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.
I read from the Wrong Curve: Free Speech, Pseudo-Invariance, and the Grammar of Liberal Rights. This essay is freely available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19636760. This segment is the Abstract and the Introduction.
In this essay, I argue that free speech discourse is structured by a category error whose source lies upstream of speech itself: in the treatment of ‘freedom’ as a stable philosophical primitive when it functions, in practice, as an essentially contested concept operating under a systematically inflated presumption of effectiveness.
tl;dr: I don’t believe in free speech.
We’ve all likely heard that the freedom to swing one’s fist ends at the tip of another’s nose. I can accept this without argument for the purpose of this assertion. Your freedom TO violates my freedom FROM.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
The problem is that one’s words don’t stop. In some cases, they continue in the manner of pollution that I don’t want my ear holes to be exposed to this noise. In the social media age, this effect is trebled and molests my eyes. This is especially egregious for misinformation and disinformation, which is to say, much of the internet and beyond.
This impact hasn’t been suitably addressed, so I wrote about it. Here, I read.
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.
I’ve selected the cover colour for Architecture of Willing. It’s monograph number 3 in a series. I chose a dark aubergine-violet colour (#4b256b) because I like the contrast, and it is different to the other 2.
I discussed Chapter 1 of The Architecture of Willing in a recent post, as well as a piece on my review process. I’ll be sharing more presently. I expect it to be completed by the end of May, but time will tell. Even though I’ve gone through seven revision passes, errors and fixes continue to crop up all the way to production – in fact, even afterwards.
The Architecture of Willing is a passion project I’ve been considering since the COVID-19 debacle. I took a couple of career breaks to focus on the problem of agency. In fact, my working title until now has been Against Agency. Upon research, I discovered that (1) the idea was somewhat tired, and (2) it was mired in a free will debate centred around determinism. And (3) the argument had been made by many about a decade earlier, so I also missed the ground swell. As my interest is to present novel views or perspectives, I bowed out, but something still irked me.
Then it dawned on me: I’d dissect will under a language philosophy microscope. This got me to a new working title: Architecture of Willing, which perhaps uncoincidentally aligns with my Architecture of Encounter.
I’m still working through the first draft, but I’d like to share a NotebookLM summary of an early draft of Chapter 1, which serves as an introductory chapter: Authoring Displacement and the Cake Grammar or some such. Have a listen.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
I use the opening chapter as a setup. I had an idea of convicting a cake on charges of being delicious and using this absurdity as a metaphor for how we inflate and personify the notion of will. Perhaps interestingly, the will (particularly the free flavour) was the central theme I explored in my novel Propensityby Ridley Park, a little shameless cross-promotion.
I’ll keep this short because I am still drafting the monograph. I hope to have it published in May. Time will tell.
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.
I had planned to write a blog post on The Remains of the Day, but I posted it on Substack instead because I changed the scope. I also created this podcast on NotebookLM.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Alasdair MacIntyre is persuasive when he argues that moral discourse is never neutral, and that modern liberalism smuggles in substantive standards while pretending not to. But he dismisses emotivism too quickly as a cultural disaster rather than considering whether it might describe moral language more accurately than his own teleological alternative. If moral utterance is fundamentally prescriptive or expressive rather than descriptive, then the collapse of ‘view from nowhere’ morality doesn’t send us scurrying back to Aristotle. It simply shows that moral language was never doing the metaphysical work MacIntyre wants from it.
The Aristotelian remedy also depends on a nostalgic and anachronistic social model. The Athens he implicitly romanticises was a small polis whose demos consisted of citizens, meaning property-owning males, already bound by shared norms, proximity, and cultural inheritance. In other words, the sort of thick local world that made a certain kind of practical ethical life possible in the first place. MacIntyre’s causal arrow points the wrong way. In Athens, democratic practice emerged from that prior social texture. You do not reproduce the same conditions by philosophical edict.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
To put it more bluntly: I don’t think moral realism is tenable, and I am not convinced MacIntyre really thinks so either. His project reads less like a discovery of moral facts than an attempt to promote an ought into an is by force of inheritance and rhetorical confidence. If he carved out a bounded cohort and imposed the right shared practices, perhaps something like his model could function. He may need to annex a reasonably sized car park for the purpose.
I have just started reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and I must confess that I can’t read like a normal person.
I made it roughly fifteen pages before the analytical lenses clamped on and refused to retract. Stevens – Ishiguro’s impeccable, heartbreaking narrator – opens with a monologue about what makes a great butler, and I found myself not following the argument so much as watching the scaffolding. Because Stevens isn’t really theorising butlers. He’s performing a world. And the performance is so seamless, so grammatically composed, that it almost disguises itself as description.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Here’s the trick. Stevens treats terms like greatness, dignity, and quality as though they named discoverable features of reality. He doesn’t present them as historically contingent, institution-soaked, liable to buckle under interrogation. He presents them as if the universe itself had ratified them, and he’s merely reporting. It’s the calm, definitional tone of a man who believes he’s describing essences when he is actually curating preferences.
Take butler itself. In ordinary usage, it looks occupationally concrete – a person who does a particular job. But in Stevens’s mouth, it stops being a role descriptor and becomes a bearer of metaphysical vocation. The word accrues civilisational mythology, evaluative freight, quasi-sacred weight, until it no longer refers to a man who answers a door but to a figure who embodies an entire moral cosmology. That is a lot for a job title to carry, and the weight does not come from the world. It comes from the grammar.
Then there is dignity. An interlocutor reasonably suggests that dignity might be something like beauty, a weasel word, like aesthetic, perceptual, taste-bound. Stevens refuses the comparison. Dignity must not sound contingent. It must present itself as something sturdier than preference, almost an objective feature of character, something a person has in the way a table has weight.
And then, naturally, he proceeds to explain it in entirely aesthetic terms: comportment, bearing, restraint, and poise – the look of self-command.
He denies the aesthetic register but then relies on it. His explicit philosophy and his operative language diverge. This isn’t a slip. It’s structural. The term needs to disavow its own supports in order to retain authority. Dignity must deny its kinship with aesthetic discrimination precisely because, without that kinship, it has no flesh.
We do this constantly – take the shakiest words and polish them until they look load-bearing. The more pressure the term is under, the more ceremonially we utter it.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
Weasel words
There’s a name for what Stevens is doing, and I’ve spent a perhaps inadvisable amount of time trying to articulate it.
In my own work, A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, I distinguish between terms that behave differently under pressure. Some are genuinely invariant – they hold stable reference across contexts, and disagreement about them can be resolved by checking. Some are contestable – stable enough for coordination and argument, but insufficiently fixed to secure the same uptake everywhere. And some are fluid – still rhetorically potent, still action-guiding, but drifting across contexts without anyone quite admitting it.
Stevens’s vocabulary sits at the dangerous end of that spectrum. Greatness and dignity are classic contestables, possibly shading into fluids: they retain social force long after referential stability has gone soft. They still feel like they mean something precise. They don’t. And Stevens’ entire identity is organised around treating them as though they do.
This matters because the language isn’t sitting atop an independent self. It’s helping to constitute the self Stevens can intelligibly be. His selfhood is assembled from grammars of rank, service, and propriety. The role vocabulary doesn’t describe a prior person. It builds one.
This brings us to his father
Stevens admits that his father might belong among the great butlers, despite lacking certain attributes Stevens associates with the newer generation. He notes the gap, then writes it off. The missing qualities belong to a different era; they are secondary, accidental, beside the essential point. His father remains the reference.
But notice what has happened. Stevens is not applying a neutral criterion and then discovering that his father qualifies. He’s adjusting the criterion around the father he already reveres. The supposed standard of greatness turns out to be less a fixed measure than a retrospective act of preservation. Firstly, canonise the figure, then tidy the theory.
The father is doing at least three jobs at once: He’s an exemplar; he’s a stabilising emotional anchor; and he’s a concealed limit-case that proves the category is being bent.
That’s how value-laden language typically works. The abstraction pretends to govern the attachment, but really the attachment is governing the abstraction. Stevens wants the dignity of a rule whilst retaining the comfort of a cherished exception. This isn’t hypocrisy in the simple sense. It’s something more interesting: it’s the ordinary mechanics of human categorisation when the stakes are personal.
And of course, the father isn’t merely a person Stevens admires. He’s the living conduit through which Stevens inherits the whole ontology of service. When Stevens prefers his father as the reference point, he’s anchoring the category in the formative figure through whom the category became intelligible in the first place. The father is part of the installation mechanism.
Then there is the tiger
With the reverent caveat that it may be apocryphal, Stevens recounts a story in which an unidentifiable butler known to his father, confronted by a tiger under a dining room table (the details are gloriously improbable), maintains perfect composure. He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t break form. He remains, in the deepest sense, a butler.
Whether the story is true barely matters. Its function isn’t evidential but exemplary. It condenses a whole metaphysics of dignity into narrative form. It is a saint’s life for the religion of service.
And that’s the key. For the father – and then for Stevens – dignity is not a detachable opinion. It’s a lived orientation. In the face of the tiger, one doesn’t first deliberate about values and then choose restraint. One already inhabits a world in which restraint is what seriousness looks like. The salience structure is preinstalled. The event is interpreted through it automatically.
The story converts dignity from abstraction into legend. It makes composure appear not merely admirable but real. It turns comportment into ontology. And it authorises imitation through lineage: the son inherits not just a standard but a dramatic image of what the standard looks like when tested.
The possible apocryphal status doesn’t weaken this. If anything, it strengthens it. The father has become less a man than a vessel for the category. The tale smooths over ambiguity and turns a contingent life into an emblem. We’re forever embalming values in stories, then pretending the stories prove the values rather than merely rehearse them.
So Ishiguro’s opening chapter is doing at least four things at once.
It presents contestable terms as if they were settled realities.
It shows institutional language masquerading as neutral description.
It reveals a person whose identity has been stabilised – constituted, really – by those terms.
And it lets the reader feel the gap between the serenity of the grammar and the fragility of what it is trying to hold together.
That last part is the killer. Stevens’s calm definitional tone is itself evidence of instability. The more pressure the terms are under, the more polished the delivery. He’s performing maintenance whilst pretending to describe an essence.
I’m only one chapter in. I suspect Ishiguro is going to make this hurt.
Philosophics 