“Briefly: LLMs create social relations between their users and the authors of the text in their training corpora. With the right access to the model and the corpus, one can trace the connections from system output back to individual source texts and their authors (Grosse et al., 2023). These social relations are mechanically mediated, giving users the illusion that they are interacting with just the machine and not an assemblage of people. But mediated social relationships and their illusions are a common fact of modern life. The social relations created by LLMs in turn cut across, and interact with, other social relations, including those shaped by other social technologies.”
Whatever else LLMs are, they are this too. This is a descriptor of the information system in the context of the broader information ecosystem it inhabits, and I think way too much of current AI discourse simply ignores this, either from a belief that humans being “less intelligent” won’t matter and will be outcompeted, or, more chillingly, where shaping the information ecosystem is seen as a priority with AI as the tool to enable it, sapping agency and control away from the public.