1) I’d put Ernest Hemingway as the most precise 20th century English-language author, but perhaps that’s just personal preference.
2) I found this statement, and the premise motivating the essay, as hyperbolic: “Synonym rotation is the fingerprint of a writer who is avoiding something or hasn’t done any thinking at all.” It sounds like you’re saying synonym rotation is really the sign of an inferior mind. But as an academic who has written a lot about rights, I can’t imagine how dull and redundant my writing would be if every time I used only the word “rights” to describe my subject, instead of paying homage to philosophical works that have unpacked this topic, characterizing them as “incidents” or “entitlements.” In short, I can’t really tell if your antipathy towards synonym rotation is genuine or a deliberately incendiary take intended to invite rebuttals like this one.
This is the important conversation to have! I agree mixing it up with deliberation is sometimes the best course. The point is not to rotate as a matter of the training protocols, for no reason at all. The point is to think about all the choices. And agree on Ernest H.
Dear Hollis, Reading this was thrilling for me. I read "The Fountainhead"in 1959 (at age 19) and have been involved with Objectivism all these years. I knew Rand, I was her graphic designer and I co-sponsored her lecture in Chicago in 1963. You have a better understanding of her thinking than many of the people who are "official Objectivists," who are making their living presenting her ideas to the public. I'll be sending this to about 70 fans of Rand's I know. We'll see what response I get.
Well, one such response (from a friend of Iris who also separately subscribes to you, Hollis) is that I *love* your drawing here on Rand's reasons for insisting on precision in diction! The first-handed thinking required to see the world and choose with care exactly the shade and nuance of meaning you want to communicate is so important in the craft of writing.
The disruption is not that machines generate shallow prose. It is that they can now generate socially credible conceptuality, which breaks the old equivalence between articulate abstraction and human cognition.
This is so insightful Hollis. A few years ago I was fortunate to connect with and discuss thinking, creativity and intelligence with Douglas Hofstadter on a research study.
I would compare his work with Rand's.
Hofstadter (author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, Pulitzer winner) presents a direct challenge to your critique of LLM writing. He has spent his career arguing that thinking is analogy and slippage between concepts. Where you brilliantly point out synonym rotation as a failure of concept formation, Hofstadter might see it as the core of cognition. In his view, a concept isn't a fixed point (A = A); it's a flexible halo of associations. I know that he thought an LLM's ability to navigate the numerical space between words is actually the closest we have come to simulating the human mind's "fluid concepts."
Test: Hofstadter is deeply skeptical of LLMs, but not because they are second-handers. He fears they lack meaning (the "referent" you mention?). However, he would likely find Rand’s "Lexicon" approach to language, where terms are "fixed and defended", to be psychologically unrealistic. To Hofstadter, a mind that cannot see how "A is almost B" is a mind that cannot create.
When I use synonyms it is not because I have not thought, but because I am trying to triangulate a complex feeling that a single word cannot capture. Does that make sense?
For me, the danger is not the machine using synonyms; it's the human reader accepting them without asking, "Wait, is 'liberty' actually the same thing as 'independence' in this sentence?" If you do not notice the swap, you have stopped thinking.
This is also the conversation I want to be having! I think my fellow humanists who balk even at engaging with LLMs are missing a fantastic opportunity to think anew about how language works and about how meaning is created. Thank you!
Related to this and your essay about LLM poetry: sometimes a synonym or metaphor illuminates the meaning of a word or phenomenon in a way concrete language cannot. Because these often occur in uncommon contexts, it’s unlikely LLMs could produce them or explain that meaning given the way they work. (Additionally, some words are figurative by nature, e.g. “illuminate,” but these are easier for LLMs to “understand.”)
My hunch is that LLMs cannot get over this hump of context-specific metaphorical thinking that provides unique meaning. I don’t recall if Rand had thoughts in figurative language. Maybe others here know?
Figurative language is a unique, occasionally profound, way for us to link ideas together in non-obvious ways and come up with a third or gestalt meaning. Like good poetry, there almost has to be a silent human identity on the other side of the utterance.
Great to see you incorporating R.E.M.'s lyrics into your piece. I recommend Chronic Town, Fables of the Reconstruction, Reckoning, and Life's Rich Pageant. Everything up to Green. Some of the most interesting lyrics ever written, which are just as much a part of my own aesthetic as Pound, or Wright, or Roethke. I would consider the danger of generating second-hand ideas myself on that basis (Stipe says in "King of Birds," that "Standing on the shoulders of giants leaves [him] cold"), but one would first have to argue that that is what I have done and I don't think anyone cares quite enough to do so. This creates the old "put up or shut up" situation. I think most of us choose the latter. If we don't, maybe we ought to.
One last thought: "The first is the “second-hander,” a person whose mind is directed at other minds rather than at reality." I think I know what this means, and I like it, but someday I'd like to hear more about the distinction between "other minds" and "reality" and what that involves.
Automatic for the People is the eighth studio album by the American alternative rock band R.E.M., released October 5, 1992 by Warner Bros. Records. Recorded during the commercial rise of Out of Time (1991), the album marked a stylistic shift toward introspective, somber, and orchestral arrangements. Several tracks feature string arrangements by John Paul Jones, contributing to the album’s restrained, elegiac tone. Producing six singles—including “Drive,” “Man on the Moon,” and “Everybody Hurts”—the album reached number two on the Billboard 200 and received widespread critical acclaim. It has since sold over 18 million copies worldwide and is widely regarded as one of R.E.M.’s most artistically significant releases.
1. R.E.M. Automatic for the People. Warner Bros. Records, 1992.
You'll pry my "bag of big" from my cold dead hands. It's enormous, gigantic, huge, massive, towering, large, immense, oversized, gargantuan, colossal...
I'm no Tolkien. When describing setting, I try to put down just enough tropes and cliches to trigger my reader's imagination, because most of the time, vividly recreating exactly what I see in my head is not important to my story--whatever details the reader fills in will suffice. And it's a fantasy/sci-fi about the gods, so the most relevant description of many things is that they are big. So yeah, I'm intentionally trying to use a bunch of different words for big, without reusing any in a single chapter, and I'll consider not mentioning something is big only after my bag is empty. Maybe it's because I'm a bad writer, I don't know.
I do strip out intensifiers and diminishers, though. Especially the diminishers. My first drafts are full of "little bit of" and "kind of like." In editing, I try to just commit fully to the description, or find a less intense word.
I love this essay. It's a fascinating dive into the way we write (or the way we should write), and the comparison with Ayn Rand's writing style is brilliant. And the REM-inspired title is perfect.
As someone who was present at the gestation, if not the birth, of artificial intelligence, I bristle a little bit at even accurate descriptions (like yours) of how LLMs produce written language.
I have thought much about this and I think I know why I bristle. [I note with interest that the human writing this instinctively chose the same word again, to link the previous thought to this new paragraph and its topic sentence, instead of a syllable or crappy metaphor.] I bristle [!] because in my view, the writer is making a comparison but without access to the thing being used as the baseline. In the instant Substack post (I am relishing being able to string those words together in this order), I believe Dr Robbins is inherently using the human brain as a comparison to LLMs.
The problem is, Dr Robbins' language algorithm, and mine, and everyone else's, uses the same system. Broca's area of the human brain does the exact same thing as an LLM: it selects the next, most likely word, using what the person has heard and read as "training materials".
I am in no wise a Randian, but I suppose this is what Rand meant by "second-handers". These are people who stop there. Their most extreme form would be the actual aphasia patient, whose language functions are felled by a massive stroke. They are reduced to a single syllable, like the index patient Mr Tan (because "tan" was his only syllable and his name was otherwise unknown).
In these patients, their word cloud choices are so severely restricted they can only produce stock phrases ("Oh, what a beautiful morning", regardless of time of day.) The ultimate in "second-handing". (Yes, that was a sentence fragment. As a human writer, I sometimes strategically break the rules.)
The difference, as far as I can tell, is that skilled writers or rhetoricians have other layers, other committees that make higher-level decisions and layer on another sort of analysis. These are where our prefrontal cortex and cingulate cortex and insula start weighing in on how we should analyze the problem before us. That is what some writers (and some politicians!) have, while others do not, and still more are somewhere on the spectrum of ability. You might even coin the phrase "critical thinking" to describe it.
Michael Stipe would despise this bumbling crypto-fascism. There is a lot that is painful about reading this essay, but the worst part might be the juvenility of its effort is to shoehorn in REM lyrics.
It's tempting to replace "LLM" in your essay with "TV news" or "social media," both second-hander machines with explicit instructions to repeat (or never say) certain words/phrases.
1) I’d put Ernest Hemingway as the most precise 20th century English-language author, but perhaps that’s just personal preference.
2) I found this statement, and the premise motivating the essay, as hyperbolic: “Synonym rotation is the fingerprint of a writer who is avoiding something or hasn’t done any thinking at all.” It sounds like you’re saying synonym rotation is really the sign of an inferior mind. But as an academic who has written a lot about rights, I can’t imagine how dull and redundant my writing would be if every time I used only the word “rights” to describe my subject, instead of paying homage to philosophical works that have unpacked this topic, characterizing them as “incidents” or “entitlements.” In short, I can’t really tell if your antipathy towards synonym rotation is genuine or a deliberately incendiary take intended to invite rebuttals like this one.
This is the important conversation to have! I agree mixing it up with deliberation is sometimes the best course. The point is not to rotate as a matter of the training protocols, for no reason at all. The point is to think about all the choices. And agree on Ernest H.
Dear Hollis, Reading this was thrilling for me. I read "The Fountainhead"in 1959 (at age 19) and have been involved with Objectivism all these years. I knew Rand, I was her graphic designer and I co-sponsored her lecture in Chicago in 1963. You have a better understanding of her thinking than many of the people who are "official Objectivists," who are making their living presenting her ideas to the public. I'll be sending this to about 70 fans of Rand's I know. We'll see what response I get.
Oh my! Thank you very very much! The highest compliment. I would very much like to know the response.
Well, one such response (from a friend of Iris who also separately subscribes to you, Hollis) is that I *love* your drawing here on Rand's reasons for insisting on precision in diction! The first-handed thinking required to see the world and choose with care exactly the shade and nuance of meaning you want to communicate is so important in the craft of writing.
What’s an LLP?
The disruption is not that machines generate shallow prose. It is that they can now generate socially credible conceptuality, which breaks the old equivalence between articulate abstraction and human cognition.
This is so insightful Hollis. A few years ago I was fortunate to connect with and discuss thinking, creativity and intelligence with Douglas Hofstadter on a research study.
I would compare his work with Rand's.
Hofstadter (author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, Pulitzer winner) presents a direct challenge to your critique of LLM writing. He has spent his career arguing that thinking is analogy and slippage between concepts. Where you brilliantly point out synonym rotation as a failure of concept formation, Hofstadter might see it as the core of cognition. In his view, a concept isn't a fixed point (A = A); it's a flexible halo of associations. I know that he thought an LLM's ability to navigate the numerical space between words is actually the closest we have come to simulating the human mind's "fluid concepts."
Test: Hofstadter is deeply skeptical of LLMs, but not because they are second-handers. He fears they lack meaning (the "referent" you mention?). However, he would likely find Rand’s "Lexicon" approach to language, where terms are "fixed and defended", to be psychologically unrealistic. To Hofstadter, a mind that cannot see how "A is almost B" is a mind that cannot create.
When I use synonyms it is not because I have not thought, but because I am trying to triangulate a complex feeling that a single word cannot capture. Does that make sense?
For me, the danger is not the machine using synonyms; it's the human reader accepting them without asking, "Wait, is 'liberty' actually the same thing as 'independence' in this sentence?" If you do not notice the swap, you have stopped thinking.
This is also the conversation I want to be having! I think my fellow humanists who balk even at engaging with LLMs are missing a fantastic opportunity to think anew about how language works and about how meaning is created. Thank you!
Agreed, an LLM is actually a massive gift to humanists. Of course I side with Hofstadter and the fluid concepts over the LLMs statistical average.
Related to this and your essay about LLM poetry: sometimes a synonym or metaphor illuminates the meaning of a word or phenomenon in a way concrete language cannot. Because these often occur in uncommon contexts, it’s unlikely LLMs could produce them or explain that meaning given the way they work. (Additionally, some words are figurative by nature, e.g. “illuminate,” but these are easier for LLMs to “understand.”)
My hunch is that LLMs cannot get over this hump of context-specific metaphorical thinking that provides unique meaning. I don’t recall if Rand had thoughts in figurative language. Maybe others here know?
Figurative language is a unique, occasionally profound, way for us to link ideas together in non-obvious ways and come up with a third or gestalt meaning. Like good poetry, there almost has to be a silent human identity on the other side of the utterance.
Great to see you incorporating R.E.M.'s lyrics into your piece. I recommend Chronic Town, Fables of the Reconstruction, Reckoning, and Life's Rich Pageant. Everything up to Green. Some of the most interesting lyrics ever written, which are just as much a part of my own aesthetic as Pound, or Wright, or Roethke. I would consider the danger of generating second-hand ideas myself on that basis (Stipe says in "King of Birds," that "Standing on the shoulders of giants leaves [him] cold"), but one would first have to argue that that is what I have done and I don't think anyone cares quite enough to do so. This creates the old "put up or shut up" situation. I think most of us choose the latter. If we don't, maybe we ought to.
One last thought: "The first is the “second-hander,” a person whose mind is directed at other minds rather than at reality." I think I know what this means, and I like it, but someday I'd like to hear more about the distinction between "other minds" and "reality" and what that involves.
Hollis, it is absolutely refreshing to learn that you appreciate the writing of Ayn Rand. Met her in high school. Fell in love.
REM FTW
Automatic for the People (1992)
Automatic for the People is the eighth studio album by the American alternative rock band R.E.M., released October 5, 1992 by Warner Bros. Records. Recorded during the commercial rise of Out of Time (1991), the album marked a stylistic shift toward introspective, somber, and orchestral arrangements. Several tracks feature string arrangements by John Paul Jones, contributing to the album’s restrained, elegiac tone. Producing six singles—including “Drive,” “Man on the Moon,” and “Everybody Hurts”—the album reached number two on the Billboard 200 and received widespread critical acclaim. It has since sold over 18 million copies worldwide and is widely regarded as one of R.E.M.’s most artistically significant releases.
1. R.E.M. Automatic for the People. Warner Bros. Records, 1992.
"Rand, Pound" Sand, and using AI to create essays and complex mathematical formulae without acknowledging it.
You'll pry my "bag of big" from my cold dead hands. It's enormous, gigantic, huge, massive, towering, large, immense, oversized, gargantuan, colossal...
I'm no Tolkien. When describing setting, I try to put down just enough tropes and cliches to trigger my reader's imagination, because most of the time, vividly recreating exactly what I see in my head is not important to my story--whatever details the reader fills in will suffice. And it's a fantasy/sci-fi about the gods, so the most relevant description of many things is that they are big. So yeah, I'm intentionally trying to use a bunch of different words for big, without reusing any in a single chapter, and I'll consider not mentioning something is big only after my bag is empty. Maybe it's because I'm a bad writer, I don't know.
I do strip out intensifiers and diminishers, though. Especially the diminishers. My first drafts are full of "little bit of" and "kind of like." In editing, I try to just commit fully to the description, or find a less intense word.
I love this essay. It's a fascinating dive into the way we write (or the way we should write), and the comparison with Ayn Rand's writing style is brilliant. And the REM-inspired title is perfect.
As someone who was present at the gestation, if not the birth, of artificial intelligence, I bristle a little bit at even accurate descriptions (like yours) of how LLMs produce written language.
I have thought much about this and I think I know why I bristle. [I note with interest that the human writing this instinctively chose the same word again, to link the previous thought to this new paragraph and its topic sentence, instead of a syllable or crappy metaphor.] I bristle [!] because in my view, the writer is making a comparison but without access to the thing being used as the baseline. In the instant Substack post (I am relishing being able to string those words together in this order), I believe Dr Robbins is inherently using the human brain as a comparison to LLMs.
The problem is, Dr Robbins' language algorithm, and mine, and everyone else's, uses the same system. Broca's area of the human brain does the exact same thing as an LLM: it selects the next, most likely word, using what the person has heard and read as "training materials".
I am in no wise a Randian, but I suppose this is what Rand meant by "second-handers". These are people who stop there. Their most extreme form would be the actual aphasia patient, whose language functions are felled by a massive stroke. They are reduced to a single syllable, like the index patient Mr Tan (because "tan" was his only syllable and his name was otherwise unknown).
https://colorado.pressbooks.pub/neuroscience/chapter/successes-and-failures/
In these patients, their word cloud choices are so severely restricted they can only produce stock phrases ("Oh, what a beautiful morning", regardless of time of day.) The ultimate in "second-handing". (Yes, that was a sentence fragment. As a human writer, I sometimes strategically break the rules.)
The difference, as far as I can tell, is that skilled writers or rhetoricians have other layers, other committees that make higher-level decisions and layer on another sort of analysis. These are where our prefrontal cortex and cingulate cortex and insula start weighing in on how we should analyze the problem before us. That is what some writers (and some politicians!) have, while others do not, and still more are somewhere on the spectrum of ability. You might even coin the phrase "critical thinking" to describe it.
Michael Stipe would despise this bumbling crypto-fascism. There is a lot that is painful about reading this essay, but the worst part might be the juvenility of its effort is to shoehorn in REM lyrics.
This is the point ? What LLMs do?
"But nonsense has a welcome ring"
It's tempting to replace "LLM" in your essay with "TV news" or "social media," both second-hander machines with explicit instructions to repeat (or never say) certain words/phrases.
Correction: What an LLM?