The popularization of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the early 2020s has been accompanied not only by corporate hype and moral panics, but also by a repertoire of vernacular knowledge that their creators and adopters contribute to through their experiences and experimentation: LLM lore. The lore of LLMs encompasses a variety of narrative genres: conceptual figures like Roko’s basilisk, the stochastic parrot or the Shoggoth with a smiley face; emergent entities like Microsoft Bing’s Sydney personality or ChatGPT’s sycophantic character; exemplary benchmarks like the failure to count ‘r’s in ‘strawberry’ or to find the seahorse emoji. The release of new LLM-based chatbots is interpreted through lore, and lore accrues around discontinued models. Through lore, expert communities and lay publics come together around shared vocabularies and negotiate their understandings of LLMs in different contexts. Lore-making facilitates the domestication of highly complex and diverse sociotechnical objects as it allows people who participate in it to condense and correlate individual experiences and shared observations into easily shareable narratives. Through lore, LLMs are made more human via strategies that have historically been used to make sense of more-than-human actants and phenomena, by drawing together disparate interface effects, behavioral patterns, and lay theories into a shared narrative universe. In this presentation, I offer a snapshot of LLM lore, showcasing key examples of different narrative genres, correlating them to different concerns, and arguing that lore and lore-making play a key role in compensating for the sudden vacuum of literacy opened up by the popularization of this technology.

This paper is interested in ‘lore’ as a problem of world-building and/in the world. I focus on the genre of fantasy, where writers often draw upon histories of colonialism and imperialism to constitute the conflict of their textual worlds. The rapid marketification of this genre means that the practice of drawing from marginalised histories can be especially predatory, even as the culture of reading has shifted from engagement to consumption. The first part of my argument is that there is often a violent separation of the lore of the text from the histories of our world; the maintenance of this separation is often what ensures that fantasy can offer an ‘escape’ from reality.  In the second part of my argument, I look to citational practices by fiction writers such as R. F. Kuang and Seth Dickinson. Babel (2022) is heavily footnoted: Kuang refers to a wide body of texts and authors to indicate where the lore of her text is commensurate, or not, with other (historical) accounts. Similarly, Dickinson’s Baru Cormorant novels (2015-present) often end with an author’s note warning the reader not to cleave too easily to the prejudicial accounts of some of his characters, and to “familiarize themselves” with ‘history.’ I argue that by anchoring fantasy in reality rather than opposing the two, these citational practices effectively broaden our conception of lore: the lore of the story touches the lore of the world. The result is that, theoretically at least, initiation into one kind of lore necessarily entails knowledge of the other. I read such practices as an ethical response to the marketification of the fantasy genre, and finally evaluate the reading and internet cultures of Kuang and Dickinson’s audience to think through the relations between lore, responsibility, and avoidance. 

P. David Marshall, in “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self,” identifies that, for more than two centuries, representational media constituted the dominant cultural regime, and the “stories, narratives, and images” that “books, newspapers, magazines, film, radio and television” circulated (160). In contrast, presentational media introduced a mode of address for producing, making and “expressing the self to others” that relies on “presentation of the self through the screens of social media via the Internet and mobile communication” (Marshall 160). I will explore how, as a presentational mode within this “new specular economy,” “lore” functions as a narrative device to reconfigure multiple representations of self.

In the context of a contemporary digital popular culture that prompts “most people to construct a public identity,” the new media persona requires “technologies of computation and mediation and their interfaces that function to automate, produce and filter communication” (Marshall 7). I will interrogate how “lore,” whether used in direct address to a camera and its imagined audience while self-narrating a video titled “Part 6 of ???” or to reference a body of knowledge or past events associated with a figure, whether friend, fictional or famous, reveals attempts to “construct a coherent identity” from fragments whose “units constitute self-representation” (Gazi 10). Conceptually, I will situate lore as a device to perform a sort of “self-serialization.” Marshall called seriality “elemental to online culture” and structured its “constitution of person and persona” and critically broadened it “to identify anything that is in sequence or linked or joined” (Marshall 4). From the printing press to digital cultures, seriality remained central to literary texts, genres, and “photography, cinema, and the television format” (Sielke 44). Still, more than “a production and publication logic,” serialization is “a narrative form that performs important cultural work and has profound ideological and aesthetic consequences” (Allen and Van den Berg 3).

The world is profoundly confusing right now. On September 22nd, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. announced that Acetaminophen taken during pregnancy was causing autism (HHS.gov). Scientists were quick to point out that this simply isn’t true in a variety of forums. We have been living in the “post-truth” world for quite some time now (Ball; Davis; Fuller). With this as a backdrop, the obsession with lore in online communities might seem a surprise.
Lore comes from the Old English lār, meaning teaching, learning, or education (OED)—and is wrapped up in the authority of the written word and those with the literacy to produce it. Folklore is ultimately defined in contrast to the official, sanctioned lore of the Medieval church. Lore is thus fundamentally clerical; as anyone who has interacted with hardcore fans of any book, television series, or film and its associated worlds can tell you, lore is particular. Its cataloguing is meticulous. As Dropout.tv’s Um, Actually game show notes in its introduction “Nerds like a lot of things, but there’s something they like above all else and that is correcting people.”
How does this desire for learning and exactness in fandom connect to the wider cultural disregard for facts and information? Is lore still about learning, knowledge, and mastery? This presentation will seek to examine where the resurgent lore-impulse comes from and attempt to draw conclusions about what that says about the current cultural moment and the desire for knowledge in a time where factuality is often meaningless.