ChatGPT后后现代会话
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2023-03-20
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ChatGPT a post-postmodern Conversation
Tom O’Connor
February 2023
Our views of everything change. Sailors feared they would sail off the edge of the world until
Magellan and Columbus showed otherwise. Galileo knew the Earth revolved around the
Sun, and even though the Church forced him to recant, the planets still went their own way.
The technological revolution has resulted in great changes and with the release of
ChatGPT4, the artificial intelligence platform continues to dominate the digital world and also
create controversy.
Postmodernism
The group of ideas that coalesce around the term postmodernism, began in the streets of
Paris in 1968, when students took to the barricades in protest over the repressive control of
education and language by the Academie Francaise. The Academie was terrified of the
polluting effects of pop culture imported from Britain and the USA. As much as the youth
loved “Le Beatles”, the aging academics were appalled by the intrusions into pure French
language. Eventually, the youth on the barricades became academics and developed their
ideas.
Primarily postmodernism is about language. It contends that our lives, experience and social
interactions are mediated through language and that language, particularly some written
texts, have been used by powerful groups in society to control and oppress people. Using
the technique known as deconstruction, the ambiguities, contradictions and control
techniques within a text were highlighted therefore the claims to legitimacy were
undermined. Religious texts were an obvious target. Any such text which offered a total
explanation of life were called ‘totalising’ and labelled totalitarian. Two expressions of
Modernism, Communism and Nazism, each based on seminal texts, were examples of
oppressive, totalizing, and therefore totalitarian, use of language.
Another postmodern concept is that of intertextuality, defined by Julia Kristeva, which
accepts the proposition that every text depends on every other text. It might be summarised
as ‘there is nothing new under the sun’. Christopher Booker’s book, The Seven Basic Plots:
Why We Tell Stories introduces the notion that there are only really seven stories that keep
on being retold in different ways. The original Greek tragedies were based on oral myths and
stories of the gods, Shakespeare’s history plays extensively used Holinshed's four-volume
Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, Thomas North's English translation of
Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans among other sources. Samuel Becket
used the New Testament and Charlie Chaplin movies as inspiration for Waiting for Godot.
These are original works of genius, the authors do not acknowledge their sources yet we do
not consider them in any way stolen. Postmodern concepts of text are broad and all-
encompassing so the essay submitted for an assignment and the email your boss sends you
at work are all ‘texts’. All capable of deconstruction and all mutually interdependent on every
other text that has been written.
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