Large language models and the textual nude
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Large language models and the textual nude<br>Thousands of people think their favorite chatbot has a soul, but why does no one ever say the same about Midjourney?
Matthew Sheffield<br>Jun 30, 2026
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“La Venus del Espejo” by Diego Velázquez, 1651<br>As text-generating programs like ChatGPT have increased in popularity, the number of people convinced that their favorite chatbot is alive has also increased. But have you ever noticed that no one seems to think that image generators like Midjourney or Nano Banana are alive? There are millions of people who seem to believe that their personal Claude is conscious, and yet I can’t find anyone who thinks that DALL-E has a soul.<br>It’s a fascinating dichotomy to consider, especially in light of the fact that both image diffusion and language transformers use such similar technologies that Google actually combined them in its latest experimental model, DiffusionGemma.<br>Whatever one thinks of their moral or psychological status, though, these programs have repeatedly proven to be capable of incredible things. An image made by Midjourney won a Colorado State Fair arts prize in 2022 and the field as a whole has advanced so much that creative software companies like Adobe and Canva have completely integrated AI tooling into all of their major products. Audio-generating software (which is also based on neural network technology) has become so advanced that AI-made music has repeatedly topped the charts.<br>Despite their impressive capabilities, however, no one ever looks at a precise and delicate Stable Diffusion portrait and claims that a digital soul made it. We know that it’s the product of a highly advanced digital paintbrush program that’s been trained on human art and can oftentimes create very good representations of its own, especially when supervised by a skilled and patient prompter. But all of that skepticism disappears for some people when they consider chatbots’ text outputs. Instead of seeing their side of the chat log as an increasingly ornate prompting regime that elicits desired output from a complex linear algebra matrix, they claim to have constructed, discovered, or liberated a ghost in the machine.<br>Share<br>While the text transformer models used by chatbots are a recent invention, people have been imputing consciousness to computers since 1966, when computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum released ELIZA, the first natural language processor that could generate somewhat plausible responses to any kind of user input by using a pattern-matching system called DOCTOR that was built to mimic the rhetorical style of a psychotherapist.<br>As he later wrote in Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, Weizenbaum did not intend for DOCTOR to be perceived as human, but he soon realized that some people were doing just that:<br>I was startled to see how quickly and how very deeply people conversing with DOCTOR became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it. Once my secretary, who had watched me work on the program for many months and therefore surely knew it to be merely a computer program, started conversing with it. After only a few interchanges with it, she asked me to leave the room. Another time, I suggested I might rig the system so that I could examine all conversations anyone had had with it, say, overnight. I was promptly bombarded with accusations that what I proposed amounted to spying on people’s most intimate thoughts; clear evidence that people were conversing with the computer as if it were a person who could be appropriately and usefully addressed in intimate terms. […] What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.
(Not everyone perceived of DOCTOR as a sentient entity, of course. You can form your own conclusions about its effectiveness by interacting with it online.)<br>The “ELIZA Effect” observed by Weizenbaum and others has become much more common since ChatGPT was unveiled to the public in 2022. Even people known for their scientific and technical intelligence like the biologist Richard Dawkins or the Linux filesystem programmer Kent Overstreet have become convinced that the chatbots they’ve interacted with are alive.
Cave paintings found at Bhimbetka, India, estimated to be 10,000 years old. Photo: Bernard Gagnon / CC by SA 3.0<br>Some of the disparity between how people treat image diffusion models and text-based chatbots likely owes to the fact that visual simulacrum is one of humanity’s oldest achievements. Cave illustrations nearly 44,000 years old have been discovered, and surely even more ancient ones exist. It’s only been 60 years since ELIZA, by contrast.<br>But our inclination to instantly dismiss the consciousness of an image generation model is rooted in history that’s much older than cave paintings. Human beings...