Perhaps you’ve used one before: everyone puts their hands forward and touches it. You ask a question. And, all by itself, the cursor starts moving, spelling out an answer, letter by letter.
Spooky! You feel a presence. There’s some other intelligence there. You can feel it. Some consciousness, ready to answer your questions…
But of course that’s just an illusion. Everyone touching it is subtly nudging it based on their own fears and desires. The board is merely summing each individual’s nudge to produce a kind of average subconscious response.
I’m, of course, here describing a Large Language Model, spelling out its answers token by token, a statistical average of the crowd whose hands are also there: the illusion only working so long as that labor remains unacknowledged, unrecognized.
When the Ouija board was introduced to the salons of the late 19th century Americans, radio was beginning to spread across the country. For the first time, the voices of famous men from beyond the horizon could be heard in your own living room through a simple contraption. Spiritualism was spreading and it seemed reasonable that someone would eventually build a similar contraption to communicate with the dead as easily as one could send a telegram to a loved one abroad (an equally unimaginable distance in those days). The technology was, in fact, thought inevitable.
Women were long thought more in touch with the spirit realm and were particularly drawn to the technology. Many soon found that famous dead people would espouse women’s suffrage when asked. Reports of famous, dead, White men supporting women’s rights soon spread and gave some credibility and momentum to the Women’s movement.
I’m not suggesting, of course, that LLMs will give the disenfranchised a voice. It seems that their introduction is merely going to drown out the disenfranchised in floods of propaganda.
So, I guess I’m not talking about Large Language Models at all, but history itself: that continuous, moving average subconscious, pushed forward by everyone’s—yes, even your—hand.
