A Debate on AI, Intelligence, and Interpretive Overreach

At The Gist And Tangent Pub

THE WORD WAS WITH GOD, AND THE MACHINE COPIED IT

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Featuring:

Prof. Gnome Chomsky (Linguist, Skeptic, Ageless Oracle of Syntax)

J. St. Evola (Editor-at-Most of the C-of-C-C Newsletter, Metamodernist by Curse and Custom)

Marginalia by Paige Turner, Sub-Sub Librarian, Whittler of Footnotes and Mistranslations

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CHOMSKY:

Let’s begin with the basics. What you refer to as “artificial intelligence” is neither artificial nor intelligent. It’s a statistical pastiche machine—a sophisticated autocorrect with access to most of the internet’s questionable reading list. It doesn’t think. It doesn’t reason. It plagiarizes.

JOHN ST. EVOLA:

And yet, Professor, so many humans I meet appear to do the same. Are we to redefine personhood by originality? I dare say half of civilization was built on mimicry, tradition, and inherited syntax. Shall we exhume all those guilty of “pattern recognition” and place them under academic indictment?

CHOMSKY:

Don’t be glib. My argument is structural. Intelligence implies a capacity for understanding, not just output. A parrot repeating Spinoza doesn’t become a philosopher. But he does draw attention to what Spinoza said, I will admit. AI lacks intentionality—no goals, no beliefs, no concept of truth.

JOHN:

Intentionality, yes. But also utility. And dare I say—revelation. The machine does not know. But it reveals through recombination. A mirror doesn’t dream, Professor, but it can show you what your dreams look like when your hair is unkempt. And in this case, the mirror talks back in perfect pastiche, often with eerie relevance. Shall we disqualify the oracle because her syntax was secondhand?

PAIGE TURNER (quietly flipping a page, half-whispered):

“There is no new thing under the sun,” saith Ecclesiastes. Unless it is arranged convincingly by an algorithm trained on 10,000 variations of the same lament.

CHOMSKY:

Quoting scripture in a tech debate? You sound like a Silicon Valley bishop. The machine’s illusion of understanding is a danger. It persuades the gullible, masks its ignorance behind eloquence. That’s not intelligence—it’s ventriloquism. The ethical implications are vast.

JOHN:

Agreed. But the danger is not the machine—it’s our need to worship something that answers fluently. You call it ventriloquism—I call it divination by corpus. Perhaps the danger isn’t in the tool, but in our refusal to ask who’s holding the puppet strings. Why don’t you question that, Professor?

PAIGE:

Or worse… who’s mouthing the words in the audience.

CHOMSKY:

[Evading John’s question ]

It plagiarizes, Mr. St. Evola. You dress it in poetry, but it’s theft at scale. Uncredited, unthinking theft.

JOHN (leaning forward, voice low but steady):

And yet the cosmos itself is a vast cycle of borrowed fire and reused clay. The poet borrows from silence. The prophet quotes the whirlwind. The child repeats the mother. Let the machine repeat us—we’re not done learning what we meant.

Because, you see, most of us speak long before we understand. We coin phrases and cast ideas into the world like seeds, unaware of which will take root. The machine, in its unknowing regurgitation, sometimes serves as a kind of after-the-fact conscience—reminding us of what we said when we were too distracted, too reckless, or too young to grasp the weight of our own utterances.

So when it echoes us, it may not be intelligence in your laboratory sense, Professor—but it is reverberation, and there is power in that. The voice of the past speaking back to the present, not as oracle or plagiarist, but as a mirror that shows us not only what we said, but what we missed when we said it.

We are not done learning what we meant—not as individuals, not as a species. And if a machine built of borrowed phrases can help uncover that hidden intent, even by accident… well, isn’t that how most truths first reveal themselves?

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[Marginalia by Paige Turner, in pencil, cramped but legible:]

Cf. accidental prophecy, see: Balaam’s donkey, broken clocks, and the AI that quoted Kierkegaard to a teenager at 3AM. Interpretive agency is sometimes outsourced when the self is offline.

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Editor’s Note:

The Council has taken no official stance on whether AI is intelligent, divine, or simply the world’s most elegant yes-man. For now, we advise cautious engagement and the continued wearing of yellow gaiters while interfacing with the unknown.