You Too Are Untranslatable

“How render back into light world language the speech defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent on a two-dimensional surface, a three-dimensional form? Or in a three dimensional image, a multi-dimensional meaning? How translate into terms of ‘yes’ and ‘no’, revelations that shatter into meaninglessness every attempt to define the pairs of opposites? Communicate to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses, the message of the all-generating void?” 

This excerpt from Joseph Campbell’s “Hero With a Thousand Faces” describes the difficulty the hero has in communicating their journey with the folks back home. The hero's experience transcends the language available to describe it.

How does Theseus, on his return, tell of the minotaur so that his audience understand, feel, and experience something for which they have no available data?

There’s an obvious parallel here between the hero’s struggle to tell their story so it lands and recreating the experiential world in the binary of AI.

A machine cannot speak of love. A Large Language Model (LLM) like ChatGPT becomes an ersatz Shakespeare as it writes sonnets of love in response to a prompt from a user.

But its output is 100% structure, 0% spirit. 

A generated text description or image of a rose is not a rose by any other name.

The machine never sees the rose’s beauty, nor inhales its scent, and is immune to the pain from its thorns

Instead, in the LLM’s attempt to mimic experience, all the complexity of life is flattened into a vector. The most appropriate response is the one closest to the one it has already mapped.

A truth universally held by those in Big Tech who would algorithm our entire existence is that you can do anything if you just have enough data.

Not if the subject defies data-isation. 

Not if the subject refuses to be constrained to a structure. 

Walt Whitman understood this in his poem Song of Myself, 52:

“The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”

Something to hold on to as we return from the times of heroes and poets back to our present, dominated as it is by Big Algorithm™… 

Past data is no indicator of future performance. However much data you give it, it will never be enough. 

Big Algorithm™ can never really know you.

You too are untranslatable.