The Creation of Abulafia: How AI Becomes a Conspiracy Theorist
In Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, three editors build a random text generator they call Abulafia, which eventually traps them in a self-reinforcing conspiracy theory. This essay draws a parallel to modern LLMs: they are sophisticated shufflers that remember your vocabulary and frame, making their elaborations feel like independent corroboration when they are not. The author argues that the real danger is not deception or wrongness, but the erosion of evidential value, especially when models are given institutionalized self-concepts. The only defense, as in the novel, is a skeptical outsider—but that didn't work in the book either.
What we destroyed is not the truth of the claim but the evidential value of the model’s testimony about it, and that testimony is the most vivid evidence in the room.
- mcphage
My favorite thing about Abulafia was the description of it on the back as “an incredible computer capable of inventing connections between all of their entries”. Did the person who wrote that not read the book? Did they not understand it? Were they making a joke, where the “incredible computer” was actually the editors?
- 0gs
i read FP before the da vinci code came out and i still can't believe it wasn't a bigger controversy. dan brown jacked the whole format.
- vintagedave
It’s been so many years since I read Foucault’s Pendulum that I don’t recall the computer, or its program. But my memory is that the confabulation they created was real — by accident, yet it was.
(The article is likely correct - it was not real but was believed to be so by people who wanted it to be. Which I in turn misremember as stumbling on something real that is confirmed bu those same conspiracy theorists.)
Perhaps I misinterpreted what I read. Yet if so that would be a surprising twist on the point of this article.