Consequences

In ‘Taking the Consequences’, one of Lawrence Durrell’s hilarious short stories about life in the Diplomatic Service, the British Embassy in Vulgaria finds itself “issuing Categorial Denials or Studied Evasions in batches of ten”, as a West German news agency keeps publishing scandalous stories about its actvities:

The Foreign Secretary wrote [the Ambassador] in prose of a secular tautness, asking him whether or not the following were true: a secret meeting with Mrs Khrushchev to negotiate a pact without telling H.M.G. Another less secret with Pandit Nehru outside a public cabinet d’aisance in Bombay. A third with Stalin. A fourth with the Baroness of Monrovia…

The source for such revelations, it is eventually established, is that the assistant Military Attaché has been selling the contents of embassy waste-paper bins to the German correspondent to supplement his income, which includes such Top Secret documents as these:

The British Ambassador met

Mrs Krushchev

In a lift

He said: “Will you be my satellite?”

She said: “Squeeze me when the lights go out.”

The result was The Warsaw Pact…

Yes, because of the Ambassador’s love of party games, the whole embassy had been playing Consequences regularly, which the German journalist, unfamiliar with such activities, had then taken completely seriously and printed as news stories…

I imagine that absolutely nobody plays Consequences any more, unless trapped in a holiday cottage in the depths of rural Wales for a fortnight of constant rain, and certainly not the younger generation – which is a shame, because otherwise this would be a neat analogy for LLMs: the algorithm (in this case, the regular structure of A and B met in/at C, A said X, B said Y, the result was Z; in the latter case, sonething more opaque) generates coherent sentences by putting together random words and phrases, and if we’re very naive we might imagine that they are genuinely meaningful.

Yes, Chat-GPT does (probably) aim for A, B, C etc to have a reasonable probability of appearing in the same context rather than aiming for the most surreal juxtapositions possible – but that just makes it seem more credible, rather than making the statements actually more reliable. In fact, more surreal juxtapositions might be more productive, suggesting new constellations of ideas that could then be explored and developed, rather than a lowest-common-denominator combination that is conventional, predictable and not even necessarily true. In other words, students might be better off writing lots of phrases on bits of paper and developing their arguments by pulling some out randomly and trying to make sense of them – Augustus / transformed / Gallic society / using / garum /and / the poetry of Vergil – rather than resorting to LLMs…