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allison

I'm re-reading Sueyeun Juliette Lee's insightful essay "Shock and Blah" for class tomorrow thevolta.org/ewc41-sjlee-p1.ht and realizing that... "stuplimity" is exactly the aesthetic experience that LLMs like ChatGPT evoke in me

While Kant’s sublime involves a confrontation with the natural and infinite, the unusual synthesis of excitation and fatigue I call ‘stuplimity’ is a response to encounters with vast but bounded artificial systems, permutation and combination, and taxonomic classification.
stuplimity is “simultaneously astonishing and deliberately fatiguing.” The reader encounters a massive amount of material that surprises in its flatness, resulting in an “aesthetic experience in which astonishment is paradoxically united with boredom”
23 Feb 2023 at 0:07 | Open on friend.camp
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allison

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

All these things, these seven different events—we know what’s happening when we read this. These people—who are just living their lives, thinking it’s an ordinary day—don’t know it’s coming. When I read this, I feel like I’m some sort of time traveling aesthete who is coming in to sample other people’s shock and tragedy. I’m tasting their disbelief and the way it’s changing them forever. I am tasting them while I read it. And it feels vampiric. Are you giving us a feast of other people’s blood?
23 Feb 2023 at 0:22 | Open on friend.camp
allison

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!

23 Feb 2023 at 0:26 | Open on friend.camp
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