It’s challenging to write a genuinely interesting academic monograph; it’s also challenging, I think, to write an interesting review of one! But I loved Derek Neal’s review of the NYU humanities prof Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism.

Neal’s review is just so inviting and accessible and engaging; he does a really excellent job of synopsizing Weatherby’s book—which has so many fresh perspectives on AI and language!—and making the review feel like a three-way conversation: between him and Weatherby (as Neal takes some of the ideas in Language Machines and extends them in fascinating ways); and with you, the reader, invited to think along with them.

One of the most interesting ideas is that LLMs may force us to return to…French structuralist theory…to more usefully describe how AI “writes” and “thinks.” The critics of LLMs are right to say that AI-generated text is often devoid of real meaning or truth; but it may be more productive to think about how even human language often isn’t about meaning, but about signifying.

As Neal writes,

The idea that language “communicate[s] our thoughts, feelings and intentions” is based on the idea that language is referential—first we have something inside or outside of ourselves, which exists before language, and then we convey that information in language…

Weatherby disagrees with this idea, claiming that LLMs show language to be poetic first and referential second; in other words, since LLMs cannot refer to the external, physical world—only its representation in language—an LLM can never escape language, meaning it can never be primarily referential. Yet LLMs do generate meaning, as anyone who’s interacted with ChatGPT knows. This makes it poetic, not in the sense that it writes poems, but in the sense of creating meaning through language…This is something the great religious and spiritual traditions have always understood—that language doesn’t just represent our world but creates it as well…

If my explanations are starting to sound as if they belong to the realm of literary theory—with such ideas as “the death of the author,” or the idea that a reader constructs the meaning of a text as much as the writer does—they should, as Weatherby thinks we need to go in this direction to understand LLMs. More precisely, he thinks we need to return to the lessons of structuralism, the literary theory pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 20th century. Structuralism treats language as a system of signs in which the relation of the part to the whole, or the word to the language, conditions meaning…

What structuralism helps us to understand, if I’m following Weatherby correctly, is that language is always cultural…”Data models always include culture,” writes Weatherby, so we need structuralism and a “semiotics of data” to understand and interpret the output of LLMs, which are not necessarily intelligent, he says, but are “language machines.”

One of the things I appreciated most about this review is how carefully Neal writes about AI from a descriptive point of view (what do LLMs actually do? separate from whether we think that’s good or bad?) and from an ideological point of view. It’s really hard to find writers that do both well—lots of AI engineers offering technical explainers and apologia, for example, or non-tech people critiquing without being able to define their terms. Doing both is really important, I think! Technology isn’t apolitical and without ideological implications, but it’s also more than just a vessel for political arguments…

As Neal writes:

Weatherby (and I) might be starting to sound like AI apologists, suggesting that LLMs are just another tool that humans can use to our advantage without posing any danger. This withholding of judgement, the fact that Weatherby doesn’t immediately frame his understanding of LLMs as a “booster” or “doomer,” is a strength of Language Machines, and it allows Weatherby to explain his view of LLMs without becoming mired in ideological debates. He does, however, eventually arrive at his concerns surrounding AI, and he is not optimistic.