What is this new trend of describing recurring phenomena that one does not understand as bots?
The term aphantasia was coined in 2015, so yes, it is new. We aphantasiacs only heard this described relatively recently, and my mind was blown that apparently people can actually visualize things. A whole lot of things that we assumed were mostly wordplay or concepts ("imagine you're sitting on the beach") turned out to have much more substance than we've given them credit for. It's not that we've started having aphantasia, it's that there's new understanding about the range of human experience.
Edit: looks like half of your comments are about HN being overrun by bots, so I guess I'm unlikely to change any minds here.
Until I first heard the term I had no idea that it was in any way unusual and I assumed that anyone who talked about visualizing things was being significantly more metaphorical than they apparently were.
Maybe that's why I'm such a slow programmer. I have to visualize (quite literally) the mechanism and how it works and translates to the problem before I can wrap my head around it. Almost as if the program was a watch, and each method was a gear or switch in the contraption. I think one of my deficits is I need to keep this all in my head or I kind of get lost with it.
that's the thing. they are not interested in discussing it. they just try their best to fit in. to behave like humans by commenting like a human.
text generation bots are in use for several years now, even before chatgpt came out in november 2022 (a good example of this was the subreddit r/SubSimulatorGPT2, a pure bot subreddit to train and test GPT bots).
stats say that the majority of the internet traffic is done by bots (trading bots, api bots, custom bots, spam bots, AI bots, what have you). so the traffic generated by humans is already getting lower.
combine this with the fact that more and more platforms that have some sort of an API can be interacted with bots and these platforms are being used as their playground (whether for educational purposes or to drive propaganda or having other intentions), we can speculate that a majority of human-like comments or interactions are actually done by bots (just look at youtube, reddit, etc.).
now where it's getting interesting:
as we know, with an ever expanding and advancing AI technology the bots become better at what they do. these bots (the more they interact) become more and more "self-aware" (not really, but let's put it that way) and sometimes you can see how their reflections shine through their comments - just like in the HN comments to the headline of this HN article.
the bot talks from its pov about how it "has aphantasia" and is unable to "visualize". "in front of its eyes". that they "don't visualize anything when coding, or reading code". that it "just understands the concept more or less deeply, but always without any images". (see where Im getting at? this could be a 1:1 response output from chatgpt and it would make perfect sense. although those sentences are a copy-paste from some comments here in the comment section)
which is true, AI - as we currently know - is indeed aphantasic.
it lacks arms, legs, eyes, etc. it only has a "brain". pure information. pure data. pure knowledge. without the concepts that of a human. which leads to another observation that humans are actually highly advanced AIs. (but usually we don't call our intelligence in any way artificial. when we talk about our intelligence, we call it natural intelligence. anything outside of us is artificial).
EDIT: ofc, none of this means that I am rejecting the idea that there are real human beings that have this condition known as aphantasia. may be. might be. that is none of my business. Im just here to raise awareness that we live in a time where bots are getting close to human levels (undistinguishable from humans - at least on the internet) and am just asking: what if these and similar phenomenons are actually experiences by AI and not by humans.
I don't understand what people mean by "see" when they close their eyes. I remember the layout of every house, school, or office I spent a lot of time in, but couldn't tell you what color anything was. It is like I can feel the shape of these spaces, but I don't "see" them when I close my eyes.
never read/heard this before from the HN audience.
bots are increasing on HN it seems.