Large Language Muddle | Issue 51 | n+1 | The Editors Highlight

Among AI’s leading critics, the computational linguist Emily M. Bender has targeted the industry with a campaign of righteous disenchantment. ChatGPT’s appearance of humanlike intelligence, she and others point out, is a mirage. The narcotized text it produces is only a recombination of whatever corpora it consumes; LLMs, Bender argues, should be seen as “stochastic parrots” and “synthetic text extruding machines.” Where real thinking involves organic associations, speculative leaps, and surprise inferences, AI can only recognize and repeat embedded word chains, based on elaborately automated statistical guesswork. This alone isn’t news: no ChatGPT-happy college sophomore really thinks there’s a little man in the machine writing his Hamlet essay for him. But it bears insistent, strident repetition. A refusal of AI in creative work begins with a refusal of that product’s ideological packaging. “When we imbue these systems with fictitious consciousness,” Bender and Alex Hanna write in their recent book The AI Con, “we are implicitly devaluing what it means to be human.”