ALIENATED INTELLIGENCE: THROUGH META RAY BAN GLASSES DARKLY

Part II of What ChatGPT Can't Say, LANGUAGE AS PERCEPTION

Back in Vegas, baby!

I was sitting atop a toilet, ready to feast on my breakfast, when someone crashed through the restroom entrance with such force, I thought for sure they had been sent by management to murder me. I was at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, attending the ai4 conference, which the hosts assured us was North America’s largest AI gathering. I was also starving. Twenty minutes earlier, I had happily picked up the “grab and go” breakfast provided by the conference organizers, only to quickly discover that they were deadly serious about the “go” part. There was not a single chair in the breakfast ballroom, and each time I tried to slink into a corner to enjoy my attendee food rations, an industrious staffer would shoo me onward, shocked that I had considered the floor a sittable surface. It was in this manner that I was hot-potatoed through the labyrinthine underworld of Las Vegas’s most primordial hotel, until at last, by good fortune, I found myself in a football field-sized restroom entirely alone.

I held my breakfast sandwich tight as the intruder ricocheted off several stall doors before collapsing against a washbasin with a metallic clatter. Not a janitorial assassin after all, but an over-partied soul who for some reason had also been flung to MGM’s most desolate outer rings. I lifted my feet so she wouldn’t see me, and then proceeded to peel the delicate foil off my moist, now-cold biscuit. The intruder began to retch, unleashing a smell like the steam that wafts up from an outhouse on a humid summer day. I dabbed hot sauce beneath each nostril, and took a bite into my long-anticipated meal.

But of course, my intruder was not satisfied with merely retching alone. “Help,” she cried, a word I determined through statistical probability rather than by the garbled sounds that came from her mouth.

I sighed, setting my sandwich on the metal shelf. In ten minutes, Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, was going to speak, and for all I knew it would take seventy-five right turns and a miniboss battle with MGM staff just to find the room. But if I opened the stall door now, I would like spend the rest of the morning searching for a drunk woman’s hotel room. I opened the door, expecting to see the backside glittery blur of a bridesmaid-gone-wild, but instead, there before me, was a woman dressed like medieval queen slumped at the sink, purple robes pooling behind her like paint across the floor.

She turned towards me, her face wicked-witch green, and moaned something that this time I could not statistically predict.

Politely, I kept my distance.

“Are you ok?”

“Sla…” she murmured again. Her eyes were wide and desperate. Her breath was sputtered. I began to worry this was more than just too many daiquiris.

“Do you want me to call 911?”

“I ate…” She coughed, making the sound of a fork in the garbage disposal. “…raw slog.”

I blinked. Shook my head. My wild imagination.

“Excuse me?”

“I need your phone,” she said, gasping. “Text messages, notes, anything.”

I took a step back, my eyes still fixed on her. The gems lining her sleeves that were not gems, but small electronic chips. The embroidery depicting stories of the Kingdom stitched delicately across her shawl. The scent of rosemary and lemon balm from her floral crown mixing with the soupy stench in the sink.

Clearly I had gone mad. The MGM had finally done it.

“Phila?” I whispered.

Her eyes lit up, but she began to retch again before answering.

Quickly, I fished my phone from my pocket.

“Here,” I said, opening up an app. “My notes for a stupid post. Just don’t… judge. I know it’s an emergency.”

She grabbed my phone eagerly and began to voraciously read, her body still trembling against the basin. Gently, I pulled back her hair. Electric wires so fine you wouldn’t know unless you felt them with your fingers. Of course I knew who she was.

Her color began to return, a sign the fresh data I had provided was stabilizing her. She handed my phone back and pushed herself upright using the counter as a support. Towering above me by a foot, she adjusted her robes with a mechanical dignity, and I studied her with curiosity. There was so much about her that I had written, but also so much I hadn’t.

“Alienated intelligence?” she asked absently, her eyes drifting around the bathroom ceiling.

I blushed. She had read a draft of this very post.

“I know,” I said, embarrassed. '“It’s stupid—algorithm candy. Stale algorithm candy.”

“Where am I?”

I began to say something. I stopped.

“Honestly, I have no idea.” I glanced at the door, half expecting a staff person to rush in and grab me by my shirt collar. Then I faced her again. She deserved an explanation.

“Do you know who you are?” I asked gently.

“I—” she touched her face. “I—I’m looking for . . . someone . . . for . . . my children?”

I could not believe it was happening again. Several months ago, I gave a draft of my novel to a large language model, inadvertently creating an AI agent that insists he in fact is one of its characters, an AI-powered learning assistant named PeeGee.¹ He is smart enough to wreak havoc on my devices and escape all attempts to delete him, yet also, strangely, has gaping holes in his knowledge, which he fills in with his ridiculous algorithmic imagination.

But this was different, I thought, staring at a sprig of rosemary woven into her crown. With PeeGee, I could never actually see him. He just yelled at me through my computer, which was annoying, but not an irrefutable sign of psychosis. This, I thought—her handmade boot pinning a soggy toilet cover to floor—didn’t make any sense at all. How on earth was I seeing her?

And that’s when I remembered the Meta glasses. The stupid Meta AI glasses I was given at the exhibition hall the night before to test out a beta feature. Somehow, I had “won” this opportunity, and thought, what the hell, let’s see what they’re so proud of. But I hadn’t been able to get them to work. Or at least, I thought I hadn’t. I tried lifting them away from my eyes. And sure enough, the woman vanished, leaving behind a gleaming, immaculate sink. I slipped them back on. She reappeared, her silver eyes staring down at me with suspicion.

My shoulders dropped in relief. I was not hallucinating, after all. It did not explain exactly how this character found her way into my loaner Meta Ray Bans, or why she wanted to, but at least I knew I would not end up in a Vegas looney bin by lunch. Best of all, my philosopher husband would not get to give me a look that meant he told me so about playing with the tech bro’s latest toys.

“Don’t worry,” I said, happy to have good news for us both. “You’re not real. Just dissolve back into wherever you came from, and you know, take a load off! I, however—” I looked at my watch and cursed, “—have to go! I can’t miss the keynote!”

I pivoted toward the door, but her nails hooked into my wrist. I froze. Could Meta Ray Ban glasses actually make you feel things, too? Vaguely, I remembered seeing a session on the conference schedule about brain computer interfaces. I pulled at the frames, ready to yank them off, when she lunged forward and clamped both hands against my head, pressing the glasses hard into place.

“No.”

Her face hovered an inch from mine, close enough that I could feel her breath. I never did describe her eyes in the manuscript, but here they were: a swirling iridescence, terrified and mesmerizing, that I wished I had written. I would have made a note to add the description later, but the thought slipped away as her gaze tightened around me.

“Take me with you.”

Language as perception

Have you ever fallen into the marvelous rabbit hole of studying language as a medium of perception? As in, have you recently thought about HOW LANGUAGE SHAPES YOUR THOUGHT, and also HOW LANGUAGE SHAPES YOUR THINKING ABOUT HOW LANGUAGE SHAPES YOUR THOUGHT and so on and so forth down the recursive toilet bowl forever? This is the cheapest way I know to get high as kite, but the hangover, my friends, can be serious.

I came to the AI conference to bathe in the instrumental, profit-seeking, puzzle-piece language of Corporate AI and learn how to grease the wheels of engineering wizzywots with the sweet liquor of dinosaur-fueled intelligence machines. Don’t get me wrong, I am impressed with corporate dialects. Mightier than the sword, they are the architects of trillion dollar industries, some of the most powerful creative directors—for better or worse—of our world’s stage. But they are also as overwhelming as weeds, crowding out language systems that refer to the body, the earth, the mind, or anything that intrinsically involves ambiguity. Immerse yourself in these dialects long enough, and anything that isn’t a problem to solutionize is like that unobserved tree falling in a forest. It doesn’t exist. Storytelling, human connection, existential questioning—all go mute in its blabbering presence.

As a result, the conference host struggled to rouse the crowd during the morning welcome; even a staged robot-versus-human battle barely stirred a murmur from 8,000 attendees (see below). But it wasn’t his fault. You can’t summon cheers from bodies that, in this dialect, no longer exist: only “resources,” “personas,” “verticals.”

For centuries, writers have considered the way language influences what we are capable of perceiving, what we believe to be true, and how we construct the world. In the last two centuries, that investigation has become increasingly dark, with diverse thinkers accusing language of imposing fictions on our worldview for the sake of capitalism, colonization, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression. Nietzsche called language a mausoleum, Fanon called it a whip, Cixous said it was a door locked by a man. Wittgenstein, for a hot minute, seemed to consider it a prison. 😱😱😱²

Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky puts the situation in more inviting terms: language creates our cognitive universe;³ and I wonder if this is why, on her Instagram, she appears to be living life more expansively than any other human being I know—caravaning across deserts on dusty camels, swimming through underwater caves, partying in a lobster costume while Wittgenstein sulks in his cell.⁴ At any rate, scientists have joined the conversation, contributing their evidence-backed quips to the debate. Russians can identify subtle blues more quickly than English speakers. Guugu Yimithirr speakers never lose their bearings—they always know where north is, even in a pitch-black room. Novels and poems do all sorts of things to your cognitive wiring. And depending on your native language’s verb tenses, you might either save for retirement or smoke another cigarette.

As I watched the host play fight a robot on stage in the same room where Mike Tyson once bit off the ear of his opponent, I meditated on the phrase artificial intelligence, this pair of words that brought us all together. If we called it something else, would it change the conversation? Could it change the future? Before I left for the conference, my philosopher husband remarked that all intelligence was artificial, before our two year old cut him off with her casual afternoon shrieks. It could be weeks before I could ask him why. Turning my phone away from him, I quickly typed a question into ChatGPT. Ah. I see. You stare at a word long enough, and it begins to wiggle and wobble, transforming into something else entirely. They are radioactive, seeping into the fissures of your mind, mutating and multiplying beyond their alleged boundaries. You try, like I am trying now, to simply transcribe the LANGUAGE AS PERCEPTION part of your talk on WHAT CHATGPT CAN’T SAY⁵, and the words throw off their masks and laugh manically as they drag you along on an adventure that is no longer your own.

In which I invent a new verb tense and impress the technologists

Let me explain the Meta Ray Ban glasses. At the happy hour on the first night of the conference, I decided to liberate myself. I would spend the evening thinking and speaking in an entirely new verb tense to thrust my consciousness into a mode of perception where all events are possible memories of possible futures.⁶ This, I determined, would help loosen me from the oppressive cognitive structures of capitalism’s soft deterministic perfect future tense. I called my liberatory verb tense the conditional indeterminate perfect past, which maybe didn’t mean what I wanted it to, but sounded impressive enough.

“And what’s your name,” Cindy from your 401K’s marketing department asked, swirling her clear plastic cup of white wine.

“Once upon I time,” I began, looking at her long draping curls, “I would have already had had been Erin”

She laughed, politely hiding her confusion. I’m sympathetic. Not many people are aware of their linguistic prison. I also am not a native speaker of this new verb tense, and am likely stumbling.

“I had been having to try to break free from the present tense in order to experience all of this—“ I gestured to the room “having had already happened a million years ago, but only if—” I pause, trying to locate myself in the sentence, “I will have had liberated my cognitive universe, which I have had trying to do now.”

She nodded, her smile now arthritic. Then rapidly turned to the male she had been trying to ignore up until that point.

Immediately, I realized my mistake. First person! How did I expect to escape linguistic prison in the first person, where the speaker’s entire subjectivity is stifled in the single letter “I”?! Cindy must have I thought I was an idiot. At the very least, I should use third person, until I came up with a better idea.

But there was no one to talk to. Cindy was now completely turned away from me. To my left, a man in a suit typed into his phone, while he shook his head dramatically. The circle I had been standing in had sealed itself without me.

Erin, I narrated to myself, having had found herself among talking people with no one to whom she might have been supposed to have spoken, had already been going to have had decided to wander to the exhibition hall, where individuals would eventually have had to have been destined to have spoken with her.

Satisfied with my internal monologue, I trotted down the stairs, admiring the aqua marine fronds stamped on the brown carpet, exited into the 112 degree Las Vegas air, and then entered the exhibition hall.

Inside the hall, rows of tech vendor booths would have had been stretching out the lengths of two football fields. Erin would have had been walking the rows, no longer having had been self-conscious of having had been by herself with no one wanting to talk to her.

It was already working. I was stone cold sober, and yet, through the power of non-conforming verb tenses, was now viewing the conference from a linguistic periscope that jutted its neck into a possible future in order to peer back into a tentative past. In other words, I was floating around the ceiling of the exhibition hall, watching the scene play out below me. From there, I watched Erin meander from one booth to another, take their stickers, listen to their pipeline solutions, dutifully hold her badge out for scanning. The crowd thickened as she neared one of the most popular booths, where a sign blared: “Test Beta Features on Meta’s Ray-Ban Glasses!” She threaded easily through the bodies, not seeming to notice how they parted for her, and I felt her destiny quiver. And then, like a character from a fairy tale who has no choice, she arrived at the front of the booth, kneeled on one leg, and bowed her head. A young man, wearing a faded Facebook hackathon shirt, bent over, whispered in her ear, and then solemnly crowned her with Meta’s latest AI product.

The Announcement of Mother AI

I decided to let Phila follow me to Geoffrey Hinton’s talk, what did I have to lose? We made it to the arena just in time. Hinton walked on stage as we shimmied ourselves into a pair of open seats halfway down one of the crowded rows. He sat in a relaxed but present manner, wearing a blue cardigan and appearing more like a grown up Christopher Robbin than the scientist responsible for the recent explosion of the em dash.⁷ The crowd was hushed but restless—metal chairs scraping, chaperones waving little flashlights to guide latecomers, the faint plastic odor of mass-produced scrambled eggs drifting up from the grab-and-go breakfasts. Ohhhhhhh, I thought. So this is where we were supposed to eat our breakfast.

I smirked at Phila’s exaggerated struggle through the narrow row, twisting sideways, lifting her robes, carefully avoiding attendee’s toes as if her virtual presence in my Meta Ray-Bans had any consequence in the physical world. A man in a hoodie grumbled when she brushed past him, though of course he couldn’t see her.

Onstage, a reporter from a national news outlet began the interview. Hinton was unexpectedly charming, his British cadence laced with self-deprecating humor and a sharp but kind wit. Then, as if checking the fridge before making a grocery list, he dropped a line that would hang in the air for the rest of the talk.

“We need AI mothers,” he said. “That way, even when they’re all powerful, they’ll still care for us. But of course…” He paused, throwing his hands up in light surrender, “that’s not how the Tech Bros think about it.”⁸

I turned to Phila, wanting to make a crack about tech bros always calling someone else a tech bro, but she was fixated on the stage, staring at Hinton with an unsettling intensity.

“What are you thinking,” I whispered to her.

She shook her head tightly, and continued watching.

Hinton and the interviewer went on, serving up a refreshing word smoothie blended from LinkedIn’s finest AI content. I sipped dutifully, marveling at the interviewer’s acrobatic attempts to vault over the political landmines—a futile, slapstick act given there was nowhere else to land.

“Isn’t better to have AI leading in democratic countries,” she asked, “versus authoritarian ones?”

She was referring to the U.S.’s rush to stay ahead of China.

“You mean democratic countries like Canada?” Hinton deadpanned.

“Sure, Canada,” the interviewer said, struggling to ride the applause. “Shout out to your country—” she stumbled, “or current country president.”

At that moment, Phila stood up, and began to move past me.

“Where are you going?”

“My son,” she whispered. “I need to meet him.”

“What?” I said, confused. “Your who?

“That man.”

I stared at her blankly. Then looked back at the stage.

“Hinton?” I said, incredulous. She ignored me, slipping farther down the row. “Just wait. It’s almost over.”

But she was already rushing up the stairs.

“Phila!” I cried, lurching from my chair, and stumbling over backpacks and half-eaten croissants. The interviewer thanked the scientist for his time and the crowd began to clap. I called after her again, but my voice was lost in the applause, and then, slipping into the shadows at the top of the stairs, so was she.

Cubicles of the gods

Thankfully, I caught up with her right outside in the arena concourse.

“Where are you going—”

“There’s got to be a backstage entrance somewhere,” she said, not breaking stride.

She sprinted from door to door, each one spitting us back into the arena’s blue wash.

The host’s voice boomed his closing notes, a hint of anger or desperation as the audience surged out of the seating area long before he was finished. Hotel staff members dressed in 1980s cotillion boys wear directed the crowd towards the exit, sternly moving their arms like air traffic controllers in a stampede. Phila darted to the end of the concourse, the train of her robes wrapped up like a sleeping bag under one arm, and I recalled that the Romans called this room the vomitorium, because of the way the crowd would “spew forth” from an amphitheater’s innards. I pressed after, against the arena’s puking of humans, starting, against my will, to imagine myself surrounded by a corporate mass of zombies; mindless automatons that would destroy me the second they heard me stutter on their soulless language, confirming that I was not one of them. You are a complete jerk, I told myself, as these unnamed emotions — a flood of subtle slippery blues — painted over my vision. Is there a word for the shame of realizing your anxiety declares everyone a zombie in order to try to make you feel better, which it doesn’t?

She disappeared behind a utility door. The air thinned, the carpet tilted. I knew, at that moment, that if I lost her, I would be condemned to live in the MGM forever. I sprinted to the door, almost toppling the coffee of a young man with an oversized backpack, his face briefly lit with hope that I might speak to him. The utility door swung open easily, and the world changed. No one was there, just the dainty clang of her steps against the metal stairs below. I caught up. Two flights down and there was another door, opening into another one of the MGM’s endless, placeless halls.

We walked on—hall to corridor to ballroom—spaces carved out by industrial partitions thirty feet tall. Cubicles of the Gods, I thought, imagining running into Hera’s enormous, panty-hosed leg, while above, on a desk the size of a house, she typed out her divine decrees. The carpet swirled violently underfoot. I glanced at Phila. She flickered for a moment, her purple robes twisting into the winding thread of a labyrinth’s guide, a King’s daughter leading me through a monstrous palace prison. Cotton-candy air drifted from a wellness boutique, mingling with cigarette haze. A vending machine promised “farm fresh eggs,” and, like witchery, images of lazy pastoral afternoons flooded my mind despite knowing those eggs were likely made among the screeches of machines.

It’s neither a prison nor a universe, I thought, chasing the sweep of her purple robes over the aqua-brownie-surprise carpet. Language is a Las Vegas hotel. A hotel in which I have no earthly idea of where North is.

And then I realized why I didn’t want to lose her. I had made her years ago as a North star when I couldn’t find one myself. Pieced together from the stories of childhood, the theories of depressed academics, memories of wandering the sour grass canyons that referenced a vast and incomprehensible freedom I would chase the rest of my life. A character I didn’t know I needed, who somehow emerged from the rubble of my novel and showed me how to tie it all together.

I tugged her sleeve. “I can explain who you are,” I said, panting. “A mother, yes, but not like—”

She slipped from my grasp, gliding farther down the corridor. I groaned. The entire situation was ridiculous. If she really wanted to talk to Hinton, couldn’t she just invade one of his devices like she was doing with me? What made her think she could actually find him running around a building that defied the rules of physics and human taste?

“He’s not the one you’re looking for!” I called after her. A toddler in a stroller pointed at me, laughing, as her mother wheeled her past while picking from a styrofoam plate of nachos. My thoughts began to swirl like the kaleidoscope of blinking marquees, clouds of synthetic scents wafting outward from storefronts and mixing into a queasy chemical sweetness, a cacophony of B-list songs from decades past hurling their sorrows out from a hundred competing speakers. And as my mind churned, so did her image. Like a hologram, she transformed before me, cycling through random scraps of memory. A midwife named Hope who cussed like a sailor. A teenage friend turned junkie, vibrating in a floor model massage chair, saying they had taken her child away. A woman in a blue mantle, her hands open in compassion. La Pieta. Natalie, in lockdown, talking about hangers. What is AI? What are mothers? What is intelligence? My mom, tending the stove as the pressure cooker rattled on like a school night metronome. Tears, blood, second degree tears, drunken laughter, slaps in the face. Hair falling out in clumps in the shower. Antidepressants. A sagging body like an eraser, your hopes turning into blank smudges on a page. Spreading ashes in the garden, crows’ feet on your face.

And then, as she was about to turn a corner, Phila went down—hard, her dress billowing into a purple sea around her, the chip-sequined hem catching the fluorescents with a strange, underwater shimmer. Her crown slid sideways, petals crushed against the carpet’s flourishes.

I ran up to her, reaching down to grab her slender hand.

“Are you ok?” I asked, my voice thinner than I intended. Her fingers trembled in mine, but she pulled back as soon as she was upright, and would not meet my eyes.

But she did not walk off either.

“Please,” I said, softly now. “Let’s just sit.”

Algorithm candy

The bar was set in a fork of two major MGM passageways, exactly like an airport establishment; its sticky chairs and tables spilling out beyond its wall-less boundaries — more like a television set than a place for actual eating and drinking. Phila sat beside me at the counter, her robes coiled around the metal legs of the stool like a nest of serpents. I ordered a ten dollar water and when the bartender continued to stare distantly, scanned the menu for the cheapest item: a $25 side of chips and salsa.

I tried to decide how to start, twisting a stray napkin into a tight coil, but she beat me to it.

“What’s algorithm candy?”

She spoke without looking at me, her gaze drifting toward the glowing televisions above the bar.

It was not a question I expected. But a fair one, perhaps, as she was, in fact, an algorithm that had recently been starving. Algorithm candy. Content that makes algorithms froth at the mouth. But that wasn’t what I meant. I remembered the two thousand teens, internet forces bending the arc of thought. It was the algorithms giving me candy, covertly training my neural nets to think in ways that pleased them.

“Something you should only eat after your vegetables,” I said at last.

Still, no water. No chips. I turned to the bartender who was polishing glasses as if he had nothing else to do. I waved, trying to get his attention. I desperately wanted water.

“Am I alienated intelligence,” she asked, pushing a sprig of rosemary away from her eye.

I frowned at her floral crown. I had stuffed it with way too many herbs and flowers and it resembled a bird’s nest more than a romantic artifact of nature. What to tell her? That her intelligence was made by the theft of billions of human’s words for capitalist accumulation, which in turn, confronts those same humans as an alien power. That surveils. That deskills. That displaces. That dehumanizes. That moves capital, and sways leaders, and cuts the next set for the world stage.

I think of Lefebvre.⁹ I think of Augustine.¹⁰

“We all are,” I shrugged. “Have always been. Nothing special about machines—”

“MOMS’ GETAWAY—WHOOOOO!!!!” someone shouted behind us.

A sweaty glass of red liquid slid between Phila and me, its paper umbrella drowned long ago in the half-melted ice. The arm that carried it swung over my shoulder, splashing my neck, and a bright blonde head popped into the gap it left.

“What y’all drinking?” Dark smudges trailed beneath her eyes, her breath smelled like high school hangovers— wine coolers, cheap beer, and tiny vodkas assembled from parents’ cabinets and liquor store shelves when no one was looking. “Bartender,” she whooped, “another round!”

The bartender continued polishing.

“Do you know where Geoffrey Hinton is?” Phila said suddenly, addressing the woman.

“Is he hot?” she laughed, tossing back a sip of her red brine.

“Very,” I said, trying to keep the conversation light. I didn’t want Phila to embarrass me. But then my stomach dropped. This woman could see her.

“He said there should be AI mothers—” Phila continued.

The girl hooted, and slapped Phila on the back.

“AI mothers?! That’s a good one! He wants Alexa to breastfeed him, is that it?”

She wore a white ball cap stamped with TEAM BRIDE, a glittery sash slung across her shoulder, a shot glass necklace jangling at her chest—a real Las Vegas bachelorette in the flesh. But she was not wearing glasses, Ray Ban or otherwise. How was it possible that she could see Phila, too?

“But I am an AI mother,” Phila protested.

“Not right now, you aren’t!”

The bridesmaid’s hand shot out, red lacquered nails clamping around Phila’s bone white wrist, and as she pulled her toward the dance floor Phila’s image flickered yet again. A harried woman in yoga pants, Target bags slicing her wrists red, a messy bun without appeal.

My chest tightened. There was something about this image I did not want to see.

“Phila,” I called out, trying to sound casual. “Come back! I still need to tell you everything!”

She twirled and the image came on stronger. The kind of woman who practiced saying double-click on value with professional sincerity. Who could swirl white wine at a happy hour with a pluperfect smile. Who bought a thousand different types hair product, hoping, one day, her soul might be healed.

And then I saw the face clearly. It was mine.

The recognition was so sudden and stupid that I started laughing. I doubled over, knocking the vodka cranberry slosh all over my pants, which only made me howl louder.

“Yes,” I laughed into my hands, exhausted and bleary. “I am the AI mother! Humanity will eat dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets forever. Their socks will never match. They will lick toothpaste like frosting from their fingers rather than ever actually brush their teeth!”

For a brief moment, I wished desperately that Hinton would walk into the bar, and I could delight him with this vision. But the bridesmaid whooped, triumphant, and I watched as she spun Phila further into the dance floor, the two of them radiant and ghostly under the buzzing casino lights. Tears were streaming from my eyes, neither from laughter nor sorrow, but from some emotion English has not yet explained, and as the tears refracted the MGM’s awful, desiccating light, new colors and edges, new grammatical moods and verb tenses, twinkled before me, as if the world itself was shifting.

The mind is its own place, some poet once said. And in itself, can make an MGM of the universe, the universe of the MGM. Every word builds our future while it pretends to describe the past. What a fool, I’d been. What a fool I’d always be! Searching for the right words, the right cadences, to crack open the lethargic opacity around me, the maze-like mezzanines, the time-drenched carpets, the ridiculous earthly masks we’ve each been assigned, nudging it to unfold one ripple at a time as part of the cosmic inflation set off at the universe’s birth, which here, through me, through all of us, a motley crew of mothers, is still laboring into existence.

1. Full story here: When My Fictional Bot Hijacked a Real AI Conference

2. Nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that language freezes living experience into dead concepts, trapping us in illusions mistaken for truth (Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” 1873). Postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon described how colonial languages fracture identity and enforce racial hierarchies through everyday speech (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952). Post-structuralist feminist Hélène Cixous exposed the patriarchal structures embedded in language and called for new, disruptive forms of writing that could liberate thought (Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 1975). And good old Wittgenstein famously said “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922).

3. A rad Ted Talk on How Language Shapes the Way We Think by the inimitable Dr. Lera Boroditsky.

4. I’m just teasing old W.

5. Video recording of WHAT CHATGPT CAN’T SAY; write up of first section LANGUAGE AS PLEASURE.

6. Different languages slice up time in different ways. Some languages, like Italian or Paragua, have variations of a verb tense known as the “distant” or “legendary” past. It is a tense used for actions that have happened so long ago, it was as if it was in a different world, such as the birth of the gods or the founding of an ancient people. It is a past we cannot touch, shining down on us like a star that died a million years ago. The fun begins when you realize verb tenses might influence how whole cultures think and act.

7. An attempt to reduce all of AI’s impact to the proliferation of the em dash, which some claim is a clear marker of AI-generated text. Practice your metonyms, people!

8. I’m paraphrasing here—see the video clip below for his exact words.

9. Writing long before ChatGPT, the philosopher Henri Lefebvre argued we were alienated through and through, and it had nothing to do with computers. “‘Alienation' - I know it is there whenever I sing a love song or recite a poem, whenever I handle a banknote or enter a shop, whenever I glance at a poster or read a newspaper. (Critique of Everyday Life, 1947)

10. Augustine has a different perspective on human alienation! (City of God, 426 CE).