This is an old opinion piece by Northrop Frye way back in 1986(!) about thought, articulation, social control, and militancy. It’s an increasingly difficult article to find (for some reason/s) so I’ve liberated it and posted it.
And I can’t help but feel that in LLMs we have reached the apotheosis of Frye’s feared “verbal formulas that have no thought behind them but are put up as a pretence of thinking”.
I think Frye, had he lived to see their introduction, would likely have sunk into a great depression over LLMs and what they represented.
Yeah I like the take that LLMs are a fascist artifact. They reduce language, our most valuable way of connecting with others, solving problems, sharing knowledge, etc. into a thing you pay not to think about and for output that is frequently wrong and cannot know when it’s wrong.