LLMs show cultural theory was right about the death of the author

Nice! I wouldn’t describe the early Foucault as ‘rebarbative’, the common translations of Birth of the Clinic and Discipline and Punish are a pleasure to read although the volumes of The Uses of Pleasure are not —- he had a little too much exposure to Derrida. [1]

But I’ve been saying that LLMs would bring a structuralist revival here for years, long before people started saying that on Just Wrong and we are seeing real ‘authors’ pick it up.

As I see it, the idea that ‘X has a structure of a language’ collapsed when Noam Chomsky introduced the idea of poverty of the stimulus (you aren’t exposed to enough language to learn grammar from first principles) and the further failure of Chomsky’s theory to be the basis of language technology (40 years post Zork we have Inform 7 and Attempto Controlled English)

We were all sure the language instinct was a peripheral added to an animal that already had a theory of mind and all that…. But all of a sudden you could train an LLM on a pile of text and it did what Chomsky said was impossible and all of a sudden language has the structure of a language and structuralism is back baby!

[1] Hate Derrida? Try Badiou. He plays the same game but with impeccable precision, you can’t ever say that he doesn’t understand the texts that he deconstructs and boy does that make some people mad…

Nice