Semantic Infrastructure, Insufficiency, and the False Romance of Interoperability
A recent Substack essay, Jessica Talisman’s Language Is the Bridge, makes a claim that is increasingly common in discussions of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs, ontologies, metadata, and semantic infrastructure: that language is the bridge between human understanding and machine action. The claim is attractive, and not merely because ‘bridge’ is one of those metaphors that allows technical discourse to cosplay as wisdom literature. It captures something real. AI systems, semantic architectures, ontologies, taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and knowledge graphs do not run on raw reality. They run on structured representations. Those representations require labels, definitions, mappings, alignments, constraints, and interpretive discipline. In that sense, language work is not decorative. It is infrastructural. But the metaphor is also dangerous.
The LinkedIn consensus has spoken: if you used AI in the writing process, you are not the author. The position is stated with the confidence of someone who has never hired a ghostwriter, employed a research assistant, submitted to a heavy editor, or considered that the Gettysburg Address was almost certainly not written by Lincoln.
Image: I couldn’t not share this Midjourney 8.1 image. It may not have understood the assignment.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Authorship has never been a production relation. It has always been an attribution relation — an institutionally stabilised answer to the question of which name the practice elects to put on the cover. These are not the same thing, and conflating them is the error from which every subsequent confusion proceeds.
The ghostwriter has existed as long as commercial publishing. The political speechwriter is so normalised that nobody considers it worth remarking. The celebrity memoir, the corporate thought-leadership piece, the attributed editorial — these are not edge cases or embarrassing exceptions. They are the normal operation of every writing-adjacent industry that has ever existed. The name on the cover has never reliably indicated the hands on the keyboard, and the industry has never seriously pretended otherwise. It has simply preferred not to discuss it at dinner.
AI changes the tool. It does not change the structure. The person who prompts, selects, curates, revises, and publishes is doing what commissioners of ghostwriters have always done. What has changed is that AI makes the mediation visible in a way that polite convention previously concealed. Visibility triggers the purity reflex. What presents itself as a defence of authentic authorship is a defence of a particular fiction — the Romantic author as solitary originating consciousness — that the industry never consistently believed and certainly never consistently practised.
The purity position also fails on its own terms before it gets started. Consider the spectrum of AI-assisted writing: a full draft submitted for light polish; a human argument substantially revised by AI; collaborative ideation followed by AI drafting; a kernel of an idea handed over for full execution. These are genuinely different in terms of human contribution. The zealot position requires a threshold somewhere on this spectrum below which authorship lapses. It never specifies where. More fatally, it has no means of verification. There is no external method of determining where on the spectrum any given piece of writing falls. The detector tools are probabilistic noise that disproportionately penalise competent prose. Any audit mechanism sophisticated enough to catch first-order evasion immediately generates a second-order workaround. The regress terminates only at continuous surveillance of the writing process — panoptical authorship as the logical endpoint of the position taken seriously.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Then there is the recursion problem, which the zealot never addresses because it is fatal. The stochastic parrot charge against AI — that it merely recombines absorbed linguistic patterns without genuine origination — describes with considerable accuracy what human cognition also does. The writer’s training data is the Dickens read at ten, the billboard absorbed on a commute, the argument overheard on public transit, the half-remembered essay that shaped a position without ever being consciously cited. The causal chain of any human idea disappears into an unauditable cognitive history. Genuine origination in the sense the purity position requires has never existed. The Romantic author was always a retrospective confabulation. Barthes said so in 1967. The industry nodded politely and continued invoicing.
What the zealot is defending is not authorship. It is a particular grammar of authorship — one that selects compositional origin as the threshold criterion, applies it selectively and unverifiably, and uses the resulting suspicion as a status boundary. It is guild behaviour dressed as principle, which is understandable as a response to a genuine economic threat but should not be mistaken for a philosophical position.
Authorship is the position a culture elects to stabilise after the work has already been produced through far messier means. It has always been thus. AI did not break the fiction. It just made the fiction harder to keep a straight face about.
The Rest of the Story
I’ve written about this before. I am not an AI apologist, but I am peeved by anti-LLM zealots, who clearly haven’t thought through their arguments.
I finished reading A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic, the part about Bertrand Russell’s claim about ‘The author of Waverley was Scotch‘. My brain latched onto authorship, and my emotional response was WTF? I have other problems with Russell and Ayer on this, but that’s a matter for another day.
To make my point, this page up to the ellipsis is the output of Claude after an extended dialogue with it and ChatGPT after I read Ayers, and something didn’t sit quite right. I am not ashamed to use LLMs in my authoring workflow and am not ashamed to mention it, as here. Almost all of these thoughts are mine. I’ve simply asked Claude to organise the output. It’s good enough to output as-is, and any edits would be trivial, so I won’t bother. I probably could have made the edits in as much time as it took to type this, but I’ve got nothing to hide. I’m just a human with access to technology circa 2026.
The title may have given this away, but my parents are in their eighties, an absurdity on the face of it, because some primitive part of my brain still files them under ‘adults’ – people who understand the performance of being alive.
Years ago, against my father’s wishes, my mother took a job as a waitress. His objection came out with that antique domestic authority that probably ought to be preserved in amber: No wife of mine is going to work. There it is. The marital constitution in a single sentence. Not an argument – rather, by decree. Still, she worked.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
It’s been years since she held a paid job, but in retirement, she seems to have lost more than employment. She’s lost a structure of demand. She is bored out of her gourd or tree or whatever. Left alone with an unfilled day, she putters, tidies, wipes, folds, rearranges, and complains – rinse and repeat. Sisyphus would be proud. And the complaint isn’t incidental; it’s part of the ritual. The labour gives the grievance somewhere to reside.
There’s a peculiar mercy in not being too useful.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
This creates an odd etiquette for everyone around her. One has to be careful not to interfere too much. Don’t clean everything; efficiently eliminate tasks; show up flushed with modern virtue and liberate her from the very thing that’s keeping the day from opening its jaws. Offer help, accept the refusal, move on without guilt. There’s a peculiar mercy in not being too useful.
Once the housework is done – or once it reaches the temporary truce by pause – the restlessness comes back. The ourobouros resumes its self-consumption. Then she needs to walk, drive, shop, bake, browse, fiddle, inspect, rearrange, and escape – more infinite loop, though only seemingly so. Anything to distract her from the long flat fact of being alive without a timetable. Employment used to do that. Marriage did that. Children did that. The household still does that. Now the old structures only remain as gestures, but gestures can still hold a person upright, as they had before, but with more salience.
A different version of this appeared with my mother-in-law, who had dementia. To occupy her, we’d give her silver to polish, or napkins to fold. There wasn’t a real need for the silver to shine, and the napkins, once folded, could be unfolded and dropped back on the pile to repeat the process. Like Keynes’s worker digging holes to fill them in again, the point wasn’t production. The point was occupation. The task didn’t need to move the world forward, as if it did in any case. It only needed to hold the day in place.
That sounds cruel when you describe it abstractly, as if we were tricking her into labour, but you’d be confusing this with Capitalism. The real cruelty would have been leaving her unmoored – nothing for the hands to do whilst the mind searched for a room it could still recognise. Folding napkins wasn’t housework in any economic sense. It was a small architecture of reassurance. A way of letting purpose survive after purpose had lost its object. even if the sense of purpose had long left the building.
There’s a distinction here, though it isn’t clean. My mum’s rituals are self-maintaining. They belong to a life trained by domestic obligation, by marriage, by an older settlement between gender and labour, by all the small cruelties that once got to call themselves normal. My mother-in-law’s rituals were externally staged – not expressions of domestic identity so much as acts of care arranged by other people. Whilst all purpose is fictional, one woman kept her purpose through the fiction of inherited duty; the other was offered purpose as a merciful fiction. The border between the two is porous, naturally, because reality has never agreed to respect our categories.
I’m not recommending any of this to anyone. I’m just noticing it, which is what we writers call ‘thinking’ when we want to dodge responsibility.
Abstract freedom isn’t the same thing as a life you can actually inhabit.
I’m a feminist the way I’m a humanist: sincerely, but with reservations about the slogans. I don’t think this is how a woman should live. I don’t believe domestic labour is some mystical feminine vocation – as if dusting were an ontological destiny and the Hoover a sacrament. But I also can’t bring myself to take it away from her. Abstract freedom isn’t the same thing as a life you can actually inhabit. Sometimes emancipation arrives too late to provide new habits. Sometimes the cage has become furniture.
This doesn’t justify the cage. It only complicates the fantasy that removing it leaves behind a clean liberated self, glowing like a freshly unboxed appliance. People aren’t appliances, although civilisation has made several brave attempts.
The mistake is assuming purpose has to be justified by productivity. That’s the capitalist infection, of course: if nothing’s produced, nothing happened. But most of ordinary life isn’t productive in that sense. It’s regulatory. Consolatory. Rhythmic. A person folds the napkin, wipes the counter, polishes the spoon, walks round the block, checks the same cupboard twice, tells the same story, asks the same question, rearranges the same shelf, writes the same sentence again with one adjective changed and calls it progress – like an LLM but with less personality. These acts don’t redeem existence. They just stop it arriving all at once.
As for me, I don’t have a purpose either, so I write. Ostensibly, this is my own form of puttering. My desk is her kitchen counter. My paragraphs are folded towels. I arrange sentences, complain about them, rearrange them, and call the whole performance ‘vocation’ because compulsive symbolic housekeeping looks poor on a business card.
There’s a shabby tenderness in this, though one shouldn’t make too much of it. The old trick isn’t really meaning; it’s occupation, rhythm – having something to do with one’s hands whilst the mind declines to look directly at the wall. Some people clean. Some people shop. Some shoot fentanyl. Some become serial killers, CEOs, presidents, consultants, motivational speakers, or other recognised hazards. Some of us write essays about our mothers and pretend it counts as insight. We all find our own ways to bide the time until we die.
In the end, nobody gets out alive. The least we can do is not steal from each other the shabby little rituals that make the waiting bearable.
Video: On a related note. Jonny talks about Setiya and atelic activities.
Self-help, pop psychology, LinkedIn, and the metaphysics smuggled into advice
Self-improvement books rarely begin by telling you what it believes a person is. That would be too honest, and honesty is bad for conversion funnels. Instead, it begins with verbs.
Choose. Decide. Commit. Heal. Optimise. Manifest. Reframe. Own. Level up. Set boundaries. Do the work. Become intentional. Stop self-sabotaging. Unlock your potential. Be your authentic self. Take radical responsibility.
The vocabulary shifts depending on the tradition. One speaks of healing, one of discipline, one of nervous systems, one of leadership, one of purpose, one of abundance. What they share is not a doctrine but a grammar: a way of arranging the person before the advice begins. The subject is always inward, sovereign, and temporarily malfunctioning. The problem is always locatable. The solution is always available, often for $29.99 or in a free webinar that becomes a masterclass for $299.
But here is where the easy cynicism runs out of road, because the people writing this stuff — by and large — believe it.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
That is the part of the critique that tends to get skipped, because it is less satisfying than imagining a cynical operator deliberately strip-mining the anxious for recurring revenue. Most self-help authors arrived at their framework the same way their readers are about to: they were struggling, they encountered a grammar that organised their experience, they felt the specific relief of suddenly being intelligible to themselves, and they mistook that relief for discovery. Then they wrote a book about it. The author is not the shark. The author is a previous customer who graduated to the front of the room.
The framework they found — and are now evangelising — is what I call, in The Architecture of Encounter, an ontological grammar: a set of prior commitments about what kind of thing a person is, which arrives upstream of any specific advice and quietly determines what advice is even thinkable. You cannot recommend reframing without first presuming a self transparent enough to observe its own cognitions and sovereign enough to revise them. You cannot prescribe boundaries without presuming a self whose territory is violable and whose autonomy is the relevant moral unit. You cannot offer alignment without presuming a self that has a true direction, temporarily obscured, patiently awaiting discovery through either a values exercise on page forty-seven or a retreat in somewhere with good lighting and worse plumbing.
The grammar arrives first. The advice follows from it. And the person reading it is not being shown a mirror. They are being issued a lens.
The lens finds its wearer. “Take ownership” resonates with people already invested in the idea of themselves as agents who have been insufficiently deliberate — it confirms the worldview while appearing to challenge the behaviour. “Your nervous system is dysregulated” resonates with people for whom the moralised language of laziness and discipline has become intolerable; here is a vocabulary that removes the accusation while retaining the explanation, which is a genuinely useful service even if the mechanism on offer is borrowed loosely from neuroscience and the rest is borrowed from hope. “Mindset is your prison” resonates with people who need their suffering to remain individually tractable — solvable, that is, without anyone having to redistribute anything expensive or inconvenient. “Manifest your abundance” resonates with people who find both structural analysis and self-blame equally unappealing and would like a third option involving the universe.
Each grammar finds its congregation. Which is precisely the problem.
A grammar propagates not because it has been tested against alternatives or evaluated for efficacy, but because it maps onto a prior self-conception cleanly enough to produce the sensation of being understood. The entrepreneur already believes in agency-language: execution, discipline, ownership, leverage. The book that tells them their discipline is the differentiator is not offering new information; it is offering comfortable confirmation in a more expensive format. The therapeutic reader already suspects their relational difficulties involve something called attachment. The book that tells them so is not illuminating; it is flattering them with their own vocabulary. The LinkedIn professional already believes their career is a project of self-authorship. The thought leader who tells them to communicate their value and build authentic leadership is not giving them a strategy; they are giving them a liturgy.
The community that forms around a grammar is a church, not a seminar. It has converts, not students. And like most churches, it is considerably better at solidarity than at falsifiability.
This matters because the mechanism by which self-help content spreads — resonance, recognition, testimonial, referral — is entirely decoupled from the mechanism by which we would establish that it works. A sentence resonates because it fits a grammar the reader has already adopted. That tells you something real: about the anxieties structuring a cohort’s self-understanding, the stories they are trying to make liveable, the descriptions of themselves they find tolerable or intolerable. It does not tell you whether the intervention produces the claimed effect, in whom, under what conditions, and compared with what alternative. Those are duller questions. Less shareable. They do not fit on a carousel post with a soft gradient and a mountain.
Horoscopes also resonate. So do conspiracy theories, national myths, and the first chapter of any book you buy during a difficult stretch of your life.
The point is not that the advice is necessarily wrong. Sometimes “set boundaries” is exactly right. Sometimes “take ownership” is precisely what someone has been avoiding hearing. Sometimes a new frame genuinely reorganises attention in ways that produce durable change, and the person is measurably better off for having found it. None of that is in question. The question is whether a framework that produced one useful instance has any reliable claim to truth beyond that instance — and whether the person reaching for it during a difficult period is in any position to make that evaluation carefully.
They usually are not. That is not stupidity. That is the condition of being in difficulty: you reach for intelligibility, and whoever offers it collects a great deal of credit. The problem is not the reaching. The problem is that the self-help ecosystem — including the parts of it operated by entirely sincere people who believe every word they publish — has no reliable mechanism for distinguishing frameworks that help from frameworks that merely feel like help while the underlying situation continues undisturbed. The true believer and the true seeker share the same vulnerability. Both reached for a grammar. One of them got to write the book.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
It is also worth noting that commerce is the easy villain here, and an overrated one. The same dynamic runs through pop psychology, where the grammar of individual cognitive mechanisms tends to dominate because it produces legible interventions in a way that structural analysis never quite does; blaming cognition is tractable, blaming the organisation of society is dispiriting and hard to monetise, even when it is accurate. It runs through LinkedIn, where the grammar is not therapeutic but managerial — the self reimagined as an optimisable professional asset — and where burnout becomes a boundary failure, precarity becomes an invitation to upskill, and alienation becomes a purpose deficit. Nobody on LinkedIn is necessarily trying to extract money from anyone. Many of them are trying to be useful, or to be visible, or both, which is human enough. But the grammar they are deploying disappears material conditions into interior architecture with the same efficiency as the most cynically produced wellness content. The mechanism does not require a profit motive. It requires only a grammar and an audience that already shares it.
The useful response to all of this is not wholesale dismissal, which would be too easy and almost certainly wrong. Some people need clearer habits. Some need better descriptions of their own conduct. Some need permission to stop tolerating what they have been tolerating. Some need a vocabulary that makes their own patterns visible, and a framework — however approximate — is better than none. These are real services. The fact that they are sometimes delivered inside a dubious metaphysics of the person does not automatically negate them.
But there is a question worth developing the habit of asking, before the grammar installs itself: what kind of person does this advice presume? Is the self it describes sovereign, where I am actually constrained? Wounded where I am actually responsible? Deficient where I am actually being exploited? Misaligned where I am actually just bored? In need of self-belief, where I am in need of rent?
These questions are less fun than a morning routine designed by someone who has never had a difficult commute. They do not come with a community or a badge or an accountability partner who sends encouraging voice notes. But they do something the grammar on its own cannot: they ask whether the patient described in the diagnosis is the one actually in the room.
Most self-help skips that step. So, not infrequently, does the person who wrote it. They found a grammar that made their experience legible, felt the relief that comes from that, and never quite got around to distinguishing legibility from truth. Which is understandable. It is also, for everyone downstream of that decision, a problem.
I don’t occupy this shared space of ontological grammar, so I call bollox.
Full Disclosure: This article was drafted by ChatGPT 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 upon a discussion of my perspective on self-help, pop psychology, and LinkedIn. I am busy with other projects, but I wanted to share my position. Apologies to those who don’t prefer LLM-authored or assisted articles.
My goal is to articulate the connexion between ontological grammar commitments, the noted disciplines, and more. As should be evident, I am not a fan of self-help or some adjacent modalities.
‘woman’ is a normative identity, and like all normative identities it is striated. It is composed of putative essences, recurring structural constraints, intersectional positions, cohort-relative projections, subjective inhabitations, and external gatekeeping.
I’m an active AI user. It’s no secret. My top uses are research and enquiry, but it is instrumental in my review and revision process.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
I am trying to wrap up my latest manuscript. I’m about 5 revisions through, so I felt I was finally in a position to check for cracks and missing elements, as well as the strength of my overall position and approach. It’s not a good idea to simply prompt, ‘What do you think about this?’
I’d tried prompts as simple as, ‘Act as a referee and be adversarial against this piece’ or ‘I got this from somewhere, and I want a critique’. These approaches shield you from AI’s programmed sycophantic tendencies. But they aren’t enough. You still need to create guidelines and guardrails, which include orientating the AI; otherwise, they will likely go off the reservation.
This is the actual prompt I last employed to various LLMs:
The attached is a complete development draft of Architecture of Willing, a philosophical monograph arguing that the vocabulary of will, intent, motive, choice, decision, and related terms operates through a two-stage grammatical mechanism – compression of action-patterns into portable nouns, followed by inversion of those nouns into apparent upstream authors of the very patterns from which they were abstracted. The book calls this mechanism authoring displacement and uses it to argue that retributive desert cannot be stably grounded in the vocabulary on which it depends.
The book is deliberately diagnostic rather than prescriptive. It does not propose a replacement psychology, a reformed legal code, or a new theory of agency. It refuses to settle the traditional free-will debate on either side. These refusals are intentional and are argued for within the text.
What I am asking for is a critical engagement from a position of maximum philosophical resistance. Specifically:
The book rests on a claim about what retributive practice requires – namely, a stable inward authoring source capable of making suffering genuinely owed rather than merely institutionally imposed. If that characterisation of retributivism’s requirements is wrong, or if it applies only to unsophisticated versions while leaving the strongest contemporary defences untouched, the central argument is significantly weakened. I would like to know whether that is the case, and if so, where exactly the book’s account of retributivism’s commitments fails to engage its best defenders.
More broadly: the book is a diagnosis of grammar. The question I want pressed is whether a grammatical diagnosis can do the normative work the book needs it to do – whether there is a gap between ‘this noun cannot stably support the load placed on it’ and ‘therefore practices depending on this noun are normatively unjustified’. If there is such a gap, what would close it, and does the book close it?
Please do not soften objections in the direction of ‘this is a good book with some gaps’. If the argument is unsound, say so and say where. If it is sound against some targets but not others, identify the targets it misses. The manuscript has already received generous assessments; what it needs now is the strongest case against it.
Of course, this prompt is specific to me and my project, but one may feel free to use it as a model for similar purposes.
Among the gaps returned were arguments I had not been aware of. In fact, in a couple of places, I had already cited authors, but the AI returned additional books or essays by the same people. In other cases, it offered material by authors I hadn’t considered. Obviously, I am interested in creating solid, watertight arguments, so this only helps my case.
For this project, my LLMs of choice have been Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Kimi K2. I used Perplexity, Mistral, DeepSeek, and Z.ai GLM in earlier iterations.
Peer review
Another application is to take the critique output from one LLM into another with a prompt to evaluate the critique. My modus operandi here is to pick a ‘master’ LLM – typically in a Claude or ChatGPT project context – and treat it as my primary partner; the others are virtual subcontractors. This means that I can get a half-dozen or more reactions in minutes, which are then digested by the, let’s say, project manager, for assessment and a proposed action plan, typically in the form of a punch list. I recommend this approach as well.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Closing shot
When I was in grad school, this part of the project would have taken months. As it is, I’ve been working on this project since COVID-19, but it’s been an on-and-off affair, accumulating research information and documentation all the while. The manuscript will be better off, and my position honed sharper over this expanse of time, so the delay was beneficial.
Would more time also be beneficial? Probably, but one needs to stop somewhere, and I’m likely facing diminishing marginal returns. If I go the way of Wittgenstein, I’ll reverse track and recant everything. And so it goes…
This is a bonus episode I asked NotebookLM to render based on the past two posts. These posts had been one, but I chose to separate them because of their core orientation on a shared topic. For those who read the posts together, this is made clear. I even continue several threads to make it obvious, but the two essays are a diptych. I feel the second post is stronger than the first, but the first was a stronger setup. If you don’t have time to read the essays, this is a decent summary.
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
— Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
I posted another longer essay on Substack on the immorality of property ownership. This isn’t my first, but I wanted to go deeper in my critique. Actually, I wrote two, but I’ll advertise the second one tomorrow.
Philosophics 