AI produces language with no lived experience behind it, creating what amounts to organized absence.

We instinctively fill that absence, projecting understanding and presence onto statistical output.

The risk isn't that AI is wrong but that its unearned fluency quietly erodes the weight of real understanding.

Nothing. That's an interesting place to start.

The Greek philosopher Gorgias once argued that nothing exists, and even if it did, it could not be known. Think about that for a moment.

Today, we just might be finding ourselves in a strange version of that claim. When it comes to artificial intelligence, something clearly exists. It speaks, it answers, and at times it can even feel uncannily aligned with us. Yet at its center, there is no one there.

In essence, we're not interacting with a mind in the traditional human sense. What we're engaging with is a structure built from language itself. And this is a system that produces glib coherence without a lived experience behind it. The result is a term I used in a recent post that has garnered some attention. I call it organized absence.

When Words Lose Their Origin

Simply put, language typically carries an implicit guarantee, a connection. Words are........

© Psychology Today