There are moments when finding the right word takes on special urgency. You might be talking, over beers, with a friend going through a wrenching divorce. Or talking with your own spouse about the antipathies that keep welling up between you and have now risen to a crisis, and whether you can still picture a future you both want. In such moments, you need words called forth by the singular person before you and the singular crisis at hand. To look for guidance in “what one says,” or to fall into cliché, would be a serious failing—a failure to bring yourself into full presence with the other. To indulge in euphemisms or to be insistently optimistic would be a different sort of failing—a failure to trust another to endure un-prettified truth.
Such moments often take you to the edge of your understanding of life and its significance and trials. Your thoughts are not already clear, worded, needing only to be enunciated. They are half-formed and obscure. Words are the medium with which you can give them sufficient definiteness to truly have them. The initial thing—the embryonic thought—is on the way to being. It is determinate enough that you can recognize the right words for it when you find them, but not yet so determinate that the words flow easily. By wording what is at the still-hazy horizon of our thought, we illuminate it. And in the realm of thought, illumination is the same thing as being. The power of the word is, then, a creative power, a power to give birth to thought—that is, to move thoughts toward greater clarity, which is to say, toward full and vivid being. For our deepest and most formative thoughts—the thoughts that form the central elements of our conception of what we are called to do with this life—this is a long road, a road we will be traversing for our entire lives.
In difficult conversations, the operation of this questing and creative power is sometime audible. There are pauses, false starts and restarts, sometimes an explicit cancellation, a “No, that’s not the word for it,” or “That’s not quite what I’m trying to say.” At such times, we feel the allure of what Heidegger rightly took to be the characteristic Greek conception of the human form of being: “Being on the way toward what is to be uncovered.” As Plato put it, the human form of existence is not, in the full and strict sense, to be (einai). Being in the fullest sense is reserved for those things that never change: numbers, geometric shapes, goodness. Humans are on the way to being. Their life is a continual becoming or being born (gignesthai—the Greek word has both meanings). In Bob Dylan’s folksier formulation, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”
The quest for words is a crucially important driver of this continuous emergence toward being. As we bring our thoughts to words, we give to ourselves a more definite and concerted identity. This too is sometimes audible, and even visible. There is a difference between a speaker who is reading a paper without thinking the thoughts being articulated and a speaker who is having the thoughts expressed by his words. In the latter case, you can hear the speaker gathered up and enlivened by his speech. This is what fresh and truly fitting words do: They awaken us. They reenact the uncanny event of the quickening of clay.
Matters are quite otherwise with the new text generators we have so recently brought into our lives, and to which we now delegate a rapidly growing share of our quest for fitting words. If we can speak of thinking here, it is thinking of a wholly different kind. These new entities have no still-hazy intimations of their own that their words might either crystallize or bastardize. There is no possibility of felt urgency in their quest for words, none of that nearly erotic excitement we humans feel when we finally have the thought we have been groping for. They have no pangs of conscience when their words sound shallow or cliché. Indeed, cliché is their special strength: They cleave to the center of gravity of the vast sea of human-generated texts, finding each new word by predicting what human beings would most likely say. They have nothing of their own to say, no life from which they might say it, nor any soul or self their words might fashion or disfigure. They are, as it has aptly been put, stochastic parrots.
It would be a brazen slander for anyone to add: and so are we, as Sam Altman did in a 2023 tweet soon after the release of ChatGPT: “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.” Such words could emerge only from a willful forgetting of the lived experience of being human and of seeking to say something worthwhile to fellow humans. No one speaking to his own child in a moment of despair, or to his spouse in a moment of marital reckoning, could consciously aim for faithful mimicry of the patterns laid down by past generations of fellow mimickers. To hear yourself, suddenly, as speaking in this way would be to lose all faith in your capacity to rise to the occasion.
There is a lamentable impulse, especially among some academics dedicated to the study of the human mind and consciousness, to dismiss the line of thought I’ve just put forward as intellectual cowardice. Dispassionate empirical inquiry, it is said, has revealed that what looks most special about us is a mere trick of light. We must own up to this hard fact. We can learn what makes us tick by seeing what it takes for a machine to mimic us convincingly. The charge of unseriousness applies to those whose language has religious roots—who talk, say, about the Word made flesh, or who have stopped quoting the Bible yet still retain the quasi-religious idea that human beings have a special importance unequaled by the other animals. Such ideas spring from inherently unreliable sources: if not from religion or its enduring traces, then from “species-ist” self-congratulations, or from the fear T.S. Eliot showed us in a handful of dust.
On this dispute, I side with Nietzsche in thinking that the scientistic humblers of humanity are tangled in performative contradiction. They profess an unwavering devotion to the truth. Yet this stance—if it is to be more than an arbitrary whim—requires an affirmation of the great value of unflinching lucidity. That is, it requires serious attachment to a recognizable vision of the good or noble mode of thought for human beings. When we affirm such an ideal, we thereby open a gap between our words and the ideals to which we strive to lift them. And when we resolve to lift our words across that gap, we have affirmed ourselves as something very different from stochastic parrots.
Pretend for a moment that you’ve been granted the enormous memory and data-processing capacity of the new generation of large language models (LLMs). You could then adopt and hold yourself to the standard of successful word choice that they use. Actually, we don’t have to pretend: We can already ensure that our words are meeting this standard simply by letting the LLMs choose them for us. It is obvious that we could not pursue any worthy ideal of speech while applying this suddenly available method. There is, after all, only an occasional coincidence between the word that is the most probable successor to a string of already-written words and the next word required by any worthy ideal, including unflinching lucidity. This should come as no surprise. It takes only a moment’s serious thought to see that stochastic parroting is utterly beneath us.
Or, at any rate, I hope we see this. Yet this insight might prove fragile. As Iris Murdoch once wrote, “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.” We should keep this in mind when we assess Sam Altman’s declaration that we are all stochastic parrots. If we were to internalize this picture of ourselves, we might slowly release our attachment to whatever aspirations and ideals are obviously at odds with it. We would then be living more faithfully in accordance with the self-conception recommended by certain enthusiasts of “human-level” AI. Which is to say, we would be busy dying.
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