>You could say that LLMs are the first technology where the medium actively invites confession.
I don't think LLMs really constitute a medium by McLuhan's definition. A medium is an extension of man, and LLMs don't extend so much as they replace. An LLM is closer to a secretary or similar force multiplier than an extension of oneself.
I think it absolutely is a medium based on his big picture idea of how the way we consume information influences us. A TV series or a web search or a university lecture or an evening in the stacks all deeply influence how we might study a subject and in what ways the facts take hold within us. An LLM query or “conversation” is a distinct sibling to those. And a secretary is a medium.
> You could say that LLMs are the first technology where the medium actively invites confession.
What about ELIZA? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
>You could say that LLMs are the first technology where the medium actively invites confession.
I don't think LLMs really constitute a medium by McLuhan's definition. A medium is an extension of man, and LLMs don't extend so much as they replace. An LLM is closer to a secretary or similar force multiplier than an extension of oneself.
I think it absolutely is a medium based on his big picture idea of how the way we consume information influences us. A TV series or a web search or a university lecture or an evening in the stacks all deeply influence how we might study a subject and in what ways the facts take hold within us. An LLM query or “conversation” is a distinct sibling to those. And a secretary is a medium.
I always said our data lake was frozen over. You could get tons of data into it, but barely anything back out.
That is literally the definition of a data lake. The one you can get anything back out of is called a database.