hash it out openly than watch it drift.