Sylvie Delacroix (King’s College London) has posted “Transitional Conversational Spaces? LLMs and the Future of Collective Moral Perception” on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
As large language models become regular interlocutors, they influence the conversational infrastructure through which communities collectively interpret their world. This mediation notably impacts moral understanding, which mostly develops through shared dialogic practices rather than abstract theorizing. Within these practices, ‘sense-making conversations’-wherein participants navigate the liminal space between felt ethical disquiet and its eventual conceptual articulation-function as a crucial yet under-theorized infrastructure for ethical development.
While routine exchanges treat uncertainty as a deficit to eliminate, these sensemaking conversations hinge on maintaining productive uncertainty long enough for new perceptions to emerge through patient attention. The systematic presence of LLMs as conversational partners stands to reshape how future generations engage with such productive uncertainty, potentially transforming the mechanisms through which communities recognize emerging moral challenges. Rather than treating technological participation as merely instrumental to system optimization, we argue for a substantive reconceptualization of the relationship between technological development and democratic practice, exploring how LLMs might constitute novel, transitional conversational spaces that serve democratic ends.