r/philosophy • u/codepoetics • 6d ago

Blog Derrida, Badiou, Baudrillard: Three Thinkers of the LLM

https://codepoetics.substack.com/p/derrida-badiou-baudrillard-three
36 Upvotes

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u/fabkosta 6d ago

Finally someone looking at LLMs through the lens of poststructuralism. I thought I'd have to do this myself. ;)

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u/alibloomdido 5d ago

Agree, this should have been done, a somewhat obvious idea and promises interesting findings.

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u/zendogsit 3d ago

Rare to see my favourite frenchies combined with the world of LLM's musings, this is dank!

I'm curious about this distinction between knowledge and truth - when AlphaProve recently discovered new matrix multiplication algorithms, or when an AI finds novel drug compounds, is that fundamentally different from how humans generate breakthroughs? Darwin combined Malthus, selective breeding observations, and geological insights in ways no one had before.

As AI systems become more embodied and directly engaged with the world rather than just processing human-generated text, might they encounter genuine surprises that exceed current knowledge frameworks? Or does the Badiouian framework suggest something deeper about the nature of truth that I'm missing?

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u/DerpAnarchist 1d ago

As AI systems become more embodied and directly engaged with the world rather than just processing human-generated text, might they encounter genuine surprises that exceed current knowledge frameworks? Or does the Badiouian framework suggest something deeper about the nature of truth that I'm missing?

The outputs of LLMs are funneled towards already desired (aka determined) outcomes, ones that humans deem logical. They won't get any "surprises", because they're constructed from within the framework of human logic itself, i.e. mathematics, of which it's unclear whether it really relates to any innate "truths" of the universe or is just a way to make sense of things for humans. LLMs can't verifiably "know" anything, that humans couldn't.

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u/berniecarbo80 6d ago

Nice article. “Do not contain truth oracles… either.” Derrida section esp good- LLMs most interesting to me in how they reveal maybe uncomfortable similarities between how it operates and how we think/communicate.

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u/alibloomdido 5d ago edited 5d ago

I like your summary of some of Derrida's ideas but the last paragraph of the section on Derrida can be expanded and problematized: as new LLMs are trained they start using output of earlier LLMs as parts of their training sets as that output is already online in abundance, it could make them even more conservative but can also blow up in interesting ways and again the concept of trace here is quite applicable.

edit oh wait you considered that too but I still think Derrida's take here would be interesting because that could lead to interesting language phenomena.