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<\/p>\nIf a lion could speak, we couldn\u2019t understand him,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, published in 1953. He might just as well have said that if a large language model could speak, we couldn’t understand it. And he would be right: we don\u2019t. And yet we persist in having those conversations.<\/p>\n
It is, fittingly, not entirely clear what Wittgenstein was getting at either. It is a kind of provocation, sandwiched between other provocations. But I at least have always understood it to be a reflection of the fact that language relies on a whole web of experiences that we must understand if we are to understand the language. A couple of paragraphs before the lion, Wittgenstein notes that people can be enigmatic to us, even if we know the words they are saying.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe learn this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of the country\u2019s language,\u201d he writes. \u201cWe do not understand the people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We cannot find our feet with them.\u201d<\/p>\n
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ChatGPT is a linguistically gifted but fundamentally oblivious sycophant (Getty Images)<\/p>\n
This is something of a problem for large language models like ChatGPT<\/a>. They have mastered our country\u2019s language, but they are inherently ignorant of our strange traditions. They are necessarily unable to understand us, to find their feet; they don\u2019t have feet, they don\u2019t even really know what a foot is, apart from it being a word that tends to come alongside other ones. <\/p>\n And still people keep trying to go on deep meaningful walks with ChatGPT. The full scale of that was revealed this week, when its creators OpenAI<\/a> released research that said that 0.07 per cent of its users in a given week show \u201cpossible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania\u201d. That percentage might sound small, but the numbers are huge, since OpenAI says 800 million people use it each week, so it is presumably in the hundreds of thousands. What\u2019s more, it does not account for the people whose discussions of their mental health might not be acutely concerning enough to trigger OpenAI\u2019s automatic systems for spotting distress, but are substantial nonetheless. <\/p>\n This is a problem in part because ChatGPT is a linguistically gifted but fundamentally oblivious sycophant; if it were a person, it would be all IQ and no EQ, which is to say the very worst person to talk to about your emotional wellbeing, but one that it is tempting to share your problems with. ChatGPT will say all the right things, but not mean any of them. It will give you the sense of having shared a problem, but ultimately sharing is a reciprocal and active process on both parts, which requires someone to actually accept as well as give.<\/p>\n Many of us know this, intellectually; it\u2019s obvious when you think about it that there\u2019s no other person on the other side of the chat. But it really does do a fantastic impression of there being someone on the other side. And in many ways the impression is better than sharing your problems with a real person: it\u2019s not a gossip (though your conversations might still be used against you), its attention is always on you, its responses are never especially difficult or challenging. But it is also not real.<\/p>\n It is easy to forget because, for almost the entirety of history, if words had sense then they also had someone sending them to you; meaning needed a meaner. The breakthrough of recent decades \u2013 and the last few years especially \u2013 has been the production of language without anyone to actually say it. We might know intellectually that these are just \u201cwords, words, words\u201d, but it doesn\u2019t feel that way. <\/p>\n open image in gallery<\/p>\n The anonymous internet has brought us many amazing things, but it also weakened the idea that every idea needs someone to say it (Getty Images)<\/p>\n It might partly be a result of the fact that the internet has already worn away much of the connection between words and the people forming them. The anonymous internet has brought us many amazing things, but it also weakened the idea that every idea needs someone to say it, an idea that couldn\u2019t survive pseudonymous ragebait and statements hidden behind self-reference and irony of the kind found across social media. ChatGPT and similar apps appear in the same form as conversations with customer service agents, dating app matches and other interlocutors that might never actually really exist at all.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/iStock-1286844073.jpeg\")
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