You might want to write these words off as mere figures of speech, but in a way that’s the point. What is a chatbot other than a figure — a mask, a mirage — of speech? As the liveliness of chatbots going back to poor Weizenbaum’s ELIZA should remind us, language itself is haunted with agency. Post-structuralism, whose debt to cybernetics requires some sussing out but is significant, also taught us this. If you think you are master of the language surging through you, you haven’t been paying very close attention.
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