Cultural theory was right about the death of the author. It was just a few decades early — Crooked Timber
crookedtimber.org

That LLMs exist; that they are capable of forming coherent sentences in response to prompts; that they are in some genuine sense creative without intentionality, suggests that there is something importantly right about the arguments of structuralist linguistics. Language demonstrably can exist as a system independent of the humans who employ it, and exist generatively, so that it is capable of forming new combinations. […] much of what we commonly attribute to individual cognition is in fact carried out through the systems of signs that structure our social lives.

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    It’s ultimately also an observation about what LLMs can and can’t be, based on the structures they’re reproducing:

    Languages are systems. They can most certainly have biases, but they do not and cannot have goals. Exactly the same is true for the mathematical models of language that are produced by transformers, and that power interfaces such as ChatGPT. We can blame the English language for a lot of things. But it is never going to become conscious and decide to turn us into paperclips.