[pjc50]

> I was thinking the other day that we really need a new term for this. In 2016 we had "post-truth", but that implies humans deliberately making stuff up to deceive people, for whatever reason, but LLMs making stuff up don't really knowingly do so, and don't really have a motive. There is the term "consensus reality", but the danger is that with more and more LLM-generated content appearing on the internet, which may ultimately pollute future training, we may find "consensus" isn't sufficient to determine reality any more. Perhaps the new term for what we're heading towards could be something like the "post-reality" era, or something like that.

Really this is just postmodernism; the general collapse in epistemic certainty leading to viewing reality purely in terms of text. "Il n’y a pas de hors-texte" (Derrida); there is nothing outside the text. GPT would have to agree with Derrida, because it knows nothing but text. It has "all" the text, or at least all the text that could be found and fed to it, but nothing outside that.

(and likewise it really accelerates "Sokal hoax" questions!)

[corbulo]

You're absolutely correct on emphasizing the text medium. Neurolinguistic programming isn't just an arcane meme for academics. The most important part of it, it only works if the user cannot separate reality from words.

Marshall McLuhan is really the techno-prophet of our era.