There are moments when finding the right word takes on special urgency. You might be talking, over beers, with a friend going through a wrenching divorce. Or talking with your own spouse about the antipathies that keep welling up between you and have now risen to a crisis, and whether you can still picture a future you both want. In such moments, you need words called forth by the singular person before you and the singular crisis at hand. To look for guidance in “what one says,” or to fall into cliché, would be a serious failing—a failure to bring yourself into full presence with the other. To indulge in euphemisms or to be insistently optimistic would be a different sort of failing—a failure to trust another to endure un-prettified truth.
Such moments often take you to the edge of your understanding of life and its significance and trials. Your thoughts are not already clear, worded, needing only to be enunciated. They are half-formed and obscure. Words are the medium with which you can give them sufficient definiteness to truly have them. The initial thing—the embryonic thought—is on the way to being. It is determinate enough that you can recognize the right words for it when you find them, but not yet so determinate that the words flow easily. By wording what is at the still-hazy horizon of our thought, we illuminate it. And in the realm of thought, illumination is the same thing as being. The power of the word is, then, a creative power, a power to give birth to thought—that is, to move thoughts toward greater clarity, which is to say, toward full and vivid being. For our deepest and most formative thoughts—the thoughts that form the central elements of our conception of what we are called to do with this life—this is a long road, a road we will be traversing for our entire lives.
In difficult conversations, the operation of this questing and creative power is sometime audible. There are pauses, false starts and restarts, sometimes an explicit cancellation, a “No, that’s not the word for it,” or “That’s not quite what I’m trying to say.” At such times, we feel the allure of what Heidegger rightly took to be the characteristic Greek conception of the human form of being: “Being on the way toward what is to be uncovered.” As Plato put it, the human form of existence is not, in the full and strict sense, to be (einai). Being in the fullest sense is reserved for those things that never change: numbers, geometric shapes, goodness. Humans are on the way to being. Their life is a continual becoming or being born (gignesthai—the Greek word has both meanings). In Bob Dylan’s folksier formulation, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”
The quest for words is a crucially important driver of this continuous emergence toward being. As we bring our thoughts to words, we give to ourselves a more definite and concerted identity. This too is sometimes audible, and even visible. There is a difference between a speaker who is reading a paper without thinking the thoughts being articulated and a speaker who is having the thoughts expressed by his words. In the latter case, you can hear the speaker gathered up and enlivened by his speech. This is what fresh and truly fitting words do: They awaken us. They reenact the uncanny event of the quickening of clay.
Matters are quite otherwise with the new text generators we have so recently brought into our lives, and to which we now delegate a rapidly growing share of our quest for fitting words. If we can speak of thinking here, it is thinking of a wholly different kind. These new entities have no still-hazy intimations of their own that their words might either crystallize or bastardize. There is no possibility of felt urgency in their quest for words, none of that nearly erotic excitement we humans feel when we finally have the thought we have been groping for. They have no pangs of conscience when their words sound shallow or cliché. Indeed, cliché is their special strength: They cleave to the center of gravity of the vast sea of human-generated texts, finding each new word by predicting what human beings would most likely say. They have nothing of their own to say, no life from which they might say it, nor any soul or self their words might fashion or disfigure. They are, as it has aptly been put, stochastic parrots.
It would be a brazen slander for anyone to add: and so are we, as Sam Altman did in a 2023 tweet soon after the release of ChatGPT: “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.” Such words could emerge only from a willful forgetting of the lived experience of being human and of seeking to say something worthwhile to fellow humans. No one speaking to his own child in a moment of despair, or to his spouse in a moment of marital reckoning, could consciously aim for faithful mimicry of the patterns laid down by past generations of fellow mimickers. To hear yourself, suddenly, as speaking in this way would be to lose all faith in your capacity to rise to the occasion.
There is a lamentable impulse, especially among some academics dedicated to the study of the human mind and consciousness, to dismiss the line of thought I’ve just put forward as intellectual cowardice. Dispassionate empirical inquiry, it is said, has revealed that what looks most special about us is a mere trick of light. We must own up to this hard fact. We can learn what makes us tick by seeing what it takes for a machine to mimic us convincingly. The charge of unseriousness applies to those whose language has religious roots—who talk, say, about the Word made flesh, or who have stopped quoting the Bible yet still retain the quasi-religious idea that human beings have a special importance unequaled by the other animals. Such ideas spring from inherently unreliable sources: if not from religion or its enduring traces, then from “species-ist” self-congratulations, or from the fear T.S. Eliot showed us in a handful of dust.
On this dispute, I side with Nietzsche in thinking that the scientistic humblers of humanity are tangled in performative contradiction. They profess an unwavering devotion to the truth. Yet this stance—if it is to be more than an arbitrary whim—requires an affirmation of the great value of unflinching lucidity. That is, it requires serious attachment to a recognizable vision of the good or noble mode of thought for human beings. When we affirm such an ideal, we thereby open a gap between our words and the ideals to which we strive to lift them. And when we resolve to lift our words across that gap, we have affirmed ourselves as something very different from stochastic parrots.
Pretend for a moment that you’ve been granted the enormous memory and data-processing capacity of the new generation of large language models (LLMs). You could then adopt and hold yourself to the standard of successful word choice that they use. Actually, we don’t have to pretend: We can already ensure that our words are meeting this standard simply by letting the LLMs choose them for us. It is obvious that we could not pursue any worthy ideal of speech while applying this suddenly available method. There is, after all, only an occasional coincidence between the word that is the most probable successor to a string of already-written words and the next word required by any worthy ideal, including unflinching lucidity. This should come as no surprise. It takes only a moment’s serious thought to see that stochastic parroting is utterly beneath us.
Or, at any rate, I hope we see this. Yet this insight might prove fragile. As Iris Murdoch once wrote, “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.” We should keep this in mind when we assess Sam Altman’s declaration that we are all stochastic parrots. If we were to internalize this picture of ourselves, we might slowly release our attachment to whatever aspirations and ideals are obviously at odds with it. We would then be living more faithfully in accordance with the self-conception recommended by certain enthusiasts of “human-level” AI. Which is to say, we would be busy dying.
A Biblical Moment
After these initial polemics, I would very much like to adopt a more moderate tone. I would like to earn your trust with sober, understated speech. Unfortunately, my topic makes it very hard for me to adopt this tactic. There is, to my ear, one word that screams out to be applied to our headlong rush into the Age of Artificial Intelligence. That word is biblical.
So I will begin with the biblical creation story—by which I mean, the creation story yielded by reading Genesis through the lens of the opening lines of the Gospel of John. This story has it that the universe begins with “the Word,” and that this unfamiliar thing, this “Word,” is God. Everything we know—the earth, the heavens, the light of day, the night, the waters, the land, the grass and trees and fruits, the birds and beasts—came forth from this Word. We too came forth from the Word, and not only from the Word but in the image and likeness of the Word. Our participation in the Word is our distinguishing attribute, our divine gift.
Now we human beings are fashioning a new being in what Altman and many others believe to be our image and our likeness. This being is thought by these enthusiasts to share with us the power of the Word. Indeed, there is a widespread expectation that it will soon equal or exceed the human level of facility with this power. It would be possible, I suppose, for someone moved by the biblical creation story to regard this as the highest fulfillment yet of the Imitatio Dei. God created us in his image and his likeness. Lacking the power of creation ex nihilo, the nearest imitation open to us is to create a being with found materials in our own image and likeness. This would be a grand case—maybe the grandest possible case—of paying it forward.
Yet it seems far more plausible to read our moment as the apotheosis of the sin of pride. It is, on this latter reading, the moment when we insert ourselves in God’s place on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, extending our finger across the cosmos and giving life to the Adam of the new machinic age, the one now stretching its newfound powers toward us—that is, toward what some regard as human-level intelligence, and what I am tempted to regard as a dangerously distorted vision of our intelligence.
What’s the Word?
It’s not every day that human history teeters on whether we have arrived at a tenable answer to a perennial and deeply obscure philosophical problem. We are teetering now. So much hinges on whether we have understood this special power of ours, this power of the Word. What if we have got it wrong? We would then be in the midst of enacting (or, for believers, reenacting) the biblical creation story in the key of travesty. What stray and perhaps uncontainable thing might then be taking shape in the laboratories of Silicon Valley? If we can credit this thing with thinking (and I have my doubts), how will its thinking differ from our own? And what consequences might this difference have for us?
Well, then, what is the Word? As most of us know, the Greek term at issue here—the term used by John—is logos. In the centuries leading up to the writing of the New Testament, it was widely accepted among Greek philosophers that logos is a crucial, and perhaps the most crucial, of the distinctive capabilities possessed by human beings. Yet translations of the relevant philosophical works rarely render logos as “the word.” Logos is usually translated as “reason” when referring to a mental faculty, and “discourse” or “speech” or “[reasoned] account” when referring to the characteristic products of this faculty.
For these philosophers, then, and for the world of thought in which John the Apostle came of age, we humans are distinguished by a form of thinking that makes essential the use of language. Yet the thinking in question is decidedly not exhausted by mastery of language. It brings us into contact with, and takes direction from, realities that lie beyond language and that give to language the great significance that it has. If it were not for the capacity of logos to reach beyond language and find significance and guidance there, the Word would be a lifeless thing—or so I will try to show.
Let’s begin with an example that I would guess is common ground for all of us: Plato’s Republic. The entirety of Socrates’ discourse in the Republic is put forward in response to Glaucon’s request for a logos (a reasoned account) of justice. Socrates makes clear that the ultimate source of any real insight he can offer is the good itself and the light it casts on justice. Keen eyesight is required, he says—by which he means that the mind’s eye must be cleared of distractions and turned toward timeless truths. What we then might hope to glimpse—the good, or that variant of it that we call justice—cannot be exhaustively captured in words. We can perhaps help others to see it more clearly, either with decades of soul-shaping education or (if shortcuts are needed) with images and allegories and myths. But the point of this education, or of these literary devices, is to help us see what lies beyond words. The dialectical exchange of words can prepare the soul for an illuminating encounter with and apprehension of the good, but it cannot confer what is known in this encounter. The good is undefinable.
For the ancient Greek thinkers we are considering, logos is not an all-purpose capacity, a kind of cognitive horsepower equally suited to plumb any object of thought. We might use logos solely to burnish our reputation or to gain wealth or political power. But if we understand what logos is, we will see that these are serious misuses. Logos has a substantive telos. Our power of worded thought comes fully into its own, and brings us fully into our own, when rising toward an increasingly clear apprehension of its proper object, the good. This was clearly Plato’s view. And, notwithstanding their ontological and epistemological disagreements about the good, Aristotle held this view as well. He too thought the vocation of the strange sort of animal we are, the animal with logos, is to grasp the good and the just and to lift itself toward these ideals under their inspiration.
This calling seems to have no correlate in the lives of other animals. While other animals reliably pursue their good, they do not do so from an understanding of the goodness of so doing. It is only human beings, as far as we can tell, who pursue the good under the idea of its goodness. When things go well in human lives, the cosmos comes to contain a distinctive kind of goodness that would otherwise be lacking. It contains goodness that is not merely an instance of the good but also a self-standing tribute to the good. Human goodness makes manifest the peculiar kind of property that goodness is: a property that cannot be known without being loved and thereby internalized. A being that cannot love cannot understand the good and hence cannot share in the power of logos. Such a being is not made in the image and likeness of the Word. It cannot be at once an instance of and a tribute to the good.
We humans do, of course, have the power to bring into being new possessors of the power of the word. This does not require fancy technology. We do it by having children and educating them—that is, by begetting, not by making. Our powers of making have not yet advanced to the point where they can rival this technique.
Another Creation Story
There is another, decidedly non-biblical way of telling the story of the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). On this telling, we are living through the moment when the shaping of life forms by natural selection gives way to what it had for so long been mistaken for: intelligent design. A particularly clever ape, having decoded the blind dynamics that yielded its own intricate physiology and powerful brain, has created an environment in which advantageous mutations of code can be selected for what might loosely be called cognitive fitness. This has resulted in the intentional acceleration of the evolution of intelligence. We are in the first moments of this shift from natural selection in natural environments to artificial selection in virtual and symbolic environments, and we are already seeing its dramatic potential for speeding the evolution of cognitive power. But it is likely that we will soon witness a sudden leap forward into superintelligence—that is, intelligence that can quickly and repeatedly enhance itself by tinkering with its own software and even by designing and planning the production of new kinds of hardware.
My guess is that this second creation story has far more currency than the first among the engineers who have devised this new technology, and who perhaps tend to pride themselves on their immunity to myths. On reflection, though, this story has every bit as much mythic resonance as the first, and hope for its enactment is perhaps as strongly driven by wish fulfillment as belief in the first. The first thing to note about this story is that it is a precise inversion of the biblical creation story. Now, almost two millennia after the writing of the Gospel of John, the software engineers of Silicon Valley are finally giving to John’s delusional talk of the Word something to which it can refer. Yet we are the creators of this newly minted Word, not it of us. Had a genuinely good creator really been there in the beginning, we would not have been consigned to the lives we have until now been stuck with. We would not have had to earn our food and shelter by the sweat of our brow. We would not have had to labor for years to make something of ourselves, only to enter, within a few quick decades, into an inexorable decline culminating in death.
Despite these hardships, the new myth goes, we have worked our way, generation after generation, to a remarkably sophisticated understanding of the workings of the natural world. This has permitted us to create a new kind of intelligent being. While the powers of this new being are still in rapid development, there are those who think it will permit us to lift the various curses we have been living under. The curse of labor, the curse of ill health. There is even talk among the Silicon Valley intelligentsia that it will help us to “solve death”—either by devising medical procedures that can halt the aging process or by permitting us to encode what is essential to our being in a form that can be indefinitely preserved.
In short, the Word really has come this time, some two millennia after we hallucinated its presence. It is here to fix a botched creation. It offers real blessings, not consoling fictions. Some think it might even offer salvation from death. We are moving in religious dimensions of meaning, but this time with ones and zeroes, not chants and incense. Those driving this heady story must feel themselves to be at the center of a nearly biblical remaking of the world, conjuring what in other ages would surely be counted as miracles. For the rest of us, and perhaps for them as well, this creates a nearly audible unease, a rapid oscillation between the sense that we are living in a time of marvels and the sense that all hell is on the verge of breaking loose. This anxious oscillation is, for me, the distinctive phenomenological marker of life in the mid-2020s.
Who Is Shaping the Future?
The unease is intensified by the utter lack of public control over the sculpting of this technology that appears to be on the verge of changing everything. The Manhattan Project and the NASA Moon Missions were overseen directly by the government, whose ventures at least theoretically answer to the public. AI research is being steered and funded privately. Traditional economic theory would have it that this gives the public a different and perhaps more reliable mechanism of control—the mechanism of consumer sovereignty. But one of the more troubling markers of the contemporary economy is that consumer preferences appear to have been decoupled from the decisions of the largest R&D departments. This is visible—as Matt Crawford has pointed out—in the ongoing race to develop driverless cars, for which there is no discernible public clamor. It is visible, too, in the development of the comparatively primitive AI algorithms that have created the booming market in human attention. Consumers were hardly asking for units of their conscious awareness to be harvested, ideally in a vacant and suggestible condition, and sold to the highest bidder. And it is visible in the ongoing AI revolution, whose most valuable products might well be replacement workers, which is to say—at least in the short term—pink slips and poverty for most consumers.
The development of AI reads less like a familiar chapter from the history of consumer capitalism and more like the storyboard of a Bond film in which we’ve all been cast as extras. There are, of course, differences. In place of the malice of a single unbalanced villain, we have a more familiar and realistic threat: good intentions shared by a powerful group with a grandiose sense of its world-historical mission. We have, more specifically, lavishly bankrolled techno-utopians caught up in dreams of a glowing future but not unaware that their do-goodism could easily backfire, causing enormous damage to the purported beneficiaries. They have presumably weighed the odds and deemed the risk worth taking.
There is a question of entitlement here: Do the techno-utopians have the right to run such risks with our collective future? But there is a more fundamental question that does not apply, say, to those performing gain-of-function research for (what they believe to be) the public good. The question is this: Are they operating with a tenable conception of the human good? There is, after all, a notoriously fine line between utopian and dystopian visions. The techno-elites are now drawing this line on our behalf. Should we trust them with this job?
Leap In or Be Left Behind
Socrates distinguished two fundamentally different uses of logos—a rhetorical use that bends our thoughts toward the strategic pursuit of worldly success, and a wisdom-loving use that helps us to clarify and come into harmony with our proper calling. The contemporary university is perhaps still torn between these two ideals, but it leans increasingly toward the former. This leads to strikingly inapt defenses of fields like philosophy or literature, which have no obvious place in any systematic plan of professional training. Administrators often remind students that these fields give them all-purpose cognitive skills that can be used in any career. There is some truth to this, but no real philosopher would explain the point of his field in such terms.
In my view, Plato’s most interesting critique of the instrumental use of language is found in the Phaedrus. Here we listen in on a conversation between Socrates and a young man, Phaedrus, who is torn between the appeal of philosophy and the enticements of the teachers of rhetoric. The choice between these opposing pictures of a proper education—and, by extension, of a well-lived life—has suddenly become personal for Phaedrus. He is mulling over a speech, and what appears to be a seduction bid, delivered earlier that morning by the distinguished orator Lysias. Lysias has argued that it is better to opt for an unloving sexual exchange than the mad ride of an erotic affair.
After hearing Phaedrus recount Lysias’s speech, Socrates offers two speeches of his own—one intended to outdo Lysias’s condemnation of erotic liaisons and another that heaps praises on the divine madness of love. Socrates then subjects all three speeches to scrutiny, with an eye to understanding what it is to make proper use of logos. It will turn out that to use words properly is to use them erotically, and that those who are not gripped by love will be deficient not only in their relationships but in their thought. By contrast, to use words badly is to use them in a lifeless or death-inducing manner. The choice before Phaedrus, then, boils down to love or death.
As Socrates sees things, the proper use of logos is to work toward, and to be transformed by, an increasingly clear grasp of the good. He regards this as an erotic undertaking. The more clearly we see the good, the more we long to bring ourselves into closer proximity to it. And the most promising path to the apprehension and internalization of the good is prolonged union and thoughtful conversation with a worthy lover.
Rhetoricians like Lysias have a completely different view of what words are for. They compose their speeches with the sole aim of getting others to believe whatever they think it most advantageous to have them believe. The advantage Lysias seeks is reliable sexual access to the young Phaedrus, so he tries to convince Phaedrus that it is best to select an influential yet unloving suitor such as Lysias himself. Socrates claims that, because it was devised by beginning with a fixed conclusion and working backwards to premises that lend support to it, Lysias’s speech lacks the special sort of organic unity possessed by a living thing. What Socrates seems to mean is that in choosing his words, Lysias has inverted the temporal direction of genuinely living thought. He began where he ought to have ended, with the fixed conclusion, and moved forward to where he ought to have begun, with considerations that purport to determine what one ought to conclude. Since the speech was not born from one of those electrified strands of living thought in which opacity or perplexity about a crucially important question slowly gives way to clarity, it is not well-suited to ignite such a transformative awakening in those who hear it. Yet this sort of awakening is the distinctive activity of the human being.
If the human being is, or is the image of, logos made flesh, what is at issue here is the refusal of the human, the turning of living flesh to stone. This was the special power, or curse, of King Midas. So it is quite apt that Plato turns to the myth of Midas to convey what is wrong with Lysias’s way of stringing words together. What Plato is telling us, with this metaphor, is that if you want to take the life out of someone, you should teach them to use words for maximal instrumental benefit. By contrast, if you want to enliven someone, as Socrates seems to want to enliven (or re-enliven) Phaedrus, you induce them to reflect earnestly on how best to live and think.
If logos were a purely instrumental power, meant for the efficient securing of worldly ends, it would make perfect sense to delegate our thinking and writing to the new generation of LLMs and to train our students to do likewise. Educators like me would be well-advised either to step aside or to devote themselves to teaching skillful prompt-writing and editing. These are the skills of text generation that will be in demand in the workplace of the future. There would be no further point in teaching students to find words for their own thoughts. This won’t happen in the workplace, so teaching students to do it would be as pointless as teaching students to do long division by hand.
It is no easy thing to become who we are called to become. We are often tempted to spare our loved ones from this struggle by somehow trying to do it for them. Heidegger calls this misguided form of beneficence “leaping in”—a term that aptly highlights what is wrong with it. It displaces another from a task that only they can do. To be spared this work is to be spared growth; it is to be left stunted. An often painful and arduous struggle is sidestepped, and the thing that steps in for you seems sure to be unobjectionable, at very least. This gets at what most worries me about the LLMs. Their stochastic parroting gives to their pronouncements a seductive simulacrum of authority—the authority of reigning opinion, the authority of the herd. Now that we can access this authority with the push of a button and undetectably attach our name to it, claiming it as our own, will we continue with the struggles that it promises to spare us from? Or will we be seduced by the frictionless-ness that is both the design ideal of the virtual realm and the central element of the technology sector’s operative notion of the human good?
My hope is that we will keep our eye on the line between the friction we should be relieved of and the friction that is an essential part of the well-lived human life. But a frictionless alternative existence is being crafted for us. It offers a respite from the struggles of life. We might easily take to life in this friction-free zone, despite—or perhaps because of—its deadening effects.
Our form of being is a never-completed becoming. We should welcome technological innovations that help us with this task of becoming and refuse those that promise to spare us this task. Yet the difficulty of this task will sorely tempt us to opt for innovations of the second kind. If we do, we will not in fact have sidestepped the task of becoming. We will have engaged in it badly, becoming shallower, less fully human.