"incarnadine" belongs to "multitudinous seas" because they're on the same line in Macbeth... so that's exactly the kind of connection an LLM will now pick up on. What the great writer did was to be the first to put them together, but maybe some random text generator would do that if we left it long enough. We just need to automate the 500 years of historical selection that gets that set of strings canonised as the great literature that the Woofs will be taught to admire.
But now we want to protest that it isn't a "learned response"... we really do admire the great line for its inherent greatness. How did we learn about that? "Incarnadine" is odd because a different modernist also used it to make a point, Ezra Pound in "ABC Of Reading". pgs 36-7
"The charging of language is done in three principal ways:
You receive the language as your race has left it, the words
have meanings which have 'grown into the race's skin';
the Germans say 'wie in den Schnabel gewachsen ', as it
grows in his beak. And the good writer chooses his words
for their 'meaning ', but that meaning is not a set, cut-off
thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board.
It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and
where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been
used brilliantly or memorably.
You can hardly say 'incarnadine' without one or more of
your auditors thinking of a particular line of verse. "
Dear old Edward Craig, as well as his lectures on current and old philosophy, wrote the wonderful book "The Mind Of God And The Works Of Man". His overall thesis was that there has been a shift in western philosophy since the Renaissance. The early moderns such as Descartes and Spinoza are concerned with pure Thought, which is poorly expressed in worldly language, because the central image guiding them is the idea of God who just sees how things are. Whereas the world after Kant put Man The Doer/Maker at the centre of the universe, and so we end up with various "linguistic turns" that treat natural language as primary and are distrustful of immaterial Thoughts. Ideas, Beliefs. As you'd expect from Craig, there is some amused scepticism about what Kant and Hegel thought they had achieved, and their influence was explained as their utility to anyone who wants to cite an influence.
As usual with this sort of broad-brush history, it gets a bit stretched the closer it gets to present time, when there are lots of different people doing different things rather than a small elite working the same problems (see also: Stephen Toulmin's "Cosmopolis"). There is the obvious point that the notion of ideal logical languages was still active in the 20th century, and some of the attraction of psychoanalytic theory is that it is getting at the real machinery behind the appearances.
But I think he was right in sensing a tension between 2 competing images: humans as observers, trying imperfectly to capture the world as they found it, and humans as the creators of their world, who are imperfectly theorising what they are doing along the way. Debates about authenticity, ownership, originality and awareness are run through with background assumptions which are drawing on different traditions and projects that have left their traces.
If we're going to talk about "the rise of science", remember there are at least 2 kinds of science: the physical and biological ones - the so-called "hard sciences" - but also the rise of the social sciences and anthropology, which very much put Man at the centre of the universe even when the former were supposedly moving him away from there.
Beautifully put, and hard to find much to disagree with in either your piece or Moran's. However, I am increasingly convinced that those who want to restrict or limit this sort of technology in education aren't fighting their students or even their administrators; they're fighting a kind of ideology. One so deeply baked into contemporary social life that it floats free of any particular political orientation or economic system. It's all basically there in Jacques Ellul, and it's what Neil Postman was fumbling towards when he spoke of a "Technopoly".
Under this ideology, if technology *can* be deployed in the service of some short-term convenience, it generally will be. There is simply no stopping this by conventional political or ideological means; arguments given to students or academic staff about long-term harms or violations of deeply held values are ineffectual. And each new incursion is sorites-sized, such that at each stage we don't notice that we are acquiescing to an entirely new form of life, one in which embodiment simply means much less, and where the connection between embodiment and words (and sounds, and images) is completely severed. "Let's do our department meetings on Zoom!" "Let's have course discussions online via a convenient message board!" "Let's save money and increase accessibility by moving that course online!" Each a grain of sand added to the pile.
Most of my philosophy of tech. students enthusiastically support the idea of a humanities education that returns to more traditional modes of teaching and learning, rigorously enforcing all the difficult measures this would involve. But it simply will not appear as an option, despite the fact that we allegedly inhabit a "supply and demand" economy and a democratic polity.
In short, I fear it will take much more than words to halt the LLM's assault on words.
Thanks for this response! It will definitely take more than words. One problem is that, even if I and others at MIT or elsewhere institute policies that effectively guard against the use of generative AI—which we need help doing—we will increasingly teach students who became accustomed to using it in high school, over which we have no direct control. The challenges are, as you point out, systemic and ideological, and that's depressing. Still, I think, it's worth trying to push back within our limited sphere of influence, while we can.
As it happens, I'm teaching a philosophy seminar this semester called "Angels, Demons, and Artificial Intelligence" focused on Aquinas. The widespread use of LLMs certainly threatens to reduce writing to the slush of content. Angels offer us a much more interesting model of immaterial intelligence than algorithms, however, precisely because they do not simply communicate (as their name – and perhaps their origin as theophanic presences – indicates). Rather, as the tradition has it, angels possess not only intellect but will, so (contra Moran) some of them do go wrong and lie and all the rest, as Milton so vividly depicts in 'Paradise Lost'. An algorithm may give the appearance of will because its behavior may be unpredictable, unforeseen by the 'user', even wholly novel; but it is merely a tool, there to be used or set aside as we choose. Would we be so ready to abdicate the use of our own faculties if we properly recognized this fact?
The course sounds amazing. And I'd delighted to have more reliable info on the angels! If you have a syllabus you'd be happy to share, I'm curious to learn more...
"incarnadine" belongs to "multitudinous seas" because they're on the same line in Macbeth... so that's exactly the kind of connection an LLM will now pick up on. What the great writer did was to be the first to put them together, but maybe some random text generator would do that if we left it long enough. We just need to automate the 500 years of historical selection that gets that set of strings canonised as the great literature that the Woofs will be taught to admire.
But now we want to protest that it isn't a "learned response"... we really do admire the great line for its inherent greatness. How did we learn about that? "Incarnadine" is odd because a different modernist also used it to make a point, Ezra Pound in "ABC Of Reading". pgs 36-7
"The charging of language is done in three principal ways:
You receive the language as your race has left it, the words
have meanings which have 'grown into the race's skin';
the Germans say 'wie in den Schnabel gewachsen ', as it
grows in his beak. And the good writer chooses his words
for their 'meaning ', but that meaning is not a set, cut-off
thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board.
It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and
where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been
used brilliantly or memorably.
You can hardly say 'incarnadine' without one or more of
your auditors thinking of a particular line of verse. "
https://monoskop.org/images/a/a4/Pound_Ezra_ABC_of_Reading.pdf
Dear old Edward Craig, as well as his lectures on current and old philosophy, wrote the wonderful book "The Mind Of God And The Works Of Man". His overall thesis was that there has been a shift in western philosophy since the Renaissance. The early moderns such as Descartes and Spinoza are concerned with pure Thought, which is poorly expressed in worldly language, because the central image guiding them is the idea of God who just sees how things are. Whereas the world after Kant put Man The Doer/Maker at the centre of the universe, and so we end up with various "linguistic turns" that treat natural language as primary and are distrustful of immaterial Thoughts. Ideas, Beliefs. As you'd expect from Craig, there is some amused scepticism about what Kant and Hegel thought they had achieved, and their influence was explained as their utility to anyone who wants to cite an influence.
As usual with this sort of broad-brush history, it gets a bit stretched the closer it gets to present time, when there are lots of different people doing different things rather than a small elite working the same problems (see also: Stephen Toulmin's "Cosmopolis"). There is the obvious point that the notion of ideal logical languages was still active in the 20th century, and some of the attraction of psychoanalytic theory is that it is getting at the real machinery behind the appearances.
But I think he was right in sensing a tension between 2 competing images: humans as observers, trying imperfectly to capture the world as they found it, and humans as the creators of their world, who are imperfectly theorising what they are doing along the way. Debates about authenticity, ownership, originality and awareness are run through with background assumptions which are drawing on different traditions and projects that have left their traces.
If we're going to talk about "the rise of science", remember there are at least 2 kinds of science: the physical and biological ones - the so-called "hard sciences" - but also the rise of the social sciences and anthropology, which very much put Man at the centre of the universe even when the former were supposedly moving him away from there.
Beautifully put, and hard to find much to disagree with in either your piece or Moran's. However, I am increasingly convinced that those who want to restrict or limit this sort of technology in education aren't fighting their students or even their administrators; they're fighting a kind of ideology. One so deeply baked into contemporary social life that it floats free of any particular political orientation or economic system. It's all basically there in Jacques Ellul, and it's what Neil Postman was fumbling towards when he spoke of a "Technopoly".
Under this ideology, if technology *can* be deployed in the service of some short-term convenience, it generally will be. There is simply no stopping this by conventional political or ideological means; arguments given to students or academic staff about long-term harms or violations of deeply held values are ineffectual. And each new incursion is sorites-sized, such that at each stage we don't notice that we are acquiescing to an entirely new form of life, one in which embodiment simply means much less, and where the connection between embodiment and words (and sounds, and images) is completely severed. "Let's do our department meetings on Zoom!" "Let's have course discussions online via a convenient message board!" "Let's save money and increase accessibility by moving that course online!" Each a grain of sand added to the pile.
Most of my philosophy of tech. students enthusiastically support the idea of a humanities education that returns to more traditional modes of teaching and learning, rigorously enforcing all the difficult measures this would involve. But it simply will not appear as an option, despite the fact that we allegedly inhabit a "supply and demand" economy and a democratic polity.
In short, I fear it will take much more than words to halt the LLM's assault on words.
Thanks for this response! It will definitely take more than words. One problem is that, even if I and others at MIT or elsewhere institute policies that effectively guard against the use of generative AI—which we need help doing—we will increasingly teach students who became accustomed to using it in high school, over which we have no direct control. The challenges are, as you point out, systemic and ideological, and that's depressing. Still, I think, it's worth trying to push back within our limited sphere of influence, while we can.
As it happens, I'm teaching a philosophy seminar this semester called "Angels, Demons, and Artificial Intelligence" focused on Aquinas. The widespread use of LLMs certainly threatens to reduce writing to the slush of content. Angels offer us a much more interesting model of immaterial intelligence than algorithms, however, precisely because they do not simply communicate (as their name – and perhaps their origin as theophanic presences – indicates). Rather, as the tradition has it, angels possess not only intellect but will, so (contra Moran) some of them do go wrong and lie and all the rest, as Milton so vividly depicts in 'Paradise Lost'. An algorithm may give the appearance of will because its behavior may be unpredictable, unforeseen by the 'user', even wholly novel; but it is merely a tool, there to be used or set aside as we choose. Would we be so ready to abdicate the use of our own faculties if we properly recognized this fact?
The course sounds amazing. And I'd delighted to have more reliable info on the angels! If you have a syllabus you'd be happy to share, I'm curious to learn more...
I’ll send it over!