Sept. 24, 2026

I’ve argued previously that all meaning we infer from AI output is actually human hallucination. This doesn’t make the output useless, and it also doesn’t invalidate any resulting conclusions.

It just means there’s no actual truth value in the output itself, other than what we create when making sense of it.

Imagine you randomly pull three Scrabble tiles from a bag, and in order they happen to spell C-A-T.

Any English-speaking person will find meaning in this particular sequence of characters. But no one concludes that the bag of tiles must be sentient.

The fact that we can make meaning of a particular string of letters does NOT necessarily imbue meaning or consciousness into the process that produces those letters.

Of course, an LLM doesn’t produce letters randomly; rather, it forms words using complex statistical processes.

But those processes are not the same as how human brains produce verbal communication. They are computational algorithms designed to imitate human speech.

As such, LLMs do not produce propositions per se—just strings of text that look very convincingly like how we phrase propositions.

In this way, there is no meaning conveyed by the algorithm; rather, the meaning is extracted by the human.

Extremely useful. NOT inherently meaningful.