but the idea of vesting responsibility and authority in a singular person was not common practice

Instead of being (mis)understood as signs of the apocalypse or the end of writing, LLMs reveal the terminal limits of the author function, participate in a deconstruction of its organizing principles, and open the opportunity to think and write differently.

But it would be impetuous to conclude that LLMs simply generate bullshit.

Their writings are and can be meaningful. What they mean is something that comes about through the process of our reading them and then interpreting and evaluating them.

“privileged moment of individualizationin the history of ideas.”

As Sven Birkerts explains in the book “The Gutenberg Elegies”: “The idea of individual authorship — that one person would create an original work and have historical title to it — did not really become entrenched in the public mind until print superseded orality as the basis of cultural communication.”

meaning transpires in and from the experience of reading. It is through that process that readers discover (or better, “fabricate”) what they assume the author had wanted to say.

All this throws up something that has been missed in the frenzy over the technological significance of LLMs: They are philosophically significant. What we now have are things that write without speaking, a proliferation of texts that do not have, nor are beholden to, the authoritative voice of an author, and statements whose truth cannot be... See more

Consequently, what has been offered as a criticism of LLM technology — that these algorithms only circulate different words without access to the real-world embodied referents — might not be the indictment critics think it is. LLMs are structuralist machines — they are practical actualizations of structural linguistic theory, where words have... See more

This is the meaning (or at least one of the meanings) of that famous statement associated with the notoriously difficult French theorist Jacques Derrida: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte,”or “There is nothing outside the text.” And this fact is especially true for LLMs as there is, quite literally, nothing outside the texts on which they have been... See more