(Seen & Unseen) – Just like the technologies which Arendt envisaged in the 1950s, it is too anthropocentric to think of LLMs as being ‘primarily designed to make human life easier and human ‘work’ less painful’. For sure, this very new technology makes a good show of trying to convince us it exists to do so. ‘Ask anything’ Open AI’s ChatGPT beguilingly invites every time you open up the page: ‘I am ready for you; I am always available for you. I will never let you down.’  

But in reality, this technology is not designed for human life. Rather, the ‘object it is designed to produce’ (on Arendt’s terms) is the wealth of its creators. The object of LLMs never was to ‘serve the world and its things’ but is the creation of engineers ‘in order to erect a world’, a new world of their own devising. That new world is designed to monetise human attention. (Read More)