Corpus Linguistics v. LLM AIs

Judge Newsom 's two concurring opinions channel recent scholarship in developing four main selling points.

They advance those points as grounds for endorsing LLM AIs over tools of corpus linguistics.

Authors: Corpus size can be an advantage, but size alone is no guarantee of representativeness.

They say it's next to impossible to pinpoint exactly what training data an LLM draws on.

Authors present AI results in the seemingly empirical terms of "probability" but concede that this is only an assessment of "the probability that GPT would give a positive response" to a given query.

Survey results are not "ground truth" on the ordinary meaning of "vehicle," for reasons we have noted.

LLM AIs are accessible, simple, and seductive, but inevitability is not the same thing as advisability, authors say.