Thom Hawkins
If you could invite anyone to a dinner party, alive or dead, who would it be? Ghandi? Albert Einstein? Dorothy Parker? Just imagine the conversation! Walter Landor did, in the 1820s, in a series of published “Imaginary Conversations.” In these dialogues, Socrates talks with Cicero, Shakespeare with Ben Jonson, and Michelangelo with Raphael. Landor (as did others who worked in this form) put in the effort to represent the figures appropriate to their respective personalities and philosophical stances, like a fantasy league for intellectuals.
Today, we can prompt a large language model (LLM) and, assuming that the corpus it was trained on includes work by and about the selected individuals, it can create a passable dialogue in seconds. (Thanks anyway for your labors, Walter—you could have saved yourself the effort if you simply waited two hundred years.) The result won’t necessarily generate new insights—yet—but the models are improving daily.
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