Summary
This paper looks at how people interact with large language models (LLMs) like chatbots or AI writing assistants in ways that traditional ideas about technology and social thinking don't fully explain. The authors suggest that humans don't just use these models as tools but also integrate their unique language patterns into their own identity and communication. However, since LLMs are built from human language but don’t have minds or feelings, this relationship is more complex, combining the machine’s influence with our own language history. The paper introduces new ideas to better understand this interaction and its effects on human autonomy and identity.
What this means in practice
- •For user experience designers: Design conversational AI interfaces that consider how users integrate language models into their sense of self and communication practices.
- •For social media platform developers: Develop moderation tools that account for the unique relationship users develop with AI language tools, helping maintain user autonomy.
A position paper. It proposes an approach and reports no results.
Abstract
New concepts based in interactional thinking are required to understand how humans are changed by relating to LLMs. Standard theories of technological impact upon users' autonomy are inadequate here, because this technology is capable of inducing linguistic interactions with humans in an unprecedented manner. Traditional theories of social cognition also fall short, because LLMs have neither autonomy nor minds nor sociality as such. And yet, humans interact, talk, and create with them. We base ourselves on enactive theory, particularly on the theory of Linguistic Bodies and recent developments of enactive accounts of AI, to explore how we make sense with machines. We argue that we incorporate machine-others in two ways: in the tool-like sense of incorporation as enabling particular skills, but also in the more linguistic and identity-tied sense of incorporating (and incarnating) LLMs' ways of languaging. However, LLMs are themselves excorporated and excarnated phantoms of our own languaging; we give a (machinic) body to our language. As such, we are not just incorporating machinic others; we are incorporating excorporated others. These conceptual advances draw a new map of our linguistic relation to LLMs, putting them in continuation with other forms of languaging involving other linguistic artifacts (e.g., religious books). We attend to some particular forms that this relation takes today, and how they may be impacting the autonomy and becoming of LLM-engaged humans. We introduce the idea of "susceptive sense-making" to characterize increased semiotic labour that is carried by the lack of friction that we sometimes encounter within these services.