That's a thorny one. I had a knee jerk reaction but upon reflection they're right about something if perhaps for some different reasons. Crux of it is, all grea

That's a thorny one. I had a knee jerk reaction but upon reflection they're right about something if perhaps for some different reasons. Crux of it is, all great writing is really great editing. So called "privileged" writing in journals, newspapers, and paragons of English style like the Economist and the FT, along with literary fiction, or even crappy genre fiction - will have had the benefit of an editor. Their argument seems predicated on the idea that either the author is the only writer and the text leapt from his head like Athena fully formed. (like these comments of mine, surely), or their entire sample set of student newspapers all had equally competent sub-editors. I'd say their argument that privileging any text is a "language ideology" is weak because the percieved quality of the writing should be attributed to the additional work that went into its editing, whereas they're saying it's due to the authors social status based on zip code. Chances are, the smaller school papers are just some yahoo publishing their own copy. Too many holes. It seems to just elevate the same critical theory as a pretext for asserting a qualification to govern GPT model training, by using the same problematizations it uses on everything else. (e.g. call it x'ist until you control it, invent an unsolvable problem only you can manage, dilute and destabilize consensus with exogenous concerns, etc.) I'd agree a lot of good stuff is probably not making it into language models because it's not edited (or ironically, not gatekept), but I'm not sure the authors are really sincere about improving language models. To me, they're using a very narrow interpretation of quality writing to assert that GPT models require governance and political accountability.