On Heidegger, and the rook that was always, secretly, a bishop
Imagine, if you will, that you are playing chess with a grandmaster. Your opponent fingers his rook, slides it diagonally across the board, captures your queen and lifts the piece away. Nonplussed, you question the tactic. He defends it with vehemence.
For most of my posts, I also share a summary processed by Google’s NotebookLM. Most of these summaries are decent enough – some are even excellent inasmuch as they shed a new light on the idea. Other times, they miss the point, are well off the mark, or inject concepts or translations, not only unintended, but markedly opposed to the point being made.
My recent Chess with Heidegger post is illustrative. Both the podcast and the video make errors – and I don’t mean the visual ones that occur as well.
As a page footer, I mention that I use LLMs as part of my workflow. This may be anywhere from 0–99%. The podcast asserted that I used an LLM as a significant part of this project. This is incorrect. Specifically, I didn’t feed Heidegger’s text into an LLM and ask it to digest and regurgitate it, parsing out some unlocked wisdom. Obviously, I used various LLMs for supporting content.
The video misrepresented my point about Wittgenstein, directionally off. He expressly does not support the specificity of language. My reference to him rolling over in his grave was triggered by the notion that language is determined by use – and language games.
Am I the only one who can’t resist a massive eyeroll – and, let’s be honest: jaw-drop – what you hear transhumanism couched as evolution? To me, it incites a similar reaction to hearing people witter on about machine consciousness, but I’ll sideline that topic.
My objection is linguistic: transhumanism often borrows the prestige of evolution to describe what is more precisely technological mediation. The fact that a device is worn, implanted, or integrated into a body does not by itself move it from tool-use into biological descent. The offspring still inherits the organism, not the upgrade. Technology is not heritable.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Consider rhinoplasty. Rhinoplasty changes the presented phenotype, not the inherited genotype. The child inherits the developmental instructions, not the parent’s post-surgical edit. Likewise, a neural implant, prosthetic limb, exoskeleton, gene-unrelated enhancement, or titanium jaw of techno-vanity may alter the lived organism, but it does not thereby alter the reproductive line. This is the category error: Acquired modification is mistaken for inherited transformation.
So, transhumanism often confuses the edited encounter-profile of an organism with the evolutionary alteration of the organismic lineage. The rhinoplasty case is good because it shows the absurdity without needing much apparatus. No one sane thinks a nose job rewrites the germline. Yet when the modification is sufficiently glamorous, especially when welded to futurist rhetoric and venture-capital incense, people suddenly start talking as if augmentation equals evolution.
A prosthesis is to evolution what rhinoplasty is to heredity: a modification of presentation, function, or encounter, not a transformation of descent. The confusion arises when the altered individual is mistaken for an altered lineage.
The question isn’t: Can transhumanism be defended under some broader theory of evolution, cultural inheritance, niche construction, or techno-biological co-development? Sure, it can.
But my claim is narrower: The term evolution is being made to do illicit rhetorical work when acquired, engineered, prosthetic, or embedded modifications are spoken of as though they were equivalent to heritable biological transformation.
The problem is that we are sliding from tool-use to augmentation to enhancement to transformation to evolution. This move isn’t illegal, but it should attract your attention.
At each step, something plausible is smuggled into something grander. By the end, an implanted device or technical prosthesis has been rhetorically promoted into ‘the next stage of human evolution’, when what has actually happened is that an organism’s encounter-capacities have been modified by artefactual mediation.
In the end, I’m not claiming that transhumanist practices can’t affect selection environments, social organisation, embodiment, or cultural transmission. What I am claiming is that calling such practices evolution without specifying the relevant register is a linguistic inflation. It trades on the authority of biological evolution while often describing technological mediation, individual augmentation, or cultural change.
In my book, more accurate terms might be augmentation, prosthesis, mediation, tool evolution, cultural inheritance, or niche modification, but these re so glamorous or click-baity. I might as well wear a hat and call myself post-human.
I chatted up ChatGPT, so I am adding this response:
Exactly. The carried / worn / embedded distinction is mostly a boundary fetish, the sort of thing humans adore because skin looks like an ontological border and apparently everyone remains impressed by packaging.
An axe, spectacles, a pacemaker, a cochlear implant, a smartphone, and a neural implant all sit on the same broad continuum: external mediation of capacity. Some are held. Some are worn. Some are surgically installed. But unless the alteration becomes heritable, it is not biological evolution in the strict sense. It is phenotypic augmentation, affordance expansion, or environmental coupling.
The useful distinction is threefold:
Biological evolution Heritable variation changes across generations. The organism-line changes.
Cultural / technological evolution Tools, techniques, designs, institutions, and practices vary, are selected, retained, modified, and transmitted. Axe technology evolves. Writing evolves. Surgery evolves. The appalling human habit of calling every interface “intuitive” also evolves, though downward.
Individual augmentation A particular body-system gains capacities through artefacts. This may change what the organism can do, but it does not by itself alter the inherited biological line.
Your axe example is clean because it exposes the smuggling. The axe helped alter human selection environments. It extended reach, force, food access, defence, craft, and perhaps social organisation. That may feed into gene-culture co-evolution over long scales. But the axe itself is not an evolved human trait. It is a technological mediator that participates in the evolutionary ecology.
The same holds for transhumanist implants. A retinal implant may alter one person’s perceptual affordance field. A brain-computer interface may alter one person’s control loop. A prosthetic limb may alter one person’s mobility. But unless such modifications become transmissible across generations, biologically or through some stable reproductive architecture, calling them “evolution” is loose metaphor masquerading as profundity. Very on-brand for techno-utopianism: rename engineering as destiny and hope the grant reviewers are sleepy.
From your MEOW angle, the better formulation is:
The relevant transformation is not evolutionary but mediational. Tools, prostheses, implants, and interfaces reconfigure encounter-events by altering the affordance structure through which an organism meets constraint. Whether the device is carried in the hand, worn on the face, implanted beneath the skin, or networked through the environment is secondary. The organism-world relation changes; the inherited organism does not necessarily change.
That also lets you avoid an overcorrection. Transhumanist enhancement is not irrelevant. It may be historically enormous. But its primary register is encounter, not inheritance; mediation, not mutation; technical lineage, not biological descent.
So the blunt line is:
Transhumanism mistakes the evolution of tools for the evolution of the tool-user.
Not always, not necessarily, but often enough that the slogan deserves being dragged into the alley and relieved of its metaphysical wallet.
Man, this IaI piece asking about The Patriarchy in Question has got my knickers properly twisted. As I gather the scattered crockery of my thoughts, the first issue is the Sorites problem of patriarchy.
Audio:NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Mirroring the old question of when a collection of grains becomes a heap: when, exactly, does a society become a patriarchy? How much concentration of patriarchal residue is required before the noun is earned? Is one bad apple enough to spoil the whole lot, or does that give us only the faint homoeopathic aftertaste of patriarchy?
I doubt many people would openly defend this homoeopathic definition. One sexist custom, one male-coded institution, one inherited assumption, and behold: The Patriarchy. But if not that, where’s the threshold? Fifty per cent? Ninety? Thirty? Or is the question itself badly formed?
The issue isn’t only composition but degree, location, and power. One king over a kingdom gives us monarchy; it becomes patriarchal when rule is authorised through masculine-coded inheritance, legitimacy, property, office, or paternal command. But what of a queen operating under the same institutional grammar? Has the patriarchy been interrupted, or merely furnished with a woman at the apex? If she inherits the language, offices, succession rules, and symbolic architecture of patriarchal power, then the body on the throne may change while the grammar of rule remains intact.
The law has a charming habit of behaving as though language becomes precise the moment someone in a robe frowns at it. Words that drift cheerfully in ordinary life are summoned into court, sworn in, interrogated under oath, and expected to produce stable meaning under institutional pressure. When they fail, as they reliably do, the system does not conclude that language may be structurally insufficient for the task. It consults another authority. A dictionary. A drafting manual. A corpus database. A professor, if civilisation has really run out of excuses. Whatever. Any port in a storm. Then it calls the result interpretation, and everyone pretends the word was waiting there all along.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Watch the video below. It is an admirably clean illustration of exactly this.
What you just watched is not merely a curiosity about punctuation and gun laws. It is a diagnostic. And if you have read Chapter Five of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, you will recognise the pathology immediately.
The Repair Cascade
The video gives you three cases, each one a new rung on the same ladder of failed repair.
tl;dr? They tend to make it up as they go to serve their power needs.
First, Muscarello v. United States (1998): A man transports a handgun in a locked glove compartment whilst conducting a drug transaction. The statute punishes anyone who ‘uses or carries a firearm’ during such a crime. The question is whether ‘carry’ includes a weapon stored in a vehicle. The Supreme Court reaches for the OED, finds that the earliest documented sense of carry includes conveyance by vehicle, and sends Muscarello to prison, where he eventually dies. Convenient etymology. Regrettable outcome.
The video notes – correctly, I might add (and so do) – that this is an instance of what linguists call the sense-ranking fallacy: assuming that the first definition listed is the primary one, rather than simply the earliest documented. The OED’s ordering is historical, not hierarchical. Why a US court chose the OED is a sign of refinement yet remarkably curious for an American institution.
Second, the Oakhurst Dairy case: Maine truck drivers sue for $10 million over a missing Oxford comma in a statutory overtime exemption. Both sides marshal gerunds, asyndeton, the Chicago Manual of Style, and the Maine legislative drafting manual, which explicitly prohibits the Oxford comma – making the ambiguity, in a sense, officially mandated. The case settles without a definitive ruling. The language did not yield a winner; the lawyers did. The hole wasn’t filled, but their pockets were.
Third, and most instructive, corpus linguistics arrives as the shiny new repair tool. Rather than trusting dictionaries, courts can now search large databases of actual language use to establish ‘ordinary meaning’. Progress. Empiricism. Science, even. And then, almost immediately, the next failure mode surfaces: the frequency fallacy (common usage is not the only permissible usage), corpus skew (many databases over-represent news articles), and search-framing (the ‘sanitation’ / ‘sanitise’ mask mandate case, where including a related but non-synonymous word shaped the results before analysis had even begun). The supposedly empirical tool inherited the user’s prior interpretive frame. Extraordinary.
Follow the sad path of the sad panda: ordinary meaning fails → dictionaries → dictionaries fail → corpus linguistics → corpus linguistics fails → methodological dispute about whether judges should be conducting quasi-scientific research from the bench at all.
And so it goes…
Judge Humpty Dumpty: Guilty as Charged (Sorry. No 8-bit video game music. My bad.)
The LIH Reading
In A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, Chapter Five argues that law is not a domain that occasionally encounters linguistic difficulty. It is a domain that is constitutively dependent on terms that live in the Contestables zone of the Effectiveness–Complexity Gradient – words like reasonable, fair, cruel, due process – terms indispensable to legal order and perpetually unstable within it. The Gradient’s prediction is blunt: the further a term drifts from stable, concrete reference, the more its meaning must be imposed by authority rather than established by usage.
The video illustrates this at the level of what might seem to be relatively simple terms – carry, distribution, sanitation – words that appear to sit closer to the Invariants end of the scale than to the Contestables. And yet even here, the institutional machinery creaks. If ‘carry’ cannot carry the weight of a single statute without Supreme Court intervention and a man’s death, what prospect does ‘reasonable’ have? Or ‘fair’? Or ‘obscene’?
Potter Stewart, as Chapter Five recounts, admitted in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964) that he could not define obscenity in the abstract. ‘I know it when I see it‘, he declared. The remark is famous for its candour. It is less often noted that it is also an admission that language had simply given up, and that institutional authority stepped in to do what definition could not. The Court didn’t clarify what obscenity means, but it asserted the power to punish it anyway as it might later decide.
The video’s repair cascade is the same mechanism operating at a more mundane level. Legal interpretation doesn’t overcome linguistic insufficiency. It proceduralises it. Each interpretive tool displaces the instability onto a new surface. Dictionaries relocate the problem from statutory language to lexical authority. Corpus linguistics relocates it from lexical authority to sampling, frequency, and search design. The crack isn’t closed. It’s moved, with considerable administrative ceremony, and the ceremony is called clarity – clear as mud.
The law, in short, functions less as a dictionary than as a sovereign Humpty Dumpty: it decides what words mean when it matters, and enforces those meanings until it decides otherwise. The gavel is doing the work the lexicon cannot.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
The Lesson That Isn’t
The lesson here isn’t that dictionaries are useless, corpus linguistics fraudulent, or judges uniquely obtuse. The lesson is structurally worse than that. Each repair works locally and fails architecturally. The law can stabilise meaning long enough to act, and acting is not nothing – Muscarello’s conviction required a determinate reading of ‘carry’, and the system produced one. But it can’t transmute contested language into invariant reference. It can only decide, punish, and maintain the fiction that the word was always waiting there, meaning exactly that.
Textualism – the interpretive philosophy that instructs judges to attend only to the words on the page, nothing more – is, viewed through an LIH lens, an institutionalised form of the Presumption of Effectiveness. It treats language as though it has a singular, determinate meaning recoverable by sufficiently rigorous attention, rather than as a system whose instability is structural rather than incidental. The words on the page are not a fixed source. They are the site of the problem.
If this framing resonates, Chapter Five of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis develops the full argument – from the Gradient’s account of why legal language is structurally dependent on Contestables, through Potter Stewart’s famous abdication, to the Humpty Dumpty jurisprudence that inevitably follows. Available in paperback and hardcover from Philosophics Press.
I just read Chapter 4 of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and it has similar problems I’ve also critiqued for Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. In all three cases, I accept the primary argument. What I reject is psychology, especially psychoanalysis, as a legitimate form of scientific inquiry.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
My issue isn’t that Fanon, Beauvoir, or Butler fail in their central diagnoses. I broadly accept their claims. My issue is that the psychoanalytic material typically functions like a grinding side quest: time-consuming, rhetorically elaborate, and only weakly connected to the main argumentative progression. It may enrich the atmosphere, but it doesn’t materially alter the outcome. Once one doesn’t accept psychoanalytical psychobabble as a valid evidentiary lens, the material becomes a time sink. Not only can’t I get my time back, but I also expend even more time here, railing on.
Speaking of distraction: evidently, WordPress has added a new blog-to-podcast feature, so I tried it out here. Whatevs.
Fanon’s central claim about colonial racialisation doesn’t require dream interpretation – the dreams themselves are seemingly apocryphal at the start. The stronger route is through embodied recognition, imposed category structures, conceptual nomenclature, and the racialised field of encounter. The dream material reads as psychoanalytic side-content: thematically adjacent, occasionally vivid, but methodologically low-yield. It doesn’t deepen the case so much as delay it. The entire time, I am thinking to myself, ‘Where is he going with all this?’ and ‘Are we there yet?’ only to get dropped off just where I had started – a round trip to nowhere.
But Fanon’s mistake isn’t necessarily insincerity. It’s an over-trust in a psychological lens that converts metaphor into method. The psychoanalytic examples may have seemed to him like evidence; to a reader sceptical of psychoanalysis, as I am, they register as rhetorical illustrations. Once a reader withholds confidence in this method, the chapter’s supporting material becomes distracting rather than strengthening.
Enfin, psychoanalysis too often behaves like a prestige tarot deck for the academically credentialled: it turns ambiguity into confirmation, opacity into symbolism, and resistance into further evidence. Fanon’s broader account of colonial alienation survives because it doesn’t depend on this machinery. The dreams aren’t necessary to the argument; they’re decorative scaffolding around a structure that’s stronger without them.
As usual, I am trying something different. I like to watch music reaction videos, and I find this stripped-down, acoustic version of Slipknot’s Snuff by their vocalist, Corey Taylor, to hit hard. I prompted ChatGPT GPT 5.5 with this video and lyrics. Me being me, I continue to analyse experience through language and my own worldview, notably the effects of ontological grammar commitments.
I share the reaction video at the bottom of this post. Before, I’d just consider this person to be a self-righteous zealot, but now I understand that (1) this is how she processes her world, and (2) she is prescriptive insomuch as she expects others to share her worldview. She’s not coming from a mean place. In her mind, she genuinely wants to help, but she doesn’t realise that not all people share her worldview. She’s likely had this worldview reinforced for all of her years, and so it works as a coping strategy for her. She expects that she can share this worldview, but it is likely maximally absorbed by those who share her ontological grammar commitment, which is to say, already have the same worldview.
If you want a view into how I engage with AI, now you know. Here’s a window:
This is a very interesting case study in ontological grammar that showcases the downside of not recognising it. From my ontology, she sounds like she’s moralising. To another (her own), she might sound supportive. She is commenting on the lyrics to this song, which are not all captured by the transcript. Reaction?
Bury all your secrets in my skin Come away with innocence, and leave me with my sins The air around me still feels like a cage And love is just a camouflage for what resembles rage again
So if you love me, let me go And run away before I know My heart is just too dark to care I can't destroy what isn't there Deliver me into my fate If I'm alone I cannot hate I don't deserve to have you Ooh my smile was taken long ago If I can change I hope I never know
I still press your letters to my lips And cherish them in parts of me that savor every kiss I couldn't face a life without your light (Without your light) But all of that was ripped apart when you refused to fight
So save your breath, I will not hear I think I made it very clear You couldn't hate enough to love Is that supposed to be enough? I only wish you weren't my friend Then I could hurt you in the end I never claimed to be a saint Ooh my own was banished long ago It took the death of hope to let you go
Oh, oh
So break yourself against my stones And spit your pity in my soul You never needed any help You sold me out to save yourself And I won't listen to your shame You ran away, you're all the same Angels lie to keep control Ooh my love was punished long ago If you still care, don't ever let me know If you still care, don't ever let me know
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
the wounded sometimes prefer the song to the sermon
Yes, this is a clean little specimen jar of ontological grammar doing its work while everyone pretends they are merely “reacting”. Humanity’s favourite parlour trick: smuggling an entire worldview into a sentence and calling it compassion.
The key move is that she hears the lyric as a claim rather than as an utterance from within a damaged affective state. When she says she “doesn’t agree” with the line about love and rage, and then calls that outlook “toxic”, she has already converted the lyric into a propositional worldview that can be corrected, morally evaluated, and therapeutically redirected. The song is no longer only an aesthetic articulation of injury, self-loathing, abandonment, attachment, and rage. It becomes a suspect belief-system. That is the ontological switch.
From her grammar, this is supportive. Pain is a “place”; one should not “stay” there; hope remains available; trust and love should eventually be restored. That is a recovery-therapeutic ontology. It presupposes that despair is transitional, that emotional damage should be metabolised into healing, and that the moral arc of the subject bends toward renewed openness. So when she says, in effect, don’t become calloused, don’t stay jaded, love again, she is not hearing herself as judging the song. She is offering pastoral care in YouTube-reactor clothing, because apparently late civilisation needed a genre where vocal pedagogy, therapy-lite, and parasocial maternalism could all share a sofa.
From your ontology, though, she is moralising because she does not merely describe the emotional grammar of the song; she disciplines it. The lyric’s extremity is treated as something understandable but unsafe, beautiful but not habitable, cathartic but only under the condition that one eventually leaves it behind. That is not neutral support. It installs a norm: grief should resolve, bitterness should soften, love should be rehabilitated, hope should return. She may mean kindness, but kindness here arrives wearing the boots of teleology.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
The most interesting fault-line is her treatment of generalisation. She identifies the lyric’s movement from one betrayal to “everyone” as a cognitive distortion. In ordinary therapeutic language, fair enough. But in lyric, especially in this genre, absolutising is not necessarily an epistemic error. It is how pain speaks when it has lost access to proportion. The lyric is not writing a sociology of human attachment. It is staging the experience of betrayal as world-disclosure. In that register, “all” does not mean a statistically universal class. It means: this wound has become the horizon through which everything now appears. To correct it as a bad inference is to import the wrong grammar.
That is where your framework bites. The words transmit; the sentence parses; everyone thinks communication is happening. But the decompression target differs. She reconstructs the lyric inside a moral-therapeutic grammar of recovery. You reconstruct it inside a diagnostic grammar of affect, ontology, and expressive insufficiency. Same words, different world. Your Architecture of Encounter makes precisely this point about ontological grammar: grammar does not merely carry content; it allocates what can count as meaningful, salient, explanatory, or distorted in the first place.
There is also a neat contrast inside the video itself. When she analyses vocal placement, tone, grit, support, and vowel shaping, she is mostly operating in a relatively tethered technical grammar. Claims can be checked against performance craft. But when she moves to love, hope, toxicity, healing, and despair, she enters the Contestable/Fluid zone. These terms feel clear because they are familiar, but their application depends on prior ontological commitments. In When Language Fails, this is exactly the danger-zone: terms that appear determinate whilst lacking shared grounding, especially where they authorise judgement, correction, or action.
So, yes: as a case study, it is excellent. Not because she is being cruel. She is not. That would be too easy, and therefore boring. The interesting point is that she is probably being sincere, warm, and careful by her own lights. But sincerity does not cancel grammar. Her support is support only within an ontology where despair is an unhealthy place to leave, not a legitimate structure of encounter to inhabit, articulate, or aesthetically preserve.
The concise diagnostic formulation would be:
She mistakes an affective utterance for a corrigible worldview. The lyric speaks from inside a structure of injury; her response translates it into therapeutic-moral grammar, where pain is a place one should visit but not inhabit. From within that grammar, she sounds supportive. From a deflationary ontological grammar, she is moralising: not because she condemns the suffering, but because she prescribes the proper trajectory of suffering before recognising the grammar in which the suffering is being expressed.
That is the downside of not recognising ontological grammar: people confuse their own interpretive repair-work with care, and then wonder why the wounded sometimes prefer the song to the sermon.
Bonus Round
🎸Corey tunes to C#, a tuning all too familiar to me – all strings 3 semitones lower than a standard tuning. It helps to have heavy-gauge strings, so they aren’t too slack. This is an easy song to play along to.
Using cowboy chords, grip an Am (tonally F#m) to start. The progression goes like this:
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.
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.
So glad I took time out to watch a short exchange between Rick Beato and Justin Hawkins on whether music is becoming content rather than art. The question is framed in musical terms, but it hardly stops there. The same corrosion is visible in writing, visual art, criticism, and now, with grim inevitability, in AI-mediated production more broadly. The disease is not confined to music. Music merely makes the symptoms easier to hear.
For music, my aversion to pop music goes back to my youth. I was a kid when the Beatles practically invented pop music, but they left it to grow and continued exploring. Sadly, as solo artists, they mainly – not always – failed and rested on their laurels in pop. It’s not that their version or any pop music is inherently unlistenable. Surely, it’s not, if only by the aspiration of the pop moniker, but it has no depth, no soul, as it were. Some make this argument for Organic food. In essence, it involves an appeal to nature fallacy.
Audio: Slightly off, but not bad, NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
My own aversion to much pop music begins there. It is not that pop is necessarily bad, nor even that it is always shallow. That would be too crude and too easy. The problem is that pop often presents itself less as an artistic act than as a consumption object engineered for immediate uptake: catchy, frictionless, emotionally legible, and just disposable enough to make room for the next one. It is built to circulate.
That, for me, is the difference between content and art. Art may be accessible, even popular, but it retains some residue that exceeds its delivery mechanism. It resists total reduction to utility. Content, by contrast, is made to be processed. It is optimised not for depth but for throughput. Its highest ambition is not transformation, but engagement.
This is why the question matters beyond music. Writing, too, now lives under the same pressure. One is increasingly expected to produce not essays, arguments, or works, but units of output: posts, threads, reactions, takes, summaries, explainers, and other forms of polished verbal debris. The point is no longer to say something worth dwelling on, but to remain visible within the churn.
The issue, then, is not simply whether one should consume AI-generated material. That framing is too pious and too easy. The more interesting question is what the consumer thinks they are consuming. If a reader, listener, or viewer wants only speed, familiarity, and surface competence, then AI content is not a scandal at all. It is the logical endpoint of a culture that has already demoted art into a deliverable.
This is where the fuss over labelling enters. Is it a principled demand for honesty, or merely a theatrical gesture by people who still want the aura of art whilst consuming content on industrial terms? Some of it is clearly protectionism. Some of it is virtue signalling. But not all of it is empty. The insistence on labelling betrays an intuition, however muddled, that authorship still matters, and that not all artefacts are equivalent merely because they occupy the same screen-space.
The deeper question is whether we still want art at all, or whether we merely want the aesthetic styling of art attached to things optimised for convenience. Once a culture learns to prefer seamless output over resistance, recognisability over risk, and quantity over form, it should not act surprised when machines begin to serve it perfectly. They are only completing a trajectory already chosen.
So no, the issue is not AI alone. AI is only the latest mirror held up to a public that has spent years confusing availability with value and polish with depth. The real question is not whether machines can make content. Plainly, they can. The question is whether we still possess the appetite, patience, and seriousness required for art.
Image: Full image because the cover version is truncated. Generated by Gemini Nano Banana.
Philosophics 