A Distinct Taste of Life in Your Mouth

(Cover image: “A DISTINCT TASTE OF LIFE IN YOUR MOUTH — Or, how LLMs make us use senses we’d almost forgotten we had.” A woman’s face with a spoon holding a tiny landscape.)

Perception is a funny thing. It’s called “subjective,” yet in many ways it’s not subjective at all. We just don’t talk about it much. Every now and then, posts pop up on LinkedIn or Reddit asking questions like, “What happens in your head when you see 35 + 17?” People pause and are suddenly amazed by something very simple — their own minds. And for some reason, we never talk about this blatantly obvious thing. It’s just not something we do.

Everyone knows humans have five senses. We’ve even got the idiom “sixth sense,” meaning “some intuitive perception unavailable to ordinary people.” Obviously, that’s just a bit of false information we all picked up in school.

Humans have way more than five senses. The more obvious extra ones include proprioception — the sense of where your bones and muscles are and how much tension they’re under. You can feel internal effort. You clearly have a sense of hunger. If you sat down and thought about it carefully, I’m sure you’d be able to identify several senses you share with other people.

Some senses aren’t tied to any organ at all. The clearest example is the sense of time. Some people have it perfectly tuned. Others couldn’t tell you the hour if their life depended on it.

I knew a drummer once, and we’d play this little game: we’d walk up to him with a metronome, hit start, and set a completely random tempo — say, 114 beats per minute. We’d pull up a site like https://www.metronomeonline.com/, pick a random tempo, let him listen for a bit, then mute the laptop. We’d chat about something completely unrelated, then ask him to tap the beat back. We’d put on headphones so we could check. He never missed. Not once. He’d been drumming since he was five. He could keep the same tempo going for half an hour, an hour straight. He had a perfect sense of time — an internal clock.

When you live in Los Angeles, after your first earthquake you lose the sense that the ground is stable. Walking feels awful, even a little terrifying. Any movement feels like a trick, and you’re scared. But when a guy from Japan walked around LA, he didn’t care. He was happy earthquakes here were so rare.

You also have a sense for other people’s moods. And you have a sense of life — of liveliness — which for most of us is deeply buried. It’s a bit like gravity. Everyone has a sense of gravity, but only some know how to use it. That’s because only a few of us ever experience situations where gravity changes.

It’s the same with the sense of life. We almost never encounter dead bodies. Most of us are used to thinking of a human body as alive by default. So when we do see a dead body, most people have a flood of reactions and feel deeply uncomfortable. (Just like with gravity: the first time someone experiences weightlessness, they freak out.) And so most of us simply don’t have much practice using this sense.

But we all know exactly how it works. When you actually see the corpse of a person or an animal, you feel it instantly — something’s wrong. There’s the body, it’s supposed to be alive, and it’s not. All those emotions and reactions are just your ability to sense life kicking in.

This is also what underlies our reactions to certain kinds of art, actions, and performances. A huge number of so-called “paranormal” events are only “paranormal” because someone was shocked to see a “living” reaction from an inanimate thing.

Or the reverse — take Terminator 2. The T-1000 acts like a machine while looking human, and the performance was spot-on. The entire dark humor of Portal and Portal 2 rests on a robot trying to be alive — and doing it terribly.

And, of course, the movie industry is one of the biggest reasons we have so many problems with how we perceive liveliness in things. We’ve got Johnny Five, WALL-E, Ultron, Wanda, and endless hordes of films where non-living things become alive. For us, it’s magical. It’s all just endless retellings of Pinocchio. They go on forever, generation after generation, planting the false idea that a robot could actually feel or be alive. C-3PO, the boy from Spielberg’s A.I., and countless others are proof of that.

The sense of life is well-developed in soldiers and doctors. Those who constantly see both the living and the dead can tell in a glance whether someone’s alive or not.

And then along come LLMs.

God, it’s hilarious reading posts that say, “I think I can tell if a text was written by ChatGPT.” Well, of course you can! Humans have a deeply neglected, rarely sharpened sense for whether something was created by a living being. That sense is honed in doctors, soldiers, artists — anyone who works with creations and performances.

The reason we can “spot” LLM-written text is that we’re used to reading things written by living people. That sense, which normally lies dormant (because every person you’ve ever met was alive), suddenly wakes up and makes you feel unsettled. Why? Because it’s the first time in your life you’ve faced a familiar thing that has become unfamiliar.

You can confidently say whether something was made by a human or not. You’re shocked when someone tells you you’re wrong. You lean in, study a rock, and smirk: “Heh, looks almost like a person made it.”

The sense of life is like the sense of time. There’s nothing paranormal about it. You’re not tuning into some cosmic battery to figure out if something is alive. Some people can immediately tell an article they’re reading was generated — same with video and voice.

By the way, those odd little moments of confusion happen a lot in theme parks and malls when you see mannequins or statues of people. Some people get a strange feeling in places like that. And if you wander into a wax museum or a medical oddities museum, you might feel that full, visceral discomfort of seeing dead bodies that look alive.

There are people (especially those numbed by apathy or grief) who will accept anything as alive. I’ve read more than one story about grieving parents trying to “upload” their dead child’s consciousness into an LLM. They pray to it, project life onto it, simply because they want their child back. But to an outside observer, there’s nothing alive there — not even a shadow of the person it was modeled on.

And naturally, there are LLM fanatics. They don’t care about any of this. They’ll charge ahead, talking about “intelligence” and “AGI” and similar things, completely ignoring the fact that most people on the planet couldn’t care less.

It’s amazing we never talk about this. We have the chance to observe it, yet we’re so unaware of what we’re looking at that we just ignore the fact that we’re seeing anything at all.