This is an old opinion piece by Northrop Frye way back in 1986(!) about thought, articulation, social control, and militancy. It’s an increasingly difficult article to find (for some reason/s) so I’ve liberated it and posted it.
And I can’t help but feel that in LLMs we have reached the apotheosis of Frye’s feared “verbal formulas that have no thought behind them but are put up as a pretence of thinking”.
I think Frye, had he lived to see their introduction, would likely have sunk into a great depression over LLMs and what they represented.
Okay, so I can take onboard the idea that the written word has become an amalgam of speech-to-text bullshit and internet newspeak has eroded the quality and lucidity of our discourse, but the only thing I’d take away from you is that when I speak of an oral tradition, I’m referring to a cultural body of knowledge that is transmitted orally which often involves long group sessions of oratory importantly based on rote memorization. What we do orally in our culture does not compare to the depth and richness and (this is key) the mental faculties that accompany such a cultural tradition.
I agree that it hasn’t been going on long enough to be considered a tradition yet, but I think over time it may develop into one — almost out of necessity — because there is no alternative with a functionally illiterate populace. (Besides the seemingly obvious one of educating people back into literacy.)
In the same article, they speculated that LLMs may be the revenge of the written word and may lead to a change. But having to work with LLMs — practically by force — I see it differently.
LLMs allow people routes around reading and writing. They aid illiteracy. They summarize and elaborate almost like a lossy compression or decompression algorithm for the written word. They allow you to take a single sentence and pretend that there was more thought behind it than there truly was, and they digest written language and produce things that allow you to be more comfortably illiterate. Functionally, they’re a hack to allow orally oriented people to pretend that they’re more literate than they are.
Yeah I like the take that LLMs are a fascist artifact. They reduce language, our most valuable way of connecting with others, solving problems, sharing knowledge, etc. into a thing you pay not to think about and for output that is frequently wrong and cannot know when it’s wrong.