Aidan Walker aka How To Do Things With Memes wrote a interesting review of Language Machines which turns to the 20th century structuralist (and deconstructuralists) philosophers to understand how we got to the point of LLM’s making “language without cognition”. I think he makes some good points about language already being artificial and how this moment forces us to peel away the some of our assumptions about what language is and how it relates to the supposed uniqueness of humans.

Full Review

So I think as we search for a “real humanism” — one that lies in actual people and their tangled experiences of the world, rather than in some ideal, untouchable essence the computer can never replicate — we must be careful and playful in equal measure. Careful, because the stakes are high and the situation demands diligent work that watches closely. Playful, because in a moment when language has become “a service” on tap that constructs itself without the steering of a human hand, all the cliches, omissions, and biases that are coded within language will bloom unchecked like algae in an unmoving pond.

In the era of its autonomous construction, the task of deconstructing language — looking at language and saying “hold up a second,” Uno-reversing the binary, joking, probing, unpeeling — becomes even more important. Which is why I love Language Machines, and why the way forward must include poetry, rhetoric, and memes.