"To avail oneself of the power to outsource articulation to a language machine makes a certain sense under particular conditions, that is to say the conditions that constitute efficiency, optimization, and productivity as the highest human goods."
I might be careful of this formulation since it cedes the argument that LLMs are in fact maximizing efficiency. In my experience they are marginal for pure research due to unreliability unless very tightly constrained and used by someone who already posseses the expertise to catch the inevitable errors. In that role they seem to outperform web search due to web search being so highly corrupted.
I have found LLMs most useful for generating masses of text that I don't much care about. The sort of work related verbiage that no one will read with any engagement and will most likely be skimmed by some bean counter to check a box somewhere. Which is to say the LLM is "efficient" in so far as it allows me to pay this tax of mediocrity and process which in a truly efficient system wouldn't exist. No value is added anywhere in this interaction.
In this sense I would say that the LLMs are currently mostly bandaids that allow us to paper over certain problems in the short term at a fairly high long term cost. Is there any doubt that they will be driving the bulk of call center interaction within a few years? Would this be sustainable without customers being locked in to a small number of monopoly providers that can provide subpar customer service since there is nowhere else to go?
As to increasing real efficiency, there are domains where progress has been made by "AI" such as computer vision but I have my doubts about the long term prospects of these LLMs providing tangible benefits beyond some narrow niches even in the currency of true efficiency and not simple strip mining of value.
I keep coming back to the phrase owning our words. The thing about language machines is that they can produce language endlessly, but no one quite has to answer for what they say. The sentences arrive polished, plausible, and strangely uninhabited. But the awkwardness of human speech, the pauses, the wrong metaphors, the slow search for the right word, isn’t just inefficiency. It’s where thinking actually happens. It’s where we discover what we mean and whether we’re willing to stand behind it. A world full of fluent language that nobody truly owns feels less like progress and more like a quiet evacuation of responsibility.
Really appreciated this reflection. I was glad to see Metaphors We Live By mentioned and to see that work brought back into the conversation, especially the idea that metaphor structures how we perceive and inhabit reality. When language becomes optimized for efficiency or outsourced to machines, the fidelity begins to thin. The words remain, but the lived connection between language, judgment, and experience begins to fray. Your point about “owning our words” captures something essential.
'Owning Our Words' landed hard for me. The distinction you're drawing — between language as instrument and language as something that owns us as much as we own it — feels like it clarifies something I'd been carrying around imprecisely for a while. The Ellul current running through this one is strong.
I appreciate the discussion of Wendell Berry. I recently started digging into his work and finding it to be a treat. I reflect on his thoughts about machines in his poem "Some Further Words" in my own Substack, The Human Adventure, for those who may be interested. Thanks for the post! https://thehumanadventure.substack.com/p/dear-algorithm
This is a challenge. It's one thing to reflect idealistically and abstractly on the nature of language, it's another to "care for words" in the day-to-day. Tolkien wasn't just being cantankerous; he was being pedantic. People who care about what words mean often carry with them an air of disdainful erudition that puts people off the care of language altogether.
This happens in my neck of the woods all the time. It's common when a medical team stops life-sustaining therapies for the team to describe what they're doing as a "withdrawal of care." Palliative care clinicians have come along to chide, "Don't say that. We never stop caring. Say, 'Withdrawal of life-sustaining therapies' instead."
As much as I agree with the fact the words are conveying, I've not found a non-pretentious way to say them. I firmly believe words matter and I often enter that conversation by way of metaphor ("Why do you think we use so much war metaphor in medicine?"), but when it comes down to calling out the use of words by others, it's tough business. You're just as likely to shut people out as invite them in.
Reading this, I kept wondering whether the task has shifted. Not so much preventing the outsourcing of language, but cultivating forms of attention that can’t be outsourced. Your essay helped me see that distinction more clearly.
On the constitutive power of metaphors and tech analogies, and the ways they also shape both the development of technologies historically (e.g. electric vehicles as 'computers on wheels'; computers as 'tools to think with' or 'thinking machines'), as well as how they shape the regulatory agenda for a technology and its subsequent legal treatment in court--and what this all implies for AI, given the widely varied metaphors used for it, you might be interested in this paper I wrote a while back https://law-ai.org/ai-policy-metaphors/
Once again, a great piece! I'd love to hear your thoughts on Weatherby's "Language Machines". I'm finding it interesting but quite frustrating - he's quite snooty about other opinions and I have the sense that quite a bit of straw-manning is going on, though I don't know enough litcrit or linguistic theory to pin it down.
“Tanya suggested that the right words could change one’s mind. No, more than that—that the right words could change one’s entire perception and experience of a thing.”
At the very grave risk of personal inflation, I would say that this describes what I, as a psychotherapist, help my clients to do: a shift in consciousness. And this is the essence of magical practice; we don’t call the ordering of specific letters to represent a word “spelling” for nothing. In the beginning was the word (and consciousness)!
Thanks for this interesting and thought-provoking piece. The view of language reminds of Charles Taylor’s description of it as “constitutive” in his books The Language Animal and Cosmic Connections. FYI, the name of the 19th-century American pragmatist philosopher you refer to as “Charles Pearce” was actually “Charles Peirce,” often also referred to as “ C.S. Peirce.”
"The use of a decent language can change your whole idea of what something is."
This put language to something I've been attempting to understand for awhile. I've had a few different experiences where I've been given language for something, it reshaped how I thought about something, and I finally was able to see how I resonated with it and why. Decent language moved me deeper into my understanding of my experience in the world.
Important article about LLMs: “We call the resulting condition Epistemia: a structural situation in which linguistic plausibility substitutes for epistemic evaluation, producing the feeling of knowing without the labor of judgment.” https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/c5gh8_v1
I find myself agreeing with most everything you and the people you quote have to say. We circle round these names, inevitably. I took George Steiner for my education in the 1970s in a regular publication of the BBC called 'The Listener'. I did not however, read enough of Weil or Arendt, Murdoch. even of Berry, but your own articles have helped me catch up. Rowan Williams is a latest must.
To me great worth is in trivial sounding ordinary converse, a way out of the wastelands. Is it, perhaps more than educated language, the constant source of the embodied inexpressible, the human and creature shared reality? That which we share with machines, an intelligence, language necessary for poison gas or for public reassurance, PR for nuclear danger, even as it contaminates our modern metaphors, even I guess invades my nightime dreams, is perhaps our purgatory? (There was a Bob Dylan song, I forget, a kind of grief in American?)
“Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them ..."
👍 Indeed. Akin to the Biblical, "In the beginning was the Word, and the word (as language itself, as synecdoche) was god."
Anthropologist Loren Eiseley -- in his "The Immense Journey", highly recommended -- talks lyrically about the beginning of language as the start of "symbolic communication". [The Dream Animal, pg. 120]
“The use of a decent language can change your whole idea of what something is.” This is so very true. And it really gets to a very important part of what Taylor has to say in The Language Animal, about the search for new articulations. Language is a gift that gives to possessors the possibility of metanoia and of transformation.
"To avail oneself of the power to outsource articulation to a language machine makes a certain sense under particular conditions, that is to say the conditions that constitute efficiency, optimization, and productivity as the highest human goods."
I might be careful of this formulation since it cedes the argument that LLMs are in fact maximizing efficiency. In my experience they are marginal for pure research due to unreliability unless very tightly constrained and used by someone who already posseses the expertise to catch the inevitable errors. In that role they seem to outperform web search due to web search being so highly corrupted.
I have found LLMs most useful for generating masses of text that I don't much care about. The sort of work related verbiage that no one will read with any engagement and will most likely be skimmed by some bean counter to check a box somewhere. Which is to say the LLM is "efficient" in so far as it allows me to pay this tax of mediocrity and process which in a truly efficient system wouldn't exist. No value is added anywhere in this interaction.
In this sense I would say that the LLMs are currently mostly bandaids that allow us to paper over certain problems in the short term at a fairly high long term cost. Is there any doubt that they will be driving the bulk of call center interaction within a few years? Would this be sustainable without customers being locked in to a small number of monopoly providers that can provide subpar customer service since there is nowhere else to go?
As to increasing real efficiency, there are domains where progress has been made by "AI" such as computer vision but I have my doubts about the long term prospects of these LLMs providing tangible benefits beyond some narrow niches even in the currency of true efficiency and not simple strip mining of value.
Great point.
I keep coming back to the phrase owning our words. The thing about language machines is that they can produce language endlessly, but no one quite has to answer for what they say. The sentences arrive polished, plausible, and strangely uninhabited. But the awkwardness of human speech, the pauses, the wrong metaphors, the slow search for the right word, isn’t just inefficiency. It’s where thinking actually happens. It’s where we discover what we mean and whether we’re willing to stand behind it. A world full of fluent language that nobody truly owns feels less like progress and more like a quiet evacuation of responsibility.
Really appreciated this reflection. I was glad to see Metaphors We Live By mentioned and to see that work brought back into the conversation, especially the idea that metaphor structures how we perceive and inhabit reality. When language becomes optimized for efficiency or outsourced to machines, the fidelity begins to thin. The words remain, but the lived connection between language, judgment, and experience begins to fray. Your point about “owning our words” captures something essential.
'Owning Our Words' landed hard for me. The distinction you're drawing — between language as instrument and language as something that owns us as much as we own it — feels like it clarifies something I'd been carrying around imprecisely for a while. The Ellul current running through this one is strong.
I appreciate the discussion of Wendell Berry. I recently started digging into his work and finding it to be a treat. I reflect on his thoughts about machines in his poem "Some Further Words" in my own Substack, The Human Adventure, for those who may be interested. Thanks for the post! https://thehumanadventure.substack.com/p/dear-algorithm
This is sooooo good.
I also love seeing a return to this format of interconnected snippets!
Agreed!
This is a challenge. It's one thing to reflect idealistically and abstractly on the nature of language, it's another to "care for words" in the day-to-day. Tolkien wasn't just being cantankerous; he was being pedantic. People who care about what words mean often carry with them an air of disdainful erudition that puts people off the care of language altogether.
This happens in my neck of the woods all the time. It's common when a medical team stops life-sustaining therapies for the team to describe what they're doing as a "withdrawal of care." Palliative care clinicians have come along to chide, "Don't say that. We never stop caring. Say, 'Withdrawal of life-sustaining therapies' instead."
As much as I agree with the fact the words are conveying, I've not found a non-pretentious way to say them. I firmly believe words matter and I often enter that conversation by way of metaphor ("Why do you think we use so much war metaphor in medicine?"), but when it comes down to calling out the use of words by others, it's tough business. You're just as likely to shut people out as invite them in.
Reading this, I kept wondering whether the task has shifted. Not so much preventing the outsourcing of language, but cultivating forms of attention that can’t be outsourced. Your essay helped me see that distinction more clearly.
On the constitutive power of metaphors and tech analogies, and the ways they also shape both the development of technologies historically (e.g. electric vehicles as 'computers on wheels'; computers as 'tools to think with' or 'thinking machines'), as well as how they shape the regulatory agenda for a technology and its subsequent legal treatment in court--and what this all implies for AI, given the widely varied metaphors used for it, you might be interested in this paper I wrote a while back https://law-ai.org/ai-policy-metaphors/
Once again, a great piece! I'd love to hear your thoughts on Weatherby's "Language Machines". I'm finding it interesting but quite frustrating - he's quite snooty about other opinions and I have the sense that quite a bit of straw-manning is going on, though I don't know enough litcrit or linguistic theory to pin it down.
“Tanya suggested that the right words could change one’s mind. No, more than that—that the right words could change one’s entire perception and experience of a thing.”
At the very grave risk of personal inflation, I would say that this describes what I, as a psychotherapist, help my clients to do: a shift in consciousness. And this is the essence of magical practice; we don’t call the ordering of specific letters to represent a word “spelling” for nothing. In the beginning was the word (and consciousness)!
Thanks for this interesting and thought-provoking piece. The view of language reminds of Charles Taylor’s description of it as “constitutive” in his books The Language Animal and Cosmic Connections. FYI, the name of the 19th-century American pragmatist philosopher you refer to as “Charles Pearce” was actually “Charles Peirce,” often also referred to as “ C.S. Peirce.”
"The use of a decent language can change your whole idea of what something is."
This put language to something I've been attempting to understand for awhile. I've had a few different experiences where I've been given language for something, it reshaped how I thought about something, and I finally was able to see how I resonated with it and why. Decent language moved me deeper into my understanding of my experience in the world.
Important article about LLMs: “We call the resulting condition Epistemia: a structural situation in which linguistic plausibility substitutes for epistemic evaluation, producing the feeling of knowing without the labor of judgment.” https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/c5gh8_v1
I find myself agreeing with most everything you and the people you quote have to say. We circle round these names, inevitably. I took George Steiner for my education in the 1970s in a regular publication of the BBC called 'The Listener'. I did not however, read enough of Weil or Arendt, Murdoch. even of Berry, but your own articles have helped me catch up. Rowan Williams is a latest must.
To me great worth is in trivial sounding ordinary converse, a way out of the wastelands. Is it, perhaps more than educated language, the constant source of the embodied inexpressible, the human and creature shared reality? That which we share with machines, an intelligence, language necessary for poison gas or for public reassurance, PR for nuclear danger, even as it contaminates our modern metaphors, even I guess invades my nightime dreams, is perhaps our purgatory? (There was a Bob Dylan song, I forget, a kind of grief in American?)
“Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them ..."
👍 Indeed. Akin to the Biblical, "In the beginning was the Word, and the word (as language itself, as synecdoche) was god."
Anthropologist Loren Eiseley -- in his "The Immense Journey", highly recommended -- talks lyrically about the beginning of language as the start of "symbolic communication". [The Dream Animal, pg. 120]
“The use of a decent language can change your whole idea of what something is.” This is so very true. And it really gets to a very important part of what Taylor has to say in The Language Animal, about the search for new articulations. Language is a gift that gives to possessors the possibility of metanoia and of transformation.