The Ecstasy of Deep Influence: Extending Jonathan Lethem’s arguments to the LLM era
- Originality isn’t some sacred, inviolable thing. Everyone is always remixing everyone else. That’s how it’s always been, and will continue to be.
- Using LLMs now is like reading, Googling, or looking up a word in a thesaurus. Personally, I use it like I would Wikipedia
- Your ideas were always stitched together from other people’s stuff. What makes your work yours isn’t the ingredients, it’s how your personal quirks flavor the mix.
- The big issue isn’t that artists and authors don’t get paid when their output is used to train AI, but that there are just a handful of companies or nations controlling all the LLMs in the world.
- The more you use LLMs, the more it changes how you think. It reflects you back at yourself. You shape it, and it shapes you. To fully unlock its capabilities, don’t lock eyes with it like it’s some digital god. Instead, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with it and look through it, with it, towards something else. Treat it like a co-panelist on stage next to you. That’s how you avoid the AI swallowing your brain whole.
- LLMs are like a supercharged version of social media, especially for those who have a large following. Both have an aggregated hivemind (LLMs greater by many factors). Both have emergent wisdom/madness of the crowd (Depending on what you post/prompt)
