LLMs are divinatory instruments, our era's oracle, minus the incense and theatrics. If we were honest, we'd admit that "artificial intelligence" is just a modern gloss on a very old instinct: to consult a higher-order text generator and search for wisdom in the obscure. They tick all the boxes: oblique meaning, a semiotic field, the illusion of hidden knowledge, and a ritual interface. The only reason we don't call i…
>When we forget that, we get nonsense like "the chatbot told him he was the messiah," as though language could be blamed for the projection. Words have power, and those that create words - or create machines that create words - have responsibility and liability. It is not enough to say "the reader is responsible for meaning and their actions". When people or planet-burning random matrix multipliers say things and inf…
Acknowledging the interpretive nature of language doesn't absolve us from the consequences of what we say. It just means that communication is always a gamble: we load the dice with intention and hope they land amid the chaos of another mind.
This applies whether the text comes from a person or a model. The key difference is that humans write with a theory of mind. They guess what might land, what might be misread, what might resonate. LLMs don’t guess; they sample. But the meaning still arrives the same way: through the reader, reconstructing significance from dead words.
So no, pointing out that people read meaning into LLM outputs doesn’t let humans off the hook for their own words. It just reminds us that all language is a collaborative illusion, intent on one end, interpretation on the other, and a vast gap where only words exist in between.