揭示AI与伪法律如何用形式迷惑人,让表象代替实质。
Pareidolic Illusions of Meaning: ChatGPT, Pseudolaw and the Triumph of Form over Substance
- 用认知错觉解释用户误把形式当内容的普遍心理
- 指出自信表达比真实内容更易被相信
- 适合关注AI伦理、法律认知与虚假信息的人阅读
2020年代初,伪法律和生成式AI/大语言模型成为两种奇特但影响深远的社会现象。伪法律使用者依赖看似合法实则扭曲法律本质的伪论证,而大语言模型则通过概率计算生成看似人类写作的内容。本文认为两者共性在于:都以形式和表象凌驾于实质内容之上,导致用户将形式误认为实质。基于法律理论、计算机科学、语言学与认知心理学,文章指出二者均制造意义幻觉,使人误认其为真实。进一步分析四重影响:第一,人类存在概念性错视(pareidolia),从模糊输入中错误感知到有意义的法律模式;第二,依赖信心启发法——人们常将自信程度视为能力指标;第三,当关注点在输出形式而非内容时,两者更易成功;第四,依赖用户的神秘思维与对‘有效’方法的渴望。文章主张,唯有具备足够法律与技术素养的用户,才能识别这些现象的虚构本质,从而破解其迷思。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The early 2020s has seen the rise of two strange and potentially quite impactful social phenomena, namely pseudolaw, where users rely upon pseudolegal arguments that mimic the form and ritual of legal argumentation but fundamentally distort the content of law, and generative AI/LLMs, which generate content that uses probabilistic calculations to create outputs that look like human generated text. This article argues that the juxtaposition of the two phenomena helps to reveal that they both share two fundamental traits as both elevate form and appearance over substance and content, and users of both routinely mistake the form for the substance. In drawing upon legal theory, computer science, linguistics and cognitive psychology, the article argues that both phenomena rely upon creating illusions of meaning that users mistake for the underlying primary phenomenon. I then explore four implications of this conception of both phenomena. Firstly, both rely on human tendencies of conceptual pareidolia resulting in the erroneous perception of meaningful linguistic legal patterns from nebulous inputs. Secondly, both rely upon the confidence heuristic, the human cognitive bias for treating confidence as a proxy for competence. Thirdly, both succeed when the primary concern is with the form of the output and not its content. Fourthly, both rely heavily upon the magical thinking of users and the desire for the promise of the approach to be real. The article argues that the legal context helps to reveal a solution for the problems caused by both phenomena as it is only where users possess sufficient legal and technological literacy that it becomes possible to reveal to them the illusionary nature of the phenomena.
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