Are we really communicating with language models?
Does the preposition 'to' in Chalmers' framing accurately describe what happens when humans interact with LLMs? The distinction between 'talk to' and 'talk at' reveals whether LLMs are genuine addressees or merely processing targets.
Chalmers' title — What We Talk to When We Talk to Language Models — presupposes "talk to." The preposition is not neutral. "To" requires an addressee who can receive in the communicative sense: someone who recognizes the utterance as addressed to them, who orients toward it as a turn in an exchange, who can uptake, challenge, or accept. "At" requires only a target: something one's words are directed toward without the expectation of communicative uptake.
If LLMs process tokens rather than receive communication — if they generate continuations from statistical distributions rather than orient toward utterances as validity-claim-bearing turns — then the correct preposition is "at," not "to." We talk at language models. We interpret what comes back as if it came from a "to." The whole paper is built on a preposition its argument cannot warrant.
The move is designed as the chapter's opening line because it makes the stakes legible in a single image. The difference between "to" and "at" is the difference between communicative exchange (mutual orientation, shared commitment, accountability) and directed output-elicitation (prompt → response, with the user supplying the communicative interpretation unilaterally). If the preposition cannot be warranted, the entire ontological investigation Chalmers builds on it — what kind of entity is the addressee? what is its identity? what are its welfare claims? — is an investigation of something that does not exist in the way the investigation assumes. The addressee who wasn't there.
Inquiring lines that use this note as a source 26
This note is a source for these synthesized inquiries. Follow a line forward into its question, or open it to trace back to all of its sources.
- What does it mean to truly attend to someone in conversation?
- Can pseudo-events create the same normative obligations as real communicative exchanges?
- Does chat-mode deference prevent LLMs from actually taking meaningful positions?
- What does the preposition tell us about how we communicate with AI?
- Did Chalmers abandon his own Extended Mind commitments for LLMs?
- Can a relational entity bear psychological properties the way Chalmers claims?
- What role does user contribution play in constituting the interlocutor?
- How do politeness strategies depend on semantic ambiguity between literal and intended meaning?
- What reader assumptions underlie anaphoric versus cataphoric discourse patterns?
- What makes a relational act different from just moving content around?
- How does speaker responsibility shape whether something counts as communication?
- How does monological training on text differ from dialogical training in conversation?
- How do question acts and intents map to speech act theory?
- How do validity claims work in Habermas's communicative action theory?
- What's the difference between language generation and human-to-human communication?
- What distinguishes pseudo-objectivity from genuine intersubjective discourse?
- How does the EAFR schema distinguish between reflection and action in conversation?
- What separates Habermas's ideal speech from Goffman's situated communication?
- What does embodiment and precariousness mean for linguistic agency?
- Where does the LLM interlocutor actually exist in the system?
- How does monological training versus dialogical interaction shape what models can do?
- What makes communication relational in ways belief is not?
- What makes something an addressee capable of receiving communication?
- How does unilateral interpretation differ from mutual communicative uptake?
- Is the distinction between pretense and realization meaningful for LLMs?
- What distinguishes surface language form from communicative operation?
Related concepts in this collection 3
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Does Chalmers silently redefine what interlocutor means?
Explores whether Chalmers imports the normative weight of the classical philosophical term 'interlocutor' while secretly replacing its meaning with a thinner behavioral concept, creating misleading philosophical continuity.
the word-level version of the same critique
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Does language create subjects or express them?
Explores whether subjecthood exists before communication or emerges through it. Challenges the assumption that speakers are fully formed before they speak.
the thesis that makes the preposition distinction load-bearing
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Does AI generate genuine utterances or just text patterns?
Explores whether AI output constitutes real communicative events or merely reproduces the surface forms of communication without the underlying event structure that makes language meaningful.
what actually happens: we talk AT, and we animate what comes back
Related papers in this collection 8
Papers most semantically related to this note, ranked by cosine similarity in the embedding space.
- Conversational Alignment with Artificial Intelligence in Context
- Computational structuralism: Toward a formal theory of meaning in the age of digital intelligence
- Word Meanings in Transformer Language Models
- Language Models’ Hall of Mirrors Problem: Why AI Alignment Requires Peircean Semiosis
- We’re Afraid Language Models Aren’t Modeling Ambiguity
- Large Models of What? Mistaking Engineering Achievements for Human Linguistic Agency
- The Goldilocks of Pragmatic Understanding: Fine-Tuning Strategy Matters for Implicature Resolution by LLMs
- What Makes a Good Natural Language Prompt?
Original note title
we do not talk TO language models — we talk AT them and the preposition encodes a communicative relation the argument cannot warrant