>When we forget that, we get nonsense like "the chatbot told him he was the messiah," as though language could be blamed for the projection.
Words have power, and those that create words - or create machines that create words - have responsibility and liability.
It is not enough to say "the reader is responsible for meaning and their actions". When people or planet-burning random matrix multipliers say things and influence the thoughts and behaviors of others there is blame and there should be liability.
Those who spread lies that caused people to storm the Capitol on January 6th believing an election to be stolen are absolutely partially responsible even if they themselves did not go to DC on that day. Those who train machines that spit out lies which have driven people to racism and genocide in the past are responsible for the consequences.
"Words have no essential meaning" and "speech carries responsibility" aren't contradictory. They're two ends of the same bridge. Meaning is always projected by the reader, but that doesn't exempt the speaker from shaping the terrain of projection.
Acknowledging the interpretive nature of language doesn't absolve us from the consequences of what we say. It just means that communication is always a gamble: we load the dice with intention and hope they land amid the chaos of another mind.
This applies whether the text comes from a person or a model. The key difference is that humans write with a theory of mind. They guess what might land, what might be misread, what might resonate. LLMs don’t guess; they sample. But the meaning still arrives the same way: through the reader, reconstructing significance from dead words.
So no, pointing out that people read meaning into LLM outputs doesn’t let humans off the hook for their own words. It just reminds us that all language is a collaborative illusion, intent on one end, interpretation on the other, and a vast gap where only words exist in between.
Words have power, and those that create words - or create machines that create words - have responsibility and liability.
It is not enough to say "the reader is responsible for meaning and their actions". When people or planet-burning random matrix multipliers say things and influence the thoughts and behaviors of others there is blame and there should be liability.
Those who spread lies that caused people to storm the Capitol on January 6th believing an election to be stolen are absolutely partially responsible even if they themselves did not go to DC on that day. Those who train machines that spit out lies which have driven people to racism and genocide in the past are responsible for the consequences.