Banana for Breakfast: A Poem About a Poem About Language Machines
“Whoever controls LLMs controls politics.” —Hannes Bajohr
Poets know that language creates, reinforces, and asserts meaning.
Language doesn’t only express our thoughts—it helps create them. Just think of the surprises we get at the end of our own sentences where something unexpected and profound is revealed. Borges et al tell us, If the poet isn’t surprised by what happens in her work, the reader won’t be surprised. Language leads us into meaning.
I’ll give you an example in this sentence that I’m writing right now –yes, this one–how I have no idea how it’s going to end, or whether it will uncover something useful, profound, or maybe just something meaningless to anyone but me and my body, like my stomach feels fat right now so maybe I should get off my ass and do sit-ups or I should be doing something else, or I think I’m going to have a banana for breakfast.
I had no idea I wanted a banana until I got to the end of that sentence. The language created the meaning, the impulse, the drive, reality, but the sentence would make no sense without the syntax, the order of things, the rules that lead to the discovery of the banana.
The syntax is prefabricated and exists with or without my personal imperatives, so that if one starts with a single phrase like, I’ll give you an example, the next token word must be “in” “with” “of” or some preposition or a period or an em-dash. I’m not really choosing what comes next. I’m unlikely to write, I’ll give you an example Peterbilt mania yesterday.
The syntactic traditions from which my language comes make the choices about direction and meaning and create the syntagms in each sentence.
Syntagm is a word I learned yesterday, so this is the first time I’m using it, ever.
A syntagm is a chain of language elements—words or sounds—strung together in a specific, expected order to create meaning. It’s the rhythm of grammar, the groove we speak inside: subject, verb, object. We rarely notice it, but it’s the scaffolding under almost every sentence we say.
But poets resist syntagms during the writing process, because we can resist meaning by paying attention, consciously or not, to our bodies. Poetry is visceral.
Especially when we consider how our bodies influence the way we generate thought and language, so that if my stomach is hurting because I ate something bad the night before and then I'm sitting at my desk writing this article by following language or my body needs potassium and I unconsciously come up with the word banana. I am resisting conventional forms of meaning. If I resist syntax I resist water.[1]
I want to bloat.
What does that mean?
Who cares?
You follow the language.
I want to bloat and you continue.
But what's stunning about the Bajohr quote above is that LLMs follow syntactical rules that are based on ideology, so that if you ask it to write a story, the ideological structure of the story will be conflict, deepening of conflict, resolution.
If you ask it to write a poem, it will do the same thing.
No matter how much you change the detail, the syntactic structure will remain intact, and it is one that replicates the political control of the culture.
So if Bajohr is right and whoever controls LLMs controls politics, it is crucial for us to understand what Trump proposed yesterday about AI companies that want to do business with the US government: Their LLMs must reflect what he calls “American values.”
What American Values. The MAGA values?
“Whoever controls LLM's controls LLMs controls politics.”
[1] Really I should have written I resist meaning, but in my poetic resistance I put WATER instead, which makes no sense. It doesn’t means anything, but it was just as an act of poetic rebellion. But think of how meaningful resisting water can be. What is water? Spirit, life? Purification? See how legacy syntax wants to keep me tied to meaning?? Ha ha ha!
The banana was delicious!