Gregory's ServerI'm re-reading Sueyeun Juliette Lee's insightful essay "Shock and Blah" for class tomorrow https://thevolta.org/ewc41-sjlee-p1.html and realizing that... "stuplimity" is exactly the aesthetic experience that LLMs like ChatGPT evoke in me
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of course ChatGPT isn't trained only on textual artifacts of our traumas—though its training set does include those, among many other things. regardless, I can't shake that (honestly revolting) feeling of vampirism—lives being feasted on—whenever large language models are used or discussed. the end! |
Lee is discussing what she calls the "traumatic stuplime" in conceptual poetry of the 2010s—works like Kenneth Goldsmith's _Seven American Deaths and Disasters_, which collects "raw" and unadorned transcripts of radio and tv coverage of traumatic events in American history. she quotes a question that Stephen Colbert asked Goldsmith during his appearance on the Colbert Report in 2013 to promote that book, a quote that I think about all the time. imo Colbert's question also applies to LLMs