(2026-03-20) Cosma Shalizi Is Aware Of All Internet Traditions

Ben Recht: Cosma Shalizi Is Aware of All Internet Traditions. I’ve been wanting to write a summary of the Cultural AI conference I attended at NYU last week.

As I often do when trying to wrap my head around complex things, I will stop worrying and just blog through it.

The talk that serves as my hub in the complex network of cultural AI is Cosma Shalizi’s “Aware of All Internet Traditions: Large Language Models as Information Retrieval and Synthesis.”

The formulaic generation of discourse looks like discourse in ways we could never have imagined. But with hindsight, we shouldn’t be surprised. Human culture is very formulaic!

As Cosma put it, in the single sentence that summarizes the entire Cultural AI conference:
"Following a tradition means not having to think for oneself.""

Not having to think is often a good thing! Tradition lets us externalize certain processes so we can focus on other tasks.

Indeed, our vast externalized cultural intelligence is the jewel of human tradition. Cosma cites Jacques Barzun’s conception of the House of Intellect: intellect is the communal form of society’s intelligence. (collective intelligence)

GenAI is the mechanization of this intellect. It is the mechanization of all of our traditions.

With James Evans, Henry Farrell, and Alison Gopnik, Cosma has been preaching the gospel that AI is a cultural technology for several years.

Mechanized tradition of Barzun’s artificial intellect is a far better description of GenAI technology than “artificial intelligence.”

Claude is not a person. It is a mechanized intellect. A Lore Laundering Machine. The frame of mechanized tradition helps me build a social metascience of our LLM condition

In the same session as Cosma, Wouter Haverals gave a rhizomatic inspection of the tradition of literary style. What is style anyway? We love to ask LLMs to write in new styles.

But humans are also great at mimicking style.

Wouter introduced Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de Style, a book consisting of 99 rewritings of the same story in different styles

Queneau rewrites this story in the past and the present. In reported speech. In the passive voice. In haiku.

Can LLM capture the style? How could you know that LLM did a good job?
The only way to answer such questions is to lean on the tradition of vulgar positivism

Silicon-sampled survey experiments enable us to mechanically generate stories from illusory correlations. These stories are interpreted traditionally as either informative or absurd, depending on the academic tradition in which you were raised. The recursion continues indefinitely. There are so many patterns and regularities in human behavior, and by simulating common text strings, we get text conforming to these regularities. To rephrase Nelson Goodman, regularities are where you find them, and in human tradition, you find them everywhere.