{"id":653,"date":"2025-09-22T19:47:39","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T19:47:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/?p=653"},"modified":"2025-09-22T20:23:40","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T20:23:40","slug":"bedtime-with-derrida","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/?p=653","title":{"rendered":"Bedtime with Derrida"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Abstract<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>This is an experiment to see if LLMs are able to translate a dense philosophical text into a soothing children\u2019s bedtime story. For the philosophical text, I used the most abstruse, allusive, elliptical philosophical text I know of, the 11,000-word essay \u201cDiff\u00e9rance\u201d by Jacques Derrida. I prompted each LLM to translate the text into a bedtime story appropriate for a 6-year-old child while conveying the core philosophical concepts and conclusions in terms that a child could understand. The contestants included two commercial frontier LLM models and five open-weight models. Unable to assemble a panel of 6-year-olds to judge the resulting bedtime stories, I scored the stories through a combination of LLM automation and human intuition. While none of the results will win literary awards, the two frontier models performed the best by a substantial margin. One open-weight model produced gibberish, yet one LLM judge awarded it a point for representing one of Derrida\u2019s core concepts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Bedtime-with-Derrida-v1.pdf\">Click here for the full PDF report<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Abstract This is an experiment to see if LLMs are able to translate a dense philosophical text into a soothing children\u2019s bedtime story. For the philosophical text, I used the most abstruse, allusive, elliptical philosophical text I know of, the 11,000-word essay \u201cDiff\u00e9rance\u201d by Jacques Derrida. I prompted each LLM to translate the text into [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":654,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[86,107,104,108],"class_list":["post-653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-derrida","tag-llm","tag-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=653"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":655,"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653\/revisions\/655"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/millermattson.com\/dave\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}