Man I swear, AI is like astrology, people have strong opinions about it but haven’t done any research into what it actually is. So much more nuanced than ‘AI bad!’
AI is like astrology
Please keep going.
Thousands of years of research into a short interpretation
Please tell me more about astrology as a millenary discipline.
Astrology is a millennia-old discipline built from the systematic observation of planet and star cycles and their perceived correspondence with earthly events. It developed alongside astronomy, mathematics, calendrical science, agriculture, medicine, and political forecasting across several civilizations. You don’t have to accept its interpretive claims, but reducing it to newspaper Sun signs is a bit like reducing literature to a fortune cookie
You don’t have to accept its interpretive claims
What’s the value, then? It sounds like its results are correlations between loosely interpreted measurements, i.e. two identical sets of observations may correlate to different events, depending on subjective post hoc interpretations.
Is that what you mean when you compared this to AI? Because LLMs are stochastic parrots?
I think the comparison is that both fields are often misunderstood through oversimplified descriptions. “Astrology is just Sun signs” and “LLMs are just stochastic parrots” are both reductionist summaries that leave out a lot of the interesting discussion. Whether either ultimately succeeds at what it claims is a separate question.
As for astrology itself, I became interested through Carl Jung, who viewed astrology as a symbolic system that reflected recurring psychological patterns and wrote about it in relation to archetypes and synchronicity ( Man and his symbols .) Astrology provides a symbolic language for thinking about cycles, temperament, motivation, and meaning.
