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

the boom in sophistication of large language models over the past few years has struck alarm bells that were already chiming. Well before the inflection point of OpenAI’s 2022 debut of ChatGPT, freelance writers and adjunct instructors were already beset by declining web traffic, stagnant book sales, the steady siphoning of resources from the humanities, and what was hard not to interpret as a culture-wide devaluation of the written word. Then along came a swarm of free software that promised to produce, in seconds, passable approximations of term papers, literary reviews, lyric essays, Intellectual Situations.