My thoughts are a little cracked here for a variety of unrelated life reasons--lovely to see my friend Anne here, enjoying but not trusting the nostalgia pangs of IM and B&W mac screenshots, reminder to resubscribe to Bookforum--but the Lakoff/Johnson frame here is helpful. I was teaching a library workshop on AI (wish I could strikethrough the term for more powerful effect; how about a 1990s-grad-seminar "under erasure" instead) a couple of weeks back and was deliberately attempting not to call it AI because I think a significant portion of our problem here lies in ceding the landscape to framing LLMs through the metaphor of intelligence. I'm enough of a crude historical materialist to know that winning the language battle won't necessarily stem the tide here, but omg how I would love to break that frame.
Celine this was such an excellent read!! I was playing music while reading and now I am listening to no angels / ICU... so DREAMY!
whenever I'm in a slump and haven't read in a long time, reading your writing helps me to feel connected to the practice of reading again. THANK YOU!!! 📖💕 much to think about from this piece!!!
This clarified and informed my thinking about AI to a remarkable degree. Full disclosure: I’m old enough to have bought an early Mac (which I used as a souped up typewriter) and read Piaget in college. Thanks a million!
Have you read "Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny" by Ted Chiang. It's about a machine to raise kids 'rationally' without the messiness and inconsistency of human emotions.
I don't think I can mark spoilers in a Substack comment so I won't spoil how it ends but I think it's how a child raised on conversations with chatbots would end up. It's a pretty short story in the "Exhalation" anthology.
But you should write your own short story as well! We'd appreciate it.
This was excellent, thank you as always for writing! I read another newsletter this morning by Tara Isabella Burton (link below). Reading both these pieces has made me feel more hopeful about keeping my head in these times when most comments on anything tech-related tends towards the pessimistic. I'm not ignorant of the problems but I do think people are thinking more seriously (and joyously!) now about what they really value. Pieces like this are an object lesson in how to pay attention to the world in all its inevitably online but mostly offline glory.
This was a wonderful read that highlights many of the consequences of misunderstanding LLMs - both at the individual and societal levels. Product designers and managers at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies should really take on the challenge of creating better conceptual models that enable mindful interactions with LLMs. The chat interface was a great starting point, but I think we’ve now seen enough iterations to understand its trade-offs, and it might be time to move on.
Perhaps this isn’t directly about “demystifying” LLMs, since that would involve describing the nature of their emergent behaviors (a difficult task in itself). But we can at least adopt more mechanical ways of reasoning about them. Personally, I like to think of them as a kind of lossy (image) compression as described here (https://lendl.priv.at/blog/2025/01/22/llm-as-compression-algorithms/). It’s not a perfect analogy, but it offers a mechanical starting point rather than an anthropomorphic one.
My thoughts are a little cracked here for a variety of unrelated life reasons--lovely to see my friend Anne here, enjoying but not trusting the nostalgia pangs of IM and B&W mac screenshots, reminder to resubscribe to Bookforum--but the Lakoff/Johnson frame here is helpful. I was teaching a library workshop on AI (wish I could strikethrough the term for more powerful effect; how about a 1990s-grad-seminar "under erasure" instead) a couple of weeks back and was deliberately attempting not to call it AI because I think a significant portion of our problem here lies in ceding the landscape to framing LLMs through the metaphor of intelligence. I'm enough of a crude historical materialist to know that winning the language battle won't necessarily stem the tide here, but omg how I would love to break that frame.
Celine this was such an excellent read!! I was playing music while reading and now I am listening to no angels / ICU... so DREAMY!
whenever I'm in a slump and haven't read in a long time, reading your writing helps me to feel connected to the practice of reading again. THANK YOU!!! 📖💕 much to think about from this piece!!!
This clarified and informed my thinking about AI to a remarkable degree. Full disclosure: I’m old enough to have bought an early Mac (which I used as a souped up typewriter) and read Piaget in college. Thanks a million!
Insightful as always, Celine!
Have you read "Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny" by Ted Chiang. It's about a machine to raise kids 'rationally' without the messiness and inconsistency of human emotions.
I don't think I can mark spoilers in a Substack comment so I won't spoil how it ends but I think it's how a child raised on conversations with chatbots would end up. It's a pretty short story in the "Exhalation" anthology.
But you should write your own short story as well! We'd appreciate it.
This was excellent, thank you as always for writing! I read another newsletter this morning by Tara Isabella Burton (link below). Reading both these pieces has made me feel more hopeful about keeping my head in these times when most comments on anything tech-related tends towards the pessimistic. I'm not ignorant of the problems but I do think people are thinking more seriously (and joyously!) now about what they really value. Pieces like this are an object lesson in how to pay attention to the world in all its inevitably online but mostly offline glory.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thelostword/p/the-internet-is-a-city?r=3a7c2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
This was a wonderful read that highlights many of the consequences of misunderstanding LLMs - both at the individual and societal levels. Product designers and managers at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies should really take on the challenge of creating better conceptual models that enable mindful interactions with LLMs. The chat interface was a great starting point, but I think we’ve now seen enough iterations to understand its trade-offs, and it might be time to move on.
Perhaps this isn’t directly about “demystifying” LLMs, since that would involve describing the nature of their emergent behaviors (a difficult task in itself). But we can at least adopt more mechanical ways of reasoning about them. Personally, I like to think of them as a kind of lossy (image) compression as described here (https://lendl.priv.at/blog/2025/01/22/llm-as-compression-algorithms/). It’s not a perfect analogy, but it offers a mechanical starting point rather than an anthropomorphic one.
always appreciate ur perspective and writing on AI/LLMs.
I can't wait to read what you have to say about László Krasznahorkai. I am reading Seiobo There Below now and think it's brilliant.
Thanks for this piece. Metaphors We Live By was a HUGE influence on my writing (about architecture and cities).