“Language is a virus” sang Laurie Anderson some years ago, riffing on William S. Burroughs’s “The Ticket That Exploded” and one wonders. How does it infect us and how do we spread it?
Does it lie dormant in our very DNA and only awaits the right circumstances to trigger, just waiting to explode into out consciousness? What would be its trigger(s)?
And then there’s the act of reading a book. Reading is staring at the hieroglyphics imprinted upon sheets of dead tree byproducts and hallucinating wildly — for hours on end! I thought this graphic below summed things up quite nicely:
[Click to see the article where I found this]
Now consider how we recruit/radicalize/train others to be able to self-hallucinate… and not just the “text”-based but things like music scores and EVERYTHING we see with our eyes…
Most of this has been triggered off of the reports of the hallucinating chatbots — given that they are based on LLMs or image databases, how does this happen?
And a happy end of June Thursday to you all!
[More on reading and hallucination: Two sources for the same paper]
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810017300314
“Uncharted features and dynamics of reading: Voices, characters, and crossing of experiences”
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5361686/
“Uncharted features and dynamics of reading: Voices, characters, and crossing of experiences”