R.B. Griggs at Tech For Life:
It would be easy to insist that LLMs are just objects, obviously. As an engineer I get it—it doesn’t matter how convincing the human affectations are, underneath the conversational interface is still nothing but data, algorithms, and matrix multiplication. Any projection of subject-hood is clearly just anthropomorphic nonsense. Stochastic parrots!
But even if I grant you that, can we admit that LLMs are perhaps the strangest object that has ever existed? It is an object that relentlessly trains on the language output of all human subjects until every semantic association has been harvested from the syntax. The result is an interface where any possible persona, both real and imagined, is just a prompt away.
If it is an object, then it is one that has mastered the subject so completely that we eagerly dream up entirely new intersubjective realities to explore with it. We want every child to experience personalized tutoring with chatbot teachers. We simulate historical figures, create AI therapists, and even, with the right fine-tuning, chat with dead relatives. LLMs are becoming a general purpose tool for filling any subject-sized hole in our very human lives, for both good and ill.
You can’t help but sense that chatbots are starting to fill a strange new ontological space. A chatbot is not fully a subject, nor merely an object. But what?
More here.
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