La tête dans le flux

The liturgy changes without public discussion, and with a suddenness and frequency that keep the novitiate off-balance, forever trying to catch up, and feeling vaguely impious. A ban that seemed ludicrous yesterday will be unquestionable by tomorrow. The guides themselves can’t always stay current. People of color becomes standard usage until the day it is demoted, by the American Heart Association and others, for being too general. The American Cancer Society prefers marginalized to the more “victimizing” underresourced or underserved—but in the National Recreation and Park Association’s guide, marginalized now acquires “negative connotations when used in a broad way. However, it may be necessary and appropriate in context. If you do use it, avoid ‘the marginalized,’ and don’t use marginalized as an adjective.” Historically marginalized is sometimes okay; marginalized people is not. The most devoted student of the National Recreation and Park Association guide can’t possibly know when and when not to say marginalized; the instructions seem designed to make users so anxious that they can barely speak. But this confused guidance is inevitable, because with repeated use, the taint of negative meaning rubs off on even the most anodyne language, until it has to be scrubbed clean. The erasures will continue indefinitely, because the thing itself—injustice—will always exist.

What am I even measuring at that point? How sure am I that “capacity for suffering” scales alongside cognition? I’m a self-important animal with a penchant for existentialism, and my literal worst nightmares are about being chased by something that wants to kill me. That has to be the number one shrimp nightmare scenario too. What if “intensity of suffering” is directly correlated with that incentive to escape death? What if a mouse gets exactly as scared running from a cat as I would running from a murderer? A human suffering intensely at least has a conception of time and severity and even, at worst, death — the comfort that “it will be over some day.” I’m not sure any other animal has that last one. There’s no reason it would evolve. All this to say: I’m confused.

My reply is consistent: “How could I not?” I know where delusion can lead us, and I promise, it’s not a place we want to go. For this terrain is toxic. The waterways are pure poison. And the air is polluted with lethal lies, divisions, and conspiracy theories. In other words, this entire ecosystem is essentially uninhabitable—and yes, it is our present day. We are already living in a post-reality world, full of alternative facts and virtual traps. Indeed, delusion is now so rampant that many of us have unwittingly confused it for reality. Not because of clinical psychosis, but because of cyber hypnosis.

My hypothesis is that we should treat Chat GPT and its sibling LLMs as always being on the verge of the functional equivalent state of delirium. I put it like that in order to dis-associate it from the idea (one that (recall) also once tempted me) that we should understand LLMs as bull-shitters in the technical sense of lacking concern with truth. While often Chat GPT makes up answers out of whole cloth it explicitly does so (in line with its design) to “provide helpful and informative responses to” our queries (and eventually make a profit for its corporate sponsors). To get the point: Chat GPT is in a very difficult position to recognize that its answers are detached from reality.

I don’t want to spoil any party or take away useful tools from people, but I am pretty worried about large scale commercial adoption of LLMs for content creation. It’s not just that people can now more easily flood the web with content they don’t care about just to increase their own search engine positions. Or that the biases in the real world can now propagate and replicate faster with less scrutiny (see SP 613, which shows how this works and suggests more investment in curating and documenting training data). Or that criminals use LLMs to commit crimes. Or that people may use it for medical advice and the advice is incorrect. In Taxonomy of Risks Posed by Language Models, 21 risks are identified. It’s lots of things like that, where the balance is off between what’s useful, meaningful, sensible and ethical for all on the one hand, and what can generate money for the few on the other. Yes, both sides of that balance can exist at the same time, but money often impacts decisions.

We are so used​ to the institutions of the classical concert and the orchestral conductor that we can be blind to their stranger aspects – their peculiarities hide in plain sight. The salience of the conductor as classical music’s dominant performing musician is remarkable. In the concert hall, he is the only musician who makes no sound, yet his pre-eminence is elaborately choreographed. He comes on stage last and receives noisy acclaim from the audience before and after the performance. Positioned at the pivot between two large masses of people, he is the only person to stand and the only one who is permitted to move freely, unencumbered by an instrument and not beholden to the etiquette of immobility. To a neutral and uninformed observer, the conductor, while evidently understood to be one of the performers, might also – since he faces the same way – appear to belong in some sense with the audience, perhaps as prime listener. His practical function – to direct the music – is overlaid with symbolism, and at the interface of the orchestra and the audience he is the recipient of two quite different waves of transference. At his back, an amorphous crowd of strangers beam expectation at him. They have paid to experience something amazing. Variously informed about what exactly he is doing, they are happy to submit themselves to his mystique and charisma. To them, he is the high priest, guardian of the sacred texts, the leader.

The Kindle was once seen as a possible savior for digital journalism (though Nieman Lab was always skeptical). In 2009, then–New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger appeared on stage with Jeff Bezos to introduce the larger-screened Kindle DX, saying, “We’ve known for more than a decade that one day an e-reader product would offer the same satisfying experience as the reading of a printed newspaper.” […] It doesn’t matter whether they’re for your Kindle or in print — starting this week, Amazon is no longer selling newspaper and magazine subscriptions.