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

For users, the optimal GenAI experience feels effortless — “frictionless,” in the smooth-talking lingo of Silicon Valley. But ChatGPT’s instant answers and uncanny simulacra are the fetishized product of what Marx called “dead labor”: all the past work of thinking and writing behind the texts on which AI models are trained, together with the coding and engineering required for their development and maintenance.2