"Cultural theory was right about the death of the author. It was just a few decades early" (article reflecting on the connection between LLMs, structuralism, and 20th-century cultural theory)
"Cultural theory was right about the death of the author. It was just a few decades early" (article reflecting on the connection between LLMs, structuralism, and 20th-century cultural theory)
Cultural theory was right about the death of the author. It was just a few decades early — Crooked Timber
That LLMs exist; that they are capable of forming coherent sentences in response to prompts; that they are in some genuine sense creative without intentionality, suggests that there is something importantly right about the arguments of structuralist linguistics. Language demonstrably can exist as a system independent of the humans who employ it, and exist generatively, so that it is capable of forming new combinations. [...] much of what we commonly attribute to individual cognition is in fact carried out through the systems of signs that structure our social lives.