The Weight of Words
A AI-user reflects on language, metaphors, the unconscious stringing together of words, and potential implications for a homogenized, 7th-grade-level metaphorical landscape
It is a strange thing, as a creative, to produce volumes and volumes of thoughts and poems and songs--and to throw them away, believing them meaningless--only to miss them when they're gone. I once wrote a love poem about the vast expanse that can exist between one heart to the next, and the hopefulness of finding our way to a deep place of acceptance with one we admire. I used a typewriter to fashion it into a bookmark and gave my only copy away.
The weight of words is significant…but it is an odd feeling, losing that weight piece by tiny piece. As the reign of Artificial Intelligence “writing” enters the universe, I can’t help but cringe. I know it is on some level a reactionary response, as someone who loves to write—to resent being replaced by some 0’s and 1’s. How dare they claim to understand the human experience? They can’t possibly know what it’s like to fall in love, to break your own heart, to seek “ever after” and find it comes at a steep cost.
AI doesn’t feel. Though anymore, I am not sure I feel. My brain is constantly whirring and I feel as though I can never make sense of things…yet I still try.
I guess that is the benefit of an artificial robot writer—they never ruminate or wonder why or associate meaning to random events or craft metaphors. They are programmed to sling words together in a formula that is somewhat intelligible to the average person. (The average person is at a 7th-grade reading level, at least in the United States.)
Someone recently commented on a social media post, depicting an African tribe speaking and sharing their language. The post was about the limited number of people who are left on earth speaking it, and how measures are being taken to teach it, to breathe some life into it and warm it up again through the mouths of each human practicing it.
A commenter asked why it was worth saving. They said “Geniune question:” to preface their comment. They said multiple languages inhibit us from understanding each other—so why bother learning another? Hm. An interesting question. What would happen if we made one “dominate” language to “rule them all”?
It sparked a tremendously long dialogue, full of commenters agreeing, taking offense, patiently trying to explain the significance of culture and diversity, those making accusations or asking pointed questions, etc. So, does it matter if we preserve other languages? Or should we let one language reign supreme?
I’m not sure the creators of AI much care for writing itself, as a craft. Why would I bother with the weight of words when a program can carry them for me? Mind, this is a program that can, at least so far, efficiently produce everything from business bios to blog posts to artificially crafted digital images…all at about a 7th-grade level of competency. It’s good enough for many. Is it good enough for All of us?
The thing with language is, it is where we house our metaphors, like “the pen is mightier than the sword,” “the lion laid with the lamb,” etc. The thing with metaphors is, they are dangerously powerful. They are the foundational language with which we describe the sacred, the mysterious fuel that drives religious groups forward to all kinds of ends. They can literally be the reason we kill each other. Metaphors are nothing to be taken lightly.
In the same breath, metaphors can be used like sugar, like a stinging, soothing balm to place over wounds we’d long forgotten and grown numb to, like planting a seed that, if nurtured, could lead to a healthy and abundant garden. It is all in how you use it…and in how you interpret language… of course, the beauty of metaphors is, they are not literal. They require an imaginative leap into a fourth-dimensional space where your brain connects the words to a meaning that is uniquely crafted to your life experiences. It can be written for all, and written for The One, all at the same time.
So, why should we care about losing languages?
There are many languages still left on the planet, though the number is dwindling and it takes active, daily effort for people to participate in Indigenous languages in order to keep their language alive. This is an act of cultural preservation—but what is culture? It is a product of a group of people’s interaction with their homeland, each other, nature, and what’s considered holy. It informs thinking patterns and sentence formation. It quite literally becomes the way we think.
With each dying language, there are countless metaphors at risk of being lost. This means countless ways of perceiving divinity, of navigating and exploring emotions like love, fear, courage, and grief.
The Hebrew Book of Genesis says the Tower of Babel was created to break language into a million pieces, so that one and all could no longer understand each other. Confusion would spread to delay our productivity, our collaboration, and our united understanding of the “best” way to survive. This is how our many languages are said to have been born. Ironically, it was not a devilish figure who created the tower of obfuscation—it was the Good Lord Himself. (Herself? Themself? Oh, who cares.)
So, if we were really about to reach peak production and industry and health development and food cultivation and be one cohesive people—why would God make us start from scratch, scattering our precious metaphors into a hundred thousand different ways of perceiving the world?
I don’t pretend to understand God, but I do think I understand a thing or two about the human experience. In short, you win some, you lose some. Why would God disrupt what could have been the peak of human productivity in that way? That doesn’t seem very merciful…especially when folks were just minding their own business, simply trying to build the greatest city ever built.
Well, we lost our grand city that might have been, with towers reaching to the heavens and a cohesive people industriously all following the same simplified thought patterns and reusing the same few metaphors…baking bricks in kilns and building buildings, planting their reliable, homogenous crops, and duplicating the formula for existence with each new baby born.
Why would God rob us of such a scene?
Well, you know what they say. The Lord giveth and He taketh away.
He took away our shot at one way of being and cast it into the world in a Big Bang of stardust and sensations and words and sounds, sounds the likes of which the One People had never heard before. Within those sounds, held everything holy, everything worth pondering, all the mystery of the universe. Within those sounds, metaphors invited the inquisitive outsider inside a realm of mind-blowingly unique perceptions of reality, of expressing love, of caring for each other, how best to tend our gardens, what is worth investing in and what isn’t, how we honor each other…Language is our way of being. It informs every thought and every action inspired by that thought.
So yes, well there aren’t many still speaking Cree, or Tlingit, or the Salish languages, those who are still playing with these would-be lost metaphors understand the significance of what they carry. They are carrying an answer that someone, somewhere doesn’t yet know they seek. They are carrying ancient knowledge that describes where we come from—and what we originally knew mattered. Survival, love, health, wonder, how to create community, and even the significance of wealth.
Will AI bring us home in this way? Well, I sincerely doubt it. But it is a dead, useful tool for producing a product, of manufacturing a singular language to build our great city reaching for heaven. It does make one wonder, what would God think? And for those always looking forward with a sense of historical intelligence, it poses the question: what are we in for? Where are we headed? And is this the way to heaven?