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Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by achierius on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @10:17AM (#42698238)
Baudrillard just gets more relevant every day. Honestly I find it hard to imagine how someone could have media literacy in the modern day without coming to an intuitive understanding of semiotics, whether they know it or not!
Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by thundergolfer on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @11:40AM (#42699686)
Him and also Marshal McLuhan. McLuhan realized all the way back in the 60s that computer technology (like all technology) in some sense wants things and manipulates the user to get it. The 'electric' technologies have their own logic and are not neutral on questions of humanity, politics, nature, etc.
Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by Communitivity on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @10:25AM (#42698352)
I called myself a Semiotics Engineer for 4 years, but the title didn't catch. I did domain analysis, logical model creation, concrete model creation in XML/OWL/KML, model review and improvement, semantic reasoning-based system design/implementation, and message system design/implementation. This was before the rise of ML.
Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by Xmd5a on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @11:13AM (#42699096)
What's your take on LLMs ? I ask you to comment on any aspect, whatever you think is the most interesting from a semiotician's perspective.
Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by pjc50 on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @11:24AM (#42699342)
Everyone who is familiar with Baudrillard goes "simulacrum!" whenever they encounter LLM output. LLM output is after all a pure chain of symbols that is extremely far removed from a connection with ground truth reality.
Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by garte on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @12:00PM (#42700060)
I'm not sure it's that direct of a connection.

There's something to be said about the structuralist part of it: using large amounts of text as a rule set to return a semblance of truth seems to be a structuralist's wet dream.

It's like drawing the map for the king: the real is being represented by reducing a huge number of data points to a mixture of randomness and hard rules that pretend to be real.

At the very least it's a form of hyperreality as far as I understand it.

Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by Xmd5a on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @01:44PM (#42701850)
Indeed this is what I was aiming at, however the concern for (a semblance of) truth seems rooted in a view that locates meaning in what signs refer to. This view feels incomplete when faced with a dyadic model where the relationship between signifier and signified takes precedence over reference. The notion of simulacrum only emerges in a technical culture that has elevated 'reality' to a special status. After all, what is 'reality' in technical systems if not itself a simulacrum? Hilbert's program, symbolic AI, rule systems, ontologies, the semantic web - they all struggled to capture reality as a whole precisely because they tried to grasp it through formal objects claiming universal scope via the machinery of said formalisms.
Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by cognitif on Wednesday January 15, 2025 @12:41AM (#42707700)
What does that have to do with LLMs?
Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by garte on Wednesday January 15, 2025 @03:33AM (#42708702)
The structuralist unsuccessfully tried to find similarities between different symbol systems in different cultures. They were convinced they could come up with some sort of formula of how a culture can be categorized and in what development state it is.

Fundamentally it's about language. What does a word or a sentence represent? How do you go from a spoken or written text to something that is meaningful to you if it's presented to you?

This intermediating process of communication is highly complicated and fraught with misconceptions which lead to lots of fuzzy logic being applied by your brain when trying to understand something.

The stuff that's happening between hearing or reading something and you actually taking it in as something meaningful is a vast space which is as of yet unexplored and gives a lot of room for speculation. This is what Beaudrillard (and others) tried to describe and analyze.

And it has nothing to do with math. Math is a whole other story and won't solve the problem for you because it's a different kind of medium (or text if you will). Math sits between you and the other while language is something in yourself, so to speak.

LLM's try to gather meaning from text stochastically. This is not the way we gather meaning as humans and in a sense this is not how communication works in the real.

But Beaudrillard (and others) reasoned that we left the real and live in hyperreality. The most famous example of his is Disney World: As soon as it existed it started to infuse itself into our everyday lives. The simulation of a fantasy world (the real existing Disney World theme park) has started to become real outside of it but not rooted in reality (it became a simulacrum): it is an emulation of reality. In that sense it is virtual. It's like virtual reality in the real world, it's a fantasy you can touch (and that can be sold and be molded to be sold more successfully).

The idea of sociability in social media is another example: it does not exist in the real sense, it is mediated by technology. Its origins are hinted at by using terminology of social interactions but in the end it's a transactional empty sort of sociability which promotes attention seeking and fast, easily digested pieces of symbolism over actual interactions. And more and more this kind of "new" sociability becomes part of our actual social lives.

Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by j45 on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @10:51AM (#42698734)
That collection of skills is still valuable.
Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by stafford_beer on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @12:05PM (#42700127)
OP here -- I like Baudrillard and McLuhan but the media theorist who best captures the present IMO is Flusser: https://kevinmunger.substack.com/p/the-discourse-is-the-cybe...
Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by BlueTemplar on Wednesday January 15, 2025 @05:25AM (#42709363)
Heh, I wonder if (hope that ?) Discord and WhatsApp are the equivalent of railroad's robber barons : they brought world-changing technology, but at the cost of tyrannical greed, before their abuses being reigned in by regulations.

Though now that I think of it, didn't that only happen when their power was on the way out, replaced by trucks and container ships ?

Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by jpm_sd on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @10:28AM (#42698387)
Yes, the 21st century is the age of simulacra and simulation. Post-truth society.
Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by coliveira on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @12:14PM (#42700288)
I'm pretty sure this was set in motion in the 20th century. This century is only about refining and monetize it to the nth power.
Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by aiono on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @10:22AM (#42698298)
I find the ideas of Baudrillard really accurate in describing some parts of modern life, but to be honest I feel like he just saying random stuff when I tried to read one of his book. It's so metaphorical and abstract it's very difficult to understand what exactly he is saying.
Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by kelseyfrog on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @10:58AM (#42698834)
My best experience reading Baudrillard was out loud with a group. Some passages spoke to some but not others, but most generated discussion. Some are also obvious to us now in the TikTok age - uncannily so.
Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by aiono on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @12:29PM (#42700567)
Definitely when I read his works even though I didn't understand some of his writings it made me think about it.
Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by cess11 on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @10:31AM (#42698442)
He's not "just saying random stuff", he was a very serious thinker. Unlike Derrida he wasn't much of a joker.

Perhaps language is fundamentally metaphorical, and perhaps reality is actually abstract.

Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by aiono on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @12:27PM (#42700534)
That's just what I feel I didn't claim that it actually is just random stuff. But I value clarity and Baudrillard doesn't seem to try to be. However, as I said I do find his general points very valuable just his style is not my cup of tea.
Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by cess11 on Tuesday January 14, 2025 @05:12PM (#42704648)
He wrote in many different styles, depending on the subject and likely audience. Simulacra and Simulation, Silent Majorities and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place are very different texts.
Re:In the Belly of the MrBeast by NoGravitas on Wednesday January 15, 2025 @10:50AM (#42712354)
Part of it may be translation, too. English translations of French academic writing always seem to come out especially convoluted.