The Machinery of Feedback

The Machinery of Feedback
Eastern screech owl (Image credits)

Several weeks ago, a commenter suggested the word "howlround" to describe the dangerous tendency of LLMs to "glaze" their users – to provide responses that are self-reinforcing in both substance and style, that are overly agreeable ideologically and psychologically. A "howlround" is what one hears from LLMs – not some pure or heightened "reasoning" but one's own ideas, validated, regurgitated, magnified, distorted.

(Some researchers also use the phrase "neural howlround" to describe this process happening within the LLM itself, in real-time in its inference stage: a "self-reinforcing interpretive loop" in which the LLM gets "stuck.”*)

The word "howlround" comes from audio engineering. It is used to describe the terrible sound that occurs when the microphone picks up the signal from the loudspeaker, re-amplifying it and creating a continuous loop of high-pitched squealing.

"Feedback," one might simply call it.

Indeed, the word "feedback" originated in audio engineering as well. The OED traces its earliest usage to 1916: "A feed-back circuit inductively connected to the output circuit of said amplifier for deriving high frequency oscillations of low power," from Edwin Colpitts's patent for the oscillator, a mechanism key to the subsequent development of telephony and electronic communications in the rest of the 20th century.

"The possibility of communication by speech between any two individuals in the civilized world is one of the most desirable ends for which engineering can strive." – Edwin Colpitts and Edward Craft, 1919

In the hundred years since Colpitts's neologism, "feedback" has become one of the most powerful technological concepts, one the most commonly-used analogies, shaping some of the most frequently-lauded practices. "Feedback" is ubiquitous throughout education, healthcare, psychology, economics, politics, you name it.

"Feedback" is how we assess machinery, how we assess one another, how we assess ourselves; "feedback" is how we define information, how we respond to data. "Feedback" is our theory of change – how we improve everything and everyone. "Feedback" is how we imagine our relationship to the world around us. Or at least "the civilised world," as Colpitts decreed.

To adopt invoke "feedback" is to adopt a framework of engineering.