Template:M intro work Large Learning Model: Difference between revisions

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 In all kinds of literature ''bar one'', construal is where the real magic happens: it is the [[Emergent|emergent]] creative act and community consensus that renders ''King Lear'' a timeless cultural leviathan and {{br|Dracula: The Undead}} forgettable pap.<ref>Maybe not ''that'' forgettable, come to think of it: it has stayed with me 15 years, after all.</ref> A literary work may start with the text, but it barely stays there for a moment. The “meaning” of literature is necessarily personal to the reader: it lives between our ears, and within the cultural milieu that interconnects the reading population.<ref>Call me post modern — go on, do — but I don't hold with Carl Sagan’s idea that a book teleports its author “inside our heads”. That would be to equate reading with symbol-processing. It absolutely isn’t, and that metaphor gravely underestimates the human brain when in construction mode. </ref>
-“Construal” and “construction” are interchangeable in this sense: over time that cultural milieu takes the received corpus of literature and, literally, ''constructs'' it into edifices its authors can have scarce have imagined. ''Hamlet'' speaks, still, to the social and human dilemmas of the twenty-first century in ways Shakespeare cannot possibly have contemplated.<ref>A bit ironic that Microsoft should call its chatbot “Bard”, of all things.</ref>
+“Construal” and “construction” are interchangeable in this sense: over time that cultural milieu takes the received corpus of literature and, literally, ''constructs'' it into edifices its authors can have scarce have imagined. ''Hamlet'' speaks, still, to the social and human dilemmas of the twenty-first century in ways Shakespeare cannot possibly have contemplated.<ref>A bit ironic that Microsoft should call its chatbot “Bard”, of all things.</ref> to be clear: the reader of literature is no symbol processor, decrypting text to reveal a one-to-one scale assembly of the content of the author’s head. Literature is not an instruction manual.
 Now there is one kind of “literature” where the last thing the writer wants is for the reader use her imagination to fill in holes in the meaning. Where clarity of authorial intention is paramount; where communicating and understanding ''purpose'' is the sole priority: ''legal'' literature.
-The ''last'' thing a legal drafter wants is to cede interpretative control to the reader. Rather, she seeks to squash all opportunities presented by creative ambiguity. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, [[there are no metaphors in a trust deed|there are no metaphors in a Trust Deed]].
+The ''last'' thing a legal drafter wants is to cede interpretative control to the reader. Rather, she seeks to squash all opportunities for improvisation presented by creative ambiguity. This is why, just as there are no atheists in foxholes, [[there are no metaphors in a trust deed|there are no metaphors in a Trust Deed]].
-Legal drafting seeks to do to readers what code does to computer hardware: it reduces the reader to a machine, a mere symbol processor. It leaves as little room as possible for interpretation.
+Legal drafting seeks to be as [[finite]] as it can be. It strives do to readers what code does to hardware: to reduce them to mere symbol-processing machines, extracting the author’s single incontrovertible meaning. To leaves as little room as possible for interpretation. That there is such a living to be made conducting commercial litigation demonstrates how hard this is.
-This is one reason why [[legalese]] tends to be so laboured. It is designed to chase down and prescribe outcomes for all logical possibilities, remove all ambiguity and render the text mechanical, precise and reliable. Where normal literature favours possibility over certainty, legal language bestows [[certainty]] at the cost of [[possibility]], and to hell with literary style and elegance.
+This is one reason why [[legalese]] is so laboured. It is designed to chase down all blind alleys, previsualise all phantoms and prescribe outcomes for all logical possibilities. To do so, it removes all ambiguity and renders the text as mechanical, precise and reliable as it can be. ''[[There are no metaphors in a trust deed]]''. Where normal literature favours possibility over certainty, legal language bestows [[certainty]] at the cost of [[possibility]], and to hell with literary style and elegance.
-Legal language is ''finite''. Literature is ''[[Finite and Infinite Games|infinite]]''.
+Legal language is, in [[James Carse]]’s sense, ''finite''. Literature is ''[[Finite and Infinite Games|infinite]]''.
-Now: the punchline. Given how important the reader and her cultural baggage are to the creative act in normal literature, we can see how a large learning model is a feasible model in that domain: to move from a model where ''most'' of the creative work is done by the reader to one where ''all'' of it is is no great step. Indeed, there is enough mediocre literature out there that meets this description now, only written by humans, but to formula and slavishly aping hackneyed archetypes that is is no great stretch to do without the writer altogether. In that case, what does it matter what the text says, as long as it is coherent enough for an enterprising reader to make something out of it?
+Now: the punchline. Given how important the reader and her cultural baggage are to the creative act in normal literature, we can see how a [[large learning model]], which spits out text ripe for someone to construct it, is a feasible model in that domain: to move from a model where ''most'' of the creative work is done by the reader to one where ''all'' of it is, is no great step. There is enough bad human literature out there like that now, that is is no great stretch to do without the human altogether. In that case, what does it matter what the text says, as long as it is coherent enough for an enterprising reader to make something out of it?
 ''But that does not work at all at all for legal language''. The language must say exactly what the parties require: nothing more or less, and it must do it in a way that leaves nothing open to a later creative act of interpretation. We should regard legal drafting as closer to computer code than literature: a form of symbol processing where the meaning resides wholly within and is fully limited by the text. But unlike computer code, you can’t run it in a sandbox to see if it works.