A compendium of doublespeak, stock phrases, non-answers and excuses

"It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. [...] It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even consciousness, so far as possible — would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature of the past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten. " -Orwell, The Prevention of Literature, January 1946.

In The Prevention of Literature, Orwell anticipates ChatGPT three quarters of a century before it comes about. His observations about the abuse and debasement of the English language in Politics and the English language are also prescient. Political media is spoken and written in an ad-hoc language comprised of prefabricated phrases, vague ideographs, idioms and meaningless officialese, with which it is difficult if not impossible to make a serious critique of the status quo. When it is not subversive, it is meaningless fluff. The worst example of meaningless fluff I've seen to date are, as Orwell predicted, written by machinery. I only had a few short "conversations" with OpenAI's ChatGPT, but it commits nearly every sin Orwell identifies. Orwell's essay, written over seventy years ago, is still somehow a more salient critique of ChatGPT than any review actually written about ChatGPT. Enjoying a bizarre and relatively uncritical reception from the media, ChatGPT seems to be marketed or promoted in various ways as (among other things) an assistant or learning tool for students, researchers and writers. A powerful LLM certainly has that potential, but it depends entirely on the data with which it is trained and the specific details of the training process. While an LLM like ChatGPT could be trained so that it at least demonstrates good writing habits (if not originality) I get the sense that ChatGPT was trained to do just the opposite. It demonstrates an evasive, vague and abstract style, with replies constructed from talking points and book-ended with wishy-washy paragraphs.

“ Complex interplay, comprehensive strategy, multifaceted nature, sensitive and complex, continuously assess, engaging in a constructive dialogue, nuanced and context-specific, rapid decision-making based on incomplete information, broader impact, challenges inherent in making decisions, complex landscape, open and transparent discussions, foster understanding and trust, diverse elements, come into play, collectively contribute, open dialogue, various aspects, highlights the complexity, layers of complexity, evolving nature, authoritative sources, evolved over time, as new evidence emerges, complex decision, influenced by various factors, the decision-making process, intricate decision-making process, manifest in various forms, economic considerations, delicate balance, broader context, has been a subject of debate, faced unique challenges, combination of factors, as the situation evolves, maintaining public trust, avenues for expressing these concerns, cultural attitudes, societal perceptions, inherently complex and subjective, no universally agreed-upon answer, capture the complexity and diversity, navigating these considerations, strives to contribute, safe and beneficial, commitment to openness and transparency, evolved its approach over time, based on various considerations, across a broad spectrum, strike the right balance, wide range of domains, exploration of complex problems, find new avenues, avoiding harmful biases, vast amount, significant challenges, addressing this issue is complex, a growing consensus, clarity and transparency, may not always be straightforward, consideration of various factors, nuanced and evolving nature, speak(s) out, opens up, escalating tensions, rally support, economic indicators, defending comments, the right direction, play into, changing landscape of, taking steps to, putting pressure on ”

What can we say about these phrases? First, they're very vague by and large, exactly per Orwell's remarks. They're not in and of themselves partisan, nor shall I add any inherently partisan phrases to this list, yet they strike one as superficial nonetheless. Granted they're not in context, but what meaning would they add if they were? Many assert controversy, difficulty or complexity, or emphasize ambiguity and uncertainty. You can just imagine how they might be pressed into service by a public figure, perhaps in the course of offering an explanation for questionable judgement or integrity. One can more or less extrapolate the intended message.Who could have known? Not us, and least of all you. It's all very complex, take our word for it. Others faintly suggest blamelessness or vague ethical imperatives. But it's time to move forward and to find new avenues. We reaffirm our commitment to transparency and openness. One hears doublespeak in this vein frequently, with so much vague, nebulous lip service, intended to placate a disturbed or irate public. Others are seemingly needless abstractions, or perhaps stand-ins for more detailed information. For instance, "taking steps to" and "putting pressure on". What steps? Applying what pressure?

I'd only had a rather short dialog with ChatGPT , but it seems likely that any good political question will yield a response that involves similar abuses of the English language. If so many students must be made to use this thing, then reading Orwell's essay beforehand would probably add a lot of perspective to the matter. One might fairly speculate the ostensible breadth of information contained in OpenAI's instance is partly due to the use of Wikipedia as training data. The model is supposedly around 700GB, more than enough to "memorize" all of en.wikipedia's pages, which are around 100GB (kiwix) and a fraction of that if one discards images, videos, etc. and only uses the text. I doubt this instance of the model is capable of novel discourse or problem-solving, nor does it seem that OpenAI's instance favors critique. Instead it appears to operate in a similar capacity to services like the Amazon echo, providing information that is already accessible and easy to access, except that the information is integral to the model itself rather than retrieved from some or other website. Attempts at Socratic debate tend to go nowhere. One should not consider it an objective or disinterested "third party", nor an oracle. Its training data, parameters, and other operational details area all now trade secrets. It's marketed as AI, which carries the faint implication that it is somehow apart from the many vested interests and biases of humanity. One might call it a novel method of Propaganda Laundering (another essay I wrote). Perhaps most concerning is the poor and arguably subversive example of English composition and writing that ChatGPT sets. I'm not a writer or a linguist, yet it should be plain and obvious to anyone that ChatGPT does not produce good English.

There's a striking resemblance between the language of mass media (political media especially) and the language generated by OpenAI's ChatGPT. Orwell makes a sound critique of political language and "meaningless words". Other academics and authors have made similar observations, yet this sort of critique does not seem to figure largely in the public discourse. Presumably, most of the public aren't exposed to this sort of critique very often, despite its salience. Anecdotally, I've wanted to read La langue de bois by Françoise Thom ever since I found the Wikipedia article wooden language, yet I cannot find an English translation and the Wikipedia article itself is practically a stub. The w:Ideograph (rhetoric) is a related idea. Prior to learning about this term, I had also considered how one should distinguish a word's literal meaning from its loaded idiomatic sense. It seems that they take a syntactic approach, using angled brackets. The article [1] builds upon Orwell's point and describes how nominalizations make language more abstract. Building upon these sources and my own observations, I hypothesize that political language uses abstractions and officialese to avoid concrete, material language and criticism, while maintaining a facade of democratic government through narrative and farce. Critique is then limited to the characters and tropes therein, and presumes legitimacy on part of the narrative itself even if it criticizes some participants. (I've made similar observations for some time now and have an unfinished essay specifically on this topic, though I'm not certain how I want to structure everything yet and will probably make many revisions.) The critique within this narrative is rarely insightful or objective, even in the "watsonian" sense, and when it is, it's often quite an easy or facile critique to make. One rarely sees a serious critique of the status quo. The mass media probably avoids communicating any truthful message that would motivate the public to involve themselves in "realpolitik", as it were. Dogma frequently displaces sound moral principles. For instance why do we speak about "equality" rather than "fairness"? As w:Ideograph (rhetoric) states, "If the definition of a term such as <equality> can be stretched to include a particular act or condition, then public support for that act or condition is likely to be stronger than it was previously. " The abstract style and idiosyncratic syntax of that article would be rather unsuitable if one needed to make a counterargument in an ordinary discussion though. In a discussion, one can simply ask for a definition. Orwell's "meaningless words" are not literally meaningless, but they are often extremely vague or broad. Nearly any dialectic argument can be expressed at least as well if not better using other words. They add no expressive power and are largely rhetorical.

Orwell offers six rules to the reader, stating "These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article." I believe he's right on the mark with those six tips. I also suspect it would be hard to write bad English using w:E-Prime, which seems to encourage a more precise manner of speech and writing. If America's public education system should encourage critical thinking (the media certainly won't), it must objectively address modern rhetoric.

AP295 (discuss • contribs)