The Epistemology of LLM Summaries
Some notes: why one should sing instead of say
Obviously, it’s somewhat tedious to write so many invectives against the misuse of AI technologies, but it remains the responsibility of those who are capable, especially philosophically-literate persons (even those so little as I) who are also practicing artists, to offer an apologia of sorts for their craft, which must be simultaneously a doxological affirmation of our God-crafted anthropology. Once the work is done, let swords be quills again.
Reiteration distributed through time and place is a means to the increase of a word’s semantic content.
The word blue, as a signifier for a particular qualia, can be elaborated (disclose itself more fully in tandem with educing a qualia latent in another signifier) in synergy with another word, for example,
Mountain blue
Horse blue
Ice blue
Sky blue
Here blue
Green Blue
His blue
Time’s blue
Orange blue
Cold blue
Thin blue
In each instance, not only is the implicit meaning of blue grappled onto sense experience, or the strange attenuation of sense which seems almost to break into the ether which is proper to certain faculties of intuition, but the other word is simultaneously enriched.
The ‘black sounds’ of Manuel Torre, connote something we find obvious.
Moments of synesthesia which are of a lattice-delicacy. The hot and cold of Lethe. The fragrant light of Hafez.
Now, the solipsistic phenomenon of aesthetic curation: slowcore, mosscore, the plethora of distinctly evocative lofi channels. Nostalgia, often weaponized.
There is an aspect of ‘oxness’ which is capable of coherently evincing “high blue of alabaster was the ox, and the thoughts of him were flesh, and heavier than hills.”
There is an aspect of coffeeness, which can coherently exist in the liminality of sensation, as orange coffee, elephant coffee, alien coffee, etc.
An abstruse point, but important for what we have to say here.
There is no quintessence of meaning in a lexical item that can be separated from the particularities of its saying: diction, syntax, its ultimate context, ie. the world.
Let’s use Dune for an example.
There is no ‘essence’ to Dune which is separate from Dune as it is written; the essence of Dune, insofar as we can know it, is manifest to us inextricably in Dune as such: with its language, rhythms, idiosyncrasies of phraseology, cadence, length, and tonality.
(the questions at hand become very complicated when factors are taken into account such as scribal transmission, or a plurality of manuscripts, as is often the case with older texts)
Therefore, mechanisms of summation, which implicitly treat their object as useful only insofar as they convey a meaning separably from the means of their saying, are gnostic. Language is a vehicle for meaning, but meaning is inherently ‘vehicled.’ In Christian tradition, the body and the soul are one thing, differently manifested (thus the doctrine of resurrection: it would be meaningless to have an immortal ‘soul’ because meaning always manifests itself in a body). Not only that, but summation is dangerous, especially when performed algorithmically; a summary is a basically a means of shaving off excess to hone in on some sort of imagined purity. This can be useful, but only if paired to the learned wholeness of an original. If you stipulate a purpose to an LLM, for example, “tell me what Dune says about economics and operationalize that information in 8-12 bullet points,” you are necessarily going to omit the greater portion of the text. Not only that, but if you are outsourcing the procedures of summation to an algorithm, then one has no way of knowing whether or not the selected language is true, let alone germane- or even if it is, it may be nominally germane, to the exclusion of obscure or implied, but numbingly pertinent datums (I would like to stitch into the word ‘datum’ implications of a functionally clarified unit of meaning). And if you ask an LLM: “Summarize the meanings contained in Dune as regards politics, anthropology, ecology, genetics, depth psychology, religion, warfare, time, probability theory, philosophy, the inheritance of Greek epic, loyalty, family identity, virtue, sexuality… ad infinitum, you will, of course, end up with a facsimile of the book, unchanged- except for perhaps without the table of contents.
If you take an essay, and run it through GPT, it won’t mean the same thing anymore, even if, at a utilitarian level, it mines out some crucial points. The essay’s meaning is in large part how it was said. This is why poetry is important, right now especially. It remembers what language is. It re-members (both emphatically and etymologically).
A poem by definition cannot be summarized because its meaning is explicitly, and often primarily, the how of the saying, rather than the what; though the two are, of course, ideally in perfect concert.
The real meaning of Dune is in the poetry of landscape, mind and relations, which are comprised irreducibly of every comma and period, every faltering of speech, every too-pedantic pilgrimage of meta-consciousness.
To summarize something in order to further expedite the gathering of knowledge or to optimise along a vector of efficiency is to sacrifice Beauty to Truth or Goodness, whereas the three should indwell one another in a simultaneously linear and non-linear fashion, with Beauty as the initial, ordinal first.
If summaries are routinely substituted for things in themselves, then we are capitulating to being further enmeshed in a web of detached representations. Not only that, but we neglect the honing of the hermeneutical faculties which can recognize what is valuable in a thing. If we outsource this labour, shortly we will have to be fed with a spoon.
Nick Cave being awesome:
https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chat-gpt-what-do-you-think/
https://www.theredhandfiles.com/are-songs-from-god/
Dr. Timothy Patitsas, Jonathan Pageau, and Makoto Fujimura (some of whose paintings are included above)