Comment by whoisyc
6 days ago
There is no answer to the question “what Joyce would have done…”. None. Nil. They are dead and anything done it their name is by definition not what they would have done, but what future generations who are convinced that they know better than the men themselves did.
It is better to leave unanswerable questions unanswered.
I am not against LLM technologies in general. But this trend of using LLMs to give a seemingly authoritative and conclusive answer to questions where no such thing is possible is dangerous to our society. We will see an explosion of narcissistic disorders as it becomes easier and easier to construct convincing narratives to cocoon yourself in, and if you dare questioning them they will tell you how the LLM passed X and Y and Z benchmarks so they cannot be wrong.
I'm confused by this response. I'm fascinated by the question because Joyce (and the other Modernists) are all dead, as you say.
Were they alive, it wouldn't be a question - we'd be able to see how they used new technologies, of which LLMs are one. And if they chose to use them at all.
I wasn't trying to provide an answer to that question. You're right that it's unanswerable. That was my point.
I also - of course - wouldn't presume to know better how to construct a sentence, or story, or novel, using any form of technology, including LLMs, than James Joyce. That would be a completely ridiculous assertion for (almost) anyone, ever, to make, regardless of their generation. I don't really understand what 'generations' have to do with the question I was posing, other than that its underscoring of the central ineffability.
I do, however, think it's valuable to take a school of thought (20th century Modernism, for example) and apply it to a new technological advance in an artform. In the same way, I think it's interesting to consider how 18th century Romantic thought would apply to LLMs.
It's fascinating to imagine Wordsworth, for example, both fully embracing LLMs (where is the OpenRouter Romantic? Can they exist?), and, conversely, fully rejecting LLMs.
Again, I'm not expecting a factual answer - I do understand that Wordsworth isn't alive anymore.
But: taking a new technology (like the printing press) and an old school of thought (like classical Greek philosophy) often yields interesting results - as it did with the Enlightenment.
As such, I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with asking unanswerable questions. Quite the opposite. The process of asking is the important part. The answer will be new. That's the other (extremely) important part. How else do you expect forms to advance?
I'm not terribly interested in benchmarking LLMs (especially for creative writing), or in speculating about "explosions of narcissistic disorders", hence not mentioning either. And I certainly wasn't suggesting we attempt to reach a factually correct answer about what Joyce might ask ChatGPT.
(The man deserves some privacy - his letters are gross enough!)