(2023-02-01) Brander Llms And Hyperorality

Gordon Brander: LLMs and hyper-orality. a friend recently shared an interesting experiment: http://wanderer.glazkov.com. By fine-tuning an LLM on his writing, he taught his blog to speak back.

ask the LLM to list some interesting key concepts from these chunks

Then, I turn this list of concepts into a list of links.

he’s not the only one pulling on the thread

The common thread through all of these is text becoming conversation, transforming from static object to dynamic action.

if you compost an internet’s worth of written knowledge, the text starts to speak back. When pushed to its extreme, literature gives birth to a renewed orality. A hyper-orality.

We are an oral species, and only recently literate.

In the living medium of the spoken word and communal memory, thoughts take on smooth curves, honed by the evolutionary selection pressures of telling and retelling over many generations. Theorist Walter J. Ong sketches out a number of emergent patterns that arise in this medium

LLMs are a new medium. How might this new medium rework our thinking?

Way back in the 70s, Walter J. Ong and Marshall McLuhan were predicting that electronic networks would reboot oral culture, and we can see this happening through social media. It seems likely that LLMs will massively amplify and accelerate this ongoing effect

McLuhan has this interesting thinking framework called the Media Tetrad

LLMs retrieve orality.

LLMs transform written language into conversation. You can chat with Plato

LLMs enhance narrativization. LLMs are narrators, not fact-finders, or logicians

LLMs obsolesce the author.

By conjuring up coherent narrative from stray scraps, LLMs will help us each express ourselves profusely

LLMs reverse and become immersive hallucination when pushed to extremes.

Wireheading lite.

All of this is likely to be a multiplier for art and creative thinking, but also for cult and conspiracy. It’s going to get weird.