The Linguistic Illusion of AI

An essay from August 2026, published on Medium in the author’s own publication, The Intuitions Age. Its claim is that the words we borrow for AI do more than describe. Dalgalidere builds on Floridi and Nobre’s 2024 paper on “conceptual borrowing”: machines are given psychological words (intelligence, learning, understanding, agent) while minds are given computational ones. So the question he wants asked is not how close machines are getting to us. It is how far our picture of the human is shrinking to fit the machine. He leans on Wittgenstein’s line that the limits of language are the limits of one’s world.

He works through the vocabulary one word at a time. If intelligence means accurate prediction, a system qualifies easily, and the embodied, moral and cultural parts of human intelligence drop out of view. “Hallucination” makes an error sound like a quirk of the system’s mind, which moves attention away from the people who chose the training data, the product design and the safeguards. “Agent” blurs acting autonomously with being morally responsible. Creativity, defined as novel combination, leaves out intention, risk, cost and mortality.

In place of comparing outputs he offers five terms for what human creation carries, which he calls the Ontological Resonance Cluster. Nobility is a mortal person choosing to create despite the risk of failing, and owning the result. Imprint is the trace of a lived life in the work. Gravity is the weight a small gesture can carry for someone else. Anchor is the moment a work takes root in another person’s memory. Spiral Temporality is meaning that deepens each time you return to a work at a different point in life. He is explicit that this is a difference in kind and not a ranking: a machine can take part in making something, and can shape how it is received, but the source of the meaning stays with the person. His remedy is “conceptual literacy”, which means being precise about what a word requires before applying it to a system.

Two things to know when reading it. The claim that this vocabulary is actually narrowing how people understand themselves is made by argument; the essay offers no survey or experimental evidence for it. And the five terms are the author’s own coinage, from his framework Creative Intuitionism, not an established taxonomy.