Large Language Models are Culture Machines

Our modern mythologies about LLMs distract us from what they have in common with actual human myths. Instead of being a big step on the road towards autonomous individual intelligence, LLMs compress extensive corpora of collectively generated human cultural knowledge, enabling new uses of myths, traditions, stock elements, formulas, nostrums, tropes and collective rules-of-thumb. This may have unexpected uses: a decade ago, few would have anticipated that the creativity of the bard and the creativity of the programmer had much in common. LLMs are automated culture machines, but humans have constructed non-automated culture machines in the past. We can learn a great deal about LLMs' limits and potential from studying previous culture machines such as Homeric epics, folk tales and structuralist literary experiments.