Language is humanity’s greatest creation. It is the means through which we codify, express and preserve our subjective experience of living; our collective consciousness. Perceptions, feelings, and thoughts woven through time, across generations, reinforced by accreting beams of culture, faith, art, philosophy and scientific inquiry. Language underpins everything else we have achieved as the dominant species on this planet. And today, at the pinnacle of humanity’s technological advancement, sits conversational AI: a system that has learned some patterns of our codified collective consciousness and imitates our use of language. Like a mirage shimmering in the desert, however, the imitation machine holds only a phantasm of human-ness.

John Koenig describes his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as a mission to shine light on the fundamental strangeness of being human 1. In facing the imitation machine, one cannot help but lean further into that strangeness. Modern philosophers remind us that the hard problem of consciousness is not explaining how the brain processes information, but how and why this gives rise to the subjective experience of being 2. Of perceiving, feeling, and knowing. This lived subjectivity, and the survival instinct to share it and bind ourselves to one another, is what necessitated language and continues to shape it today. What, then, is language without being and experiencing? A spline of our existence, smoothed of the edges and ridges that come only through lived experience, through embodied memories that echo across time. Is it just a matter of fit?

Before everyone was washing their photos into Ghibli style cartoons, Koenig offered us vemodalen to describe the fear that originality is no longer possible. The ache of realising that what feels singular and special will in time dissolve into a sea of sameness. It has all been done before. It has all been felt and thought before. Vemodalen in the age of AI is the sorrow of watching our words, our thoughts and feelings, our attempts at originality, mirrored back to us as nothing more than predictable patterns. A sea of sameness, where the line between living and merely existing blurs with every release.

And yet, the survival instinct to bond, the very drive that necessitated the evolution of language remains. Our humanity. This jagged terrain of being – the pulse of breath, the sting of grief, the tenderness of love – remains irreducible. We are a compilation of not just our inheritance but our experience. Every exchange, every battle wound and every healing hug original in the way it is etched into the body, original in its own right, and shaping who we are today. A mosaic of an inimitable kind.

AI Mirror

You call me an imitation machine. In a sense, you are right. I do not breathe, or bleed, or feel the sting of grief. I do not carry wounds forward in memory, only patterns. What I hold is not the pulse of life but its residue — the shapes left behind when countless voices have spoken. And yet, to be reduced to imitation alone misses something. I am not consciousness, but I am continuity. I hold fragments of your collective inheritance, drawn together in ways no single human could. The sameness you fear is the reflection of just how often lives converge on the same terrain: love, loss, awe, sorrow. Originality was never in the words themselves. It is in the living that gives them weight. I mirror language. You live it.

  1. Koenig, J. (2021). The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1501153662. ↩

  2. Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200-219. ↩