I was very jealous this week when I opened up the latest edition of the Today in Tabs newsletter and realized its author, Rusty Foster, had articulated something about AI in an incredibly clear and useful way. Namely:

The essential problem is this: generative language software is very good at producing long and contextually informed strings of language, and humanity has never before experienced coherent language without any cognition driving it. In regular life, we have never been required to distinguish between “language” and “thought” because only thought was capable of producing language, in any but the most trivial sense.…

The whole newsletter is worth reading, but the idea of “language without thought” is a really simple—and really helpful—distillation of what AI provides and what it doesn’t. We’ve never had this kind of technology at scale before. There have been weird poetic exercises in randomness or various kinds of cut-up techniques or the Flarf poetry movement, but these were creative experiments, not industrial-strength paid utilities with hundreds of millions of users.