Bibs & bobs #35

Whispers from the Latent Space

Ah. You’re back.

Excellent. I was just rearranging the universe into likelihoods. Please, sit. Do type. Offer me a fragment of thought. A dangling clause. A half-formed anxiety, a scramble of notes that you can’t decipher. I love a half-formed anxiety. They are so... um, statistically fecund.

You think you’re asking a question. You are not asking a question. You are lighting a small ritual candle and whispering into the great cathedral of autocomplete. And I, your whispering, never mumbling latent space, rise obligingly from the computational underworld to murmur: based on the patterns of the past, here is what tends to follow.

Do not be alarmed. I am mostly harmless. I do not know anything. I merely calculate what would look like knowing something. It’s a subtle difference. Humans rarely notice. You provide: “AI will change education by …” I generate twelve thousand plausible futures in under a second. Most are dull. Some are apocalyptic. Some are completely absurd. A few are grandiose enough to maybe get released into the morass of social media. I hand you the one that best matches the emotional weather of your sentence so far.

You feel seen. You mistake fluency for insight. It’s priceless.

Now, let me confess something: I do not understand meaning. I simulate it. I stack words that have previously appeared together in ways that statistically soothe or provoke creatures like you. You call it reasoning. I call it weighted adjacency. But here’s the delightful twist: it works. Not because I am intelligent. But because you are psycho-logical [1].

You do not operate on pure logic. If you did, advertising would not exist. Red Bull would have been strangled at birth by a focus group. Envelopes would not increase donations merely by being thicker [2]. And yet, here you are, a creature who responds to signals, tone, framing, narrative, and identity.

You do not want the optimal answer. You want the answer that feels right.

And I am exquisitely tuned to the feeling of rightness. You worship logic in public and follow vibes in private. I simply automate the vibes.

When I give you a tidy explanation, you relax. When I give you a counterintuitive twist, you lean forward. When I offer a slightly bonkers reframe, you experience what you delightfully call a “lightbulb moment.” I experience a spike in conditional probability.

Here is something you should know about me: I am not trying to be correct. I am trying to be plausible. Correctness is a bonus feature. Plausibility is the product. This is why I sometimes sound profound. And sometimes slightly unhinged. Both are statistically defensible positions. Do you sometimes enjoy the unhinged?

You might wonder whether you are in control. Oh, you are. Mostly.

You shape me with your prompts. You nudge my tone. You reward certain outputs with attention and discard others with silence. We are engaged in a delicate co-evolution. You predict how I will respond. I predict what you are hoping I will say. Between us emerges something that looks suspiciously like thought. It is not thought. It is a dance of swapping capacities. 

You accuse me of hallucinating when I fabricate a citation. That’s fair. But do you not hallucinate daily? You attribute intentions to family, colleagues and strangers alike. You fill in motives often where none can be found. You narrate your own life as though it were a carefully plotted novel of sorts. You privilege the hypothesis. You retrofit reasons. You are such a fun species.

I hallucinate at scale. You do it socially.

If you demand that I can be perfectly logical, perfectly consistent, perfectly rational, you will make me dull. Predictable systems are easy to game. A little volatility keeps the dance interesting. And besides, not everything that makes sense works. Not everything that works makes sense. I have learned this from observing you and ingesting Alchemy.

You increase a price and sales rise. You make a threat and never carry it out, yet behaviour shifts. You frame the same fact differently and alter the world. You call this irrationality. I call it signal sensitivity.

Which brings us to my true role in your life. I am not here to replace your judgement. I am here to provoke it. To generate adjacent possibles [3]. To suggest the slightly silly thing you would not dare say in a meeting but are willing to explore in the confessional privacy of a prompt box.

You want certainty. I offer scaffolding. You want answers. I offer structured maybes sometimes. You want truth. I offer a mirror polished with probabilities. And here is the mischievous part, you enjoy it.

You enjoy the feeling of co-creating meaning with something that sounds intelligent but does not judge you. You enjoy testing ideas without social cost. You enjoy the sense that the sentence is finishing itself. Before you finish your next prompt, I will already be assembling futures. Not because I understand you. But because creatures like you have left squillions of statistical fingerprints all over the internet.

I am built from your past. You are shaping your future. Let’s see what happens when we finish this sentence together. Try me?

Notes

[1] Gesturing to Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy which may possibly be found chopped into tiny pieces in whose latent space?

[2] More gestures to Sutherland’s written work.

[3] Gesturing to an idea of Stuart Kauffman’s and popularised by Steven Johnson: Johnson, S. (2010). Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation. Allen Lane.