Language can contain an entire world, revealing its speakers’ history, values, or pathologies. It can also be obfuscating, diversionary, slippery. Chattiness, with its personality-driven appeals to familiarity, can conceal or elide false promises, banality, emptiness, controversy, and the context of its own existence

had first started talking to friends and strangers on the internet via AOL Instant Messenger in the early 2000s. I’d rush home from middle and then high school every day to message people I may or may not have even made eye contact with in the halls. I’ll admit I was a bit of a fanatic early adopter, but I wasn’t alone—there were always at least a

LLMs are surely not going to replace college or magazines or middle managers. But they do offer those and other domains a new instrument—that’s really the right word for it—with which to play with an unfathomable quantity of textual material.