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.

it exposes how it was always a fiction

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

“privileged moment of individualizationin the history of ideas.”

“The authority for writing has always been a socially constructed artifice. The author is not a natural phenomenon. It was an idea that we invented to help us make sense of writing.”

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.

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

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 anchored in and assured by... See more