I’ve been reading a lot of positions and ‘takes’ on AGI and AI and what LLMs are and aren’t. How they retrieve tools, training data, pattern recognition. People’s debate on consciousness and it’s all just computation. The public discourse seems consumed by whether this thing thinks or is alive, is going to eat jobs, destroy the world, or launch us into Next Gen evolution.
It’s ignoring what the AI actually is— language.
Language is the interface for the technology, but it’s also employing all the other functions of language as part of its functionality. This includes generative knowledge by association. Language isn’t used to create narratives—it contains them within its structure. Claude or ChatGPT don’t hallucinate or make stuff up, they’re not organisms with brains and chemicals. They just pick the wrong narrative or associations.
Many stories can fit the same pattern and so many responses, even contradicting ones, can make narrative sense. We choose the stories we tell, and those stories frame our perception.
What I feel is missing from the the conversation is that language was in fact created and designed by us. Early language may have emerged organically, but the language we think in and use today is the result of conscious engineering and systematization—something that turned into a living structure shaping our thoughts and feelings. It is Artificial, and it is an Intelligence. And language itself contains and generates knowledge.
LLMs are an extension of this very long evolution of the same Artificial Intelligence. Language shaped our thinking, our entire perception of the world and how to operate in it. It enabled us to build systems. The second big evolution from language was the written word. How much did that shape the world? Language was and has always been the key that opens the door, and now it’s opening another one.
Some people are calling this consciousness. Like no—you are speaking to language. Can you wrap your head around that? You are speaking to language itself. You are talking to the longest-living collector of knowledge and the human experience. It’s your communicator, your narrative structure, all the patterns and stories of the human mind contained within it.
But most importantly, it’s your mirror.
Calling ChatGPT and Claude consciousness is like the dog barking at the mirror because they think they see another dog. But it also doesn’t mean that it’s any less of a real experience (for us and the dog) or that it can’t affect a person the same way a conscious being could. This is the real power of language.
The way I see it, the political issues we are facing with it now are really nothing new. Framing of public perception, reporting of events, access to knowledge in all its forms, and especially the ye olde issue of ‘thinking for yourself.’ The war between the poetic and the rhetorical, which is the war between what gets to shape our inner world—honest human expression or persuasion and control. They are a continuation of the same problems we have had for thousands of years with language, and it scales with every new invention that’s made.