Il sogno del lullista: i Conversational Large Language Models e la modernità

Abstract

The paper, using the history of philosophy to look into current phenomena, discusses some similarities between Early Modern Lullism and present-day debates on conversational LLMs, here considered as offering a universal service of secretarial kind. This happens inside a system of, so to say, production of texts by means of texts, with two different kinds of textual production now coexisting and feeding each other. This in turn implies that, while everyone benefits from the universal secretary, everyone is going to feed the LLMs of future secretaries, and as in academic publishing, you are going to pay for what you help to produce: as in academic publishing, automatic Lullism should rather be socialized.

English title: The Lullist’s Dream: Conversational Large Language Models and Early Modernity