> Briefly: LLMs create social relations between their users and the authors of the text in their training corpora. With the right access to the model and the corpus, one can trace the connections from system output back to individual source texts and their authors (Grosse et al., 2023). These social relations are mechanically mediated, giving users the illusion that they are interacting with just the machine and not an assemblage of people. But mediated social relationships and their illusions are a common fact of modern life. The social relations created by LLMs in turn cut across, and interact with, other social relations, including those shaped by other social technologies...We draw heavily on the ideas of Simon (1996), who saw AI, political science, administration, economics, computer science, and cognitive psychology as so many branches of the “sciences of the artificial,” studying how human beings create "artifacts" that model, and act on, their environment..
