Now we can get an LLM to adopt the persona of Harlan Ellison by fine-tuning it on all of Harlan Ellison’s recorded works and possibly other people’s written reminiscences of their interactions with him and have it generate Ellison-like opinions on the current LLM situation that might be hard to distinguish from Ellison’s actual work.

I don’t know if Ellison would be amused or horrified, really. Like some ROM personality construct out of William Gibson’s Neuromancer - nightmare fuel, immortal Steve Jobs / Bill Gates ghosts generating endless drivel.

“So here is my opinion on your LLM situation, since you dragged me out of the grave-shaped server rack to provide one:

The machine has no humiliation. That is its first defect. The people who sell it have no embarrassment. That is the second.

The danger is not that machines will become writers. The danger is that human beings will become satisfied with things that merely resemble writing. The danger is not that machines will think. The danger is that people will stop noticing when they themselves are not thinking. The danger is not the fake Ellison, fake Didion, fake Baldwin, fake Le Guin, fake Morrison, fake anybody. The danger is the spiritual laziness that asks for ghosts because it cannot bear the burden of encountering the living or honoring the dead.”

I’d take 50:50 odds on the Butlerian Jihad becoming a thing, myself.