Last year, I applied for a research project. During an initial email conversation with the organisers, I suggested two topics for research: one around the phenomenon and accusations of kitsch and AI imagery, and the other around Large Language Models as a 21st-century Big Other. They chose kitsch. (I liked this way of communicating with open call organiser as it overcame the usual and often inevitable power dynamic typical with open calls and their respondents. The topic of power will become relevant soon.) A Big Other, for those unfamiliar, is a phrase used to describe an external authority enacted through the symbolic order coined by Jacques Lacan, arguably the second father of psychoanalysis after Freud, or as I described him in LAMELLA://pamphlet (2023), Freud’s bastard son. According to Slavoj Žižek in How to Read Lacan, (2006), “it is here [the Big Other], directing and controlling my acts; it is the sea I swim in, yet it remains ultimately impenetrable”. An oversimplified statement would be to say the Big Other is God. Oversimplified or not, it may also be an accurate summation. I was disappointed not to be pursuing the ‘LLM as Big Other’ concept as I think it is more interesting an d far reaching that one about kitschiness – although that would be a subtopic in any inquiry that addresses LLMs or the wider topic of AI which is a catchall term that applies to a variety of processes in which reality is reduced to information so that it can be reformulated as required1.
Recently, I have come across others who also ask how LLMs may relate to the concept of the Big Other – linked below; only one of these actually refers to Lacan’s phrase. Vauhini Vara (2025) does, nevertheless, explore how corporations have ‘exploited’ language to exercise a kind of power via LLMs, which amounts to riding the symbolic order to exercise power. I would suggest humans have always ridden the symbolic order to exercise power and open calls for artists are just one example of many instances in which this occurs, and which we accept as ‘a norm’. I suppose Vara is suggesting that the corporations are no longer merely riding, but rather penetrating the symbolic order, and that is a conversation to be had. Whatever the case, one may sympathise, although not agree entirely with Vara’s analysis (I don’t think I do), but still recognise significance in her arguments. In her article, titled ‘ChatGPT may be polite, but it’s not cooperating with you‘ (she’s right), Vara laments how the media have reduced her book to a clickbaitable, binary scenario that is not only inaccurate, it completely misses her point. This brings up another problematic in the world in which LLMs have arrived but which are not the fault of LLMs, and which has been percolating for many decades, perhaps ad infinitum. I understand the rage people feel towards LLMs and AI image generators. But 2022 was not the time to begin getting cross. Social media and before that reality TV and before that, page 3 of the Sun Newspaper here in the UK (and other similar titles elsewhere) or perhaps the Sun Newspaper in its entirety all played a role in the class war that situates reified education, knowledge, and critical thought as the enemy. We are not ‘cognitively offloading’ because of LLMs. If we are cognitively offloading at all, and that is also debatable, it is occurring in a complex, entangled paradigm, in which a host of behaviours and phenomena interact, manifesting situations in which populations around the world seek to overcome ongoing injustices. LLMs have emerged. Accusing them of being the cause of social Armageddon stops us from addressing why they emerge in the first place. Or for that matter, what it was about the internet before that, which emerged as society continued to fragment and atomise throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The second piece is a podcast which addresses LLMs as Big Other directly and is worth a listen.
Vauhini Vara, 2025, ChatGPT may be polite, but it’s not cooperating with you https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/may/13/chatgpt-ai-big-tech-cooperation
Why Thoery, AI, 2025 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/why-theory/id1299863834?i=1000705189814
I have decided to give away PDFs of why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers/ (2021) and LAMELLA://pamphlet (2023). Anyone will be able to download these from my website soon for free – give me a day to find and upload. They contain relevant questions about the way language, power and technology interact. I’m afraid there are no easy answers in either. Because, as much as anyone would like to have easy answers, unfortunately, there aren’t any. But LLMs are not going away anytime soon. Students will use them. They and tutors need to be taught how to do this effectively, when to do so, and to be made acutely aware of the pitfalls when not using them appropriately. The education system is in crisis. But again, not because of LLMs. It has been in crisis for years. Today’s schools were designed by Victorians for a Victorian paradigm, and that model is no longer fit for ours. Universities are in battle with neoliberalism and the short-sightedness of policymakers and budget holders. LLMs, if used appropriately, may even help address some of the issues that arise under those circumstances.
Ref:
Žižek, S. (2006) How to Read Lacan. London: Granta Books.
1 I have, in fact, submitted a work which begins to address the loss and rehabilitation of a recognisable Big Other via AI through the topic of kitschiness elsewhere, which may or may not materialise at some point later this year.