Stop saying LLM: Large Discourse Models (LDM) and Artificial Discursive Agent (ADA)?

TL;DR

This paper advocates for rethinking large generative models as Large Discourse Models and Artificial Discursive Agents, emphasizing their role in modeling human experience and promoting transparent governance in social contexts.

Contribution

It introduces an epistemological framework replacing LLM with LDM and ADA, focusing on discursive projection and socio-historical embedding of AI models.

Findings

Proposes an ontological triad for analyzing discursive models

Suggests replacing fear with public trials for AI governance

Frames AI models within socio-historical and regulatory contexts

Abstract

This paper proposes an epistemological shift in the analysis of large generative models, replacing the category ''Large Language Models'' (LLM) with that of ''Large Discourse Models'' (LDM), and then with that of Artificial Discursive Agent (ADA). The theoretical framework is based on an ontological triad distinguishing three regulatory instances: the apprehension of the phenomenal regularities of the referential world, the structuring of embodied cognition, and the structural-linguistic sedimentation of the utterance within a socio-historical context. LDMs, operating on the product of these three instances (the document), model the discursive projection of a portion of human experience reified by the learning corpus. The proposed program aims to replace the ''fascination/fear'' dichotomy with public trials and procedures that make the place, uses, and limits of artificial discursive agents in contemporary social space decipherable, situating this approach within a perspective of governance and co-regulation involving the State, industry, civil society, and academia.