Mark CarriganLLMs and crystallisation as a form of object relating
I thought this was interesting from Mari Ruti’s The Summons of Love pg 109:
Stendhal labels this process “crystallization,” describing it as follows: Leave a lover with his thoughts for twenty-four hours, and this is what will happen. At the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they haul it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable. What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one. Crystallization endows the beloved with every possible perfection. Through it, the object of our desire, no matter how ordinary, is rendered extraordinary. As Stendhal specifies, crystallization implies “a certain fever of the imagination which translates a normally commonplace object into something unrecognizable, and makes it an entity apart.”
I don’t think this idealisation is narrowly romantic: it’s a particular mode of object relating in which a subject determinedly renders an object as sublime, seeing in every empirical facet of it evidence of the sublimity they have already ascribed to the object in their psyche. Essentially I think it’s a totalising way of reading back your own initial emotional response to the object into the nature of that object itself, in the process sharpening and entrenching the contours of that response.
It’s exactly the form of object-relating which I worry that LLMs make much easier. Object relating like this thrives on articulation. It’s through putting reactions to the object into words that those reactions begin to crystallise the object, inviting stronger and deeper expressions of the initial reaction. It’s an auto-catalytic process: the more you do it, the more you’re prone to doing it. The problem isn’t just model sycophancy (they’re much less likely to check this behaviour than a human interlocutor) but rather the epistemic constraints of being entirely text based and reliant on what the user shares with them.
It also makes me wonder if modes of object relating would be a useful analytical frame to bring towards the suffusion of LLMs into the lifeworld.
#crystallization #idealisation #LLMs #MariRuti #obesssive #Stendhal
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