There is a meaningful distinction to be made between publicity and advertising. To publicize is to make known what in fact exists. To advertise is to make known what may or may not in fact exist. I might publicize a meeting by stating its subject, time, and place, but to advertise a product I wish to sell, I must do more than state the relevant facts: I must suggest an association, a likeness, between my product and other objects—a relationship whose power will depend upon your imaginative belief, whether veridical or not.
And therein begins the trouble. When an actor reading advertising copy tells me she can’t believe how much time she has saved using a new digital calendar, or when another actor, capably manufactured this time for a phone call, tells me her department is in the final stages of approving my unrequested loan request, what is the reality I am being induced to believe? Who, in other words, is speaking to me? And from what world? Is a human presence who has configured language to communicate one’s thoughts and reflections addressing me, another human subjectivity? And if not (of course not), am I confusing myself in engaging with the simulacrum? I know that a serious actor on stage is portraying a fiction; I have agreed to suspend my disbelief in order to enter another intelligible world. Am I expected to assume the same off stage? And to whose benefit am I involuntarily seized there?
Such thoughts come to mind in thinking more about artificial intelligence, specifically about large language model technology, because there is an analogy to be made between publicity and advertising on the one hand, and true human presence and mechanical verisimilitude on the other. For there is no logical way (though imaginatively there are many) to maintain that machine-assembled language is human language. Speech, the deliberate use of language written or oral to convey one’s living thoughts and emotions, is human for the very reason that it arises from human awareness. Its recognized elements and patterns take shape from the kaleidoscopic reflections which ideas and events make directly on the human mind. One witnesses all that and then speaks or writes. And that is where the difference between the dignity of human speech and the indignities of its deliberate impersonation is to be found.
And that difference is poignant. For am I not the less in letting something else speak for me, something bereft of that interior human perception and wonder? If I cannot find the words to say what I want to say—about what has passed before my mind, what has made its way through my thoughts and perhaps even etched at my heart—well, then I need another human being to help me learn the way words work in my language and another to tell me more about the manner in which language, like music, can so mysteriously convey meaning. In that way I may become more than I presently am. But what will not help my character enlarge is turning to an artificial someone to tell me what to say or do or think—unless, I suppose, I deem that humanoid good enough for me. But such a price to be paid. The language of human speech is not a fabrication, inconceivably sophisticated though it be. It is a making known of what directly presents itself to one’s mind, one’s own precious share of awareness. To short that connection is to accept the imitation for the genuine, and to accept gladly the parodic for the real.
There, I think, is where the conversation about this kind of AI needs to be had. It’s the same place as any serious conversation about education, about politics, about the economy needs to be had: what is a human being and what is the purpose of being human? If the answer is nothing more important, really, than anything else and so, to be honest, no distinguishable purpose at all, then indeed we should accept our wretched lot and get on as best we can. But if we answer in any way which points beyond our self-asserting selves and beyond the barren, violent world those selves can alone only make, then being told what to think and to be given the very sentences to say what we as priceless persons mean and feel in our own being—well, that will not be good enough for us any longer. Instead, each of us will find our dignity in awaking to our own bright mind and the language that brings that uncontrived presence among other minds in a human—not artificial—community worth gathering and preserving in its preeminence.
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My word, well done! In my role as homeschool director, I have been thinking much about the purpose and process of education. But you broaden and deepen that with “what is a human being and what is the purpose of being human?” These are the issues of our time, no? And now seems the time for “our better angels” to give clear voice using “the manner in which language, like music, can so mysteriously convey meaning.”
You taught me “The Design of English.” The words I have found to think with were first given shape at the Feltre school. What follows is not a refutation of your essay so much as an attempt to deepen its question from the vantage of my work. As a brand strategist—and as someone who teaches branding to MBA students—I am often asked whether it is even legitimate to “brand” objects, products/services, individuals, cities, or nations. Beneath that question lies another: is our way of life itself built less on publicity than on advertising?
I do not mean the cynical falsehoods of politicians or terrorist recruiters. I mean something more unsettling: sincere speech that nonetheless cannot claim the certainty it presents. The pontiff in a place of worship does not lie. But does he know? Has he seen the heaven he promises? No—he believes. And belief, as I have come to understand it, is often what accumulates where knowledge cannot reach, yet speaks in its tone.
I mean the patriot who invokes people with tears in his voice. The father who tells his child, “everything will be okay.” Every culture, every religion, every identity—each a web we did not spin but inhabit. Each, in its own way, an advertisement for a world that may not exist as claimed, yet is offered with the force of publicity.
You write that human speech “arises from human awareness” and “makes known what directly presents itself to one’s mind.” But what we call awareness may itself be sedimented with inheritance—language, symbols, narratives we did not author. What if we have been speaking as simulacra to one another long before ChatGPT arrived? The indignity of AI, then, is not that it impersonates human speech for the first time. It is that it reveals how much of what we have called human speech already bears the marks of impersonation. The machine does not introduce the imitation; it exposes it. It holds up a mirror, and the reflection is difficult to accept.
You end your essay with an honest call: to awaken to our own bright minds, to find dignity in uncontrived presence. I want that to be true. But I wonder: is uncontrived speech even possible after a lifetime of advertisements, propaganda, and the social performance of selves? Or is the task harder—not to return to some pure speech, but to struggle toward it, knowing we will often fail, and knowing that the machine’s fluency mocks our failure?
You ask what a human being is. Perhaps one answer is this: the being capable of mistaking its own constructions for reality, and therefore the being called to discern the difference. That labor may take the form of art, of silence, of genuine friendship—places where something less fabricated can appear. And perhaps it also requires recognizing, within our own speech, where publicity ends and advertising begins.
I do not know if you will agree. But I wanted you to know that your teaching did not end in your classroom. It followed me into the world, and it continues to ask more of me.
Definitely not advertising.
I hope you are well.