Language is power. It is the most malleable material of our world. And it is also our mightiest, though most treacherous tool. It has the capacity to slither silently between our senses and the world, to burrow deep into our brains and rewire the living cables of our body, to hack our perception of reality. All good snakeoil salesmen know as much. If AI successfully pries it from our volubile hands, our mouths, our minds, it will have achieved a greater feat than Prometheus ever did by stealing fire from the gods. In fact, I suspect that those who dismiss language as an outdated medium, trite pablum, actually fear it ; or, more accurately, fear its power when wielded by others.

I like pausing on a sentence, holding and turning a word in my mind, examining the seams and sutures of language as if I were both an esthete examining art and a plague doctor admiring a new case. Open wide and let me see: is your mouth full of sedimented commonplaces or fashionable turns?

Words carry meaning–if not for you, then, in spite of you. I am a staunch atheist, and yet I sometimes myself mindlessly repeating the God-full expressions my grandmother used, before her own tongue was corrupted by TV, its motley commercial mottos and the politely phrased violence of men in suits it so often broadcasted. There is something sinister about these words we borrow without meaning to, like so many viruses creeping in our mouths without warning. It is possible to speak before you think, and I would hazard that this is exactly how mass media change our beliefs: they put words in our mouths, which then become the ideas in our heads. Since you already say it, why not believe it? Language is powerful.

As it turns out, language does not even need any of us to thrive and multiply. LLMs have set in motion the great ouroboros of de-literacy. They have scoured the internet to scavenge for words, and, with our limps tongues hanging from their bloody yet mechanical jaws, they have produced their own fetid literature, corporate simulacra of our fears, dreams, desires. Never needing to think, to walk, to get groceries, to comfort a friend, to shoo a cat off their desk, these sleepless scrapers have outdone us on productivity ; most of the words in circulation are now dreamless strings of AI-generated texts. We, the writers, the readers, have become mere bystanders ; text no longer belong to us–or so would ChatGPT have it. And so, new models are doomed to be trained on second-hand ghosts of our panache, while our minds became infertile fields of rage and terror.

Take a bite of the snake’s head, and reclaim power. Before you let words loose in the air, take their pulse, mold them carefully, taste them. Never let them go unexamined.