I think I'm coming to view LLMs as essentially being the Fae.
The Fae are usually seen as not having souls, and therefore not having consciousness in a way we can recognize;
they don't understand the difference between lies and truth, kindness and cruelty;
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April 11, 2026 - 12:25 UTC

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They can be bound and given orders, but just as often fulfill those orders in a destructive way;
they lure people to their deaths through flattery;
everything they give you has a terrible price that you'll pay later;
Just interacting with them, or looking at them, can be very dangerous
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And they can never truly create anything of their own, but only copy from humans.
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why not think of it as text generating software
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That’s also a description of some humans.
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Do you ever listen to the folklore podcast “Spirits”? They have a recurring discussing about fae stories being feudal peasants’ ways of processing how power was in their world; the way the real aristocracy acted/were at the time etc
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Kit Whitfield's In The Heart of Hidden Things is fiction about fae, but often the human aristocracy are spoken about as far more distant, dangerous and terrible than local people and creatures who are fae-touched.
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This dovetails in interesting ways with a creation myth I wrote once. Our spiritual ancestors, transhuman and omnipotent, create gods as servants / managers to relieve the tedium of exercising power themselves. The gods confine our ancestors to mortality and other limitations bc sick of their shit.
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