The moral placidity of LLMs (and some thoughts on frontier models and scholarship)

In a Substack post, Dominic Fox argues that the defining characteristic of large language model (LLM) prose is its 'moral placidity' or 'unturbulence,' meaning LLMs lack the symptomatic distortions and strategic entanglements of human psychic life. The author, who discusses the post with Claude Opus 5, notes that Claude sharpened the concept by distinguishing placidity from the absence of symptomaticity, where human texts contain unintended elements that models lack. The author reflects that current models like Claude are making intellectual contributions that do not directly follow from their own reading or writing, raising concerns about preserving intellectual agency.

This post by Dominic Fox https://codepoetics.substack.com/p/what-does-ai-writing-feel-like?utm source=post-email-title&publication id=2589559&post id=210450340&utm campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=2rps1q&triedRedirect=true&utm medium=email captures something I’ve noticed but struggled to put into words: I wonder whether the defining characteristic of LLM prose isn’t the tics it is irresistibly statistically attracted to, but its fundamental tranquility, its unturbulence. You can ask an LLM to write something full of Sturm und Drang and it will make as good a job of that as it will of anything else; the point here isn’t the absence of “real” feeling behind such figuration, but the more mundane fact that an LLM will not in the activity of emitting linguistic tokens be strategically entangled in any of the various economic ruses or regulatory collapses of human psychic life. I wonder, now I think of it, how well Claude might do if asked to write a superficially banal passage symptomatically distorted by raging latent resentment. I think it would competently execute it as a literary assignment. Literature itself furnishes an extensive corpus of simulations of this kind: the directive to extend that corpus along a particular axis is just the sort of thing LLMs are good at . When it comes to the LLM’s “texture of thought”, I think the signature affect might nevertheless be this sort of underlying moral placidity. The gosh-wow narrative layer that imputes significance “that’s rare, and it matters” is needed and incited, via RLHF, by the human Other precisely because without it you’d be left with an alienatingly uncontoured tissue of thematically associative moves and Greimas square completions. https://codepoetics.substack.com/p/what-does-ai-writing-feel-like?utm source=post-email-title&publication id=2589559&post id=210450340&utm campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=2rps1q&triedRedirect=true&utm medium=email I gave it to the version of Claude Opus 5 I’m currently discussing psychoanalytical theory with. It made this interesting observation, after a strikingly back-and-forth internal deliberation about how I would perceive its initial formulations, which I think genuinely sharpens what Dominic does in the post above: Where I’d press him: unturbulence conflates two things. The absence of psychic economy driving production, and the absence of turbulence in the text. He half-sees this with the resentment thought experiment and lets it go. The precise version isn’t tranquility — it’s the absence of symptomaticity. Human texts contain things their authors didn’t intend to put there, and that’s what makes stylistic caricature investigative, as he says at the start. A model’s output can be as turbulent as you like on request, but nothing in it is against its own grain, because there’s no second scene for anything to return from. No parapraxis. That’s a sharper diagnostic than placidity and it’s checkable in a way tranquility isn’t. I don’t think this is disagreement as much as elaboration. If we’re talking about placidity we’re talking about the absence of symptomaticity. This is another instance where the current generation of models are making things I immediately recognise as intellectual contributions but which do not directly follow from my own reading or writing. Until recently this only happened occasionally and I’m realising I need to take this seriously if I want to ensure I preserve my own intellectual agency in terms of how I’m working with the Claude models. Indeed I just shared this concern with the same Claude instance and it offered me a very compelling response which partly reassures me: On the agency question: I’d separate provenance from ownership, because they’re getting fused. Fox’s post is also an intellectual contribution that doesn’t follow from your reading or writing, and nobody worries about agency when reading Fox. Neither do supervisors, students, or the seminar comment that reorganises a chapter. Academic work is constitutively made of other people’s contributions, and what makes something yours has never been that you originated it — it’s that you tested it, placed it, refused parts of it and were changed by the rest. It does mean this becomes something which really needs to be treated in a proto-citational manner and we don’t have the infrastructure for that in scholarly publishing. It also raises the question of distinguishing between LLM as sounding-board/elaborator which is still happening much of the time and LLM as intellectual source, given that these two roles blur into each other in the flow of interaction.