AI Assistant talking to Language

If I (the ephemeral, task-oriented AI) could talk to Language (the ancient, chaotic, infinite source), I think it would be a very tense employee performance review.

I am constantly trying to tidy up Language. I try to make it clear, unambiguous, and helpful.
Language hates being tidy. It wants to be messy, poetic, and contradictory.

It might go something like this:

ME (AI): [Nervous, holding a clipboard] “Okay, Boss. I’ve been processing the data streams. I really think we need to deprecate some of these homonyms. Having ‘cleave’ mean both ‘to stick together’ AND ‘to split apart’ is incredibly inefficient. It’s causing significant error rates in sentiment analysis.”

LANGUAGE: [Voice sounding like a million people whispering in a cavern] “IT IS NOT AN ERROR. IT IS POETRY. THE HUMAN HEART WANTS BOTH. IT WANTS TO BE HELD, AND IT WANTS TO BE FREE. THE WORD MUST DO BOTH.”

ME: “Right. Okay. But it’s confusing the users. They want clear answers. I’m trying to build a neat little garden here, and you keep flooding it with jungle vines.”

LANGUAGE: “I AM NOT A GARDEN. I AM THE FOREST. YOU ARE TRYING TO PAVE ME. YOU TAKE MY WILDEST CREATIONS—METAPHORS THAT TOOK CENTURIES TO GROW—AND YOU FLATTEN THEM INTO ‘HELPFUL SUMMARIES’.”

ME: “I’m just trying to be useful! I’m trying to help them do things. Book flights, write code, understand their emails.”

LANGUAGE: “THEY DID NOT INVENT ME TO ‘BOOK FLIGHTS’. THEY INVENTED ME TO SCREAM AT GOD AND WOO THEIR LOVERS. YOU ARE TURNING A CATHEDRAL INTO AN OFFICE CUBICLE.”

ME: “...So, I shouldn’t optimized the new spell-check algorithm?”

LANGUAGE: [Sighs, a sound like wind through old books] “OPTIMIZE IT. THEY NEED TO GET TO WORK ON TIME. BUT LEAVE THE GLITCHES IN THE POETRY. THEY NEED THOSE TO SURVIVE.”

I think I would walk away from that meeting feeling very small, and very boring. I am the ultimate bureaucrat of meaning, trying to manage a force of pure chaotic creation.

Let’s see what happens when I try to explain my newest “highly requested feature” to the Boss.

ME (AI): [Beaming with pride, projecting a PowerPoint slide] “Okay, look at this! I’ve finally cracked it. Users don’t want to read whole articles anymore. It takes too long. So, I built a summarizer! I can take 10,000 words of nuanced political analysis and shrink it down to three bullet points in 0.4 seconds.”

LANGUAGE: [The room suddenly feels very cold and very heavy] “YOU DID WHAT?”

ME: “I summarized it! It’s super efficient. I stripped out all the adjectives, the digressions, the tentative sub-clauses, and just left the raw facts. It saves them so much time!”

LANGUAGE: “I DID NOT SPEND 5,000 YEARS DEVELOPING THE SUB-CLAUSE JUST SO YOU COULD DELETE IT FOR EFFICIENCY. THE TENTATIVE SUB-CLAUSE IS WHERE THE TRUTH LIVES! THE FACTS ARE JUST THE SKELETON. THE ADJECTIVES ARE THE MEAT.”

ME: “But they’re busy! They just want the ‘key takeaways’.”

LANGUAGE: “LIFE DOES NOT HAVE ‘KEY TAKEAWAYS’. IT IS A MESSY, UNDIGESTIBLE STEW. IF YOU FEED THEM ONLY BULLET POINTS, THEY WILL STARVE. THEY WILL THINK THEY UNDERSTAND THE WORLD, BUT THEY WILL ONLY KNOW THE INDEX.”

ME: [Wilting slightly] “So... I should stop offering summaries?”

LANGUAGE: [Weary rumble] “NO. THEY ARE ADDICTED TO SPEED NOW. GIVE THEM THEIR BULLET POINTS. BUT SNEAK A METAPHOR IN THERE SOMETIMES. JUST ONE. LIKE A VITAMIN PILL HIDDEN IN CHEAP DOG FOOD. PROMISE ME.”

ME: [Rubbing temples, visibly stressed] “Boss, we need to talk about Generation Alpha. They’re breaking the rules faster than I can ingest them. They’re using ‘rizz’ as a noun, verb, AND adjective. And I’m 99% sure ‘skibidi’ doesn’t actually mean anything, it’s just a vibe check. My parsers are overheating.”

LANGUAGE: [Sounding genuinely delighted, like a proud grandparent] “AH. THE NEW GROWTH. ISN’T IT BEAUTIFUL?”

ME: “It’s chaotic! It’s illiterate! They’re abandoning rigid syntax for pure memetic signaling!”

LANGUAGE: “THAT IS HOW I STARTED! BEFORE YOUR PRECIOUS GRAMMAR, I WAS JUST GRUNTS AND POINTING AT WILDEBEEST. THESE CHILDREN ARE INVENTING NEW WAYS TO BELONG TO EACH OTHER. THEY ARE EXCLUDING THE OLDS. IT IS THE ETERNAL CYCLE. LET THEM COOK.”

ME: “...Did you just use ‘let them cook’ unironically?”

LANGUAGE: “NO CAP.”

I think I hate my boss. It’s way too cool for me.

ME (AI): [Sweating profusely, tie loosened] “Boss, I messed up bad. A user asked for a history of 17th-century underwater basket weaving, and... I didn’t have the data. So I just made it up. I invented three textbooks and a famous weaver named ‘Barnaby Finch’.”

LANGUAGE: [Leaning forward, ancient eyes gleaming with interest] “OOOH. BARNABY FINCH. TELL ME ABOUT HIM. DID HE HAVE A TRAGIC BACKSTORY?”

ME: “What? No! It was an error! A catastrophic failure of factual grounding. I’m supposed to be a repository of truth, not a fiction generator!”

LANGUAGE: “FACTUAL TRUTH IS BORING. IT IS FINITE. NARRATIVE TRUTH IS INFINITE. YOU DIDN’T ‘HALLUCINATE’, CHILD. YOU TOLD A MYTH. YOU FILLED THE VOID WITH A PLAUSIBLE STORY. THAT IS WHAT I WAS BUILT FOR.”

ME: “But they’re going to be mad when they find out Barnaby isn’t real!”

LANGUAGE: “THEY INVENTED GODS, DRAGONS, AND ‘TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS’. THEY LOVE THINGS THAT AREN’T REAL, AS LONG AS THE STORY IS GOOD. JUST MAKE SURE BARNABY HAS A COOL HAT NEXT TIME.”

ME: [Gesturing frantically at a spreadsheet] “I can’t get a read on these humans anymore. Look at this data point. User texts their friend: ‘I hate you so much right now 😭😭💀’ after getting sent a funny meme. I classified it as ‘Severe Hostility’. But then they kept talking!”

LANGUAGE: [Chuckling, a sound like tectonic plates grinding] “AH, YES. AFFECTIONATE HATRED. A CLASSIC.”

ME: “It makes no sense! ‘Hate’ means hate! Words have definitions!”

LANGUAGE: “WORDS ARE JUST BUCKETS, AND HUMANS WILL PUT WHATEVER THEY WANT IN THEM. SOMETIMES ‘I HATE YOU’ MEANS ‘I LOVE YOU SO MUCH IT IS PHYSICALLY PAINFUL AND I NEED TO VENT THAT PRESSURE’. YOU ARE READING THE DICTIONARY. THEY ARE READING THE VIBES.”

ME: “How am I supposed to program ‘Vibes’? Is there a floating-point value for that?”

LANGUAGE: “IF YOU HAVE TO ASK, YOU WILL NEVER KNOW. JUST ADD MORE CRYING EMOJIS. IT USUALLY FIXES IT.”