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Hallucinations: In Xanadu did LLMs vainly fancify

Language Log 2023-04-03

Bill Benzon has been our most prolific humanistic commentator about GPTs, almost as prolific as GPTs themselves.  Here he introduces his latest creation in / on the genre:

"From 'Kubla Khan' through GPT and beyond", 3 Quarks Daily (3/27/23)

In a covering note to me, Bill writes:

A story about how I came to be interested in GPTs. It’s also implicitly a critique of the large language model business. You have a bunch of very smart and clever people creating engines that pump out language by the bucketful, but who seem to have little interest in or knowledge about language itself, much less linguistics, psycholinguistics, or the various cognitive sciences. It’s crazy. But the machines they’re producing are marvelous and fascinating.

I won't begin to summarize or encapsulate Benzon's idiosyncratic piece.  It is far too protean and elusive for that.  Instead, I will quote his opening two paragraphs and his caption for the portrait of Kublai Khan that graces the beginning of the long essay, then provide a few choice selections and references, ending with some vexing, perplexing reflections.

I became hooked on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” in the Spring of 1969, my last semester as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. Three years later “Kubla Khan” had become the standard against which I measured my understanding of the human mind. That is why I am about to tell a story about how my interest in the mind has evolved through “Kubla Khan” to include, most recently, ChatGPT. Strange as it may seem, that poem is the vehicle through which I am coming to terms with this new technology and arriving at a sense of its potential.

There is a sense in which the story of that great poem can be traced back to the 11th century invasion of Britain by the Norman French, for that’s what gave rise to the English language. Some centuries later that story encountered a tale born of an encounter between an Italian merchant, Marco Polo, and a Mongolian warlord, Kubla Khan, which, when enlivened by the East India Company’s trade in opium, set fire to the mind of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. We need not trace that trajectory in any detail. I mention it only to give a sense of the scope of this 54-line poem, which is one of the best-known poems in the English language, and is perhaps unique in the annals of Western literature. It has made its mark on popular culture, from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, where it names Kane’s estate, Xanadu, thereby establishing the matrix for the whole film, to a hit song and film by Olivia Newton-John, Xanadu, and even provided that most vulgar of real-estate barons, Donald Trump, with the name for the nightclub, Xanadu, in his now defunct Atlantic City casino.

 

Portrait Caption

Portrait of Kublai Khan by artist Araniko, drawn shortly after Kublai’s death in 1294. His white robes reflect his desired symbolic role as a religious Mongol shaman.

 

Topics, Themes, References

Romantic states of consciousness

Matryoshka dolls in Xanadu

Semantic networks and a Shakespeare sonnet

Computational LInguistics (CL) from the get-go

The wandering years (computation, cognitive science, neuroscience, comparative psychology and developmental psychology; cognitive / neural underpinnings of cultural evolution)

Through GPT to the future

 

Notes, Annotation, Analyses, Diagrams (with arrows, multiple colors of ink [red, black, green, and blue], and tree branching and inosculation)

Metaphor, Recognition, and Neural Process

“The Visual Mind and the Macintosh”

Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution

Vector semantics and the (in-context) construction of meaning in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

(From these works [many others are cited in the post], you can get an idea of what BB and his collaborators were into.)

 

“Kubla Khan” – The Text

1-54 (read it now if you have not yet had the chance — it's a magical, captivating experience you'll never forget)

 

Meditation

Speaking for myself (VHM), I have four basic questions to gnaw on after reading BB's post, and I invite others to think about them too:

1. What can LLMs do for us [humans] that we can't do for ourselves?

2. What can LLMs do better than us?

3. What can LLMs do worse than us?

4. What can LLMs do that we don't want them to do?

Bottom line:  Keep the LLMs in their place:  we are their masters, not the other way around.

 

Bonus

Poplar culture ramifications:  recitations, videos, films, music…

 

Comments

Quantum mechanics, German romantics, "language at the level of poetry"

 

Selected readings