Standardization matters. The Marquis de Condorcet, the French Enlightenment thinker Iâve studied extensively over the past year, understood this in 1794. He was interested in the shared notations and symbolic languagesâstandardizationâthrough which knowledge could accumulate:
One who has learned the elements of a science and wishes to go further will find in books [...] new signs needed to rise to further truths.
Standardization was meant to propel fields forward. It was a ladder to scramble onto the shoulders of the giants, then push beyond.
Beyond meant different. Sometimes itâs a matter of magnitude, of going further in the same direction. Sometimes itâs less about direction than about adding new dimensions, ideally orthogonal, to explore. Or revisiting well-trodden ground with new sensibilities. But most importantly, it meant new.
Reading Erik Hoelâs excellent essay, âHow the MFA Swallowed Literature,â reminded me of what happens when standardization does the opposite. Instead of raising everyone up so they can see further, standardization can comfort us to flatten the world. Erik describes literary fiction being deracinated by a protocol that became ubiquitous. I think it foreshadows what LLMs might catalyse in other fields, both near and far.
Erik argues that the rise of MFA in Creative Writing programmes has steamrolled literary fiction. The key is that these programmes have a standard formula: group workshop after group workshop, critiquing each otherâs drafts. Rinse and repeat.
Itâs a protocol: take aspiring writers and, through repeated peer review, sand away peculiarity, weird ambition and the unfamiliar edges most likely to attract an objection. Out the other end comes writing thatâs homogenized and optimized to survive the workshop: âwan little husks of âauto fictionââ, as Joyce Carol Oates put it.
An entire economy has grown around a defensive style of writing that minimizes the novelâs âattack surface.â There were 15 MFA programs in the US in 1975 and 250 by 2012. Today, Erik argues the craft of literature and the program supposed to teach it have become identical. âOne ate, digested, absorbed the otherâ.
The point of a literary culture is to find authors who help us rethink the canon. I think of Salman Rushdieâs Midnightâs Children, and the unruly memory that carries the myths, languages, and history of an independent India. He expanded the canon, changed what an English novel could be. He also gave new writers taller shoulders to stand on. Rushdieâs innovation was first a style, then a category, then a set of conventions. And finally it became mundane. Now we need to find the next writer who changes the form. Homogenization, which I think of as safety institutionalized, makes this harder.
Itâs a problem of systems meeting incentives. In literature, the system is how creative writing gets taught and how that slowly makes each writerâs pages remind you of the others. And downstream, the publishing machine molds to the shape of that output.
But itâs not a process limited to fiction. A key purpose of any creative domain, be it scientific or artistic, is to find the next, not to repeat the last, with a tiny increment. Some systems foster modest speciation; others, a Cambrian explosion. The wrong system paired with short-term incentives will encourage the former.
And this is where the LLM comes in. An LLM is a standardised system, trained against particular incentives, to output against a particular statistical distribution with its very own shape. Weâve all experienced it.
At its most shallow, it is the words they spit out. But when you work with them more and more extensively, you can feel a common conceptual architecture of LLM thinking. Applied as a rubric, they will amplify their sameness in everything we use them for. In that sense, they parallel workshops that sand away sharp edges; they norm by finding the middle of a distribution. Outliers are unwelcome.