I guess I don't find that relevant, it's just what the algorithm spits out given certain numeric inputs. you can find it by putting in the numeric inputs, or you can reverse engineer the numeric inputs from the output, but it's all the same.

or put another way, with the example up thread: I don't think the programmers told me to kill myself, and I don't think *I* told me to kill myself; I simply used an algorithm to find where in a mass of random letters, those letters are arranged in a way I thought would be funny and illustrative.

So I think your analogy is saying, “this is basically the same thing as ctrl F or searching the internet.” But I think the fact that the pages don’t exist in a fixed form until searched also matters here. And I’m not sure how close this is as an analogy to LLMs anyway.

oh it’s definitely attenuated. i’m just kinda noodling online here about the limits of what we consider speech