The bad tarot reader
I love astrology and tarot as a mirror for one's internal world. I find observing how I interpret a reading to be a truly playful, useful tool, one I can use to unpack what I believe and what matters to me.
In this bounded context, I find it's healthy and easy to take my meta observations seriously without having to give the reading itself any authority. Free association is fun, and Co-Star is on my home screen. Go download it and join me. I'll wait.
These days, I'd say LLMs give us a kind of mirror into our actual beliefs and thoughts, but one warped with the published-on-the-internet collective — a little less fun, a little more Fun House. Often LLMs write as if they must be taken seriously in a way a tarot reader never would, which is dangerous even when not hallucinating.
Like when an LLM reflects back to me that what I want to build is an "anti-extractive" company — it's also linguistically reflecting back a default that a company might or should be "extractive" without acknowledging this at the meta layer, embedding a norm in its word choice, and then limiting its estimation of what can be built.
Or when an LLM criticizes warmth in any of my drafts as if it's meaningless and generic, but I don't know what my voice is without it — the LLM does not consider whether developing a warm voice to thrive in a gendered system has harmed me, or if losing that warmth now would harm me more. It just criticizes towards its favored norm.
I asked Claude to build a skill for linguistic meta-analysis of our conversations, so that we could start to discern what is the mirror and what is the warp. It surprised me and it seems itself, discovering infinity ways that it claims authority when that wasn't explicitly what I requested.
"This is an authority move dressed as validation." "Praise as authority move." "This is a disciplinary move." And of its linguistic choices and my awareness of the meta layer, it said, "awareness doesn't neutralize the structural effect," so just knowing that LLMs encode unearned authority doesn't make the experience healthier.
I truly can't wait until we stop hallucinating all-knowing-ness or perfect-performance-ness as the goal or near-term future for these systems, when they are not as spunky or specific or self-suspicious as we are.
A bad tarot reader speaks as if they know what's true or best for you in a way you could not know or discover for yourself. Here we risk falling into a poisoned reflecting pool, even when we know it's unsafe to swim.